“I do see this as a continued trajectory of their main business model of controlling what people see, putting ads in front of them, and collecting more data,” Mir says.

It’s definitely rational to be anxious about handing over your credit card to an agent. Even if you could trust these AI tools wouldn’t be tricked into spending money in ways you don’t want, outsourcing your shopping decisions can have unintended consequences. Consumer advocates see this purchasing automation as potentially opening the door for companies to prioritize certain brands or other products in an agent’s output, based on sponsorship deals. Meta’s Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang hinted in an interview with Axios that it’s looking for more revenue opportunities in Muse that aren’t ads, without disclosing specifics.

Personally, I enjoy the slow scrolls of online shopping, where I can spend an hour on a website and leave with nothing in my cart. There’s a whimsical inefficiency to browsing Depop for leather jackets I likely won’t even buy. By exploring the Internet on my own, I’m slowly building my own sense of taste and curating an understanding of what I actually enjoy. If Muse does everything for me, I lose out on the journey that led to the decision.

“At some point, the AI is making all of your meaningful taste decisions, your preference decisions, decisions about where you go, where you eat, what you do, what vacations you take,” Schroeder says. “That’s kind of the joy of being human—getting to test things out and figure out what you like. So, the concept of turning all of that over to a machine is pretty horrifying to me.”

Sharing Machines

Relying on agents, like Meta’s Muse, could degrade our functioning while these tools collect data about us.

“The design of AI agents is such that it disengages users,” says Margaret Mitchell, a researcher and chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face. “So, users become more passive.” Mitchell recently co-wrote a research paper unpacking how agentic tools are not effectively designed for human oversight and may actually worsen the user’s ability to assess what the agent is doing on their behalf.

People who use agents may become overly reliant on the tools, even more so than when interacting with a standard chatbot, since agents have access to more information and can do more tasks. One potential impact is “cognitive degradation,” where users rely on automations from a confident-sounding, external source and are less able to make independent decisions.

Mitchell also sees high levels of personalization as potentially priming users to share even more data about themselves. “It’s not only that it knows about you, so you trust it more,” she says. “It’s that it’s actually aligning to you in what it talks about and how it talks about it, in a way that further pulls you into interacting with it and divulging more private information.” Recent research shows that AI tools may start to mirror a user’s speaking style as they collect more interaction data.

While Muse is powerful, I’ve decided to send this data goblin back to its cave, and deleted the app after my initial experiments.

Before I could remove Muse from my phone, the agent sent me one final ping. A tip! I wonder what it could be. “Connect your apps so I can do more,” the notification read. Alright, buddy. I heard you the first time.

Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.

Molly McCann Sanders has a lot in common with many of the other women who helped Donald Trump win a second term as president. A pro-life Catholic who lives in Texas, she has staunchly conservative opinions on immigration and a fierce hatred of eminent domain—the practice of the government taking private property for public use.

Sanders, the president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, which was started by Phyllis Schlafly, also describes herself as “a crunchy MAHA mom”—and says she’s been paying particular attention to data centers.

“I’m alarmed by the idea that these data centers can move in and pollute,” she tells me. “I’m not a data center expert. I’m not a tech expert. But I’m suspicious and wary, and want to move slowly.”

She loves Trump, “but I think he’s wrong about data centers,” she says. And she sees the GOP’s effort to court what she calls “the laptop class”—young men who are enthusiastic about technology—at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month as a huge misstep with midterms nearing.

McCann Sanders isn’t alone. More than 60 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, say they are opposed to the construction of data centers in a poll released by The New York Times last week. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies sounding the alarm on how voters perceive data centers, warning that “campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” Last week, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio issued a memo to the party’s candidates claiming that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.”

But the GOP is facing one big hurdle: Trump himself. In recent weeks, facing mounting scrutiny on his policies and support for the industry, Trump has doubled down on his defense of both data centers and AI. In late August, he wrote in a Truth Social post that only communities that wanted to be “backwards and poor” would refuse data centers coming to town.

Last week, he issued yet another series of posts boosting AI data centers. Users on his own Truth Social platform pushed back. An analysis from The New York Times of thousands of responses found that anti-data-center and anti-AI comments—including from staunch MAGA accounts—outnumbered positive comments by four to one.

