Tim Hardwick (Hacker News):
Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible culprits.
In particular, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) both impose strict requirements for how speech and translation services are offered. Regulators may want to study how Live Translation works, and how that impacts privacy, consent, data-flows, and user rights.
This implies that it’s not because of DMA-related antitrust concerns. I would have expected those to come into play since, as far as I’m aware, live translation doesn’t work with headphones from other brands.
Previously:
AirPods Antitrust Apple Intelligence Digital Markets Act (DMA) European Union GDPR iOS iOS 26 Legal Natural Language Translation
Adam Engst:
When Apple first introduced Emergency SOS via satellite with the iPhone 14, it promised two years of free service. Later, Apple extended the free service by another year (see “Apple Extends Free Emergency SOS via Satellite for iPhone 14 Users for Another Year,” 15 November 2023). That extension was set to expire in November, but Apple has—in a footnote on the press releases for the new iPhones—moved the free access expiration date again[…]
I’m glad to have this feature, but after recently trying it out when hiking I wouldn’t plan to rely on it. It took a long time and a fair amount of moving my feet and orienting my body and the phone in order for it to acquire a signal in an area that had some light tree cover and rock. I had to concentrate on holding the phone and making sure it remained aimed at the satellite, as it moved overhead. Then I would have to keep at it while waiting for a reply. Chances are that in a real emergency, if I were stuck or injured, I wouldn’t be able to do all of this. It’s great that maybe it would help when you need it, but if you were thinking about carrying a dedicated messenger device or locator beacon you should probably still do that.
Previously:
Emergency SOS via Satellite iMessage iOS iOS 26 Short Message Service (SMS)
Howard Oakley:
When an app that supports versioning saves a file, the current version is added as a dataless file to a folder in AllUIDs, with its UUID as its name, its data are added to the ChunkStoreDatabase, and its details are added to the database in db-V1. Chunk sizes typically range up to just over 20 MB. The service responsible for versioning is revisiond, and the subsystems you’ll encounter in the log are com.apple.foundation.filecoordination and com.apple.chunkinglibrary.
Retrieving a version thus consists of looking it up in the db.sqlite database, and reconstituting that version as a file, using the dataless file with its attributes and metadata in the file UUID, and its data restored from the ChunkStore.
[…]
The most common cause of problems with the version database is excessive size. Although its size isn’t readily discoverable, it can be a major contributor to that attributed to System Data in Storage settings and third-party utilities, and in some cases can exceed 100 GB.
[…]
My free utility Revisionist has a version crawler that will list all files in a volume or folder with the number of versions they currently have stored in that volume’s .DocumentRevisions-V100 folder.
Howard Oakley:
In recent discussions here about the version system built into macOS, two potential problems were raised: first that a file’s versions don’t go with it wherever the file goes, and second that versions wouldn’t preserve datestamps. This article demonstrates how you can easily work around the first, and how the second isn’t correct.
Previously:
Apple File System (APFS) Mac Mac App Mac OS X Versions macOS Tahoe 26 Revisionist Storage
