Apple

News, tips, software, reviews, and more for Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad

Applite is a powerful free and open source MacOS application for streamlining the installation, updating, and management of third party apps using the Homebrew cask feature, without ever having to use the Terminal. Presented in an easy to use simple graphical interface, Applite is sort of like a third-party App Store that makes using Homebrew ... Read More

Amazon continues to offer amazing deals on great Apple products, taking big discounts from the Apple retail prices of everything from the latest iPad mini 7, big discounts on the MacBook Air M2 and M3 models, AirPods, AirTags, Apple Watch Series 10, and more. If you’re in the market for some new Apple gear, don’t ... Read More

The popular AirTags trackers can be shared with others, and if someone has shared an AirTag with you then you’ll likely want to accept the invitation to track that object, belonging, pets, luggage, package, or whatever else is being tracked. While you will receive a notification about a shared AirTag, you might have dismissed it ... Read More

The Photos app on iPhone received a significant layout redesign in iOS 18 that has left many iPhone users annoyed or frustrated as the new Photos design is not necessarily intuitive or easy to use for everyone. Things have been moved around, albums or features they were using might be missing or harder to access, ... Read More

Amazon is offering the latest model AirPods 4 for just $99, taking 22% off the $129 retail price. Whether you want to treat yourself, or you’re looking for a gift for a loved one, friend, or colleague, AirPods might just fit the bill. AirPods 4 are the most popular wireless headphones and for good reason, ... Read More

Don’t use Apple Intelligence? Don’t care to have Apple Intelligence write your emails for you or instantly create a business plan or any of the handy writing and summary tools? Whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, if you recently updated to the latest versions of system software, then you’ll find that Apple Intelligence ... Read More

Many Mac, iPhone, and iPad users are discovering that installing the latest available system software updates of MacOS Sequoia 15.3.1, iOS 18.3.1, and iPadOS 18.3.1 will automatically enable Apple Intelligence, even if the feature has been disabled before. While this doesn’t happen to everyone, some Mac, iPhone, and iPad users are seeing an Apple Intelligence ... Read More

Amazon is back with some more great deals on Apple products, with one of the best deals being the M2 MacBook Air 13″ model for just $799 in the 16GB / 256GB configuration, taking $200 off the retail price. And if the M2 MacBook Air isn’t what you’re looking for, the M3 models remain at ... Read More

Apple has released MacOS Sequoia 15.3.1 update for Mac users running the Sequoia operating system. The new software update includes bug fixes and security enhancements, making it recommended for all users. Separately, Apple has released iOS 18.3.1 for iPhone, ipadOS 18.3.1 for iPad, watchOS 11.3.1 for Apple Watch, and updates to other Apple devices as ... Read More

macOS Sonoma 14.7.4 and MacOS Ventura 13.7.4 are available as small software updates for Mac users running the Sonoma and Ventura operating systems. The updates focus on security enhancements, making them recommended for all Mac users running those operating systems, and they appear to include same security updates available in the just released MacOS Sequoia ... Read More

Amazon is back with some great Apple deals this week, including the newest iPad mini 7 for $100 off, Apple Watch Series 10 for 18% off, AirPods starting at $99, a pack of AirTags for $70, $200 off MacBook Air models, and more. iPad mini 7 – $399 (down from $499) iPad mini 7 is ... Read More

iOS 18.3.1 for iPhone and iPadOS 18.3.1 for iPad are now available for all eligible users and devices. The new iOS/iPadOS software updates are relatively small and focus on security enhancements and bug fixes, making the update recommended to all users. Additionally, MacOS Sequoia 15.3.1 is available as as software update for Mac along with ... Read More

Apple is opening a new retail store in Miami, which might interest you if you live in Florida, and to celebrate the occasion they have released a nice tropical floral wallpaper for iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Of course you don’t have to live in Florida or Miami to appreciate the wallpapers, so grab the appropriate ... Read More

Amazon consistently offers some of the best deals on Apple products, and this week is no exception. Check out some fantastic deals on the all new AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, Apple Watch Series 10, MacBook Air in 13″ and 15″ screen sizes, and a 4-pack of AirTags. AirPods 4 – $99 (down from $129) ... Read More

Using AirTags to keep track of a dog can offer some additional peace of mind, especially if you’re worried about your fuzzy companion wandering off. Whether your dog has a penchant to escape out of your yard, has a tendency to bolt, or simply likes to run off at any opportunity, AirTags can provide a ... Read More

More news and rumors, more help and how-tos, more app and accessory reviews, more iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. More of everything you love. iMore.

Time to power down for good.

One of the best mobile DACs I've reviewed, the iFi GO bar Kensei is a masterclass in build quality, and quality features, with audiophile-grade pricing

Have audiophile aspirations and a "beer wallet?" Fiio's KA11 delivers without breaking the bank if you have a solid pair of headphones or IEMs.

A wealth of features, a speedy pan and tilt motor, and smart security features make the Tapo TC73 the best on the market right now.

Aqara gets a lot right with their Smart Video Doorbell G4, including pricing and features. However, if your porch is tight, its aspect ratio may leave you a bit in the blind.

Smart privacy features, Wi-Fi 6, f/2.0 lens, and wallet-friendly pricing make the Aqara Camera E1 tough to beat.

This mobile Bluetooth DAC has it all! Beautiful design, highly functional features, and excellent sound quality make this my top pick right now.

Who says your indoor security camera needs to be all business to be effective? The Aqara Camera Hub G3 is long on features and fun!

This smooth DAC from iFi is a solid performer for those wanting to level up their desktop audio experience.

Paying just $60 for this high-quality DAC means you can spend your money where it counts most, high-quality headphones.

What you get for $100 with the Qudelix-5K is quite impressive, but that's just the beginning. Wait until you crack open the app! It's PEQ heaven.

Combining a great indoor PT camera, Zigbee hub, and a huge list of accessories to connect to makes the Aqara Camera Hub G2H Pro a HomeKit standout!

The former design lead at Apple has teamed up with Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence company.

Nebula's newest projector has already replaced my 4K television — but it comes with a price.

Anker has announced its updated MagGo range for 2024, which includes new power banks, stands, and more.

The Razer Huntsman V3 Pro Tenkeyless is a mechanical keyboard that you can make (almost) entirely your own, even without macOS support for its Synapse customisation app.

With my iPhone 16 Pro arriving on September 20, I'm already planning to buy these accessories for it.

With macOS Sequoia now available, I've bought these three accessories to help me multitask to the next level.

Now that iOS 18 is out, we’ve rounded up the best apps for your iPhone's newest update!

visionOS 2 is the first major software update for Apple Vision Pro, and now it's available for everyone to install after months of beta updates.

The latest software update for Macs is now available. You can install macOS Sequoia (version 15) on your device for some big upgrades.

After months of beta releases, Apple is finally rolling out the watchOS 11 update to all Apple Watch users with the Series 6 or newer.

Apple is officially rolling out iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 to all users, after months of beta releases. But, it launches without any Apple Intelligence features.

iOS 18 will feature a 'Repair Assistant', to help indicate what parts will work with your broken iPhone.

A plastic version of the Apple Watch SE 3 is still in development, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Netflix's app update is ending support for iOS 16, affecting older iPhones that can't run iOS 17 onward.

Apple Intelligence is now only available on iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models, unless you buy a used iPhone 15 Pro.

Geekbench results for iPhone 16 Pro suggest it'll be a powerhouse that could outperform your MacBook.

Your new iPhone won't include Apple Stickers, reports suggest, but you can ask for them if you feel nostalgic.

Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji, has confirmed all new iPhone 16 models have 8GB of RAM.

Apple has confirmed third-party app stores will be available on the iPad from tomorrow, September 16.

You can now preorder iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro directly from Apple's site as well as select carriers!

The Apple Store is down in advance of iPhone 16 pre-orders.

Apple has received FDA clearance for its new hearing aids feature for the AirPods Pro 2.

Apple's iPhone 16 features up to 45W wired charging across the board.

With Apple allowing apps updated for iOS 18 to be submitted to the App Store, developers have noticed one less requirement.

AT&T has revealed its iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro deals ahead of next week's launch.

According to leaker Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is waiting until 2025 to release the next generation of Apple Watch Ultra and SE.

Apple has released a new firmware update for AirPods Pro 2, bringing iOS 18 features to the wireless earbuds.

After seeing Apple roll out the AirPods 4 with noise cancellation, I might leave my AirPods Pro 2 behind.

After the iPhone 16 event, Apple quietly revealed that Beats is now making hardshell polycarbonate iPhone 16 cases in a surprising move.

In the iPhone 16 keynote, Apple said the new devices have bigger batteries, but didn't go into the specifics. Now, we can see the battery life stats offer hours of extra battery.

Apple just released the Apple Watch Series 10 and a new option for the Ultra 2, which comes with new bands. But, they'll work with older models.

Apple must pay back 13 billion euros to Ireland following a ruling in its unpaid taxes case.

While the new iPhone 16 models are eSIM only in the US, they still come with a SIM card tray everywhere else, while lacking 5G mmWave support.

After seeing Apple announce the iPhone 16, I think it's time to admit that I'm not a "Pro" user anymore.

If you missed the special event or just want to watch everything again, here's how you can re-watch Apple's "It's Glowtime" event.

Apple just released the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods 4, and more. Here are my early thoughts on Apple's impressive new devices.

Apple has launched its pre-approval process for customers who wish to purchase an iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro.

