Spotify wants you to argue with its algorithm. As of this week, US listeners can open the new Taste Profile feature and tell the service, in ordinary sentences, what they want to hear more of. No more hoping the machine reads your mind. You type what you're after, and the recommendations shift to match your wish. Meta launched its Muse AI agent to much fanfare. Apparently, its AI calling feature involves a real human in a call center. And finally, Apple reverted to a design that blocks DIY storage upgrades on the Mac mini. One step forward, and two back!

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Spotify has officially rolled out its Taste Profile feature to all US users aged 18 and older, giving listeners a straightforward way to shape their recommendations using plain, conversational language. First tested in limited form last October and expanded into a dedicated feature in May, the tool is now broadly available and represents one of the more accessible personalization options the platform has offered. Rather than burying users in settings menus or algorithmic toggles, Taste Profile lets people simply describe what they want to hear more or less of in a text box accessible from the side menu on the homepage.

The feature goes beyond simple genre requests. Users can ask for more of a specific artist at a certain time of day, surface news-heavy podcasts, or steer recommendations toward audiobooks tied to a particular area of interest like history or art. Spotify says the system also responds to moods and emotions, not just musical categories, and that changes to a user's home feed typically take effect within a few hours of submitting a note. Previously entered notes can be edited or deleted at any time, giving users ongoing control rather than a one-time setup. With Taste Profile now live across the US, Spotify appears to be pushing toward a more dialogue-driven model of personalization, one that could continue to expand in scope as the company refines how its recommendation engine interprets natural language input.

Apple's new M6 and M5 Pro Mac minis have reversed one of the more consumer-friendly decisions the company made with their predecessors. Teardown specialists at Expand Mac Mini confirmed that the NAND storage chip on the latest models is soldered directly to the logic board, eliminating any possibility of an aftermarket upgrade. The M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis had used a pop-out module that allowed buyers to purchase the base 256GB configuration and swap in a larger drive later for far less than Apple's own storage upgrade pricing, a workaround that saved users hundreds of dollars. That option is now gone entirely.

The situation is made worse by a second discovery affecting the base M6 model specifically. Benchmarks from AAPL Ch. show the entry-level 256GB variant uses a single NAND chip rather than the two chips found in higher-capacity configurations. The result is roughly half the read speed of the 512GB model, with the 256GB version posting around 3,217 MB/s compared to approximately 6,371 MB/s on its sibling. The base model is still faster than the M4 Mac mini in raw read performance, but buyers paying a premium for additional storage are getting quicker speeds on top of the extra capacity. For most of the Mac mini's history, from the M1 through the M3, soldered storage was simply the norm, making the M4 generation a brief and notable exception rather than a new direction.

When Meta executives announced last month that its AI agent Muse could make phone calls on your behalf, booking restaurant tables, scheduling haircut appointments, they framed it as a breakthrough in autonomous AI capability. What they did not mention publicly, but did tell employees internally, is that the feature relies on human workers in call centers to place and handle those calls. According to internal communications obtained by 404 Media, Meta quietly added what it described as "a human agent layer" to complete those calls, and early testers were not informed that a person, rather than an AI, was making the call until after it had already happened. The revelation touches on serious privacy concerns that Meta's own employees flagged loudly on internal message boards.

When a user asks Muse to schedule a sensitive medical appointment, for example, that request and the personal details attached to it may be routed to a human contractor, a fact users had no way of knowing. Meta told employees that contractors received extensive training to keep data safe, but workers pushed back, with one noting bluntly that training "is not a security mechanism." Several employees warned that launching the feature without clear disclosure would generate damaging press and destroy the goodwill the product had earned among early adopters. Meta told 404 Media that internal testing is a standard part of its development process and that the company will only roll out the calling feature publicly "when it's ready and with the proper disclosures," suggesting the human-assisted version of Muse calls is not the final product, though exactly how and when the handoff between AI and human agent occurs remains unclear.

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