Linked List: August 28, 2026

Friday, 28 August 2026

Apple Announces Price Increase for Apple TV and Apple One Subscriptions ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here are the full details on the price increases:

Apple TV (monthly): $14.99 (up from $12.99)

Apple TV (annual): $119 (up from $99)

Apple One Individual: $21.95 (up from $19.95)

Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the Individual plan.

The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple says existing subscribers will be notified of the price increase about a month before they are charged the new price.

Seems poetic that Tim Cook’s last action as CEO is a goose to services revenue.

‘I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them Into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform’ ★

Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney’s:

People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.

(Via Michael Sippey.)

‘How Americans See E.U. Tech’ ★

I think at least half a dozen people have sent me a link to this video and now that I’ve watched it, I understand why. Perfect.

We Certainly Have Made a Hames Out of This ★

I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure.

But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame.

(The other longstanding Great Lakes mnemonic is the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One”, which I don’t love because neither Superman nor everyone ought to be treated as two words, but it does have the advantage of sorting the lakes geographically from west to east.)

‘Not Sure How You Own Canada by Deleting Your Own History’ ★

Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change):

This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called Ontario — at least one of them predating the Canadian province by like 100 years — because the word originates with native tribes in North America. It’s not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect all you’re doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Yeah it’s funny when Canadians are upset I guess or whatever, but Lake Ontario, the name itself, is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history.

Politically this is also stupid because the number one challenge Republicans will face in the midterms is the charge that they haven’t used their time in power to advance the interests of everyday Americans. This kind of thing will be used as evidence to make that case. That might not be fair. Sure technically you can advance the interests of everyday Americans and also do dumb shit like this. But the fact is that far from “making liberal heads explore [sic],” you’re actually handing them a political gift. It helps their case much more than it helps ours. And, like I said, the historical logic here is totally confused. Lake Ontario was not named after the Canadian province of Ontario. It’s the other way around.

Good sign that the whole mad-king thing is running on fumes when even Daily Wire commentators agree that this is stupid and isn’t even an effective troll. Every deluded fool runs into reality eventually. (Via Oliver Darcy’s Status.)

Also: Applying a new name to the Gulf of Mexico is equally ahistorical — Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the Gulf’s name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation and 150 years older than the United States.

From the DF Archive: ‘Golfo Del Gringo Loco’ ★

Yours truly back in February 2025:

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t.

I’m starting to worry how well that’s going to hold up.

And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario.

That “(yet?)” held up very well, alas. The rest of my essay holds up very well too, I think, especially pertaining to how Google and Apple present the change in their respective maps apps:

So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas, disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:

United States: “Gulf of America”.

Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.

Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own suggestions):

United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.

Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.

There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political lunacy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.

Earlier in the essay, I wrote:

To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy. What is reasonable is to minimize controversy.

Trump has delivered fresh “Lake America” shit sandwiches for Google and Apple to eat. I suggest that the path I recommended 18 months ago remains the path of eating the least shit, maintaining the most integrity, and courting the least collective controversy. Label it “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” to those of us here in the U.S., and keep it as “Lake Ontario” with no mention of Trump’s petulant fiat name anywhere else in the world.

Trump Declares That Lake Ontario Is Now ‘Lake America’ ★

Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS:

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates.

The president said the name change was “effective immediately” during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the name change. When asked by reporters about the move, Trump said he was sending “no message” to Canada with the name change.

“Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the president said. “Actually, as you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America.”

Aaron Rupar has video clips of Trump declaring the change in an Oval Office press event, here and here. In the second clip Trump ruminates, “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” Those who deny that he’s a mad king slipping ever deeper into dementia might say, well, he’s obviously joking. But if I had told those same people just two years ago, in the run up to his reelection, that Trump was going to declare new names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, they’d have said I was crazy because that would be nutty.

It is nutty. Renaming these large bodies of water is nuts. He’s nuts. This is not complicated. Crazy people do crazy things and this is obviously crazy. I often use the phrase jokingly but Donald Trump is not hooked up right, and the proof is right before our eyes on camera every day.

Factoid: HOMES is the longstanding mnemonic for recalling the five Great Lake names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. “Hames”, technically, is a playable Scrabble/Wordle word (“a part of a horse collar”), but it’s far too obscure to serve as a mnemonic. That leaves one word in the English language consisting of the five necessary letters: SHAME.