Sanders says she sometimes “looks past” the wilder things Trump says, but she can’t fully overlook his pro-data-center rhetoric.

“That is not the right way to go about this,” she says of the “backwards and poor” post. “We do have legitimate concerns. There are real problems.”

My colleague Hugo Lowell, who covers the White House and writes our Inner Loop newsletter, says he’s not surprised by Trump’s attitude. “He’s bullish on AI,” he tells me. “He’s been told that restricting data center development means restricting compute, which means the US loses to China.”

The China competition angle is being publicly echoed by tech accelerationists and White House allies, including former White House AI czar David Sacks and investor and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. The latter debated Steve Bannon’s tech editor Joe Allen—whom I profiled last month—at an auxiliary event during the convention. That conversation between Lonsdale and Allen, Sanders says, was the only time she heard data centers brought up during the entire midterm convention.

Just past 6 pm on a recent Wednesday night, half a dozen pet owners logged into a Zoom meeting to confess something they’re afraid to talk about in public: They’re fed up with their dogs.

Before discussion began, Louise Crane, the president and cofounder of Dogs Anonymous, the organization hosting the meeting, recited the seven acknowledgements participants must agree to, the first being, “I admit that life with my dog is not what I imagined.” Crane wore a black T-shirt exclaiming “Abolish ICE” in thick white lettering.

“I may need to be talked off a ledge,” one attendee said as conversation kicked off, mentioning that she wasn’t sure how to handle her dog’s mood swings. Her family had been through a series of new changes: Their other dog died and they were also fostering one, and now their boxer was “unsettled” and “grumpy” to the point he was doing more “demand barking, which has never been like him.”

Other attendees confessed their private shames: a shepherd mix had started engaging in more intense “resource guarding” when around other dogs—the term for when dogs aggressively protect something they value. “He got into it with my sister’s little weiner dog the other day because they both were begging for food.” One woman, who lives in a busy apartment complex, needed advice on how to better handle her dachshund’s constant barking at strangers. (In the spirit of anonymity, Dogs Anonymous asked WIRED to leave out the names and identifying characteristics of its participants.)

Shame is the emotion attendees struggle with the most in these meetings. “The embarrassment of having a dog that’s losing its shit, especially as a woman,” is difficult for some people, Crane tells me when we speak a few days before.

Crane launched Dogs Anonymous, a nonprofit focused on training and emotional support by animal behavior experts, in 2025 in an attempt to help people vocalize their shame.

“We wanted to give people not just a space they could trust for advice on behavior issues or if they are having a crisis with their dog, but also a place where they don’t feel judged to ask questions and admit that maybe it’s a little bit too much for them,” Daphne Mendoza-Tervanis, a cofounder, says.

Sessions are held weekly and span first-time and experienced dog owners, adopters, foster caregivers, and occasionally trainers seeking tips on how to work aggression cases. The meetings are primarily attended by US residents, though previous sessions have attracted dog owners from Singapore, Costa Rica, and beyond.

Jerri Scherff, a cofounder who is 13 years sober, had first-hand experience with recovery programs, and it was important to her that Dogs Anonymous also include some of the same traditions as Alcoholics Anonymous. “We wanted to create something that was repeatable, sustainable, and eventually autonomous, which is the way that recovery groups work,” she says. The most important one was anonymity—what is discussed in the group stays in the group.

The founders say the effectiveness of the group doesn’t necessarily stem from the advice they impart during meetings but comes from members bonding over shared struggles. “The magic of AA the community is that you are going through something that somebody else has either been through or they’re going through the same thing,” Crane adds. This approach, called “sharing your experience, strength and hope,” is a core part of the 12-step recovery program and encourages members to analyze their experience in a way that makes them feel less alone.

According to a survey published in the scientific journal Pets in June examining guilt, burden, and wellbeing among owners of dogs with behavior problems, 53 percent of respondents reported feeling alone, and 78 percent reported “elevated caregiver burden,” a term for the emotional and financial strain of being a caregiver.

