This Week in Apple: Nothing can stay gold

We’ve got the hot news about search engines (I hear great things about that AltaVista), the woes of watch ownership, and we’ll catch up on all the -gates this side of Bill.

Browser’s Castle

Last week brought us the news that back in 2020 (is something that happened three years ago “news”?), Microsoft held exploratory meetings with Apple to discuss selling Bing. The deal did not happen largely because Google shoots a firehose of money at Apple in order to keep its search engine as the default on Apple’s platforms.

Also, something about “quality and capabilities”, yadda-yadda-yadda.

Apple, of course, didn’t let such trivialities concern it when it walked away from Google Maps back in 2012, but Google was demanding more user information. Which is why two years prior to discussing Bing with Microsoft, Apple was interested in making DuckDuckGo the default search engine for private mode in Safari, conducting around 20 meetings and phone calls with the company.…