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.”

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for spring 2027, aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Current prototypes of the new model, code-named V62, add a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photography, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product hasn’t been announced. It’s now in advanced testing within Apple, they said.

When Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu of The Information broke the story on the second-gen iPhone Air getting a second camera system back in November, they didn’t say what kind of lens it would be — ultra-wide or telephoto. I speculated that it could go either way. The no-adjective iPhones 11–17 have all sported two lenses: 1× and 0.5×. Pro-tier iPhones have shipped with three lenses (1×, 0.5×, and a telephoto that has varied in length from 2× to 5×) ever since the iPhone 11 Pro introduced the “Pro” adjective in the name. But prior to the iPhone 11 model year, top-tier iPhones with two lenses (7 Plus, 8 Plus, X, XS) shipped with a telephoto 2× lens, not a 0.5× ultra wide, as the second lens.

If Gurman is correct that the additional lens on the second-gen iPhone Air is going to be an ultra-wide 0.5×, I wonder if that is motivated by which type of lens is more popular, or which one fits the Air’s thin form factor better. Could be both — that ultra-wide photography and video is more popular than telephoto, and it fits the constraints of the form factor better. (When I wrote about this in November, a bunch of readers emailed to say that their teenage kids shoot a ton of ultra-wide photos.)

I just ran the numbers on my personal photography with the iPhone 17 Pro over the last nine months. I’ve shot just a hair under 4,000 stills and 90 videos. Still photos by lens:

 0.5x:   6%
   1x:  86%
   4x:   5%
Front:   3%

Videos by lens:

 0.5x:  18%
   1x:  80%
   4x:   2%
Front:   0

By the numbers, I use the ultra-wide 0.5× lens about the same amount as the telephoto 4× for stills, but much more frequently for video — because video is captured with a sensor crop. But flipping through the stills shot with each, an awful lot of my 0.5× photos are macro close-ups of things like receipts and products on store shelves. If I could only have one of the two additional lenses, it’d be a close call, but I’d choose the telephoto 4× — which has become more useful than any previous telephoto lens this year with the sensor crop to get an optical 8× zoom.

Update: “Ultra-Wide 0.5× Lenses Have Utility Beyond ‘Photography’”.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/apple-prepares…