The News

Apple’s new iPhones, hardware double down on Apple-yness

Thin (with curves), fit and expensive were the themes of this year’s Apple “awe-dropping” hardware event. We got a new iPhone, updated designs, new features across most product lines and surprisingly little AI chat — which was a nice change for a tech event in 2025. If you want to dive into everything that happened, the Verge has the best liveblog, WIRED has a good overall wrap and EFTM has Aussie prices.

My take is that it feels like Apple is playing it safe by leaning into its Appley-ness with these product updates. Here are my notes::

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BOM. HAS. HTTPS.

It’s happening. In fact, it’s already here. Our long national nightmare is over.

The Bureau of Meteorology website now supports HTTPS!!!!!!!!!!!

For the better part of a decade, BOM’s website has politely told people trying to access its HTTPS version that it does not support it (Reddit). Why doesn’t Australia’s government body for weather support a very basic web standard? No idea! Last year, BOM’s new website beta launched with HTTPS (TechAU).

And now, I am so so so so so proud to share that you can bloody fang in https://www.bom.gov.au and it works!!!!! This is so big I was tempted to lead the edition with this, ahead of Apple.

A BOM spokesperson confirmed to me that “as part of our preparations to transition to the new website https://beta.bom.gov.au/ the Bureau of Meteorology is enabling HTTPS security protocol and current security certificates on many of the bom.gov.au pages.“

(https://bom.gov.au/ still doesn’t work but baby steps, I guess!).

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Judge rejects $2.3B AI author payout over concerns its actually not fair enough to authors

A US judge gave a thumbs down to a historic AU$2.3 billion copyright payout from AI company Anthropic to the authors of 500,000 books used to train its AI over concerns that the settlement was going to be a dog’s breakfast (Bloomberg Law, $). Judge William Alsupp told both sides to refile their agreement to pay authors $3,000 per book because there were “important questions” about the number of authors that would get pay-outs, the process for claiming them, and the low rate per book.

The Sizzle: The news that Anthropic was on the hook to authors for $2.3 billion got mixed reviews: some people thought it was a piddly amount for a company worth $230B, whereas others were just surprised authors were getting anything. I didn’t expect the judge to reject what would’ve been the largest copyright class action payout ever, but he seems to have good, pro-author reasons for doing so. (Although there is a little voice in my head that wonders whether this might end up backfiring if the Trump administration introduces a “fuck copyright train on whatever you want” directive).

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Leftovers

Well, I guess that’s one way to make money from AI

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Oh, Also

Meet 'Hairy Creature', 'Distorted Face' and the other new emojis

Speaking of annual events: the Unicode consortium’s yearly release of new emojis rarely disappoints — and this year’s cohort is no exception (Jennifer Daniel on Substack). Unicode 17.0 includes some real bangers including “Hairy Creature” and “Fight Cloud” (Unicode Blog). It does take a little while for various systems to update to display the characters, so it’s probably about six months until you can start spamming that mfing “Distorted Face” in the chat.

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Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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