While the iPhone 16 event was all about new iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods, it also marked the end for all of these Apple products.

Apple, iPhone, iPad, Mac News and Rumors

Today we're tracking a pair of deals, one on the Apple Pencil 2 and one on the 2020 M1 MacBook Air. These sales include the current best price online for the Apple Pencil 2, and an all-time low price on the MacBook Air.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Apple Pencil 2
Firstly, Woot has the Apple Pencil 2 for $109.99, down from $129.00. This sale isn't the lowest price we've ever tracked on this accessory, as it's been down to $99.00 in previous sales earlier this year, but it's still a solid second-best deal if you're looking to purchase an Apple Pencil 2 this week.


$19 OFFApple Pencil 2 for $109.99

The Apple Pencil 2 is compatible with the new iPad mini 6, but not the new 10.2-inch iPad. For that tablet, only the original Apple Pencil is supported.

MacBook Air
Amazon today has the 512GB M1 MacBook Air for $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. This is a match of the all-time low price on this model of the 2020 MacBook Air, and it's available in Space Gray and Silver.



You'll see this sale price reflected on the checkout screen, once an automatic coupon is applied to your order. While the Gold option won't be available until around October 1, you can still purchase a Gold MacBook Air today at this discounted price ahead of the delayed shipping date.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.99

The 256GB model is on sale as well, available for $849.99, down from $999.00. All three colors are discounted for this model, but none are in stock today. This is still the lowest price we've ever tracked for the 256GB MacBook Air, so if you're willing to wait a few weeks, it's worth locking in this price while it's available.

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Get the Apple Pencil 2 for $109.99 ($19 Off) and 512GB M1 MacBook Air for $1,099.99 ($149 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon today is offering the 512GB M1 MacBook Air for $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. This is a match of the all-time low price on this model of the 2020 MacBook Air, and it's available in Gold and Silver.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

You'll see this sale price reflected on the checkout screen, once an automatic coupon is applied to your order. Only the Gold color is available to ship today, while the Silver option won't be available until around September 21. You can still purchase a Silver MacBook Air today at this discounted price ahead of the delayed shipping date.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.99

The 256GB model is on sale as well, available for $849.99, down from $999.00. All three colors are discounted for this model, but none are in stock today. This is still the lowest price we've ever tracked for the 256GB MacBook Air, so if you're willing to wait a few weeks, it's worth locking in this price while it's available.

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Amazon Takes $149 Off 2020 MacBook Air Models, Starting at $849.99 for 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon today introduced new low prices on the M1 MacBook Air for both 256GB and 512GB storage options. To start, you can get the 256GB model for $849.99, down from an original price of $999.00.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Only Silver and Gold are available at this price on Amazon. This sale marks a new all-time low price for Apple's 2020 M1 MacBook Air, providing the cheapest entry price into the lineup since it debuted last year.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (256GB) for $849.99

Likewise, the 512GB version of the M1 MacBook Air is seeing a notable discount to $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. This is a record low price for the notebook, and it's available in all colors.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Amazon Drops Price of 256GB M1 MacBook Air to New Low of $849.99 ($149 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon this week has the M1 MacBook Pro on sale in both 256GB and 512GB configurations, including a return to record low prices for both models. Prices start at $1,099.99 for the 256GB MacBook Pro, down from $1,299.00. You'll see the discount after an automatic coupon worth $49.01 is applied at the checkout screen on Amazon.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This price is a match of the previous all-time low price on the 256GB M1 MacBook Pro. This model of Apple's notebook line includes the same aluminum body with large Force Touch trackpad as previous generations, speakers at the side of the keyboard, and a 13.3-inch display with slim black bezels. Both colors are on sale and available to ship out today.

$199 OFF256GB M1 MacBook Pro for $1,099.99

Secondly, Amazon has the 512GB MacBook Pro for $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00. This sale price is available in both Silver and Space Gray, and it's sold directly from Amazon.

$199 OFF512GB M1 MacBook Pro for $1,299.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple DealsRelated Forum: MacBook Pro
This article, "Deals: All-Time Low Prices Return to Apple's M1 MacBook Pro, Starting at $1,099.99 for 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Best Buy and Amazon are both offering great deals on numerous models of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air today, including a handful of record low deals on the latest Apple notebooks.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

13-Inch M1 MacBook Air
Starting with the 2020 M1 13-inch MacBook Air, you'll find the 256GB notebook for $899.00 at Amazon and $899.99 at Best Buy, down from $999.00. Amazon stock has dwindled and will "ship soon," but Best Buy has plenty of stock in all three colors.

Additionally, both retailers have the 512GB M1 MacBook Air at $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. While this is a record low price on the 512GB notebook, the 256GB model's discount is a second-best price.

• M1 MacBook Air, 256GB - $899.99, down from $999.00 at Best Buy / Amazon


• M1 MacBook Air, 512GB - $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00 at Best Buy / Amazon

13-Inch M1 MacBook Pro
For the newest MacBook Pro models, Best Buy and Amazon have lowest ever prices on the new 2020 M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. You can get the 256GB notebook for $1,099.99, down from $1,299.00, in both Silver and Space Gray.

For more storage, the 512GB M1 MacBook Pro is on sale for $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00. This model is also available in both Silver and Space Gray at this price.

• M1 MacBook Pro, 256GB - $1,099.99, down from $1,299.00 at Best Buy / Amazon


• M1 MacBook Pro, 512GB - $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00 at Best Buy / Amazon

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Take Up to $199 Off Apple's M1 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air at Best Buy and Amazon" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

A record low discount has returned to Apple's 512GB M1 Mac mini today on Amazon. You can get this model for $799.00, down from its original price of $899.00.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale matches the previous all-time low price on the 512GB M1 Mac mini seen on Amazon, and it's available to ship out today. You'll find a matching sale over at B&H Photo, which offers free expedited shipping for orders placed in the United States.

$100 OFFM1 Mac mini (512GB) for $799.99

At this time, the 256GB M1 Mac mini is not seeing a steep discount at any retailer, with Amazon offering the lowest price at $659.00, down from $699.00. The best price on this model has been $599.00, so we recommend waiting for a better deal.

Keep up with all of this week's best discounts on Apple products and related accessories in our dedicated Apple Deals roundup.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, Mac miniBuyer's Guide: Mac Mini (Buy Now)Related Forum: Mac mini
This article, "Deals: Get Apple's 512GB M1 Mac Mini for Record Low of $799 on Amazon ($100 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup is seeing all-time low discounts across the board today, including the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 13-inch MacBook Air, and 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

13-Inch M1 MacBook Air
Starting with the 2020 M1 13-inch MacBook Air, Amazon has the 256GB notebook for $899.00, down from $999.00. This price is available in all three colors of Gold, Silver, and Space Gray, but stock is dwindling on the latter two options.

$100 OFF13-inch MacBook Air (256GB) for $899.00

Additionally, Amazon is also selling the 512GB M1 MacBook Air at $1,099.00, down from $1,249.00. Both of these discounts represent all-time low prices, and they're shipped and sold directly from Amazon.

$150 OFF13-inch MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.00

13-Inch M1 MacBook Pro
For the newest MacBook Pro models, Amazon has lowest ever prices on the new 2020 M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. You can get the 256GB notebook for $1,099.99, down from $1,299.00, in both Silver and Space Gray.

$199 OFF13-inch MacBook Pro (256GB) for $1,099.99

For more storage, the 512GB M1 MacBook Pro is on sale for $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00. This model is also available in both Silver and Space Gray at this price.

$199 OFF13-inch MacBook Pro (512GB) for $1,299.99

16-Inch MacBook Pro
Moving to the 16-inch MacBook Pro, we're tracking record low prices on both storage options for this 2019 notebook. You can get the 512GB model for $1,999.99, down from $2,399.00. This sale is available in both Silver and Space Gray color options.

$399 OFF16-inch MacBook Pro (512GB) for $1,999.99

The 1TB 16-inch MacBook Pro is on sale for $2,299.99, down from $2,799.00. Like the other model, this is an all-time low price, but it's only available in Silver. Both notebooks are sold by Amazon and are ready to ship today.

$499 OFF16-inch MacBook Pro (1TB) for $2,299.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, MacBook Pro, MacBook AirBuyer's Guide: MacBook Pro (Buy Now), 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forums: MacBook Pro, MacBook Air
This article, "Deals: Shop Record Low Prices Across Apple's Full MacBook Pro and MacBook Air Lineup (Up to $499 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Today we're tracking a pair of deals on the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro from late 2020, with Amazon matching previous record low prices on both storage options for this model.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Starting with the 256GB 13-inch MacBook Pro, you can get this model for $1,099.99 in Space Gray on Amazon, down from $1,299.00. At the time of writing, the Silver model is out of stock for this sale.

$199 OFFM1 MacBook Pro (256GB) for $1,099.99

You can also get the 512GB 13-inch MacBook Pro on sale today, priced at $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00. Both Silver and Space Gray colors are available for this model, and they're shipped and sold by Amazon.

$199 OFFM1 MacBook Pro (512GB) for $1,299.99

Both of these discounts found today on Amazon match the previous all-time low prices on these M1 MacBook Pro models, making them the best sales online this week. You won't need any coupon code or have to wait for a discount at checkout, as both sales have been directly applied already by Amazon.

