We learned this week that Apple TV+ show Bastards has been scrapped. The show, which starred Richard Gere, is not the first piece of challenging content pulled by Apple. At Cult of Mac, Luke Dormehl made a compelling case as to why this might not be the right approach.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard murmurs about Apple’s family-friendly TV and movie ambitions. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tim Cook made the call to cancel a semi-autobiographical drama about Dr. Dre… Apple TV+ should arrive this fall at roughly the same time as a bunch of other new streaming services. The biggest of the newcomers, Disney+, will presumably sate many people’s appetite for family-friendly fare. Carving out a niche for Apple TV+ in this crowded environment could mean counter-programming against Disney. Where Disney goes light, Apple could have gone dark. Cupertino’s enormous cash reserves give it the capability to take risks that few others can.

Geekbench 5 is the latest update to Primate Labs’ benchmarking software. It’s available for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

Geekbench 5 is 64-bit only, dropping support for 32-bit processors and operating systems. Geekbench 5 does not include any of the compromises required to run on 32-bit systems. This enables Geekbench 5 to include more ambitious benchmark tests with larger data sets and longer running times.

Americans love their AirPods. They also lose them. A lot of them. The Wall Street Journal looked at how New York deals with the issue.

“They’re tiny. They’re hard to find,” said Steven Dluginski, an MTA maintenance supervisor. Given the darkened tracks where they drop, he said, “the only saving grace is that they’re white.” AirPod rescues from New York City subway tracks ramped up in March, when Apple released a new version, Mr. Dluginski said. This summer has been the worst, possibly because the heat and humidity on subway platforms makes the ears and hands of New Yorkers pretty sweaty, he guessed.  Transit workers use a pole that extends to about 8 feet and has two rubber cups on the end that can be squeezed together to grab small objects. The “picker-upper thing,” Mr. Dluginski called it.

Fintech startups are not as disruptive as they might be because they are not “full-stack” companies, Ron Shevlin wrote at Forbes. Can Apple beat them at their own game and became a full-stack bank, he wondered? Probably not.

Apple likes to tout that its new credit card was created “by Apple, not a bank.” I guess we should pay no attention to the folks from Goldman Sachs and MasterCard behind the curtain. Apple’s moves with Apple Card, Apple Pay, and Apple Cash are big moves towards a full(er)-stack bank, but the company is hampered by one big weakness: It’s DNA is in tech products. For all the innovative moves Apple makes across industries like financial services, entertainment, and health, one thing is constant: It wants to sell devices. This prevents Apple from achieving the openness needed to become a full-stack bank.

The Apple Card is made out of titanium, but just how much? Bloomberg Businessweek wanted to know, so they sent one off to an expert to find out.

A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter sent his card to a mineralogist, University of California, Berkeley professor Hans-Rudolf Wenk. Professor Wenk used what’s known as a scanning electron microscope, or SEM device, to determine the card’s atomic makeup. He found that the answer is about 90%. The rest of the card is aluminum, according to the analysis. The Apple Card isn’t the first credit card to be made with metal, as both American Express and Chase offer their own heavy cards, but Apple’s stands out, given the company’s push to market its metallic essence.