A new report claims that Apple is cutting jobs at Apple Fitness+, but without supporting evidence, concludes that this means enormous changes are coming.

As a devision, Apple Fitness+ has had some bad press about bullying, but if it’s correct that there are now job cuts, they are not substantial. The new Bloomberg report suggests that Apple Fitness+ is in trouble and claims audio features such as Time to Walk and Time To Run are being scaled back.

But it then takes this to mean that Apple Fitness+ will at some point be subsumed into Apple Health. Yet even as it makes that conclusion, the report admits that the job cuts amount to handful of roles.

It does not mention that there are currently 73 Cupertino-based positions being advertised by Apple that mention fitness.

That’s because this is another story of how any departure or redundancies is the end of Apple. In this case, the handful of job cuts has been extrapolated out to the potential end of Apple Fitness+ by way of a completely false assertion over the costs of the service.

Apple Fitness+ is a core services offering

The argument is specifically that Apple Fitness+ is an easy place for Apple to make cuts because users are demanding more content. There is also a claim about subscriber numbers changing, although that isn’t backed up with any detail.

Getting rid of people when your userbase is calling for more content does not seem the most practical response. If the report were correct about the costs of the service, that might be an issue.

But unlike independent production companies that have to rent space as and when they need it, Apple owns its studios. Those studios are costing money whether or not anything is being filmed in them.

Apple Fitness+ has a very low cost overhead

It’s the same with filming equipment, although there it’s not known if Apple has bought or leased its cameras. Either way, it’s a sunk cost and since Apple Fitness+ is entirely studio-bound, it presumably never needs to hire extra cameras.

So whether it’s bought or is leasing them, Apple Fitness+ has the cameras, it has the studio, and even according to Bloomberg, the service requires constant new content.

That does leave staffing as the only part that could practically be reduced. Only, the staff are television producers, editors, and fitness people turned presenters.

These are not the most highly-paid positions and the cost benefit of making a handful redundant is laughable.

This isn’t to say there aren’t redundancies, and it is not to say that Apple Fitness+ might well benefit from some shakeup. But a handful of people leaving is not the end of Apple Fitness+, even if they aren’t being replaced.

If Apple Fitness+ is to be absorbed into Apple Health, it will likely be some time before that occurs. While some services shifts can seemingly happen at any random point, Apple missed a great opportunity to go ahead and get it done with the Apple Health app redesign coming later in watchOS 27.

The service itself launched in December 2020, just in time for New Year’s resolutions to fall into place. Apple isn’t on some kind of set calendar here, but it does like saving its biggest changes for event announcements, and rearranging fitness and health seems to be a perfect fit for an Apple Watch release announcement.

It didn’t happen in 2026, so perhaps these musings will come to pass in 2027. Regardless, Apple Fitness+ isn’t going anywhere for now, even if Apple’s plans shift a bit on the backend.

Don’t just hand your laptop to a friend or secondhand store; you need to protect your personal data.

Back up everything first

Jun/Getty Images

Do a proper wipe of your laptop

Organic Media/Getty Images

CD players are back. Back again. Tell a friend — preferably the one who dumped an entire collection at Goodwill because Spotify was supposedly the future forever.

The timing of FiiO’s new DP11 could hardly be better. Our recent look at RIAA data found U.S. CD unit volume up 45.7% to 17.5 million during the first half of 2026, while wholesale revenue jumped 58.6% to $171.1 million. Streaming still dominates music consumption, but the little silver disc is behaving rather poorly for a format that was pronounced dead years ago.

FiiO has already leaned hard into the revival with portable models including the DM13 and DM15 R2R. The DP11 takes a different approach: it is a compact desktop CD transport and player designed to sit in a proper hi-fi system.

Related Reading:

What Makes the DP11 Different?

Currently listed at $169.99 through HiFiGo, the DP11 is unusually well equipped for the money. FiiO uses a custom desktop CD mechanism with optimized servo control and a support structure designed to reduce mechanical noise during playback.

The rear panel is the real story. AES, coaxial and optical digital outputs let the DP11 feed an external DAC, while an internal Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC and stereo RCA output mean you do not actually need one. USB can also turn the DP11 into a digital interface for a computer, phone or tablet, while CDs can be ripped directly to USB storage in lossless WAV format.

