Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago:

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers.

“I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for your products while the tariffs were in place,” wrote Senator Warren.

On Twitter/X, she posted:

NEW: Apple reportedly got $2.2 BILLION back in tariff refunds. Amazon got $600 MILLION.

What’s their plan to give YOU your money back?

Warren published the letters she sent to the CEOs, including Tim Cook:

Reports indicate that Apple has applied for a refund of the roughly $3.3 billion in tariffs you paid in 2025, and as of July 30th, that you have received nearly $2.2 billion in refunds. This amounts to a multi-billion dollar windfall, which could still grow if more of your refund petitions are granted. You have claimed that you “plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing,” but this vague statement offers no clarity as to where this money will go: indeed, it implies that you will not be returning it to the millions of consumers who purchased Apple products last year and paid higher prices. [...]

You have received an astronomical cash infusion in the form of a tariff refund, and Apple customers who paid increased prices for your products, ostensibly due to tariffs, deserve to know how that money will be spent. Your vague statements about “reinvesting” the refund leave hardworking Americans who paid hundreds of dollars more to buy Apple products in the dark about why they paid those increased prices and where their money will go. To better understand the disposition of any tariff refund you might receive, I request that you respond to the following questions by August 21, 2026.

Amongst the 11 questions she asks, the only one that seems pertinent is #5:

(5) How much did Apple increase prices on products in 2025?
(a) For what products did Apple increase prices, and how many of these products were directly impacted by tariffs?

Unless I’m missing something, the answers are “$0” and “none”. Apple increased none of its prices on any of its products in response to tariffs in 2025. The iPhone 17 lineup, in fact, surprised many observers and made news by holding prices steady.

In May 2025, Warren co-signed a letter to the FTC encouraging them to discourage large profitable companies from raising prices due to tariffs. Apple — a large profitable company — didn’t raise prices at all, which seemingly was what Warren thought they should do. But now she’s expressing outrage that Apple got a refund for the tariffs whose costs the company covered, and her followers are left to believe that Apple did raise prices and is keeping the money.

Link: warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-pushes…

Kirk McElhearn, back in February:

I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you still get ads.

And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.

One of the ads he examined was, supposedly, from a small company going out of business because the proprietor — supposedly a straight-out-of-Central-Casting kind old woman — was retiring after 26 years. McElhearn looked up the domain name and it had only just been created last year, and was registered from a company in China.

Two years ago this very week, I wrote about Apple striking a deal with Taboola to sell ads for Apple News. In that post, I quoted Eric Seufert (of Mobile Dev Memo) posting on Threads:

Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective, assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.

They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s the point.

Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace ads personalization.

Now quoting from myself in that same article:

If you told me that the ads in Apple News have been sold by Taboola for the last few years, I’d have said, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because the ads in Apple News — at least the ones I see — already look like chumbox Taboola ads. Even worse, they’re incredibly repetitious. [...]

So while I don’t think it’s good news that Apple is partnering with Taboola, I don’t expect it to make any discernible difference in the ad quality or frequency. Maybe it will improve the variety?

Privacy is not the issue with Apple’s Taboola partnership, or Apple advertising in general. The issues are quality and user experience. I was correct that the partnership has made no discernible difference in ad quality or frequency. And it hasn’t made any improvement to variety either. Here’s a collection of ads I continue to see in Apple News — often with the same ad appearing 3–4 times in the same article, as I scroll. (I posted the same image in my recent article “John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope”, if you’re thinking it looks familiar.)

The ads I see in Apple News are not relevant or informed. And, to be clear, I have “Personalized Ads” turned on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising (which makes me wonder if turning that off might actually make the ads even worse). The ads shown in the App Store never seem contextually relevant to me. So I have no faith that the ads that Apple is supposedly on the cusp of serving in Apple Maps are going to be good.

Back in March I wrote:

I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?

This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what mades the brand what it is. But now they’re stricken with the mindset that it’s the Apple brand that makes something a high-quality superior experience. If it comes from Apple it must be great — that sort of thinking. The ads in Apple News and the App Store can’t be detrimental to the user experiences and at times even embarrassingly crude or downright scammy because Apple doesn’t ship things that are detrimental to the user experience or embarrassingly crude — and certainly never with even a whiff of scamminess.

My theory is that’s why Apple isn’t allowing users to buy our way out of the ads. When streaming services like Netflix let you pay more money for ad-free tiers, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that the experience with ads is worse. Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps¹ because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse. If you refuse to admit that the ads make these services worse, you also can’t admit that there’s a reason to offer an ad-free experience. So the thinking is something like “Apple always focuses on the user experience, and never deliberately makes the user experience worse. Therefore, if an Apple service shows ads, those ads are high quality and don’t detract from the quality of the product or the experience of using it. Therefore, there’s no reason to offer users a paid ad-free tier, because there’s no reason to want to avoid Apple’s ads.”

It’s a textbook case of Upton Sinclair’s famous adage: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The obvious truth is that Apple’s ads just plain suck. They are not good at advertising-based services. And it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not good at advertising-based services, because the incentives for advertising-based services are in direct opposition to the incentives for everything Apple actually is good at. To wit: offering superior products worth paying a premium price for.

One can argue that an ad-free Apple Maps experience ought to be included with the price of the devices Apple sells. It’s even easier to argue that the App Store ought to be ad-free for everyone, based on its exclusive role in software distribution and the 15–30 percent commission Apple takes on every transaction. But if Apple simply made the App Store and Apple Maps ad-free for users paying for iCloud+ or Apple One, I’d stop complaining. That would make it clear: the full Apple experience requires not just an Apple device, but an Apple subscription. But the way things stand now, that ad-free experience isn’t even available.

Swiss project proves the viability of solar panels placed in the otherwise unused space between railroad tracks.

The Amble One is perhaps the world’s best-designed golf cart. It’s street-legal, tuned for off-roading, goes 60 miles on a charge, and starts at $25K.

Great piece by Andrea Pitzer on how lost Ezra Klein is in this current moment, newly relevant because he interviewed fascist activist Christopher Rufo on his NYT podcast (JFC!) “If you don’t know what your core beliefs are, you’re going to get played.”

Brexit vote: 10 years on. “‘Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,’ says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.”