An Epically Bad Week for Apple

App Store Updates • Gemini on iPhones • Meta's Money • Waymo Cars

May 02, 2025

The epic beatdown Apple received in federal court this week feels like a watershed moment. Obviously, there’s a natural tendency to overreact to such news, but this feels like something that’s a culmination of tensions and ill-will that have been building for years. Over a decade, really. And Apple only have themselves to blame for that. But this also now gives them an opportunity to reset such relationships, as it were. To do the “right” things going forward. Unfortunately, those right things may not align with their bottom line goals — especially given all of the other battles and macro situations going on.

I won’t go so far as to say this is make or break for Tim Cook — if nothing else, the Trump relationship and tariff situation makes him uniquely suited to lead Apple right now — but it’s a moment that may be looked back upon when it comes to his legacy.

My three posts on the matter this week — have a great weekend, all:

Tim Sweeney’s Last Laugh

A federal judge just dismantled Apple in the most Epic way possible...

Epic Won Because Everyone Won, Because Apple Lost

And Tim Sweeney continues to poke the bear...

Tim Cook Chose Poorly, Now Apple Can Choose Wisely

Tear down the App Store wall

• Enjoying a Brewdog Cold Beer Lager 🍻
• Listening to "Mud" by Waxahatchee 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

I Think...

💳 App Store Guidelines Updated to Allow Links to External Payments

Humorously, the first change listed is to allow for developers to link to external NFT collections. Finally. But the real meat is obviously the ability for companies to point users to the web to pay for their services directly, perhaps with a better deal or bundle than what they can get through the App Store. To be clear, there still needs to be an in-app App Store payment option, but it can be buried below the preferred methods. It’s a great first step, obviously. And unsurprisingly, Spotify — long the Apple antagonist in this regard — was first to jump on submitting a build. More surprisingly, Apple accepted it quickly and without complaint. Or maybe that shouldn’t be surprising given the smackdown they just received in federal court. This will likely open the floodgates for Microsoft and others to take advantage of the new rules. But no word yet on Fortnite. Tim Sweeney said he would only make “peace” if Apple rolled out this change worldwide, which Apple did not do. And that implies they may intend to roll it back if they can win an appeal. (I have a hard time seeing, optically, how they can go back, but we’ll see.) But also, will Apple actually accept Epic back into the App Store? They still broke the rules, and in doing so, broke the App Store. [9to5Mac]

♊️ Google Confirms It’s Close to Putting Gemini on iPhones

Given that this was not just rumored, but basically confirmed by Apple executives on stage almost a year ago, it’s not clear why it’s taken so long for this iOS integration to roll out. Perhaps they agreed to some sort of exclusive window with OpenAI? Or maybe it was just the entire Apple + AI fiasco? From Sundar Pichai’s comments (during the search monopoly trial, no less), it sounds like this will be very similar to the ChatGPT integration — it could start as a part of Siri, but to get full functionality including premium features, you might download the Gemini app. The next questions: will there then be a choice screen between ChatGPT and Gemini? Will it be open to others, such as Claude and Perplexity? Maybe even Copilot? Grok? (Probably not?) Will the integration with any of these go even deeper with the next iOS iteration to try to bolster Siri before Apple’s new internal work is ready to roll? [Verge]

💰 Meta Boosts Capex Forecast in Push to be an ‘AI Leader’

The two key takeaways from Meta’s earnings — beyond their strong numbers — are: that they’re increasing their full-year CapEx range — again. It’s now $64B - $72B (up from $60B - $65B), some of this is hardware costs due to the macro fiasco, but a lot of it is a push to build more capacity. While Microsoft is bringing such spend down, Meta is pushing onward (even without friends to help foot the bill). The other key new wildcard is the Llama API — Meta’s first real cloud service. Mark Zuckeberg is downplaying it (naturally), but it could signal at least a test of competing with the big boys in the cloud — and thus helping to offset/justify those aforementioned costs… How long until Meta hires an enterprise sales team? [FT 🔒]

🚙 Waymo, Toyota to Bring Self-Driving Tech to Personal Vehicles

I noted this the other day, thinking it was Sundar Pichai simply taking a swipe at Tesla. But actually, this partnership — with former Tesla partner Toyota, you’ll note — could be a bigger deal. Certainly, nothing may come of it ultimately, as often happens with partnerships between car companies (and tech and car companies), it seems. But it’s interesting that Waymo/Toyota are coming at the market from basically the opposite end of Tesla/Cybercab. Waymo already has a network up and running but with cars that they fully own. Tesla has millions of cars that people own, but not network self-driving ridership yet. And when you throw Uber into this mix, which of course has an even larger network of riders, and drivers with cars on that network, but is just now starting to partner with self-driving car makers (including Waymo), it’s… something to watch. I’m honestly not sure which starting position I like more… [CNBC]

I Wrote...

