Apple CEO Tim Cook, presenting in dad shoes, clearly understood the assignment. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Apple is starting to show its age

Today’s event, complete with discussion of sleep apnea, showed Apple is catering to older customers. Bye-bye skydiving and rock climbing. Hello heart monitoring and fall detection.

Rani Molla

9/9/24 4:10PM

Apple is almost 50 years old. It’s acting like it.

During Apple’s hardware event today, Apple felt older than ever. To wit: Company executives mentioned “sleep apnea” a dozen times and introduced a new feature on the Apple Watch that measures breathing disturbances. The AirPod demo discussed “hearing loss” way more than sound or audio quality, as they showed off noise reduction features as well as a clinically validated hearing test. Indeed, the AirPods Pro 2 will now double as hearing aids, which will benefit anyone with a hearing impairment, regardless of age.

Generally, a brand that once felt young and hip seemed to be acting its age, trading in super sexy styles for features that seemed to be genuinely useful for a user base that is getting older. Bye-bye skydiving and rock climbing. Hello heart monitoring and fall detection. Apple’s preoccupation with style seems to have given way to a focus on durability and substance. The company’s obsession with high-end materials — sapphire, titanium, ceramic — felt more in line with renovating a bathroom than promoting the next hot technology.

But rather than trying to pretend otherwise, the iPhone maker seems to be leaning in. Apple and many of its customers are aging, and it’s meeting them where they are. And as they say, with age comes wisdom.

Today Apple laid out the biggest update to its flagship iPhone to date: the iPhone 16 has incorporated AI, or Apple Intelligence, throughout the device. If the demos are to be believed, the new iPhone will be able to anticipate your needs, understand what you say, and do things for you by pairing artificial intelligence with the fact that Apple knows everything about you. In other words, it will be a far cry from the Siri of yesterday.

That means some potentially very helpful and time-saving features: Being able to tell Siri to find and text someone images from an event. Having it play music or add dates to your calendar based on what comes up in your text conversation. Giving you context about where you are or what you’re looking at through your phone’s screen. Prioritizing and summarizing your notifications. (Apple was sure to emphasize privacy at every step because all this stuff sounds very invasive, too.)

Of course, that all means Apple could further lock people into its ecosystem. You can almost hear the antitrust case writing itself. But until then, Apple seems to be aging gracefully.

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Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5