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Apple has repeatedly trumpeted the success of its financial services, a product lineup that now encompasses the Apple Card credit card, high-interest savings accounts, and a buy-now-pay-later service called Apple Pay Later .

But even if those products have proven reasonably popular with consumers, they haven’t been working out for the bank that Apple has partnered with to supply those services. Goldman Sachs’ consumer services have been losing the company billions of dollars, according to reporting from Bloomberg , CNBC , and The New York Times , among others. These losses have been driven in part by a much higher-than-usual loss rate on its credit card loans—meaning that people with Goldman-backed credit cards like the Apple Card are actually making their payments less often than people with credit cards from other banks.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has sent Goldman Sachs a proposal that will end their partnership within the next 12 to 15 months, leaving Apple to find a new backer for its financial products.

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The latest advertiser fallout on X , the platform formerly known as Twitter, could end up costing Elon Musk's company much more than the $11 million in revenue that the company previously estimated could be "at risk" due to backlash over antisemitic content on X.

According to internal X sales team documents reviewed by The New York Times , X may lose "up to $75 million" as more than 100 major brands—including Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Uber—have stopped advertising, while "dozens" more are considering pausing ads on the platform.

These sales team documents, The Times reported, "are meant to track the impact of all the advertising lapses" in November. On top of noting which brands have stopped advertising, the documents also flag brands at risk of halting ads. Ultimately, the sales team's goal is listing "how much ad revenue X employees fear the company could lose through the end of the year if advertisers do not return," The Times reported.

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Apple has released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS today to fix actively exploited zero-day security flaws that can be used to install malware via a "maliciously crafted image" or attachment. The iOS 16.6.1, iPadOS 16.6.1, macOS 13.5.2, and watchOS 9.6.2 updates patch the flaws across all of Apple's platforms. As of this writing, no updates have been released for older versions like iOS 15 or macOS 12.

The CVE-2023-41064 and CVE-2023-41061 flaws were reported by the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Also dubbed "BLASTPASS," Citizen Lab says that the bugs are serious because they can be exploited just by loading an image or attachment, which happens regularly in Safari, Messages, WhatsApp, and other first- and third-party apps. These bugs are also called "zero-click" or "clickless" vulnerabilities.

Citizen Lab also said that the BLASTPASS bug was "being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware ," the latest in a long line of similar exploits that have been used to infect fully patched iOS and Android devices.

Enlarge / Is this the new face of the tabletop RPG player? Demeo maker Resolution Games thinks it might be.

Resolution Games today announced that a version of Demeo —the developer's popular virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) tabletop RPG simulator—is in "active development" for the Apple Vision Pro headset. The title is among the first VR/MR games to be officially confirmed for Apple's highly anticipated $3,500 wearable computing device , which is expected early next year.

After Demeo 's launch in 2021 , Resolution Games added a Mixed Reality update late last year that places in-game objects on top of a view of the real world (via passthrough cameras on compatible headsets like Meta's Quest 2 and Quest Pro and the upcoming Quest 3 ). A "Mixed Reality 2.0" update for the game, launching today, adds support for controller-free hand-tracking as well as "co-location" of mixed reality items, which can now appear in the same place for multiple users in the same physical room.

Those kinds of MR features will be useful on the Apple Vision Pro, which doesn't use handheld controllers and is primarily focused on MR apps that can be layered over a view of the real world. But Resolution Games says Vision Pro will also support a "fully virtual" version of the game that doesn't integrate passthrough images.

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Apple has acquired 50-year-old record label BIS Records, the Swedish company's founder, Robert von Bahr, announced Tuesday. The purchase of the classical music-focused label follows Apple's late March launch of the Apple Music Classical app.

Apple's BIS purchase adds to the app, which in March Apple called the "world's largest classical music catalogue" with "over" 5 million tracks. Von Bahr said the record label will be incorporated into the Apple Music Classical app and Platoon. Apple bought Platoon , which identifies new talent and helps creators make, distribute, and market their content, in 2018. Von Bahr noted his just turning 80 as part of the decision to sell. He also pointed to his interest in Apple's support for spatial audio and in bringing "classical music to new audiences all over the world."

Neither Apple nor BIS disclosed the price of the acquisition. However, von Bahr said that he and the rest of the BIS staff will be "retained" by Apple.

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Google has reached a tentative settlement with more than 30 US states and 21 million customers who sued the tech giant for allegedly violating antitrust laws by overcharging for apps in the Google Play Store, Reuters reported .

The settlement comes approximately one week after a court revoked the lawsuit's class-action status . Details, including the amount of the settlement, were not disclosed, Reuters reported, but plaintiffs agreed in a court filing yesterday not to oppose the court's decision on the class-action certification. At one point, plaintiffs estimated that Google might owe them $4.7 billion in damages ; however, it was previously reported that losing the class-action status would significantly reduce damages for states and customers suing.

Nothing will be finalized until the settlement is approved by the State Attorneys General and Google owner Alphabet Inc’s board of directors. After that, a long-form settlement agreement must be reached before final approval by the court.

Apple and Microsoft have argued with Brussels that some of their services are insufficiently popular to be designated as “gatekeepers” under new landmark EU legislation designed to curb the power of Big Tech.

Brussels’ battle with the two US companies over Apple’s iMessage chat app and Microsoft’s Bing search engine comes ahead of Wednesday’s publication of the first list of services to be regulated by the Digital Markets Act.

The legislation imposes new responsibilities on tech companies, including sharing data, linking to competitors, and making their services interoperable with rival apps.

Enlarge / The Apple Watch (seen here in its current iterations) is set to get a new look. (credit: Corey Gaskin )

Annual updates to the standard Apple Watch have been almost too small to mention for the past few years, and it looks like that trend will continue with the new wearables Apple plans to debut next month. But, according to a Bloomberg newsletter , a major Apple Watch overhaul is coming as soon as next year.

Dubbed "Watch X," it will be the 10th edition of the Apple Watch that was originally announced in 2014 and released in 2015. To commemorate the occasion, Apple is planning the most significant redesign of the Watch yet apart from the recently launched Ultra, which is more of a spinoff than a direct follow-up.

Of course, that's not saying much. Each year's update has typically brought one small change—like a slightly bigger screen, a modest CPU speed bump, or a new health tracking feature aimed at one specific ailment—such that there's little reason to upgrade even once every two or three years, much less annually.

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One of your Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings on Saturday about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool.

There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways.

Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software “persistence.” Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and “persist” on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious.