Apple Maps, Google Maps, Uber and other Apps on iPhone screen

Travel apps Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Uber on the screen of an iPhone (Getty Images)

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Apple is planning to put advertising in the Maps app by 2026

Boosting its Services division with a few extra ad dollars sounds nice — but it could drive users away.

10/27/25 11:46AM

Apple is well known for its iconic ads. Now, the same thing that attracted many to the company in the first place could be what deters them from its products. According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published on Sunday, Apple is moving ahead with plans to put ads in its Maps app.

Like features already incorporated into rival Google Maps and other navigation services, Apple plans to sell prominent space within the app’s search results to restaurants and other businesses. Per Gurman, this will be similar to search ads in the App Store, where developers can buy promoted slots for their software based on queries. Apple also intends to employ AI for its sponsored Maps suggestions to ensure “relevant and useful” results.

Think similar

After years of eschewing ads within its offerings, Apple seems increasingly enamored by in-app marketing — perhaps as a way to bolster its all-important Services division, which keeps the Apple machine ticking along between iPhone purchases. Last year, the segment brought in ~$96 billion in revenue, roughly a quarter of the company’s total.

Home to the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, advertising, and more, Apple’s Services revenue has grown fivefold in the past decade alone. Meanwhile, per eMarketer’s estimates, Apple’s ad revenue totaled $6.5 billion last year, or 7% of its Services total.

Though Apple has historically played down its desire to move further into the ad space, in part due to its privacy-conscious data collection terms, “Apple Ads” may now be too fruitful an option for the company not to squeeze for juice (à la Walmart and Amazon), with advertising typically carrying very healthy profit margins.

Still, Apple could face a backlash if it plugs promos too strongly: users have fought against ads featuring in iOS settings; in June, many iPhone customers bemoaned Apple Wallet putting out a push notification to promote “F1: The Movie”; and we all remember that U2 album.

Rani Molla5h

Tesla’s Model Y just cleared a new federal safety bar

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced today that Tesla Model Ys manufactured after November 12 were the first to pass the agency’s new advanced driver assistance system tests, which are now part of the New Car Assessment Program.

“By successfully passing these new tests, the 2026 Tesla Model Y demonstrates the lifesaving potential of driver assistance technologies and sets a high bar for the industry,” NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison wrote in the press release. “We hope to see many more manufacturers develop vehicles that can meet these requirements.”

The new tests include:

Pedestrian automatic emergency braking
Lane-keeping assistance
Blind spot warning
Blind spot intervention

The milestone offers Tesla highly coveted regulatory validation, as it seeks to spur usage of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech. The NHTSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

80x

Jon Keegan6h

We knew Claude Code was driving crazy growth at Anthropic, but it may be much more than the company is expecting.

Speaking at the company’s developer conference yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that while the company is planning for 10x growth this year, it could be as much as 80x, calling the overwhelming demand “crazy” and that he looked forward to more modest growth, saying such growth is “too hard to handle.”

The demand is so great that Anthropic partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI to buy up the bulk of computing from his Colossus data center in Tennessee.

Rani Molla12h

Tesla’s made-in-China vehicle sales jumped 36% in April

Tesla’s sales of made-in-China vehicles — sold across China, Europe, and other international markets — rose 36% year over year to 79,478 units in April. The increase marks the sixth straight month of annual growth in sales of vehicles made in the world’s largest manufacturing economy, suggesting the EV maker’s overseas business may be stabilizing after a difficult stretch.

That said, China wholesale deliveries fell from March, even as overall new energy vehicle sales rose 7% during the period.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Tesla China April wholesale sales jump year-on-year but slip from March

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Rani Molla5/6/26

Anthropic’s scramble for compute now includes rival xAI

Another day, another major partnership with an AI rival. This time, Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX’s xAI to access compute from its Colossus 1 data center to help it improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Just yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic planned to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud services over the next five years. As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote:

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

xAI — Creators of Grok, the AI Chatbot

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

5/6/26