You can find the best monthly deals on all new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks in our "Best Deals" guide. Be sure to visit the guide and bookmark it if you're on the hunt for a new Apple notebook; we'll be updating it weekly as we discover new MacBook offers across the web.Related Roundup: Apple DealsRelated Forum: MacBook Pro
This article, "Deals: Find All-Time Low Prices on M1 MacBook Pro Models in Amazon's Newest Sales ($199 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon, B&H Photo, and Adorama today are discounting the M1 MacBook Air to match previous record low prices for both 256GB and 512GB storage options. To start, you can get the 256GB model for $899.00 today on Adorama, down from an original price of $999.00.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Only Silver and Space Gray are available at this price on Adorama. You can also find this sale on Amazon, with a $50 automatic coupon applied at checkout on the Gold and Silver colors. Gold is available to ship in one to two business days, and Silver will be in stock soon, according to Amazon.

$100 OFFM1 MacBook Air (256GB) for $899.00

Likewise, the 512GB version of the M1 MacBook Air is seeing a notable discount to $1,099.00, down from $1,249.00. This is a record low price for the notebook, and it's available in all colors. For Silver and Space Gray, you'll find an automatic coupon that will be applied to your order at the checkout screen. The same sale can be found at B&H Photo on the Gold model.

$150 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.00

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, MacBook AirBuyer's Guide: 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Air
This article, "Deals: Get the M1 MacBook Air for Up to $150 Off, Starting at $899 for 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon today is offering the 512GB M1 MacBook Air for $1,099.00, down from $1,249.00. This is beating the previous sale price by about $50, and represents a new low price for this model of the 2020 MacBook Air.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

You can get the M1 MacBook Air at this price in both Gold and Silver. For the latter color option, you'll see the price reflected at the checkout screen once a $50 coupon is automatically applied.

$150 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.00

The 256GB model is on sale as well, available for $899.00, down from $999.00. This is a sale price that we've been tracking for most of the summer, so it remains a solid deal if you are shopping for the entry level model of the MacBook Air.

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, MacBook AirBuyer's Guide: 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Air
This article, "Deals: Apple's 512GB M1 MacBook Air Hits New Low Price at $1,099 ($150 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon this week has a sale on Apple's new 24-inch M1 iMac in two configurations. Sales start with the 7-core GPU with 256GB, priced at $1,249.99, down from $1,299.00. This sale is available in Blue and Silver.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale is a match of the previous record low price on this version of the M1 iMac. No other retailers are matching the sale as of writing, so you'll only find this deal on Amazon.

$49 OFFM1 iMac (7-Core GPU, 256GB) for $1,249.99

In another new sale, Amazon is also offering $49 off the M1 iMac with the 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, priced at $1,449.99, down from $1,499.00. These iMacs are sold directly from Amazon and both are available to ship today.

$49 OFFM1 iMac (8-Core GPU, 256GB) for $1,449.99

You can keep track of ongoing sales on Apple's iMac line by visiting our Best iMac Deals guide. There, we keep track of the best iMac offers from Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo, and other retailers, so be sure to check back often if you're shopping for an iMac for the first time, or thinking of upgrading.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, iMacBuyer's Guide: iMac (Buy Now)Related Forum: iMac
This article, "Deals: Get $49 Off Apple's New M1 iMacs, Starting at $1,249.99 for 7-Core 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

In the wake of Prime Day, Amazon is still discounting the M1 MacBook Air to record low prices in both 256GB and 512GB storage options. To start, you can get the 256GB model for $899.99 today on Amazon, down from an original price of $999.00.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

As of writing, all colors are in stock and ready to ship from Amazon. The sale has also been applied automatically so you won't need to wait until the checkout screen to see the discount price.

$99 OFFM1 MacBook Air (256GB) for $899.99

Likewise, the 512GB version of the M1 MacBook Air is seeing a notable discount to $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. This is a record low price for the notebook, and you'll see this price at the checkout screen once a coupon worth $50 is applied.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Amazon Continuing to Discount M1 MacBook Air Models to All-Time Low Prices (Save Up to $149)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's 512GB M1 MacBook Air has returned to its all-time low price of $1,149.00, down from $1,249.00. This sale is available on Amazon, and only for the Gold color option. Stock appears to be low, although Amazon sometimes has more in stock than is reflected on the website.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Apple updated the MacBook Air in November 2020 with the new Apple M1 chip, which has an 8-core CPU, a 7- or 8-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine for machine learning. These updates brought about improved performance, better battery life, and more. There's also a 256GB model, but we aren't seeing any notable discounts this week.

$100 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,149.00

You can find the best monthly deals on all new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks in our new "Best Deals" guide. Be sure to visit the guide and bookmark it if you're on the hunt for a new Apple notebook; we'll be updating it weekly as we discover new MacBook offers across the web.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, MacBook AirBuyer's Guide: 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Air
This article, "Deals: Amazon Discounts 512GB M1 MacBook Air to Match Record Low Price of $1,149 ($100 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

At Amazon today you can get Apple's 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro (512GB) for $1,299.99, down from $1,499.00 on Amazon. You'll see this price at the checkout screen after an automatic coupon worth $50 is applied.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale is available in both Silver and Space Gray color options, and it's in stock and ready to ship. At a total of $199 off the original price, this is a match of the previous low price on this model of the MacBook Pro.

$199 OFFM1 MacBook Pro (512GB) for $1,299.99

If anyone's on the hunt for the entry level version of the M1 MacBook Pro, Amazon does have the 256GB model at its typical sale price of $1,149.99, down from $1,299.00. There's no checkout coupon for this one, and it's also being discounted in both colors.

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundup: Apple DealsRelated Forum: MacBook Pro
This article, "Deals: Apple's 512GB M1 MacBook Pro Hits $1,299.99 on Amazon ($199 Off, Lowest Price)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon today is taking $49 off Apple's new 24-inch M1 iMac in two configurations. Sales start with the 7-core GPU with 256GB, priced at $1,249.99, down from $1,299.00. This sale is available in Blue and Silver.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Amazon previously was discounting this model down to around $1,258.99, making today's sale a new all-time low on this model of the M1 iMac. No other retailers are matching the sale as of writing, so you'll only find this deal on Amazon.

$49 OFFM1 iMac (7-Core GPU, 256GB) for $1,249.99

In another new sale, Amazon is also offering $49 off the M1 iMac with the 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, priced at $1,449.99, down from $1,499.00. These iMacs are sold directly from Amazon and both are available to ship today.

$49 OFFM1 iMac (8-Core GPU, 256GB) for $1,449.99

You can keep track of ongoing sales on Apple's iMac line by visiting our Best iMac Deals guide. There, we keep track of the best iMac offers from Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo, and other retailers, so be sure to check back often if you're shopping for an iMac for the first time, or thinking of upgrading.Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Deals: Take $49 Off Apple's M1 iMac With New All-Time Low Prices" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Record low discounts have returned to Apple's 2020 M1 Mac mini on Amazon today, in both 256GB and 512GB storage options. For the 256GB model, you won't see the sale price until you reach the checkout screen and receive an automatic coupon on your order.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Starting with the 256GB M1 Mac mini, you can get this version for $599.99, down from $699.00. This is beating the previous Amazon low price of $639.00, and it's in stock and ready to ship today.

$99 OFFM1 Mac mini (256GB) for $599.99

You can also save $100 on the 512GB M1 Mac mini, available for $799.00, down from $899.00. This is another all-time low price on the M1 Mac mini, beating the previous record low of $829.00 on Amazon and other retailers.

$100 OFFM1 Mac mini (512GB) for $799.99

Keep up with all of this week's best discounts on Apple products and related accessories in our dedicated Apple Deals roundup.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, Mac miniBuyer's Guide: Mac Mini (Buy Now)Related Forum: Mac mini
This article, "Deals: Save $100 on Apple's 2020 M1 Mac Mini, Starting at $599.99 for 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon today has introduced another discount on Apple's 512GB 27-inch 5K iMac with 6-core CPU. We've been tracking a discount down to $1,699.99 over the past few weeks, and now you can get this 2020 model for $1,599.99, down from $1,999.00, after an automatic coupon worth $299.01 is applied at checkout.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This is now the best price we've ever tracked for this model of the 27-inch iMac across all retailers. The iMac is ready to ship today with Amazon's typical free shipping for all Prime members.

$399 OFF27-inch iMac (512GB SSD) for $1,599.99

Additionally, the 256GB 27-inch 5K iMac is on sale for $1,499.99, down from $1,699.00. This model hasn't seen a discount in a few weeks, and now Amazon has introduced a sale alongside the 512GB model. You'll see the markdown at checkout after a $199.01 discount is automatically applied.

$299 OFF27-inch iMac (256GB SSD) for $1,499.99

You can keep track of ongoing sales on Apple's iMac line by visiting our Best iMac Deals guide. There, we keep track of the best iMac offers from Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo, and other retailers, so be sure to check back often if you're shopping for an iMac for the first time, or thinking of upgrading.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, iMacBuyer's Guide: iMac (Buy Now)Related Forum: iMac
This article, "Deals: Amazon Introduces Pair of Record Low Prices on Apple's 27-Inch iMacs (Save Up to $399)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Today we're tracking an ongoing record low price on Apple's 512GB 27-inch 5K iMac with 6-core CPU from 2020. You can get this model for $1,699.99 on Amazon, down from $1,999.00, after an automatic coupon worth $199.01 is applied at checkout.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale was introduced last month on Amazon and it remains the best discount we've ever tracked for this model of the 27-inch Intel iMac. Amazon's discount is so steep it's pricing the 512GB model down to the same level as the 256GB 27-inch iMac.

