An investigation into a crime prediction system used by Bristol police suggests in some cases it really didn’t work at all. CC-licensed photo by Matt Gibson on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Guilty? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20% • Financial Times
Michael Acton:
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Apple has increased the price of MacBooks and iPads by about 20%, one of the broadest price rises in its history, as the iPhone maker blamed memory chip shortages caused by the AI infrastructure boom.
Apple’s decision to substantially increase the cost of its entire line of laptop and tablet products spooked investors on Thursday, with a 6.1% share fall wiping $263bn from Apple’s market capitalisation.
It marked Apple’s biggest single-day fall since early April last year, when US President Donald Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, and the stock’s second-biggest one-day drop in valuation on record.
The $4tn US tech giant said on Thursday that the consumer technology industry was facing an “unprecedented challenge”, with memory prices rising so quickly that it would have to pass the costs on to customers.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook had warned last week that price increases this year would be “unavoidable” because of the “unsustainable” cost of memory and storage.
But it has so far stopped short of raising prices for the iPhone, Apple’s blockbuster product that still accounts for about half of its revenue.
“The rapid expansion of AI data centres has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” Apple said. “We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.”
…The iPhone maker joins a growing list of consumer technology companies that have raised the prices of their products citing the memory shortfall this year. Laptop makers Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus have already flagged similar price increases, while Samsung raised the price of two models of its new S26 smartphone in the US by $100.
…The DRam market is dominated by US company Micron and South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung, all three of which have surpassed $1tn valuations this year as they profit from the massive demand for advanced high-bandwidth memory from AI “hyperscalers” such as Google, Meta and Amazon.
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Micron announced quarterly profits up 15-fold and margins of over 80% on Wednesday. You could say that Tim Cook (and the other Apple people) are not delighted at the way the memory makers have them over a barrel.
The shoe yet to drop: no changes to iPhone prices. Yet.
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Updated XBOX console prices • XBOX Wire
Joe Skrebels, XBOX Wire Editor-in-Chief:
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Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.
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It seemed like Apple gave Microsoft the excuse to raise its prices once again. Those are scary figures, and the question feels like: are the prices going to come down any time soon? 2028 feels like – is – a long way distant. Presumably we can expect Nintendo and Sony to follow in time.
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Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams sues Meta over attempts to “silence” her • The Guardian
Ella Creamer and Michael Savage:
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The Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams is suing the tech company over its efforts to “silence” her.
A 57-page complaint filed to a US district court in California on Thursday argues that an interim arbitration ruling sought by Meta preventing Wynn-Williams from publicising her memoir, Careless People, was “improper and unlawful” and a “blatant violation of the first amendment”. It also accuses the company of “coercive surveillance”.
Wynn-Williams, who between 2011 and 2017 served as director of global public policy at Facebook, published her memoir of her time at the company in March 2025. The book contained allegations of a toxic internal culture, including sexual harassment and gender-based discriminatory practices. The company has described the book as a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.
Upon publication, Meta sought an emergency order preventing Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, on the basis that she had signed a severance agreement that included arbitration and non-disparagement clauses.
Thursday’s complaint, accompanied by a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams, argues that the severance agreement is unenforceable partly because it was signed under financial duress. It says when Facebook fired Wynn-Williams in August 2017, the company knew her termination would take away “critical employment benefits” – described as “cornerstones of her financial stability” – meaning she “had no choice” but to accept the severance agreement, allowing her to retain many of the benefits and obtain a significant cash payment.
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Freedom of speech also comes under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
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“This article states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” In essence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 meaning is a dual guarantee: it protects the inner liberty to form thoughts and the outward liberty to share them, encompassing the entire cycle of information—from seeking knowledge to disseminating ideas across all platforms without borders.”
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Perhaps she had to build up a sufficient warchest before filing the suit, because though the case seems strong on its face. It is coercive, and it has been surveilling her in order to fulfil the coercion.
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British Police built a sprawling crime-prediction machine. Some results couldn’t be trusted • WIRED
Matt Burgess and Mark Wilding:
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The Think family database holds records on close to half a million people who live in the city of Bristol, England. For many years, few of them knew anything about it.
Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information—police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a “picture of threat, harm, and risk” in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: “I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody.”
