Apple says the App Store is 'fair and free of bias' in response to Musk's legal threats
xAI founder Elon Musk accused Apple of "unequivocal antitrust violation" by favoring OpenAI in a post on X, warning that his company "will take immediate legal action." In a separate post from his threat, he asked Apple why it "[refuses] to put either X or Grok in [its] 'Must Have' section." X, he said, is "the #1 news app in the world," while Grok is ranked number five among all apps. "Are you playing politics? What gives?" he continued.
Musk didn't provide evidence to back his accusations. It's also worth noting that Chinese AI app DeepSeek reached the top of Apple's free app rankings back in January, overtaking even ChatGPT. As X's own Community Notes also mentioned in Musk's post, added hours after it went up, Perplexity reached the top of overall rankings in India's App Store back in July. Both apps were able to reach the top of their respective lists way after Apple and OpenAI announced their partnership last year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Musk's accusation, as well. He said it's a "remarkable claim," given that he has heard allegations that Musk manipulates "X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like." In response, Musk posted: "Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes."
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Boston Globe
5 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Shopping for school supplies becomes a summer activity as families juggle technology and tariffs
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Retail and technology consulting company Coresight Research estimates that back-to-school spending from June through August will reach $33.3 billion in the U.S., a 3.3% increase from the same three-month period a year ago. The company predicted families would complete about 60% of their shopping before August to avoid extra costs from tariffs. Advertisement 'Consumers are of the mindset where they're being very strategic and conscientious around price fluctuations, so for back to school, it prompts them to shop even earlier,' said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, the research division of software company Adobe Inc. Getting a head start Miami resident Jacqueline Agudelo, 39, was one of the early birds who started shopping for school supplies in June because she wanted to get ahead of possible price increases from new U.S. tariffs on imported products. Advertisement The teacher's supply list for her 5-year-old son, who started kindergarten earlier this month, mandated specific classroom items in big quantities. Agudelo said her shopping list included 15 boxes of Crayola crayons, Lysol wipes and five boxes of Ticonderoga brand pencils, all sharpened. Agudelo said she spent $160 after finding plenty of bargains online and in stores, including the crayons at half off, but found the experience stressful. Kylie and Cash Zimmerman shop in the back-to-school supplies section of a Target in Sherwood, Ore., Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. Jenny Kane/Associated Press 'I am overwhelmed by the need to stay on top of where the deals are as shopping has become more expensive over the years,' she said. A lot of the backpacks, lined paper, glue sticks — and Ticonderoga pencils — sold in the U.S. are made in China, whose products were subjected to a 145% tariff in the spring. Under the latest agreement between the countries, Chinese goods are taxed at a 30% rate when they enter the U.S. Many companies accelerated shipments from China early in the year, stockpiling inventory at pre-tariff prices. Some predicted consumers would encounter higher prices just in time for the back-to-school shopping season. Although government data showed consumer prices rose 2.7% last month from a year earlier, strategic discounting by major retailers may have muted any sticker shock for customers seeking school supplies. Backpacks and lunchboxes, for example, had discounts as deep as 12.1% during Amazon's Prime Day sales and competing online sales at Target and Walmart in early July, Adobe Insights said. Throughout the summer, some of the biggest chains have are advertising selective price freezes to hold onto customers. Advertisement Walmart is advertising a 14-item school supplies deal that costs $16, the lowest price in six years, company spokesperson Leigh Stidham said. Target said in June that it would maintain its 2024 prices on 20 key back-to-school items that together cost less than $20. An analysis consumer data provider Numerator prepared for The Associated Press showed the retail cost of 48 products a family with two school age children might need — two lunchboxes, two scientific calculators, a pair of boy's shoes — averaged $272 in July, or $3 less than the same month last year. Digital natives in the classroom Numerator, which tracks U.S. retail prices through sales receipts, online account activity and other information from 200,000 shoppers, reported last year that households were buying fewer notebooks, book covers, writing instruments and other familiar staples as students did more of their work on computers. The transition does not mean students no longer have to stock up on plastic folders, highlighters and erasers, or that parents are spending less to equip their children for class. Accounting and consulting firm Deloitte estimates that traditional school supplies will account for more than $7 billion of the $31 billion it expects U.S. parents to put toward back-to-school shopping. Shopping habits also are evolving. TeacherLists, an online platform where individual schools and teachers can upload their recommended supply lists and parents can search for them, was launched in 2012 to reduce the need for paper lists. It now has more than 2 million lists from 70,000 schools. Users have the option of clicking on an icon that populates an online shopping cart at participating retail chains. Some retailers also license the data for use on their websites and in their stores, said Dyanne Griffin, the architect and vice president of TeacherLists. Advertisement The typical number of items teacher request has remained fairly steady at around 17 since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, Griffin said. 'The new items that had come on the list, you know, in the last four or five years are more the tech side. Everybody needs headphones or earbuds, that type of thing, maybe a mouse,' she said. She's also noticed a lot of schools requiring clear backpacks and pencil pouches so the gear can't be used to stow guns. Enter artificial intelligence For consumers who like to research their options before they buy, technology and retail companies have introduced generative AI tools to help them find and compare products. Rufus, the AI-powered shopping assistant that Amazon launched last year, is now joined by Sparky, an app-only feature that Walmart shoppers can use to get age-specific product recommendations and other information in response to their questions. Just over a quarter of U.S. adults say they use AI for shopping, which is considerably lower than the number who say they use AI for tasks such as searching for information or brainstorming, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in July. Some traditions remain Before the pandemic turned a lot more people into online shoppers, schools and local Parent Teacher Associations embraced the idea of making back-to-school shopping easier by ordering ready-made bundles of teacher-recommended supplies. An extra fee on the price helped raise money for the school. Market data from Edukit, a supplier of school supply kits owned by TeachersList parent company School Family Media, shows that about 40% of parents end up buying the boxes, meaning the other 60% need to shop on their own, Griffin said. She noted that parents typically must commit no later than June to secure a bundle, which focus on essentials like notebooks and crayons. Advertisement Agudelo said her son's school offered a box for $190 that focused on basics like crayons and notebooks but didn't include a backpack. She decided to pass and shop around for the best prices. She also liked bringing her son along for the shopping trips. 'There's that sense of getting him mentally prepared for the school year,' Agudelo said. 'The box takes away from that.'