$299 OFF27-inch iMac (512GB SSD) for $1,699.99

The iMac is in stock and sold by Amazon, ready to ship today with Amazon's typical free shipping for all Prime members. You can keep track of ongoing sales on Apple's iMac line by visiting our Best iMac Deals guide.

There, we keep track of the best iMac offers from Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo, and other retailers, so be sure to check back often if you're shopping for an iMac for the first time, or thinking of upgrading.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, iMacBuyer's Guide: iMac (Buy Now)Related Forum: iMac
This article, "Deals: Amazon Discounts 512GB 27-Inch iMac to Lowest Price of $1,699.99 ($299 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon this week is still hosting a record low deal on Apple's 512GB 27-inch 5K iMac with 6-core CPU. You can get this 2020 model for $1,699.99, down from $1,999.00, after an automatic coupon worth $199.01 is applied at checkout.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

This sale is particularly notable because it knocks down the 512GB 27-inch iMac to the same price level as the 256GB model. It's also the best price we've ever tracked across all of the major Apple resellers online. The iMac is ready to ship today with Amazon's typical free shipping for all Prime members.

$299 OFF27-inch iMac (512GB SSD) for $1,699.99

You can keep track of ongoing sales on Apple's iMac line by visiting our Best iMac Deals guide. There, we keep track of the best iMac offers from Amazon, Adorama, B&H Photo, and other retailers, so be sure to check back often if you're shopping for an iMac for the first time, or thinking of upgrading.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, iMacBuyer's Guide: iMac (Buy Now)Related Forum: iMac
This article, "Deals: Get Apple's 512GB 27-Inch iMac for Lowest Price of $1,699.99 ($299 Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's M1 MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD has returned to its all-time low price of $899.99 today on Amazon, down from an original price of $999.00. This sale will be seen after an automatic coupon worth $50 is applied at checkout.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

As of writing, only the Gold color option is in stock and ready to ship from Amazon. Silver is delayed by over a month, but Space Gray will be "in stock soon" according to Amazon's stock estimation.

$99 OFFM1 MacBook Air (256GB) for $899.99

Likewise, the 512GB version of the M1 MacBook Air is seeing a notable discount to $1,099.99, down from $1,249.00. This is a record low price for the notebook, and it's only available at this price in Gold.

$149 OFFM1 MacBook Air (512GB) for $1,099.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you're shopping for a new Apple notebook.Related Roundups: Apple Deals, MacBook AirBuyer's Guide: 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Air
This article, "Deals: Amazon Discounting M1 MacBook Air Models By Up to $149, Starting at $899.99 for 256GB" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

AppleInsider News Feed

Amazon's Presidents Day MacBook Air sale discounts the ultraportable laptops to as low as $749, with Best Buy offering flash deals today only as well.


Grab a MacBook Air for $749 today only.
Amazon is offering shoppers a bonus $50 discount on top of a $200 instant rebate on Apple's standard M2 MacBook Air 13-inch with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, bringing the price down to $749 for Presidents Day.

Buy for $749


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A new report about Spotify's plans for a more expensive premium tier claims that Apple is considering doing the same, but Apple Music has no reason to ever copy its streaming rival.


Apple Music
The days of Spotify being the most popular streaming music service in the world and yet constantly losing money, may be over. The days of Spotify trying to get the EU to force Apple into giving it an unreasonably better deal, may never change.

But a new report says that amongst Spotify's plans for the near future, there is the likelihood that it will introduce a new and more expensive subscription tier. Bloomberg says the new tier would, for a start, offer better quality audio — which Apple Music already does as standard.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

On this episode of the HomeKit Insider Podcast, we break down the latest in smart home news such as more rumors on Apple's smart display, new devices, and smart robots.


HomeKit Insider Podcast
We have even more rumors on Apple's smart home display this past week. One report reiterated a possible timeline, putting a launch at April at the earliest.

Ming Chi Kuo also gave his analysis on the robot lamp that was demoed from Apple's machine learning group. Based on supply chain, the personal robot is still in the proof of concept stage and won't start production until 2028 at the earliest.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A lot of damage can be done with a person's phone number, from endless spam calls to fraud and scams. Surfshark Alternative Number can protect you.


Alternative ID can protect you from scammers - Image credit: Surfshark
Phone numbers may not seem like a potential attack vector since users can just hang up on spam, but it's not as simple as that. Companies have begun relying on phone numbers to verify identity, send temporary passwords, and other aspects of account security that scammers seek to exploit.

If you're using your personal phone number on online accounts, it can be trivial for bad actors to exploit it and gain access to that account. Whether they use SIM swapping, phishing, or other techniques, access to a phone number can lead to data loss, bank account hacks, and identity theft.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider

The latest in a series of leaks about the physical chassis design of the iPhone 17 range says that it will be a significant departure from previous models.


A render of the front of the iPhone 17, which isn't expected to change so dramatically
With Apple rumors, there is quite often smoke without any fire, but a new leak backs up sporadic previous claims about the design of the iPhone 17 range. Previous rumors have said, for instance, that at least the iPhone 17 Pro will feature a new camera bar layout.

Now according to leaker "Digital Chat Station" on Chinese social media site Weibo, the design changes will be significant. Depending on which machine translation is used, the poster describes the change as varying from greatly, to significant, and even dramatic.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Dockcase has combined its USB-C hub and SSD enclosure prowess to make a formidable all-in-one USB-C accessory.


Dockcase 7-in-1 USB-C Hub with SSD Enclosure review
SSD enclosures are useful for extra storage, and USB-C adapters let you connect to monitors and other acessories. This hub and enclosure combo shows how much you can get away with, allowing you to be connected to the storage and peripherals you'd need for work or recreation.

As a company, the 7-in-1 is Dockcase's 14th successful Kickstarter after 8 years of making USB-C products. I've reviewed their USB-C hub and more recently their SSD enclosure, both of them standing out for their LCD screens that convey important technical information.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Amazon's steeper Beats deals deliver price cuts of up to 50% off over-ear headphones and earbuds.


Save up to 50% on Beats headphones.
On the heels of the Powerbeats Pro 2 launch, Amazon has issued fresh price drops on other models from the Beats line, including Studio Pro over-ear headphones.

Grab Beat deals


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Boox Note Air 3 C is the best color e-ink tablet we've tried. Just don't expect to get an iPad, even though you're paying iPad prices.


Boox Note Air 3 C
The $499 Boox Note Air 3 C is, broadly speaking, a cross between an e-book reader and a tablet. It's billed as having some functionality similar to a tablet but with an ePaper screen.

The main difference is the 10.3-inch Kaleido 3 Carta 1200 glass ePaper screen, which is designed to offer a paper-like appearance. It's similar to the previous Note Air 3, but the C stands for its 4,096 hues of color, instead of a greyscale version.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

When consumers will see the debut of M5-based devices from Apple is coming into focus, and the shift will likely start with Apple's MacBook Pro lineup.


The next MacBook Air could be the first model to sport an M5 processor.
A new report from Bloomberg suggests that Apple will start releasing Macs with the M5 processor beginning in the fall of 2025. Ahead of that, the company is expected to launch M4-based MacBook Air models as soon as March, followed by M4 updates to the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

Those latter products seem likely to be announced around the time of Apple's WWDC event in June. Following that event, the transition to the M5 chip will likely begin in the fall.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple is once again considering adding advertising to Apple Maps, a move that could help bump up its growing Services revenue even more.


Apple Maps
Apple's advertising business already serves ads for the App Store, as well as switching to an internal team for ad sales on Apple News in November. However, it may grow the ad business more by turning its attention to Apple Maps.

In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter, Bloomberg claims Apple is now thinking about ways to monetize its Maps app. In a recent Maps group all-hands meeting, Apple management confirmed that it was exploring the possibility of monetizing the app.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's rumored update to the Apple Studio Display may not arrive in 2025 after all, with a release in 2026 now expected for the premium Mac display.


Apple Studio Display
On Thursday, a report claimed an update for the Apple Studio Display is in development, which could bring an improved miniLED backlight to the design. However, a few days later, another report states that the timeline is a bit longer than first offered.

According to Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter on Sunday, the claim of a new 27-inch Apple Studio Display is repeated. The new model is said to have a similar design to the 2022 original, and "roughly" the same size of screen.


Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Ahead of the expected February 19, 2025 launch of the iPhone SE 4, there are signs that previous claims of it being renamed may be true.


iPhone SE 4 is rumored to resemble iPhone 14
In early January 2025, a seemingly unlikely leak claimed that the iPhone SE 4 would be renamed the iPhone 16E. It was chiefly considered doubtful because of the source of the leaks, but there was also that "iPhone SE' has been a successful brand since 2016.

Now Bloomberg is backing up the claim of a rebrand, and doing so chiefly because of the phrasing Tim Cook used in his teaser tweet about a February 19 launch.


Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Save $70 on Apple's latest Mac mini with an M4 chip and upgrade to 24GB of memory with this exclusive deal.


Save on Apple's M4 Mac mini with 24GB RAM.
The M4 Mac mini makes a great addition to an Apple setup thanks to its compact form factor and power of the M4 chip. And with a price point that just got even more aggressive, you can get a whole lot of machine for under $1,000.

For a limited time, AppleInsider readers can grab the exclusive price of $929 for the M4 Mac mini with an upgrade to 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage (the latter which can be expanded further through the use of an external SSD).