This risk scoring inside the Think Family Database was just one part of Avon and Somerset Police’s sprawling predictive analytics program. Among at least 23 separate models the force created were algorithms to identify the risk that people would commit burglary, fail to turn up in court, go missing, or become a victim of domestic abuse. One senior officer described creating a “league table” of the area’s most dangerous criminals—an apparent reference to the Offender Management App, which was designed to hold data on around 300,000 people in the region.
How the police have developed and used their predictive tools hasn’t always been clear to the public. John Pegram, the leader of a local police accountability group in Bristol, says he didn’t hear about the Offender Management App until 2023, years after it had been created. When he did learn about it, he began to suspect he might be included. “I think I knew I was on the app,” Pegram says.
In early 2024, Pegram filed a request to find out how the police were using his data. The police refused to say. Months later, after Pegram had hired solicitors to work on his case, the police confirmed he was on the app but declined to elaborate further. Like others across Bristol, the UK, and, increasingly, around the world, Pegram didn’t know whether he had been scored by an algorithm, what that score might be, or how it could affect his interactions with the authorities.
…[Our] investigation reveals that at least two of these risk-scoring models were quietly abandoned after Bristol City Council staff deemed they could no longer trust them. Previously unreported documents show government inspectors and independent reviewers highlighting a startling lack of transparency about some elements of the program and warning that the systems could undermine public trust. Police data disclosed to WIRED—comprising more than 36,000 model performance scores—appear in some cases to show “genuinely poor predictive performance,” according to an independent analyst who reviewed the data for WIRED.
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(Article is free to read.)
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Instagram wants to monopolize your attention • The Verge
Charles Pulliam-Moore:
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This week, Instagram launched a series of new features for its smart TV app that are all designed to get people to spend more time on the platform through the biggest screens in their homes. In addition to vertical Reels, Instagram for TV — which is currently available for Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, and Samsung Smart TVs — users can now watch disappearing Stories and horizontal videos with aspect ratios similar to what you typically see on YouTube. And soon, Instagram will make a big push for longform, episodic content and TV-focused “live creator experiences.”
This foray into the TV space feels very different from the Meta-owned company’s previous attempts to capture more of our attention by adding functionalities borrowed from competitors like TikTok, Snapchat, and Periscope (RIP.) It’s all contingent on the idea that people want to sit on their couches to watch Instagram content that they would typically consume on their phones.
The fact that we take our phones with us basically everywhere means that Instagram is always just a few taps away. The inherent portability of phone-based Instagram is arguably the biggest reason why the platform has managed to hit 3 billion monthly users. Scrolling through Instagram’s discovery page is something to do while you’re bored and already swiping through your phone. It’s easy to fire the app up and send videos to friends while you’re commuting, waiting for an elevator, or using the bathroom. But Instagram’s latest pivot is geared towards a more stationary experience that’s meant to be shared with people in the same room. This is a big bet.
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I had no idea that Instagram has a smart TV app. Do any substantial number of people use it? Will they? It seems utterly mindless: the couch experience is surely normally associated with a longer watch; look, people are going to films which are hours long. And Instagram thinks we’ll settle down on a couch to watch short video? I could be wrong, but the phrase “pivot to video” has become synonymous with football chairmen expressing full confidence in the team’s manager: it won’t last.
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Meta looks to AI to review harmful content in cost-cutting drive • Financial Times
Hannah Murphy and Cristina Criddle:
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Meta is racing to replace human moderation with generative AI as it undergoes a broader cost-cutting drive to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vast spending on AI.
The $1.4tn tech group has accelerated plans to switch to using large language models to review content and advertising across its platforms, according to four people familiar with the matter, which could help it save billions of dollars annually.
Already, Meta had replaced about 50% of human review requests with LLMs this year, several of the people said. The company was aiming to reduce that figure even further by the end of the year, the people added, potentially by more than 90% for certain types of content.
Meta has long relied on a mixture of automated systems and human reviewers, including third-party contractors, to assess whether a post or an advert breaches its rules. Appeals by users have typically been handled by human reviewers.
Meta said the shift towards AI moderation was to use a rapidly evolving technology more effectively rather than for cost savings. Since March, it said, its initial tests had shown that on average, LLMs made 13% fewer mistakes than humans when enforcing against violating content, while finding 10% more actual violations.
“The point of this work is to improve our enforcement efforts, and we’re deploying these more advanced AI systems once we’re sure they’re consistently performing better than our current methods of content enforcement,” it added.
