This Week in Apple: Friends and enemies

Jony Ive makes a new friend, Fornite returns to the App Store, and Mr. Tim Cook of Apple, please come to the White House courtesy phone.

High on their mutual supply

Finally, a chance to talk about AI.

“OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI hardware company”

If you were worried about Jony Ive’s financial solvency since leaving Apple, well, you can now rest comfortably. Ive’s AI company io (they had to make the “i” lower case because the moons of Jupiter are very litigious) was acquired by OpenAI for a whopping $6.5 billion. That’s a lot of scratch, even if it’s in the form of phony-baloney money like shares of OpenAI. A few more tariff announcements and the deal could be worth only $5 billion. It should also be noted that OpenAI already owned part of io, so it is in effect paying itself but please don’t sully this beautiful technological marriage by calling it money laundering.…