Apple's Weirdest iTunes Walk-Back Turns 12 Today
Apple's Weirdest iTunes Walk-Back Turns 12 TodayTuesday September 15, 2026 4:13 am PDT by Tim Hardwick12 years ago today, Apple published a web page with one job: to make a U2 album go away. On September 9, 2014, at Apple's iPhone 6 event, Tim Cook revealed that "Songs of Innocence" would be given to every iTunes customer for nothing. The album was directly linked to accounts, and devices set to "download automatically" got it without asking.
- ▪Apple's Weirdest iTunes Walk-Back Turns 12 TodayTuesday September 15, 2026 4:13 am PDT by Tim Hardwick12 years ago today, Apple published a web page with one job: to make a U2 album go away.
- ▪On September 9, 2014, at Apple's iPhone 6 event, Tim Cook revealed that "Songs of Innocence" would be given to every iTunes customer for nothing.
- ▪The album was directly linked to accounts, and devices set to "download automatically" got it without asking.
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| Original publisher | MacRumors |
| Canonical URL | https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/15/apples-strangest-support-page-turned-12-today/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:13:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T11:16:52.626Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T11:16:52.626Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | p4AF4GNWTLIu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Apple's Weirdest iTunes Walk-Back Turns 12 TodayTuesday September 15, 2026 4:13 am PDT by Tim Hardwick12 years ago today, Apple published a web page with one job: to make a U2 album go away. On September 9, 2014, at Apple's iPhone 6 event, Tim Cook revealed that "Songs of Innocence" would be given to every iTunes customer for nothing. The album was directly linked to accounts, and devices set to "download automatically" got it without asking. Complaints quickly followed, and on September 15, Apple was forced to respond with a one-click page that stripped the album from accounts. Users were given a month to reinstall it at no cost. Apple said 26 million people ultimately downloaded the full album. Bono apologized a month later.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at MacRumors.
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