Linked List: February 27, 2024

Tuesday, 27 February 2024

Netflix Will No Longer Accept Payments From App Store Billing for Legacy Accounts 

Luke Bouma, reporting for Cord Cutters News:

Are you one of the Netflix customers who still pay your Netflix bill through Apple? For years now, Netflix has not accepted new subscribers or rejoined members who want to use Apple to pay their bills. If you already had an active account, though, that paid through Apple you could continue to do so. Now, though, that seems to be coming to an end.

Today, Netflix started to inform customers that Apple will no longer be accepting Apple Pay through iTunes Subscriptions, for example.

Netflix stopped accepting new subscriptions from in-app purchases five years ago, but until now had allowed existing in-app subscriptions to keep going — and for many of those users, at lower prices than they currently offer.

Netflix and Apple used to be partners; now they’re rivals. Dropping support for the remaining legacy iTunes accounts isn’t nearly as big a deal as Netflix eschewing a native VisionOS app, but still, it’s a sign of how far apart the two companies are today. Apple TV didn’t have an App Store until the fourth-gen models (a.k.a. “Apple TV HD”) were introduced in 2015. But back in 2010, Apple included a Netflix “app” in the second-gen Apple TV, along with YouTube and Flickr. Those services were integrated right into the system software. That seems like forever ago.

Also, hats off to Cord Cutter News for their humility. Netflix’s stock was up 2 percent today. Surely that’s because this news came as “a relief to investors” — but Cord Cutter News took no credit for it.

Apple Is Canceling Electric Car Project 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is canceling a decadelong effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.

Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people.

The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.

Kevin Lynch took over leadership of Project Titan back in September 2021, but remained in charge of Apple Watch, too. In hindsight that makes me wonder if Lynch’s mission wasn’t to ship a car, but more to assess what technologies the group had created could be used to create other products. Whatever progress Apple has made with “autonomy” ought to be applicable to robots, for example. Making intelligent robots feels more like something Apple should be doing than making cars.

The move came as a relief to investors, who sent Apple shares climbing Tuesday after Bloomberg reported the news. The stock was up about 1% at $182.63 by the close in New York.

Or, maybe, investors didn’t care at all, and popular stocks typically move up or down by a percentage point or so every single day. But Bloomberg is going to Bloomberg.