Apple Will Drop Down to 15% Cut on Outside App Store Purchases; YouTube Starts Counting Views Earlier; First Test Flight of Large Electric Plane-$5 Electricity Cost; Anthropic Watermark System-Some Users Really Angry

Under the gun from the US District Court of Northern California to reduce their cut of purchases, Apple has now proposed commissions of 15% from standard apps, and larger discounts for developers enrolled in special Apple Programs. TechCrunch.com reports that small business developers would pay a 5% commission on payments. Developers in the Video Partner Program, News Partner Program, and Mini Apps Partner Program would pay 10%. Subscription renewals would also be reduced to 10%. All this is in Apple’s court filing. Cupertino had delayed and appealed, but last week the Supreme Court rejected Apple’s plea to pause the lower court action. This all flows from the lawsuit that has been ongoing for years brought by Epic Games. Apple had been taking a 30% cut originally….a pretty hefty commission.

YouTube is getting set to start counting views as soon as a video starts to play, aligning them with what Instagram, TikTok, and their own Shorts do. According to theverge.com, X still doesn’t count a view until a couple seconds have passed. YouTube will keep their original view counting method, but it will be under an ‘engaged views’ metric. 

This is some pretty exciting news. The first test flight of a large-sized electric airplane has been completed, and it only used $5 worth of electricity! Arstechnica.com notes that the plane was the Heart Aerospace X1. How long did it fly on that $5 bucks? A half hour. That would work out to a 4 hour flight costing about $40 in electricity…a hell of a lot cheaper than Jet A fuel. The X1 plane is the size of a regional plane like fly between a couple of close cities frequently. It is noticeably quieter than a jet…the plane is a propeller craft though, not a jet. It has a range of 500 miles…plenty for those commuter hops between cities. When I fly from Denver to Colorado Springs, it is always on one of the small Canadair regional jets flown by a subsidiary of the likes of United or Delta. That’s 15 minute flight, so figure the fuel cost would be $2.50. Will airlines buy these and charge less for those flights? I won’t hold my breath…but if it keeps them from raising ticket prices, that would be cool.

Anthropic has stirred up a hornet’s nest with some users, as it has announced a controversial watermarking system. On Friday, the company put out a blog post trying to justify it. Gizmodo.com says that the watermarking is intended to comply with the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The watermarking will make it harder for users to get away with pretending they wrote AI-generated text. Apparently…according to posts on X…a number of users have cancelled their accounts over the watermarking. Anthropic claims the watermarking will not be distinguishable by users. They are basically using the same tech as Google uses in its SynthID watermarking system. Some Claude users admit that they don’t want their AI-generated work to be detected by clients and school faculty who expect work to be done by a human. I say good for Anthropic and Google. In a college situation, professors used to be able to spot something copied from Cliff’s Notes in a New York second. It’s harder with AI generated text, so the watermarking is a good thing in my opinion.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.