Reuters: Tim Cook says iPhone sales, which slightly missed Q2 estimates, were held back by chip supply constraints, as “demand was off the charts”  —  Apple (AAPL.O) on Thursday reported results that beat Wall Street estimates, with customers showing eagerness to buy a new MacBook model driven …

Todd Spangler / Variety: Apple reports Q2 revenue from Services, which includes the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Music, and more, grew 16.3% YoY to $30.98B, beating estimates of $30.4B  —  Apple hit another high note in the first three months of 2026, delivering an earnings beat driven by a surge in iPhone sales and continued momentum in its Services segment.

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Apple Q2: iPhone up 22% YoY to $56.99B, vs. $57.21B est., Mac up 6% to $8.4B, iPad up 8% to $6.91B, and Wearables, Home, and Accessories up 5% to $7.9B  —  Apple issued a better-than-expected revenue forecast for the current period after beating on sales and earnings in the fiscal second quarter.

American launched flights to Venezuela for the first time in 7 years on Thursday, after US officials in January tore up a 2019 order barring US carriers from flying there. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images American Airlines is the first US carrier to resume service to Venezuela in 7 years. It comes after US officials tore up a 2019 order barring US carriers from flying in the country. Caracus airport used to be a bustling gateway, but economic turmoil had pushed airlines to retreat. Now boarding for the first time in seven years: Venezuela. On Thursday, American Airlines ended its yearslong hiatus and resumed flights from Miami to Caracas, reclaiming a route no US carrier has flown since 2019 after regulators halted operations to the nation amid security concerns and political instability. The roughly 3.5-hour route is operated by American's wholly owned regional subsidiary Envoy Air, using a 76-seat Embraer E175 with first class and economy cabins. American will add a second daily E175 flight to Caracas starting May 21. The Embraer jet flying the inaugural — which is Brazilian-built — will sport a special "America250" livery celebrating the US' 250th birthday; 2026 is also American's centennial year. American's return to Venezuela is initially limited to the capital, Caracas, though service to Maracaibo — a coastal city in the northwest where it also used to fly — has also been cleared by the Department of Transportation. The route will follow this schedule, effective April 30. Depart Miami: 10:16 a.m. | Arrive Caracas 1:36 p.m. Depart Caracas 2:40 p.m. | Arrive Miami: 6:13 p.m. The second daily frequency, effective May 21, will leave earlier in the day. Depart Miami: 8:55 a.m. | Arrive Caracas 12:15 p.m. Depart Caracas 1 p.m. | Arrive Miami: 4:34 p.m. Data from the aviation analytics company Cirium shows American has about 680 scheduled flights between Miami and Caracas this year. Before 2019, it flew up to 5,000 flights annually from cities like Dallas-Fort Worth, New York, and San Juan, and was the largest US operator in Venezuela. Demand is expected to be driven primarily by "VFR" (visiting friends and relatives) traffic among the large Venezuelan diaspora in Florida, though the nation is also bracing for more international tourists and business travelers. The boarding gate for American's relaunch to Caracas. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images Competing with American on the route is Venezuelan carrier Laser Airlines, which is expected to launch flights on Friday using a leased Airbus A320 from US-based Global Crossing Airlines. The jet can hold about twice as many people as Envoy's E175. Laser cannot operate its own aircraft in the US because Venezuela's aviation regulator is rated below international safety standards by US authorities. Nearly two dozen other foreign airlines also serve Venezuelan cities, with about 40,000 flights collectively scheduled for 2026, per Cirium — less than a third of the roughly 130,000 the airport handled at its 2013 peak, during its era as a key gateway for oil, business, and international travel. Revived service to Venezuela comes after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, in January, rescinded a 2019 order barring US carriers from flying there, effectively reopening its skies to commercial flights. The decision followed the removal of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a US military raid that helped reset relations between the Trump administration and the remaining Venezuelan leadership. "By restarting service to Venezuela, American will offer customers the opportunity to reunite with families and create new business and commerce with the United States," Nat Pieper, American's chief commercial officer, said in January. There were festivities at the gate in Miami before the flight. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images The airline said it worked with regulators and other key stakeholders to assess security and ensure a safe return. The Trump administration has targeted undocumented Venezuelans living in the US as part of its mass deportation effort, and accused some of being violent gang members. Direct commercial flights offer Venezuelans a way to self-deport, should they choose to. Some airlines that had continued serving Venezuela despite the country's crisis briefly suspended flights earlier this year during US military operations. Many have since returned, including LATAM, Avianca, and Copa Airlines, as well as European carriers like TAP Air Portugal, Iberia, and Turkish Airlines. It is unclear whether American will remain the only US carrier operating to Venezuela; rivals United Airlines and Delta Air Lines have not announced plans to return. Both United and Delta, which used to connect Caracas to Houston and Atlanta, respectively, stopped flying to the nation in 2017, citing declining demand and Venezuela's deepening economic crisis. Read the original article on Business Insider

