Google may pay $9 bn to remain Apple's default search engine
San Francisco, Sep 29: Google is reportedly paying Apple a whopping $9 billion in 2018 to remain the default search engine for iPhone's Safari browser on iOS, the media reported.
According to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall (via Business Insider), this number would only continue to grow, potentially leading to a payment of $12 billion in 2019, 9to5Mac reported late on Saturday.
While Apple uses Google as the default search engine in Safari on iOS, the company also uses Bing in various other places such as searching the web via Siri.
Apple has been touting that services will be a huge area of growth for the company, as sales of its hardware start to peak. Apple Music has seen steady growth since its inception back in 2015.
While the free iCloud storage tier still remains at just 5GB, more users are now willing to pay the monthly fee to get access to more storage.
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RBI keeps policy rate unchanged amid inflationary pressure
Mumbai (PTI): The Reserve Bank on Wednesday expectedly kept interest rates unchanged amid hopes of a global recovery on the back of ceasefire in the six-week-long US/Israel-Iran conflict.
The policy decision comes as a month and a-half-long West Asia conflict has disrupted energy supplies, shot up crude oil prices and created fiscal and inflationary pressures for import-dependent nations like India.
This is the first monetary policy review after the government announced a fresh inflation target for the RBI last month. The government has asked the RBI to maintain retail inflation at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on either side for another five years ending March 2031.
Announcing the first bi-monthly monetary policy for the current fiscal, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has unanimously decided to retain short-term lending rate or repo rate at 5.25 per cent with a neutral stance.
The rate cut pause comes on the back of the consumer price index (CPI) based headline retail inflation that moved closer to the RBI's medium-term target of 4 per cent at 3.21 per cent in February.
Additionally, the rupee has depreciated by over 4 per cent since the war, which has consequences for pushing up import inflation.
However, the rupee has appreciated by 50 paise to 92.56 against US dollar following announcement of the ceasefire by the US and Iran.
Based on the recommendation of the MPC, the RBI reduced the repo rate by 25 bps each in February, April, and December 2025 and 50 basis points in June amidst easing retail inflation.
India's retail inflation dropped to a historic low of 0.25 per cent in October 2025, marking the lowest level since the Consumer Price Index (CPI) series was introduced.
However, the rupee declined to historic low and crossed 95 against a dollar last month making imports costlier, raising fears of rise in inflation. Rupee touched a record low of 95.21 on March 30, 2026.