Power can come from the internal AC supply or an external 12V DC supply, giving tweakers an obvious path toward an aftermarket linear power supply. Nobody required FiiO to make a $170 CD player this flexible, but here we are.

FiiO DP11 Specifications

• Type: Desktop CD player / digital transport
• Mechanism: Custom tray-loading CD drive
• DAC: Cirrus Logic CS43198
• Digital Outputs: AES, coaxial, optical
• Analog Output: Stereo RCA
• USB: Digital interface and CD ripping
• CD Ripping: Lossless WAV to USB storage
• Display: 3.71-inch LCD
• Power: Internal AC or 12V/2A DC
• Remote Control: Included
• Dimensions: 213 x 230 x 67 mm
• Weight: 1.8 kg / 4 lbs
• Finishes: Black or silver

The Bottom Line

The DP11 is not an everything box. There is no headphone output, SACD playback, Bluetooth or network streaming, so anyone wanting a Discman, streamer and headphone amplifier rolled into one should keep walking.

That focus is also part of the appeal. The $299 Shanling CR60 also rips CDs and functions as a compact transport, but requires an external DAC. The $199 Shanling EC Play adds Bluetooth 6.0, LDAC and headphone outputs, but is designed primarily as a portable player.

For listeners with shelves full of CDs and an existing amplifier or DAC, the DP11 offers an unusually complete set of connections for very little money. Considering what has happened to CD sales in 2026, FiiO may have arrived at exactly the right moment.

The CD player is back. Again. Please try to act surprised.

Where to buy:

Related Reading:

John Ternus and iPhone Duo designers reveal how ordinary paper notebooks were a key inspiration for the new foldable iPhone Duo.

Even as Apple is celebrating the arrival of the iPhone 18 Pro in stores, even its own executives are looking ahead to when the iPhone Duo comes out. CEO John Ternus, hardware executive Molly Anderson and software executive Steve Lemay have been talking to GQ magazine about having started from scratch to build the foldable.

“Steve [Jobs] talked about the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” says Ternus, “and I think iPhone Duo is a perfect example of that.”

According to Anderson, vice president of industrial design, reaching that goal meant starting with specific aims that were derived from paper notebooks.

“Everyone knows what a notebook feels like in the pocket and what it feels like to carry around,” says Anderson. “So that was a big part of the inspiration: ‘How do you get to something that gives you space but also feels compact?’”

GQ claims that the iPhone Duo’s proportions are actually based on the A-series paper system used internationally. A4 is the international nearest equivalent to US Letter size, for instance.

If the iPhone Duo’s proportions were based on that series, they’re closest to A5, which is half the size of A4. Even that isn’t an exact match, but it’s near.

Apple and most people who’ve tried the iPhone Duo out instead tend to describe it as passport-sized when closed. But of course this is a phone that is meant to be opened out, and Anderson says Apple focused intensely on how it feels to use it open.

Apple’s Steve Lemay (left) and Molly Anderson, during the iPhone Duo launch – image credit: Apple.

“We really obsessed about how it feels when you open it — it’s incredibly smooth,” she says. “The hinge is defined by a custom variable torque profile, so it’s easy to open, and then it’s actually biased so that it holds itself open and lays flat.”

Anderson says the hardware design started, at least in part, with the aim of emulating the convenience of paper notebooks, and making something new. Steve Lemay, vice president of human interface design, says that at the same time, its software grew out of all that had come before.

“You’ll see a lot of learnings from iPad in here, learnings from even Macintosh, and learnings from the existing phones,” he says. “It’s sort of the greatest hits of those products together.”

“We didn’t want it to feel like you’re starting a different operating system when you unfold it,” he continued. “And you’re never searching for the button you were just looking at.”

Pre-orders for the iPhone Duo begin on October 16, 2026. The iPhone 18 Pro is now available both online and also in Apple Stores.

Police sought a man in an iPhone theft at a casino, and a man is accused of stealing iPads from a company that had just fired him,, all in this week’s Apple Crime Blotter.

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series on the world of Apple-related crime.