Gizmodo
5 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
DOGE Has Continued to Waste Billions While Saving Almost Nothing: Reports
The Trump Administration's Department of Government Efficiency has been a project largely defined by ever-diminishing expectations. At the outset of DOGE's journey, its chief operator, Elon Musk, famously claimed, in a bout of wild optimism, that he hoped to cut 'at least' $2 trillion out of the federal budget. Not long after the election, Musk reduced his ambitions to $1 trillion. Throughout the first few months of Trump's second term, DOGE claimed to be saving Americans billions, but analyses repeatedly showed the organization was wildly inflating its savings and often making rudimentary math mistakes. In May, the billionaire claimed that DOGE had saved Americans $160 billion, but admitted that his org was 'not as effective' as he'd hoped. At the time, the New York Times reported that DOGE had only publicly accounted for $58 billion of the savings Musk alleged and that even those purported savings had been 'significantly inflated, by including outright errors and guesses about the future.' Now, yet another fact-checking effort aimed at Musk's initiative has resulted in greatly reduced facts and figures. An analysis by Politico claims that, of some $52.8 billion that DOGE purports to have saved Americans by cancelling various government contracts, only a fraction appears to have been realized. The report states that, of the savings bragged about on DOGE's 'Wall of Receipts' website, only '$32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings' could be verified. On top of that, the news outlet found that 'DOGE's savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.' Politico further notes that none of those savings will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money went back to the respective agencies to which it had been allotted. In other words, DOGE basically did nothing. The apparent blunder was achieved through a poor grasp of timetables, the report claims: DOGE's savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out. Counting this 'ceiling value' gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers. 'That's the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, 'I've just saved $20,000,'' said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. 'Anything that's been said publicly about [DOGE's] savings is meaningless.' Also relevant is another recent report that claims DOGE spent substantially more money attempting to downsize government than it saved by destroying public programs. Authored by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the analysis claims that DOGE blew through some $21.7 billion in taxpayer money as it attempted to downsize the federal workforce. Between January and July, DOGE spent some $14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program, which paid public employees 'not to work for up to eight months.' DOGE allegedly spent another $6 billion on '100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.' The organization spent hundreds of millions more on various inefficient and wasteful policies. The Senate committee notes that the amount that DOGE spent in this fashion is more than double the amount that DOGE has definitively culled from the government ($9 billion, via cuts to NPR, PBS, and foreign aid) through the rescission package voted for by Republicans this summer. Meanwhile, as DOGE has continued on with its questionable antics, its own staff have continued to suck taxpayer money out of the government. In March, NPR reported that $40 million in public funds had been apportioned for DOGE's activities, but much about the cost of the initiative remains unclear. That same month, Wired noted that some DOGE staffers were making six-figure government salaries for their slash-and-burn work. The money often appeared to be coming from the very agencies that DOGE was butchering, the outlet noted. If both the recent studies are accurate, they reveal the very ironic contours of DOGE and its activities—an organization that claims to be rooting out governmental waste and fraud, but whose operations appear wasteful and whose public statements are frequently, according to many journalistic analyses, fraudulent. At this point, it's unclear what the heck DOGE is even doing. The organization isn't dead, but with the loss of its Supreme Leader (Musk), its mandate has become increasingly unclear, and its activities are now shrouded in mystery. Like a computer virus, the organization continues to worm its way through the bureaucracy's guts, servicing nebulous projects, like the creation of a national citizenship database that has alarmed privacy activists. Some of DOGE's former members continue to prove useful to the administration in other ways. Last week, the 19-year-old former DOGE-ling known as 'Big Balls' (real name Edward Coristine) managed to get punched in the face by a group of juveniles while out for a stroll in the nation's capital, according to Washington D.C. police. The spectacle of Coristine's bloodied visage was shared widely on Musk's X platform and other social media sites, and the incident has since served as a justification for Trump's authoritarian-style federalization of local police forces in D.C. The episode shows that, while DOGE has been an utter trainwreck from a governance and policy standpoint, it continues to serve certain functions deemed critical to the success of the current regime: namely, those of the public relations (i.e., propaganda) department.
Bloomberg
6 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Fight Over Musk's Role in Shuttering USAID Is Kept Alive by Judge
A lawsuit accusing billionaire Elon Musk of unlawfully directing the closing of the US Agency for International Development can move ahead over the Trump administration's objections, a Maryland federal judge ruled. US District Judge Theodore Chuang on Wednesday rejected the Justice Department's request to toss out a lawsuit that alleges Musk exercised power within the US government that's reserved for Senate-confirmed officials. The judge also left intact a claim that the Department of Government Efficiency project spearheaded by Musk unlawfully took steps to dissolve an agency created by Congress.