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

According to a new rumor, Apple Vision Pro will finally get Apple Intelligence in an upcoming update alongside a new spatial media app.


Apple Vision Pro finally getting Apple Intelligence
Apple Vision Pro launched in February 2024, and very little native content or apps have been released in the year since. Apple Intelligence was revealed later in 2024, but it hasn't come to the headset, but that may change soon.

Bloomberg has said that Apple will bring Apple Intelligence features, such as including Genmoji, writing tools, and Image Playground, to the $3,500 headset, expanding the technology beyond recent Mac, iPad, and iPhone models. If true, it would help flesh out the feature set of the Apple Vision Pro.


Rumor Score: 🤯 Likely


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has now confirmed long-standing rumors that it will open an Apple Store in downtown Detroit, potentially as early as this summer.


Apple is hiring for a forthcoming store in downtown Detroit. Image credit: Apple
The previous rumor from June 2024, has now been confirmed through a general recruitment notice on the store's new website.

No specific job positions have been listed yet, and neither the opening date nor the exact location of the store has not been confirmed. Apple says only that the new store is "coming soon," with no address details.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Closeout deals offer up to $1,000 off two loaded M3 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro configurations exclusively for AppleInsider readers.


Save up to $1,000 on M3 Max MacBook Pros.
Two powerful M3 Max MacBook Pro 16-inch configurations are heavily discounted for AppleInsider readers at Apple Premier Partner Expercom. These MacBook Pro deals feature the top-of-the-line M3 Max chip with a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU that was part of the Late 2023 line.

• 16" MacBook Pro M3 Max, 16C CPU, 40C GPU, 64GB, 2TB: $3,699.54 ($900 off)



Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

It's been widely reported that Apple's Siri advancements promised for 2025 would arrive in April with iOS 18.4 but a new report casts some doubt on that timeline.


Siri is gaining a new animation around the edge of iPhone screens
Apple has yet to officially announce when the advancements were coming, beyond a 2025 timeframe. The features were announced at WWDC 2024 and were said to be coming to iOS 18.

But, according to a new report by Bloomberg on Friday, Apple's work has hit some snags. Some features that were said to be planned for iOS 18.4 are said to have been pushed back to May, or even later.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

As quickly as it came, support for Netflix in the Apple TV app has been removed, and it turns out it wasn't supposed to exist at all.


Netflix confirms Apple TV app integration was just a bug
Earlier we saw what appeared Valentine's Day truce between Netflix and Apple, but unfortunately, that isn't the case.

On Friday morning, US Netflix subscribers were prompted to connect their Netflix account to the Apple TV app. For a short time, Netflix series such as "Squid Game" are showing up in the Apple TV app's Watchlist and Continue Watching sections.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

With the iPhone SE 4 launch imminent, one analyst predicts that the upcoming model should outsell its previous iterations — and could cause drama between Apple and Qualcomm.


The fourth-generation iPhone SE is expected to be announced soon
On Friday, Ming-Chi Kuo posted on X, saying he believes the fourth-generation iPhone SE move more units than previous budget models. He estimates that Apple will ship 12 million units in the first half of the year and 10 million units in the second half. Previously, the iPhone SE lineup was believed to ship 20 million annually, though Apple does not publicly share sales numbers.

He also anticipates that this could help offset the usual post-holiday slump in sales. It would also help boost the adoption of Apple Intelligence, as the iPhone SE 4 will be compatible with Apple's collection of AI-driven features.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

After discounting the Silver finish to $1,749.99, Amazon has matched the $250 discount on the Space Black 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip.


Get an M4 Pro MacBook Pro for $1,749.99 at Amazon - Image credit: Apple
We're following the new markdown on the standard M4 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro, with both Space Black and Silver down to $1,749.99 thanks to an instant rebate stacked with an on-page coupon.

Grab the $1,749.99 deal


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's M4 MacBook Air may be out as soon as the week of February 17. Here's what to expect from Apple's first Mac release of 2025.


MacBook Air
While it's previously been rumored to be launched any time from January 2025 onwards, it is known that Apple has been testing an M4 MacBook Air ahead of a presumably imminent release. While the iPhone 4 SE may be the major launch for February 2025, the new MacBook Air may debut very soon as well.

That would also make it about a year since the last update. March 2024 saw the MacBook Air gain the M3 processor, and various improvements including Wi-Fi 6E and the ability to use two external displays.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

TimePorter is the easiest way we've found to store your Apple Watch bands with a wall-mounted bar that mimics Apple's minimalist aesthetic.


Twelve South TimePorter review: This is the best way to display your Apple Watch bands on the wall
If the TimePorter name sounds familiar, I'd because it isn't the first time Twelve South has used the moniker. It was previously used for a folding box, similar to a large glasses case, that could hold your Apple Watch bands and a spot to mount to your charging puck.

While many loved the original TimePorter, Twelve South discontinued the product, freeing up the name years later for this new incarnation. The original product seemed more fitting, but can't argue with how good this product is.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The NBA's 3D tabletop mode for Apple Vision Pro is an early glimpse at how mixed reality could reshape sports, concerts, museums, and education.


Apple Vision Pro
The update brings a 3D, diorama-style court to the NBA app, giving viewers a miniature, real-time look at the action alongside the standard 2D livestream. While the main broadcast stays the same, the added perspective makes the game feel more immersive.

Powered by motion capture technology from NBA arenas, the feature has a slight delay — around half a second — compared to the live feed, according to Upload.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has shown us a peek into the long term future with its Pixar-like robot, a peek into the very near future with the iPhone SE 4, and just maybe an alternative future where it makes all its apps work on Android, on the AppleInsider Podcast.


Left: Apple's robot lamp. Right: Stylized Apple logo believed to be promoting the iPhone SE 4
Apple researchers have unveiled an anthropomorphic lamp — think how Pixar's logo lamp is so human — and while it's a demonstration of general research, it does also suggest a new direction for the company, following the cancellation of the Apple Car. Host Wesley Hilliard will buy an Apple robot the minute it's released, but see if he convinces you any more than he does co-host William Gallagher.

Both, though, are looking forward to the iPhone SE 4 which is now expected to be launched on February 19. If all the rumors about it are true, this could be the phone that brings Apple Intelligence to most people — and it looks certain to be a very good buy.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

After years of holding out, Netflix appears to be thawing toward Apple TV as certain shows began appearing in the TV app's "Continue Watching" selection — before being removed again.


Netflix shows are starting to appear in the Apple TV app.
Netflix did recently update its iPhone app to allow full-season downloads. However, on Apple TV 4K set top boxes, Netflix has long insisted on remaining solely its own app, instead of allowing it to be included in Apple's own TV app.

Now, however, Apple TV 4K users in the US are being prompted to "Connect Netflix to the Apple TV app," and then at least some Netflix titles start appearing there. Just as with Amazon Prime, Paramount+, and many others, selected Netflix series such as "Squid Game" are showing up in the Apple TV app's Watchlist and Continue Watching sections.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple Intelligence is still in its infancy, but not everyone wants to use it. Here's how to disconnect from Apple Intelligence on iOS and macOS.


Unplug from Apple Intelligence.
While artificial intelligence is gaining in popularity at an accelerated rate, some users have found they prefer to turn off Apple's AI, Apple Intelligence, on their iOS and macOS devices.

In iOS 18.3 Apple made Apple Intelligence be on by default. You may want to turn it off.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple will finally be able to launch Apple Intelligence in China, but the cost is allowing Alibaba to manipulate AI output to be acceptable to the Chinese government.


Apple Intelligence coming to China
Apple Intelligence is an Apple-built artificial intelligence system that runs on devices and in the cloud through Private Cloud Compute. The ChatGPT chatbot can be called via Siri, and Visual Intelligence allows users to search Google, but all the iPhone AI features are built from the ground up with privacy in mind.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple's ability to bring Apple Intelligence to China relies solely on giving the government the ability to censor the output. So, in an unprecedented move, Apple has partnered with multiple AI companies in China to help ensure its customers can use a sanitized version of Apple Intelligence.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

New renders of an iPhone 17 Pro Max with a massive camera bar are going around, and not only are they an incredible departure from Apple design, they're from unreliable sources.


A render of the iPhone 17
Apple is out of space for its camera system, so a camera bar that reaches across the back of the device may help provide more needed space. The idea of a camera bar isn't new, as Google Pixel employs one, and there's no way of knowing if Apple will actually implement one.

That said, the current renders show an impractically large camera bar that is just an extended version of the camera bump. The latest hail from Jon Prosser and his current render artist Asher Dipprey.


Rumor Score: 💩 B#$&(*it


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has finally returned TikTok to the App Store after receiving a letter from US Attorney General Pam Bondi.


TikTok returning to Apple App Store
Apps controlled by Chinese company ByteDance were banned on January 19 due to failing to meet requirements set by a law. On January 20, newly inaugurated President Trump signed an executive order that aimed to restore TikTok's operation in the United States for 75 days.

The President doesn't have the authority to stop the Department of Justice from enforcing laws, so companies like Apple and Google were cautious and didn't restore the app to their app stores. According to a report from Bloomberg, the newly appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Apple, which has resulted in the promised return of TikTok.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

With the release of the Rugged SSD Pro5, LaCie becomes one of the very first to release a Thunderbolt 5 device. We got one in our studio and we test it out with the latest Macs.


