Apps

#TBT: RIP, Yahoo. You had a good run

Published

July 28, 2016

Monch Lopez

News broke out on Monday that Verizon, one of the giants of the U.S. telecom industry, is acquiring Yahoo for a small fraction of what it was worth during the dot-com boom glory days. Reports said the agreement was worth five billion dollars in cash — which is a lot but still nowhere near Yahoo’s $125-billion valuation in 2000, when it had enough in the coffers to buy Google.

And although the deal has yet to be fully ironed out — it will be completed sometime in 2017 — the death knell has sounded, the fate of an internet pioneer has been decided, and it looks like its next chapter will involve mobile video.

Yahoo, as you and I know it, is no more, even if it retains its name.

(Time for a disclosure: I wrote tech stories for Yahoo Philippines. My partner worked as an editor for the company.)

This isn’t a eulogy for Yahoo; it has historically done well on the stock market. People far smarter than I am said its stock outperformed its contemporaries from a bygone era. Unfortunately, its accomplishments on Wall Street didn’t mean as much to the people in Silicon Valley and to the rest of the world.

We should’t shed a tear for the company, or its investors. We could instead take a nice, casual walk on memory lane.

My early exposure to the web started with Yahoo services: the Yahoo landing page was my Facebook News Feed; the email and chat clients were my Gmail and Messenger and Slack apps; Yahoo Music on the desktop messenger app was my Spotify; Yahoo Groups was my Reddit; and all my searches were done on the Yahoo homepage.

If I wanted to get things done online in the late ’90s, Yahoo was my first click. For the vast majority of the population, including myself, Yahoo wasn’t on the internet, it was the internet.

And I wasn’t alone; my brother, all my friends — we were on the same page. These were innocent times, before hackers and malware coders and trolls and cyberbullies and mean-spirited armchair critics.

I’d be lying to you if I said at that time I thought the status quo would never change, but it did irrevocably. My social circle stopped using Yahoo for anything except to tell the people around them to use Google or Friendster or Napster instead. Being the impressionable youth I was, I gave in and signed out.

Your story is probably different than mine. But the ending is nevertheless familiar: We signed out.

Over the next few months, pundits will argue why Yahoo’s empire crumbled; why Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google executive tasked to lead the company’s comeback efforts, couldn’t keep the roofs and pillars from collapsing; and what could have been done to stop the cracks from showing.

I share the sentiment that it didn’t pivot fast enough to take full advantage of the digital ad market, and that Yahoo couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, even as Google was attempting to usurp its dominance in search. Most damning of all is its failure to act on shifting consumer preferences, the shift from desktop to mobile computing and from websites to apps.

I still have two active Yahoo Mail accounts: There’s one I check less frequently than my Google inbox; the other, I couldn’t care less about — it’s probably full of spam, anyway. That’s about the extent of Yahoo’s influence on my life today, its role reduced to housing possibly malicious emails.

How times have changed.

[irp posts=”8688″ name=”16 biggest hits and misses of 2016″]

Apps

Apple Creator Studio: Creative apps bundled into single subscription

All the tools you need, one payment

Published

January 14, 2026

GadgetMatch

Apple has officially streamlined its popular creative apps into one single subscription suite with the introduction of Apple Creator Studio.

The collection includes some of the most useful apps for today’s creators: Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage.

New AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers also make the Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite. Freeform will eventually be added to the lineup.

The groundbreaking collection is designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone. It builds on the essential role Apple devices play in the lives of millions of creators worldwide.

The apps included cover video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity to give modern creators the features and capabilities they need.

Final Cut Pro introduces exceptional new video editing tools and intelligent features for Mac and iPad.

For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is also coming to iPad with a uniquely crafted experience optimized for touch and Apple Pencil.

Logic Pro, meanwhile, for Mac and iPad introduces more intelligent features like Synth Player and Chord ID.

Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning January 29. In the Philippines, the rates are PhP 399 a month or PhP 3,990 annually.

There is also a free one-month trial which includes access to:

Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad
Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac
Intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

College students and educators can subscribe for a discounted price of PhP 149 per month or PhP 1,490 per year.

Apps

Apple gives up on making AI, inks a deal with Gemini to power Siri

Gemini gets another feather in its cap.

Published

January 14, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

In the not-too-long-ago past, the biggest names of the tech industry competed to build their own AI software. Now, though some brands are still on the hunt, it’s easier to name certain software that have more successfully drowned users in a flood of AI-powered features. Today, Google gets another win by adding Apple’s Siri to its Gemini cap.

In the past, Apple peddled Apple Intelligence, an upcoming AI-powered system to compete against the giants of the industry. However, much like other features from other brands, Apple Intelligence came out half baked with features still lacking months after the initial launch.

Now, Apple has signed a deal with Google to use Gemini for a revamped Siri. The former plans to launch a new version of Siri later this year. Because of the deal, the voice assistant will start using Gemini as a foundation for its own services. Currently, Samsung’s Galaxy AI already uses Gemini.

Formerly a battleground between so many competing brands, it’s now looking like a battle between two major companies: Google and OpenAI. Google now has a huge grip, though. Both Samsung and Apple are no slouches when it comes to owning market share in the world’s smartphones.

Now, as consumers, Apple’s deal probably doesn’t mean much besides the continued influx of features that add little to no value to a smartphone.

Apps

Microsoft continues to shove Copilot where it’s not wanted

This time, it’s reportedly coming to File Explorer.

Published

January 14, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

If you look at a modern keyboard, you’ll find that the Copilot button is the cleanest one on the entire panel because no one ever willingly presses it. And yet, Microsoft still believes in the feature’s value. To show their odd commitment, the company is reportedly adding Copilot to File Explorer.

According to @phantomofearth from X (via Windows Central), a new Windows 11 preview build will add a button beside File Explorer’s navigation menu. Currently, the button is invisible and doesn’t do anything. However, the report says that the feature is tied to something called “Chat with Copilot.” It’s becoming clear that the system aims to add the AI software right inside the file organization app.

Besides revealing the potential addition of the egregious feature inside File Explorer, @phantomofearth also added mock-ups of a desktop with Copilot right on the taskbar, hinting at a potential nightmare of the feature lording itself over where it’s not wanted.

Thankfully, the preview build doesn’t always represent a final version of the system. There’s still a chance that Microsoft will not add the AI to the File Explorer.

As of late, Microsoft has received a lot of flak for persistently pushing Copilot onto users, regardless of how they feel about the feature. The company is also facing criticisms in the background for being a major proponent of AI data centers in the United States, which, in turn, have caused the prices of tech to skyrocket this year.