(⌾ Denotes an Inner Ring column ⌾)

I Note...

The notion that VC will be one of the industries not disrupted by AI seems to imply that AI also won’t be effectively able to manage email. (As that’s like 80% of the VC job.) [Gizmodo]
Threads is up to 350M MAUs — with growth continuing to speed up, they’re inching closer to Xitter (something around 600M). Will increased ad loads slow the growth down? (Probably not.) [TechCrunch]
The obit for Stan Love, the father of NBA star Kevin Love, is quite the unexpected read. I had no idea that it’s the same Love family as The Beach Boys — Mike Love was Stan’s brother. And Stan — once his own basketball career was over — eventually became the bodyguard of his cousin, Brian Wilson. RIP. [NYT]
Andy Jassy says that 100,000 people now have Alexa+. That’s more than 0, I suppose. But it’s also roughly 0.017% of Alexa’s installed base. And that’s closer to 0 than anything meaningful. I still have yet to see/hear anyone actually talk about it. What can it do? Anything promised? [TechCrunch]
A judge is allowing the lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI to move to trial. OpenAI was trying to have it dismissed. [FT 🔒]
- But she also threw out 11 of the 16 claims being pursued. And rejected the petition by former OpenAI employees (and Geoffrey Hinton) to block the for-profit conversion. Still, overall, the whole thing continuing to move to trial doesn’t seem like great news for OpenAI. [Information 🔒]
- One more thing: the judge overseeing it? Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. You may have seen her name recently. She’s been busy… [Spyglass]
The White House launches a news aggregator (that obviously rips off the design of Drudge Report) for their own propaganda. How long until they monetize it? Sponsored propaganda, anyone? SponProPa? [Axios]
Tariffs come for the Xbox — prices going up across hardware and software. Curious how the real world impacts starting to roll out will impact policy here… [Verge]
Also quick to move on the App Store opening up front: Stripe, which now allows you to easily set up payments outside of your app. [Xitter]
- And Epic is working on their own alternative payment system as well via their own web store as well as letting others launch their own “webshops”. [Verge]
AI comes for Norway’s $1.8T sovereign wealth fund. The country believes it will save some $400M a year simply by helping the fund — which owns, “on average 1.5% of every listed company globally” — trade less. [FT 🔒]
The third act of MoviePass is a sort of fantasy sports game for movies. It sounds a bit like HSX back in the day (it still exists I guess — I can’t access it in Europe), but of course there’s a crypto angle now. [THR]
The key takeaway from the first LlamaCon seemed to be that Meta is all-in on going after OpenAI. From consumer to the cloud (per the earnings note above). [TechCrunch]
- Given that context, it’s sort of interesting that the main on-stage conversation was between Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella. Who disclosed that about 20%-30% of the company’s internal code is now written by AI. This is roughly inline with Google’s earlier statement on such matters. [TechCrunch]
- Not to worry though, we soon thereafter got another selfie from Sam Altman and Nadella. Just a totally normal thing to keep doing when all is well, of course. [Xitter]
- One thing not at LlamaCon? The reasoning version of Llama 4… [Information 🔒]
Google is now testing baking ‘AI Mode’ into Search by default for some US users. Again, you can tell how serious they’re taking this by how fast and aggressively they’re moving here. [Verge]

I Quote…

“In some cases, smugglers have employed creative methods to circumvent export controls, including hiding processors in prosthetic baby bumps and packing GPUs alongside live lobsters.”

— Anthropic, making a case for stronger American AI export controls. NVIDIA was not too happy about this post, and made that quite clear saying that the AI startup was telling “tall tales” about China. I mean, what is going on?

I Spy...

Just to add insult to injury to Apple this week (though again, this is their own fault)…