Man in Best Buy line has iPhone stolen

A man waiting in line for nearly 40 hours at a West Hollywood Best Buy for a new Pokemon card release had his iPhone 17 Plus stolen, although he later tracked it and got it back.

According to WeHo Online, the man got in line on the afternoon of Monday the 14th for the release of Pokemon’s 30th anniversary trading cards, and was still in line on the 16th. At 7 a.m., it was reported to police that the iPhone had been stolen.

The man gave police permission to track the device, and police determined that the thief had dropped it. The man got his iPhone back and declined to press charges.

Man sought for theft of iPhone from casino

Carson City Sheriff’s Office in Nevada is looking for a man who they say stole an iPhone from a customer at the Nugget Casino.

2 News reports the theft took place August 17, and the alleged thief was “last seen wearing a purple sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, purple-and-black Nike shoes and a white headband.”

Man accused of stealing 30 iPads from company that fired him

A 43-year-old man from Hialeah, Fla., has been arrested for stealing 30 iPads, valued at $12,000, from a business that had fired him earlier that day.

According to NBC Miami, police say the theft happened on September 4, when an employee recognized the man as he was entering the warehouse. Even though the man was wearing a mask, the owner of the business was also able to recognize him on surveillance video.

The report said the man had been fired for not showing up for work the previous two days. It was later discovered he had pawned some of the iPads shortly after the theft.

iPhone left in Porsche helps catch a scammer

An elderly Connecticut woman had nearly $28,000 stolen in an identity theft scam, although an iPhone left in a Porsche led to the scammer’s arrest.

CT Post explains a scammer told the 80-year-old woman her Social Security number had been compromised, using a fake “Apple Security” alert. The man on the phone told her that she would need to pay $27,975, in cash left in a shoebox, to get a new Social Security number.

A witness provided a license plate number of a Porsche used in the scam. An iPhone left in the car was traced back to the man who was later arrested.

AirPods signal leads police to stolen car in New Jersey

Police in Englewood, N.J., arrested a man after they followed the signal from a pair of AirPods to track a stolen car.

According to News 12, police eventually found the man carrying the AirPods, after which he “made several disparaging comments and threatened one of the officers.”

He was hit with several charges, including burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, terroristic threats, resisting arrest and possession of burglary tools.

Man put on Walmart vest to steal Apple Watches, police say

A 42-year-old man walked into a Walmart store in Sarasota, Fla., put on a Walmart vest in order to impersonate a store employee, in an attempt to steal from the store.

That didn’t work, as he got out only with the vest. However, he later used that vest in a different Walmart to steal three Apple Watches, police said.

WWSB reports police caught up with him entering his vehicle, which they searched, turning up the watches and a gun. He was charged with grand theft, a felon in possession of a firearm, and burglary of an occupied structure.

Verbal disturbance report leads to arrest for thefts of iPad Pro and AirPods

A 19-year-old North Carolina man has been charged with multiple felonies after he allegedly broke into the victim’s vehicle and took an iPad Pro, AirPods, a wallet, a purse, and medication.

According to Fox Carolina, police pinged the AirPods to the man’s residence. After a verbal altercation between the man and the victim, the sheriff’s office arrived, recovered the items, and arrested the man.

Police said evidence from the man’s phone “supports the allegations of theft.” He was hit with charges of felony breaking and entering a motor vehicle, felony larceny, and felony possession of stolen goods/property.

Man arrested for AirTag stalking, threats

Police in Ohio arrested a man on charges that he used an AirTag to stalk a woman.

TiffinOhio.net writes the woman told police that the man had been following her and placed the device on her car, in addition to making threats.

The man was charged with menacing by stalking, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Man arrested in Georgia for iPhone counterfeiting

A man in Georgia, the country, was arrested for a rather crude form of iPhone counterfeiting. Police say he made a plastic object meant to resemble an iPhone and attempted to pawn it at a Tbilisi pawn shop.

According to Georgia Today, police determined that the man was part of a conspiracy that had pawned “six imitation mobile phone devices at different pawnshops, causing significant financial damage to the companies.”

He was charged with repeated fraud, attempted fraud, and the production and use of forged documents, the Interior Ministry told the outlet.