LaCie Rugged Pro5 SSD review: LaCie released one of the very first Thunderbolt 5 portable SSDs
This new pro-level portable storage device was first shown off at CES 2025. Fortunately, it was only a short time before it went up for order.

Apple was quick on the uptake of Thunderbolt 5 as the latest MacBook Pro and Mac mini support the stand. We had one of the latter on hand to test this out with.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple could make a change to its relatively small screen collection, with claims it is working on an updated Apple Studio Display for release later in 2025.


Apple Studio Display
Aside from Apple's Mac models with displays, consisting of the 24-inch iMac and the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lineups, the company does offer a few external screens. That selection is rather limited at the moment, consisting of the Apple Pro Display XDR and the Apple Studio Display, both of which have yet to have any updates.

If a claim from Display Supply Chain Consultants' Ross Young is correct, Apple could be upgrading the Apple Studio Display for the first time.


Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

While a public Wi-Fi hotspot can be convenient, it may still be a security risk. Here's why you should use one of the best VPNs for Mac while on public Wi-Fi.


Coffee shops often provide free Wi-Fi hotspots - Image Credit: Pexels/Nhi Lam
Access to the Internet is crucial to modern life, to a level where it's very easy to get online wherever you are in a variety of ways. One common method is through public Wi-Fi hotspots, which are offered by businesses and municipalities as a convenience to customers and visitors.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a coffee shop that doesn't offer customers free Wi-Fi while they sip their drinks.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's top-of-the-line M4 Max chip and 64GB RAM is $250 off with coupon (and units are in stock and ready to ship).


Save $250 on a loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro.
To pick up the high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro configuration, head over to Apple Authorized Reseller Adorama.com and enter promo code APINSIDER during Step 4 of checkout.

Use code APINSIDER


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

In a post on X on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook says that Wednesday, February 19 is the debut of "the newest member of the family" which is likely the iPhone SE.


Apple logo, animated in Tim Cook's post on X
Cook sometimes teases events like WWDC or the like in X, but it's not often that a posting from the man is the first indication of a release date. The post is simple, and included below.

Get ready to meet the newest member of the family.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The new Apple Titanium Milanese Loop's high price seemingly hasn't put off Apple Watch Ultra owners. We've been testing it out for a few months now that Apple finally managed to get them in stock.


Apple Titanium Milanese Loop review: The new band style looks great on Apple Watch Ultra and Apple Watch Series 10
In the absence of a true Apple Watch Ultra 3, Apple looked to spur sales of its high-end wearable with a new color and new bands, including a revised Milanese Loop. A rugged alternative to the existing model.

It's available in both black and natural silver and can be picked up on its own or paired with a new Apple Watch Ultra. After weeks of trying, we got our hands on a silver one to test out.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

US lawmakers want Britain to drop its demand for a backdoor into iOS, and say that if they don't, America should cut down intelligence sharing with the country.


UK Parliament
Both Republican and Democrat committee members claim that Britain's demand for Apple to give it full access to user data imperils Americans. Even if other bad actors were somehow unable to use the backdoor, the UK government would be able to read previously encrypted data from any user, including ones in the US.

According to The Washington Post, bipartisan members of congressional oversight committees have written to Tulsi Gabbard, the new National Intelligence Director about the issue. Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Andy Biggs, a Republican on the House Judiciary committee, have asked her to demand that the UK rescinds its order.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple could be updating the TrueDepth Camera in the iPhone 17 Pro Max, with a reconfiguration rumored to make the size of it and the Dynamic Island much smaller.


Dynamic Island on an iPhone hides the TrueDepth camera
The front-facing camera on the iPhone is actually multiple elements in a row, which led to the wide design of the notch and the Dynamic Island. However, in a continuing bid to shrink down its hardware, Apple is apparently planning something new for the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

In a Thursday Weibo post by serial leaker "Digital Chat Station," it is claimed that the iPhone 17 Pro Max will have a "metal meta-lens." It is a component described as integrating both the receiver and transmitter required for Face ID depth mapping, so it uses one smaller aperture instead of two.


Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

AirPods Pro 3 are coming soon. Here are what the latest rumors tell you to expect — and if they're worth waiting for.


AirPods Pro 2 are soon going to be outdated
The original AirPods Pro popped into our ears on October 30, 2019. It was in 2022 when the first upgrade arrived with better audio, improved ANC, and Find My.

A small revision happened a year after that in 2023 when Apple finally ditched the Lighting port for USB-C and added lossless audio for Vision Pro users.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The rumored collaboration between Apple and Alibaba to get Apple Intelligence in China has now been confirmed, sending Alibaba shares rising to a new high.


Craig Federighi launches Apple Intelligence
China has regulatory rules regarding the use of AI models, with the practical effect that a US company effectively has to find a Chinese partner. It was previously rumored that Apple was in talks with Alibaba, and according to Reuters, that company's chair has now announced the collaboration.

"They talked to a number of companies in China," Alibaba chair Joseph C. Tsai said at the 2025 World Government Summit in Dubai. "In the end they chose to do business with us."


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Image Capture is Apple's image acquisition app for grabbing pictures from your camera or scanner. Here's how to use it in a variety of settings.


Apple's macOS Image Capture app.
While Apple's iPhone, iPad, and the Photos apps in iOS and macOS are the standard for image acquisition and processing today, there's another way to get images into your Mac: Apple's Image Capture app.

Image Capture has been around in macOS for decades and it's fairly easy to use.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The ShiftCam SnapSeries lineup has evolved to include a more powerful battery pack, a larger studio light, and a much taller tripod — all connected via MagSafe. Here's how it all fits together.


ShiftCam SnapSeries: expand iPhone photography with MagSafe
ShiftCam offers an increasingly varied range of equipment for content creators and photographers that work from iPhone. When I reviewed the original SnapGrip, I was excited by the prospect of an evolving MagSafe accessory ecosystem, and ShiftCam continues to deliver with the latest SnapSeries products.

ShiftCam also offers a lens set for iPhone called LensUltra, which I found to be a strong competitor to other attachable lens options. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is compatible with this set via a new case, so I'll discuss the set alongside SnapSeries here in this roundup.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple is once again running ads on the social media platform X, after the company previously stopped all advertising on the website due to the presence of objectionable content on it.


Apple has seemingly resumed advertising on X.
The iPhone maker hasn't marketed its products and services on X, formerly known as Twitter, since November 2023, but all of that seemingly changed on Tuesday. New advertisements have appeared on the website, following a January 2025 report that indicated the company was looking to resume its marketing efforts on X, which turned out to be true.

One of the ads recently posted by Apple promotes the privacy features of the Safari web browser, emphasizing that it helps protect users against online trackers. "A browser that's actually private," the advertisement reads.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 have finally been upgraded, bringing with it heart rate monitoring and active noise cancellation for the first time. Here's how they fare compared against Apple's identically-priced AirPods Pro 2.


Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 [left], Apple AirPods Pro 2 [right]
The Beats Powerbeats Pro have always had a place as one of the premium earphone options on Apple's roster. However, as time pressed onward, other earphones in the Apple and Beats ranges started to overtake it with features.

In Feburary 2025, Beats finally made some big changes to the Powerbeats Pro. The second-gen model offers a thinner appearance, while still catering towards the fitness crowd.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Android owners can now enjoy all their favorite Apple TV+ series and films right from the palms of their hands.


Apple TV on Android. Image source: Apple
Since its launch in late 2019, you've had plenty of ways to watch Apple TV+. Apple has dedicated apps for Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. It also is a common sight on smart TVs.

It's also available for PlayStation, Xbox, and Roku. It's even been available to stream in-browser since its launch.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Dio Node sounds great for a single Wi-Fi speaker, but a lack of stereo pairing and the extremely close proximity of the HomePod mini to the price point make it a tough choice.


Dio Node review - one Dio Node
For the longest time throughout the 2010s in another venue, I'd joke that we were hazing new writers by bombarding them with wireless Bluetooth speakers. They were cheap, easy to write, and generally were pretty terrible beyond some of the multi-hundred dollar systems.

Just ask Amber about this. She probably bore the brunt of that when she first got hired.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

In an effort to get both more buyers and more developers on board with the Apple Vision Pro, Apple is launching a new visionOS workshop and appears to be preparing to allow third-parties to sell the headset.


Apple has quietly released a new app for determining Apple Vision Pro lens and headband sizes
One year after the Apple Vision Pro was first released to the public, reports of its sales have varied from poor to more positive. Right from the start, though, even Tim Cook was saying that the headset would be too expensive to sell in large volumes — and now Apple is trying to get people interested again.

It's certainly targeting developers with the specific aim of getting more to launch more content for visionOS. Other than its price, the most consistent criticism of the Apple Vision Pro is that it lacks content.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

For years, iPhone owners have been holding onto their devices longer, but new data suggests that trend is shifting — at least for now.


iPhone 15 models
A report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) claims that more iPhone users retired their devices at a younger age in the December 2024 quarter compared to 2023. Specifically, 36% of buyers had owned their previous iPhone for two years or less, up from 31% in late 2023.

Meanwhile, fewer users held onto their phones for three years or longer. It's not clear whether the CIRP report looks at iPhone buyers worldwide or just in the U.S.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Amazon's top MacBook Pro deal is back, with M4 models falling to as low as $1,399.99 with on-page coupons.


Get an M4 MacBook Pro for just $1,399.99 - Image credit: Apple
The $1,399.99 price at Amazon is thanks to a $160 instant rebate stacked with a bonus $39.01 on-page coupon.