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But how do you appeal against an AI decision? Does an AI gatekeep it? We’ve already seen the calamitous effects that AI helpers had when used for security and password resets on Instagram, so is everyone absolutely sure that these fewer mistakes and more violations are accurately measured?
Though one could wonder about what the point is. Facebook has become a swamp of AI slop.
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Newsletters in 2026: $10 per month is default price • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
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The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month or $100 per year, according to analysis of thousands of publications hosted on Beehiiv.
Beehiiv said these average prices have held steady since 2024 despite more creators entering the market.
Both small and large newsletters (with email list sizes of under 1,000 and those above 100,000) are charging about the same on average.
Beehiiv CEO and co-founder Tyler Denk told Press Gazette said that although this is the median price being paid by newsletter consumers, it is not the ceiling and some publications successfully charge much more.
Asked why $10 per month or $100 per year appeared to be the newsletter pricing sweet spot, Denk said: “I don’t think readers are inherently resistant to paying more. The reason so many subscriptions settle around $10 to $15 a month is that consumers have spent the last decade being conditioned to see that as the standard price for digital content. Whether it’s Netflix, Spotify, or The New York Times, people have a mental model for what a subscription should cost.
“What’s interesting is that at that price point, the purchase decision becomes relatively frictionless. People don’t spend much time debating it, which is incredibly valuable because retention is ultimately what turns a newsletter into a durable business.
“That said, there are plenty of exceptions with some creators and publishers offering something readers can’t easily get elsewhere, whether that’s specialised expertise, proprietary research, or access to a highly engaged community, and they charge more for it.
“So while $10 to $15 a month may have emerged as the default, it’s not a ceiling. It’s more of a starting point. The real determinant of pricing power isn’t consumer tolerance, it’s the value being delivered. The more indispensable the product, the more flexibility creators have on price.”
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The price is more dictated by “nice round number” than any idea about quality. $1, $5, $10 per month; $10, $50, $100 per year. It’s hardly the most complicated form of marketing. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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South Korean air force holds first live-fire drill against drone swarms using Vulcan guns, shotguns • Seoul Economic Daily
Lee Hyeon-Ho:
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South Korea’s Air Force has conducted its first live-fire drill to shoot down drone swarms, which have emerged as a new threat on the modern battlefield.
According to the Air Force on Monday, the Air Force Missile Defense Command carried out the exercise the previous day at a training range in the West Sea, mobilizing Vulcan guns and other weapons to counter drone swarm infiltration.
Eight Vulcan guns simultaneously poured firepower like a net in a “barrage fire” against 50 drones approaching at low altitude from about 1 kilometer ahead, shooting down 44 of them.
The remaining six were destroyed at close range with one portable laser and five shotguns.
“This was the first drill to defend against the infiltration of drone swarms, which are emerging as a powerful threat, using existing assets such as Vulcan guns,” said Colonel Nam Hyung-joo, head of the information operations division at the Missile Defense Command. “Based on the results and lessons from this exercise, we will continue to develop our drone swarm response system.”
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This is the fuller writeup of the exercise I mentioned yesterday. Does 44 out of 50 sounds impressive? It shouldn’t – the video shows it to be a complete load of junk, the equivalent of an enemy standing in the middle of a field saying “shoot me!”
Let us know when they can down 100% of a proper attack swarm. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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AI can’t fix the student-motivation problem • The Atlantic
Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein:
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In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.” By 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was chiming in that AI was on the verge of delivering, for students, “virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”
But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non-event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake—whether students use it—has stagnated.
A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems.
“Learning is hard work,” Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, told us. “It’s cognitively effortful and not experienced as fun. How do we get kids to want to do that?” AI is a powerful tool, she added, but it can’t be expected “to bridge that motivation gap.” Although AI tutors have sometimes proven valuable in low-resource schools in developing countries, a recent Stanford review of all of the available research into the use of AI in K–12 schools found that educational benefits for students generally were limited.
Only about one in three students is highly engaged in school, according to U.S. census data—a share that has remained stable over the past decade. These students, who also tend to come from wealthier homes with two educated parents, may well be motivated to seek extra guidance from a bot. But a motivated minority will not produce a revolution.
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Not only that; they only get minimal benefit. Everyone thinks education is easy to fix; it turns out it is far more complex. There was a while back that Mark Zuckerberg was sure that he could fix education. And before him Google (by buying its hardware and renting its software), and before him Apple (ditto).
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 