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Andy Craddock/Unpslash You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work. But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language. There is no magical ‘rule’ The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter. At first glance, the claim seems plausible. But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading. Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction. We don’t read letter by letter When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognise words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds. These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input. This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there. The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess. Word shape and structure matter The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter. But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognise, even when slightly distorted. This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition. In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters. Not all scrambled text is readable If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find. Take this example: Salhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable. The hidden tricks behind the meme Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears. First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged. Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next. Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements. Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognise the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment. The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning. This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information. But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text. Humans and machines Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analysing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence. In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule. The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation. At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online. So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning. Karen Stollznow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

fStop Images - Epoxydude/Getty I hope this article finds you well. Did that make you cringe, ever so slightly? In the decades since the very first email was sent in 1971, the technology has become the quiet infrastructure of white-collar work. Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. Instead, for many, it has morphed into something else: always there, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming. Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox – drafting, summarising and replying. My colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society found 45.6% of Australians have recently used a generative AI tool, 82.6% of those using it for text generation. A healthy chunk of that use likely includes email. So, what happens if we end up fully automating one of the staples of the white-collar daily grind? Will AI technologies reduce some of the friction, or generate new forms of it? Dare I ask – are we actually about to get more email? Why the printer isn’t dead yet Soon after the advent of email, some voices in the business world heralded the coming end of paper use in the office. That didn’t happen. If you work in an office today, there’s a good chance you still have a printer. In their 2001 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them. Sellen and Harper show how paper use didn’t disappear with the rise of email and other digital communication tools; in many cases, it intensified. The takeaway isn’t that offices failed to modernise, but rather that work reorganised around what these new tools could do. In this case, paper persisted not only out of habit, but because of what it affords: it is easy to annotate, spread out, carry and view at a glance. This was all too clunky (or impossible) to perform via the digital alternatives. At the same time, email and digitisation dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing communication. It was far easier to send more messages, to more people, more often. Circling back to today Will AI be different? If early signs are anything to go by, the answer is: not in the way we might hope. Like earlier waves of workplace technology, AI is less likely to replace existing communication practices than to intensify them – but at least it might come with better grammar and a suspiciously upbeat tone. Some new AI tools offer to manage your inbox entirely, feeding into broader privacy concerns about the technology. At this moment, what a lot of these products seem to offer is not an escape from email, but a smoothing of its rough edges. Workers are using AI to soften otherwise blunt requests, modify their tone or expand what might otherwise be considered too brief a response. Rather than removing the need to communicate, these tools offer pathways to make a delicate performance easier. What email is actually for Email, like many forms of communication, is as much about maintaining everyday relationships as it is about the transfer of information. At work, it’s often about signalling competence, responsiveness, collegiality and authority. “Just looping someone in” or “circling back” are all part of our absurd office vocabulary, a shared dialect that helps us navigate hierarchy, soften demands and keep things moving – all without saying what we really think. If AI lowers the effort required to produce these signals, it won’t necessarily reduce their importance, but it could unsettle things in rather odd ways. If more people use AI to draft emails they don’t particularly want to write, we end up with a game of bureaucratic “mime”: everyone performing sincerity and quietly outsourcing it, and no one entirely sure how much of their inbox was actually written by a human. The labour of email was never just about crafting sentences. It’s always been the scanning, the sorting and the deciding. AI doesn’t remove this burden. If anything, it amplifies it. When everything arrives polished, everything looks important. That points to a deeper question for the future of work: if AI can perform responsiveness, why are we generating so many situations that still require it? Email has long been about more than just communicating information. Vitaly Gariev/Unsplash Looking forward What would a workplace look like if email wasn’t the default solution to every coordination problem? Perhaps fewer performative check-ins, “just touching base”, “looping you in” or “following up on the below”. More clearer expectations about what actually requires a response, and what doesn’t. Email, like paper, is likely to persist for good reasons. It is simple, flexible and universal. It allows things to be deferred, revisited, forwarded and quietly ignored. But if AI is going to change any of this, my hope is that it makes visible how much of this is ritual, how much is habit, and how much has long been unnecessary. And if the machines are happy to keep saying “hope this finds you well” to each other, we might finally have permission to stop. Daniel Angus receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Linkage Project LP190101051 'Young Australians and the Promotion of Alcohol on Social Media'. He is a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.