Buy for $1,399.99


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's work in robotics has been impressive so far, but consumers will have to wait until 2028 at the earliest to be able to buy an Apple robot.


Apple's lamp robot concept - Image credit: Apple Machine Learning Research
Apple's development in robotics has been long-running, and has recently resulted in the demonstration of one novel prototype in a video. However, there's still a long way to to before anyone will be able to buy an Apple robot in some form.

In a Wednesday X post, TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo offered that Apple is actively working on robots for the smart home, both in non-humanoid and in humanoid form. So far, they are still in an internal proof-of-concept stage, rather than anything the public can even consider using.


Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

An Apple lawyer believed to have worked on the canceled Apple Car project has been appointed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, by President Trump.


Lawyer Jonathan Morrison is thought to have worked on the Apple Car project
According to his sparse LinkedIn profile Jonathan Morrison joined Apple in March 2021 following three years as Chief Counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) during President Trump's first term. There is no detail available concerning his role at Apple, but based on his prior work experience, Morrison will have been on the company's legal team.

Reuters reports that he will now serve as the NHTSA's administrator. It means that Morrison will now lead the agency's policy development.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

I’m Marco Arment, creator of Overcast, technology podcaster and writer, and coffee enthusiast.

Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond.

Like podcasts better than blog posts? Listen to ATP #596 for more!

What’s new

• Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more accessible.
• Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on today’s phone sizes.
• Improvements throughout, such as undoing large seeks, new playlist-priority options, easier navigation, and more.

What’s not

• Most features. Overcast is still Overcast!
• The audio engine. It’s the best part of Overcast, and still leads the industry in sound quality, silence skipping, and volume normalization. (More soon!)
• The business. I’m still a one-person operation, with no funding or external ownership, serving only my customers.
• My principles. I always want to make the best podcast app, and I’ll never disrespect your time, attention, or privacy.

What’s gone

Streaming. Most big podcasts now use dynamic ad insertion, which causes bugs and problems for streaming playback.¹ Downloading episodes completely before they begin playback is much more reliable.

Tapping a non-downloaded episode will now open the playback screen, download it, then start playback. It works similarly to the way streaming did before, but playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered.

On today’s fast networks, this usually only takes a few extra seconds.

And in the near future, I’ll be adding smarter options and more control over selective downloading of episodes to further improve the experience for people who don’t automatically download every episode.

What’s next

• The last few missing features from the old app, such as Shortcuts support, storage management, and OPML. These are absent now, but will return soon.
• More options for downloading and deleting episodes.
• Upgrading the Apple Watch app to the new, faster sync engine. (The Watch app is currently unchanged from the previous one.)

And, of course, more features, including some of your most-requested features over the last decade.

Getting this rewrite out the door was a monumental task. Thank you for your patience as I work through this list!

Why?

Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person.

That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years.

You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted.

For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.

Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better.

Thank you all so much for the first decade of Overcast.

Here’s to the next one.

1. Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) splices ads into each download, and no two downloads are guaranteed to have the same number or duration of ads. So, for example, if the first half of an episode downloads, then the download fails, and it downloads the second half with another request, the combined audio may jump forward or back at the halfway mark, losing or repeating content. ↩︎

Overcast’s latest update (2022.2) brings the largest redesign in its nearly-eight-year history, plus many of the most frequently requested features and lots of under-the-hood improvements. I’m pretty proud of this one.

For this first and largest phase of the redesign, I focused on the home screen, playlist screen, typography, and spacing. (I plan to revamp the now-playing and individual-podcast screens in a later update.)

The home screen is radically different:

Home screen, before (left) and after (right).

• Playlists now have strong visual identities for nicer and easier navigation. Each playlist has a customizable color, and a custom icon can be selected from over 3,000 SF Symbols to match modern iOS design and the other icons within Overcast.

  And playlists can be manually reordered with drag-and-drop.

• Recently played and newly published episodes can now be displayed on the home screen for quick access, much like the widget and CarPlay experience.

• Podcasts can now be pinned to the top of the home-screen list.

  Pinned podcasts can also be manually reordered with drag-and-drop.

I’ve also rethought the old stacked “Podcasts” and “Played Podcasts” sections to better match people’s needs and expectations. Now, the toggle atop the podcast list switches between three modes: podcasts with current episodes, all followed podcasts, and inactive podcasts (those that you don’t follow and therefore won’t get any more episodes from, or haven’t posted a new episode in a long time).

The playlist screen’s structure remains mostly the same, while refining the design for the modern era:

Playlist screen, before (left) and after (right).

Here, it’s more apparent that I’ve replaced the system San Francisco font with an alternate variant, San Francisco Rounded, to increase legibility and better match the personality of the app.

I’ve also added highly demanded features:

• By far, Overcast’s most-requested feature is a Mark as Played feature. That’s now available as a checkmark button on episode rows, as well as a left-side swipe action.
• The second-most-requested feature is a way to view all starred episodes. Special playlists for Starred, Downloaded, and In Progress can now be created.

The light and dark themes now each have a customizable tint color from the modern iOS UI-color palette, including these favorites from beta testers:

And throughout the app, I’ve made tons of tweaks and bug fixes, including:

• Notifications and background downloads are now much more reliable.
• Episode downloads can now be individually deleted or re-downloaded.
• Links can now be opened in Safari. (under Nitpicky Details)
• Performance is now significantly better with very large playlists and collections.
• Fixed bugs with episode-duration detection, CarPlay lists, Mac-app sharing, and much more. So much is better in this update that I can’t even remember it all.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped me beta-test this massive update.

As always, Overcast is free in the App Store. Go get it!

Losing Steve affected me more than it probably should have, given that I never met him or had any correspondence with him.

But losing him was devastating — not just to my world, but the world.

He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did.

We all wanted his attention and approval, and that drove us to do better work — even those of us who never worked at Apple.

Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can.

But as an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on.

He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime.

He had so much more to offer the world.

After the dust settles from the developer class-action settlement, the South Korean law, the JFTC announcement, and the Apple v. Epic decision, I think the most likely long-term outcome isn’t very different from the status quo — and that’s a good thing.

Allowing external purchases

Here’s what I think we’ll end up with:

• Apple will still require apps to use their IAP system for any qualifying purchases that occur in the apps themselves.
• All app types will be allowed to link out to a browser for other purchase methods.

• Most apps will be required to also offer IAP side-by-side with any external methods.¹

  Only “Reader apps” will be exempt from this requirement.²

• Apple will have many rules regarding the display, descriptions, and behavior of external purchases, many of which will be unpublished and ever-changing. App Review will be extremely harsh, inconsistent, capricious, petty, and punitive with their enforcement.³
• Apple won’t require price-matching between IAP and external purchases.

These few but important corrections reduce Apple’s worst behavior and should relieve most regulatory pressure.

The result won’t look much different than the status quo:

Most big media apps (qualifying as “reader” apps) won’t offer IAP, but will finally be allowed to link to their websites from their apps and offer purchases there.

Many games will offer both IAP and external purchases, with the external choice offering a discount, bonus gems, extra loot boxes, or other manipulative tricks to optimize the profitability of casino games for children (commissions from which have been the largest portion of Apple’s “services revenue” to date).

Most importantly, many products, services, and business models will become possible that previously weren’t, leading to more apps, more competition, and more money going to more places.

External purchase methods will evolve to be almost as convenient as IAP (especially if Apple Pay is permitted in this context), and payment processors will reduce the burden of manual credit-card entry with shared credentials available across multiple apps.

The payment-fraud doomsday scenarios argued by Apple and many fans mostly won’t happen, in part because App Review will prevent most obvious cases, but also because parents don’t typically offer their credit cards to untrustworthy children; and for buyers of all ages, most credit cards themselves provide stronger fraud prevention and easier recourse from unwanted charges than the App Store ever has.

No side-loading

I don’t expect side-loading or alternative app stores to become possible, and I’m relieved, because that is not a future I want for iOS.

When evaluating such ideas, I merely ask myself:

“What would Facebook do?”

Facebook owns four of the top ten apps in the world. If side-loading became possible, Facebook could remove Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger from Apple’s App Store, requiring customers to install these extremely popular apps directly from Facebook via side-loading.

And everyone would.

Most people use a Facebook-owned app not because it’s a good app, but because it’s a means to an important end in their life. Social pressure, family pressure, and network lock-in prevent most users from seeking meaningful alternatives. People would jump through a few hoops if they had to.

Facebook would soon have apps that bypassed App Review installed on the majority of iPhones in the world.

Technical limitations of the OS would prevent the most egregious abuses, but there’s a lot they could still do. We don’t need to do much imagining — they already have attempted multiple hacks, workarounds, privacy invasions, and other unscrupulous and technically invasive behavior with their apps over time to surveil user behavior outside of their app and stay running longer in the background than users intend or expect.

The OS could evolve over time to reduce some of these vulnerabilities, but technical measures alone cannot address all of them.

Without the threat of App Review to keep them in check, Facebook’s apps would become even more monstrous than they already are.

As a user and a fan of iOS, I don’t want any part of that.

No alternative app stores

Alternative app stores would be even worse. Rather than offering individual apps via side-loading, Facebook could offer just one:

The Facebook App Store.

Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger could all be available exclusively there.

