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Today, we’re exploring AOL, airports, and Apple’s latest iPhone.

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Millions of Americans are still on AOL, as Apollo mulls sale

AOL, the internet OG and now obsolete web portal, might be sold once again.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the price might be peanuts — but AOL is not as dead as you might think.

According to The WSJ, the company's current owner Apollo is weighing a sale that could value AOL at ~$1.5 billion. That would mark the latest stop in AOL's long, bumpy ride through a string of owners: Apollo picked it up (with Yahoo) from Verizon for $5 billion in 2021, after Verizon itself had bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 — a fraction of its peak valuation.

In 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner, one of the biggest corporate tie-ups of all time. Revenue topped $9 billion the following year, but the momentum didn’t last: the dot-com bubble burst, and broadband quickly ate into AOL’s dial-up business. The combined company soon posted a record $99 billion loss.

Since then, however, AOL has been remarkably steady financially. Per the Journal, the company makes about $400 million in annual EBITDA today — nearly as much as the $406 million it reported in 2014. No growth, but no collapse either, which is weirdly impressive for an internet fossil like AOL. 

So what’s keeping it alive?

Eyeballs matter

In 2014, three-quarters of AOL’s revenue came from ads, with the rest (24%) from subscriptions — mostly dial-up, often bundled with antivirus or tech support. We don’t know the exact business split now, but with subscriptions now mostly centered around ID protection and security tools, and dial-up finally being shut down this month, it’s likely that advertising still does the heavy lifting — which makes sense, because AOL’s traffic is very real.

From June to August, AOL's website averaged 239 million monthly visits, per Similarweb. That’s more than retailers like Etsy, Target, and Home Depot; tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Hulu, and Spotify; and even media brands like the New York Post and BBC.

Four decades on from its founding, and an uncountable number of existential threats to its business later, AOL is still getting (some) Americans online.

John Wayne Airport in Orange County tops the list of North America’s favorite airports

Despite a record year of passenger numbers, flight cancellations, and delays, a new survey has revealed that flyers have been increasingly satisfied about their experiences in North American airports. 

According to this year’s North America Airport Satisfaction Study from data analysts J.D. Power, overall passenger satisfaction scores were up 10 points (on a 1,000-point scale), largely from “improvements in food, beverage and retail and ease of travel through the airport.” The annual survey measures overall traveler satisfaction across the region’s airports in seven categories (in order of importance) — ease of travel, level of trust, terminal facilities, airport staff, airport departure experience, food and retail, and airport arrival experience.

Here are the region's favorites:

Topping the list was John Wayne Airport, Orange County, a hub in the “large airport” category (between 10 million and 32.9 million passengers per year) with a score of 730, closely followed by Indianapolis International Airport, which also held the top position amongst medium-sized airports for the second consecutive year. 

Notably, none of the mega-sized airports (with more than 33 million passengers per year) made it to the overall top 15, with its top scorer, Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, coming with a much lower 660 points compared to that of other categories. That makes sense, as the things that have the ability to ruin our airport experience — wait times, queues, security checks, delays — tend to be more common at the mega airports.

Zooming out: Though worries about falling travel demand and spending plagued America in the first few months of 2025, the study also noted that a “record number of travellers” passed through the nation’s airports during the 12 months ending July 2025 as a whole, reflecting how the region’s leading airlines have seen demand slowly recover after a strong late summer season.

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People are rushing to buy Apple’s iPhone 17, but it’s probably not because of the iPhone 17

Apple’s new iPhone went on sale today, and it looks like it might be a relative hit that might not have much to do with the iPhone 17 itself.

More people turned up for Apple’s online iPhone 17 event earlier this month than have since 2022, according to data from Similarweb, and a few days later when the phone became available for preorder, suggesting more people might be buying a new iPhone during the preorder period than did so in the previous three years.

At the event, Apple unveiled a new slimmer iPhone Air as well as a basic iPhone and an iPhone Pro with faster chips, along with better cameras and larger displays. Apple didn’t mention much about AI, but the company's rollout of AI has been spotty at best.

However, people don’t really buy new iPhones because of new features or incremental hardware improvements. Instead, the main driver of iPhone upgrades is that someone’s old phone is obsolete or broken or its battery just doesn’t last as long as it used to.

And 2025 happens to be a big year for older iPhones. That’s because during the early years of the pandemic, Apple experienced a “supercycle” of iPhone upgrades as people trapped at home with extra cash shelled out for new tech.

2020 and 2021 also coincided with natural upgrade cycles. So here we are, four or five years later, the people who upgraded at that time are likely dealing with shorter battery life, smashed screens, and all the other annoyances of old phones.

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