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Meta said the Kenyan workers didn't "meet our standards."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Meta previously announced it will cut 10% of its staff next month. Meta's HR chief told staff in a meeting that she can't promise further layoffs won't happen. She added that the business is strong and acknowledged that morale has been affected at Meta. Meta plans to lay off around 10% of its staff next month, and it told staff it's not ruling out deeper cuts. That's what Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, told employees in an internal meeting on Thursday, according to three sources on the call. "Will there be more layoffs? The question always comes up. I'd love to say that there are no more layoffs, but I can't say something we can't deliver," Gale said during the meeting. "While the business is strong, priorities change, competition is fierce, and we will continue to manage our costs responsibly." She said this means that Meta will "continue to evolve teams as needed" and "try to redeploy talent." She pointed to how Meta is investing in its Applied AI organization. Gale added that some organizations would be more affected by layoffs than others, though she did not specify which. Meta leaders also said during the meeting that AI token usage would not be considered as a factor for the layoffs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also addressed the layoffs at the meeting, saying that AI automation is not the driving factor behind them. He said that AI has made small teams far more efficient. During the call, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta's plan to monitor employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to improve its AI models. He said humans are not actually watching what the staff are doing and that this data is abstracted and used to improve AI. Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang also appeared at the meeting, sporting a camouflage-pattern T-shirt featuring multiple deer, according to a photo seen by Business Insider. During the Q&A, he praised Meta's latest AI prowess, notably the recent release of its Spark model. Meta declined to comment for this article. Reuters reported in March that Meta plans to cut about 20% of its total staff this year. Given the looming layoffs, Gale said at the meeting that they hit morale at Meta, and the company tries to make tough situations like that "the best version possible." She added that Meta has tripled COBRA healthcare coverage to 18 months. Meta CFO Susan Li previously said during its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday that she "doesn't really know" the ideal size of the company's head count, which runs at above 77,000. Meta announced that its infrastructure spend, largely for AI, is doubling this year, to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion. Have a tip? Contact Charles Rollet via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Contact Hugh Langley via email at hlangley@businessinsider.com or Signal at 628-228-1836. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read the original article on Business Insider

The Cheesecake Factory has one of the largest menus in American dining, with over 250 items as varied as pasta, tacos, sushi, and of course, dozens of cheesecakes. And it makes nearly everything fresh daily. It's a big undertaking during a time when many restaurant chains are cutting dishes from their menus as ingredient prices soar. But the Cheesecake Factory makes it work. It cashes in more money per restaurant than most of its casual chain competitors like Chili's and Applebee's. We went behind the scenes to see how the Cheesecake Factory consistently executes such a massive menu and makes it profitable. Read the original article on Business Insider

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