The majority of iOS users in the world would soon install it, and Facebook would start using leverage in other areas — apps’ social accounts, stats packages, app-install ads, ad-attribution requirements — to heavily incentivize (and likely strong-arm) a huge number of developers to offer their apps in the Facebook App Store, likely in addition to Apple’s.

Maybe I’d be required to add the Facebook SDK to my app in order to be in their store, which they would then use to surveil my users.

Maybe I’d need to buy app-install ads to show up in search there at all.

Maybe I’d need to pay Facebook to “promote” each app update to reach more than a tiny percentage of my existing customers.

And Facebook wouldn’t even be the only app store likely to become a large player on iOS.

Amazon would almost certainly bring their garbage “Appstore” to iOS, but at least that one probably wouldn’t go anywhere.

Maybe Google would bring the Play Store to iOS and offer a unified SDK to develop a single codebase for iOS and Android, effectively making every app feel like an Android app and further marginalizing native apps when they’re already hurting.

Media conglomerates that own many big-name properties, like Disney, might each have their own app stores for their high-profile apps. Running your own store means you can promote all of your own apps as much as you want. What giant corporation would resist?

Don’t forget games! Epic and Steam would come to iOS with their own game stores. Maybe Microsoft and Nintendo, too.

Maybe you’d need to install seven different app stores on your iPhone just to get the apps and games you already use — and all without App Review to keep them in check.

Most developers would probably need to start submitting our apps to multiple app stores, each with its own rules, metadata, technical requirements, capabilities, approval delays, payment processing, stats, crash reports, ads, promotion methods, and user reviews.

As a user, a multiple-app-store world sounds like an annoying mess; as a developer, it terrifies me.

Apple’s App Store is the devil we know. The most viable alternatives that would crop up would be far worse.

Course correction

The way Apple runs its business isn’t perfect, but it’s also not a democracy.

I loved this part of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ decision in Apple v. Epic, as quoted by Ben Thompson’s excellent article that you should read:

Apple has not offered any justification for the actions other than to argue entitlement. Where its actions harm competition and result in supracompetitive pricing and profits, Apple is wrong.

I interpret “entitlement” without a negative connotation here — Apple is entitled to run their platform mostly as they wish, with governmental interference only warranted to fix market-scale issues that harm large segments of commerce or society.

As a developer, I’d love to see more changes to Apple’s control over iOS. But it’s hard to make larger changes without potentially harming much of what makes iOS great for both users and developers.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers got it right: we needed a minor course correction to address the most egregiously anticompetitive behavior, but most of the way Apple runs iOS is best left to Apple.

1. If the South Korean law holds, IAP may not be required — but only in South Korea. With this exception, I expect the rest of these rules to be enforced the same way globally. ↩︎

2. Apple defines “reader” apps as “[allowing] a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video).”

   This includes many apps that Apple’s services compete with, such as Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle, that raise anticompetitive concerns among regulators and legislators when forced to give Apple 30%. ↩︎

3. App Review has higher-level queues for managerial review of controversial rules or edge cases, typically identifiable from the outside by an app stuck with “In Review” status for days or weeks, and often ending in a phone call from “Bill”.

   I’d expect any app offering external purchases to have a very high chance of being escalated to a slower, more pain-in-the-ass review process, possibly causing it not to be worthwhile for most small developers to deal with.

   I have no plans to add external purchases to Overcast for multiple reasons, including this — but mostly because, for my purposes, I’m satisfied with Apple’s IAP system. ↩︎

Apple’s leaders continue to deny developers of two obvious truths:

• That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple.
• That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store.

For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting — not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers.

This isn’t about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple’s many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.)

It’s about what Apple’s leadership thinks of us and our work.

*     *     *

It isn’t the App Store’s responsibility to the rest of Apple to “pay its way” by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones.

Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today.

If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly “pay the way” of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple’s own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers.

The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The “way” is already paid by the hardware — but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip.

And that’s just business. Apple’s a lot of things, and “generous” isn’t one.

But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple’s feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting.

*     *     *

Apple further extends the value argument, and defends their justification for forced commissions, by claiming responsibility for and ownership of the customer relationship between all iOS users and each app they choose to use.

This argument only makes sense — and even then, only somewhat — when apps are installed by a customer browsing the App Store, finding an app they hadn’t previously heard of, and choosing to install it based on App Store influence alone.

But in the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge.

The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy.

It isn’t the App Store that has enabled all of the commerce on iOS — it’s the entire world of computing and modern society, created by a symbiotic ecosystem in which Apple played one part alongside many others. The world was already moving in this direction, and had Apple not played its part, someone else would’ve. The App Store is merely one platform’s forced distribution gateway, “facilitating” the commerce no more and no less than a web browser, an ISP or cellular carrier, a server-hosting company, or a credit-card processor.

For Apple to continue to claim otherwise is beyond insulting, and borders on delusion.

*     *     *

At WWDC next week, these same people are going to try to tell us a different story.

They’re going to tell us how amazing we are, how important our work is, and how much they value us. And for thousands of Apple employees who’ve made the great products and platforms that we love, including the hundreds of engineers presenting the sessions and working the labs, it’ll be genuine and true.

But the leaders have already shown us who they really are, what they really think of us, and how much they value our work.

Please forgive some sloppiness in my metaphors or phrasing — my writing skills are pretty rusty — and I’ll return the favor to anyone who responds.

A summary of today’s changes to 3.1.3 Other Purchase Methods:

Your app must use Apple’s in-app-purchase (IAP) system for all purchases made in the app.

Unless they’re purchases for goods or services that are consumed outside the app, in which case you are prohibited from using IAP.

Unless those goods or services consumed outside the app are magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video, in which case, you are required to use IAP.

But if your app only “reads” previously purchased magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, or video, and doesn’t mention the possibility of purchases anywhere in the app, you don’t need to use IAP.

Unless you offer account creation, in which case, you are required to use IAP.

Unless you only offer free account creation, in which case, you don’t need to use IAP.

But if you offer paid upgrades from free accounts within the app, you are required to use IAP.

Except for accounts that were created outside the app, which can offer paid account upgrades and don’t need to use IAP.

If you’re selling “experiences” between people, you don’t need to use IAP.

Unless those “experiences” include three or more people, or aren’t consumed live, in which case, you are required to use only IAP.

If your purchase is for services, features, or game items, you are required to use only IAP.

Unless you operate on multiple platforms, in which case, you can also offer purchasing outside the app. But you can’t tell anyone about it.

Unless you get their contact info somewhere else, in which case, you can tell them about it, but not in the app.

You are required to use IAP even if you sell your app or service directly to other people.

Unless you only sell it to businesses or groups for their employees or students to use, in which case, you still must use IAP, but you can include your own payment method as well.

Unless those groups are families, or unless those employees or students are somehow “consumers”, in which case, you must only use IAP.

Do I have that right?

*     *     *

How about an alternative that’s clear, fair, reasonable, and consistently enforceable?

Apps may offer other payment mechanisms in their app, as long as terms are clear and customers aren’t misled, and may or may not choose to implement in-app purchase based on its merits.

In one stroke, antitrust and regulatory pressure disappear, developer relations are significantly repaired, and Apple can go back to spending its time, resources, PR, and political capital on making their products better and customers happier.

The latest update to Overcast includes a feature that I’m especially proud of that took over a year to build.

Voice Boost 2 is an all-new audio engine that includes professional-grade, mastering-quality loudness normalization.

When I first introduced Overcast in 2014, Voice Boost was one of its headlining features:

Voice Boost is a combination of dynamic compression and equalization that can make many shows more listenable and normalize volume across all shows. This makes amateur-produced podcasts (including many of my favorites) more listenable in loud environments, like cars, where you’d otherwise need to crank the volume so loudly to hear the quiet parts that you’d blow your ears out when the loudest person spoke.

Voice Boost 2 achieves the same goal as the original Voice Boost, but with dramatically more sophisticated methods, leading to more consistent results and much better sound quality.

Goals

When I wrote the original Voice Boost with only a rudimentary understanding of audio processing, it was a single configuration of Apple’s AudioUnits that applied a fixed set of parameters to all podcasts, regardless of their audio characteristics. It was an effective but blunt tool, relying on aggressive level compression and a strong EQ to make the compression less noticeable.

Since then, I’ve edited over 500 podcasts, learned a lot more about how to master them properly, and developed a much better understanding of audio signal processing.

I set out to develop a better, smarter, and more refined Voice Boost that took advantage of everything I’d learned, with these audio goals:

• The effect should be much more subtle: mostly just consistent volume, plus slightly smoother tone.
• It should analyze the input audio and apply just enough processing to achieve a consistent volume level, modifying already-good audio as little as possible.
• It should sound good, and consistent, regardless of the volume dynamics of its input.
• Quality should be so good that I can even play high-quality music through it¹ and not notice any artifacts.

And these technical goals:

• Like Smart Speed and the original Voice Boost, it had to work as a streaming process, easily toggled on and off at will, without needing to scan the entire file first or look very far ahead.
• The code had to be pure C, with highly optimized and vectorized code, so it wouldn’t be a major power drain on older phones and could potentially run on much lower-power devices as well.
• I had to write every component from scratch, without using AudioUnits, because I wanted to understand and control everything, ensure the highest performance and sound quality, and avoid Apple’s platform-specific API limits.²
• It had to be modular and easily customizable, like a channel strip in an audio editor, so I could adjust the processing during development and testing, offer user customization down the road, and use the same engine to build myself a modular podcast-preproduction tool to save time in my weekly workflow (which I’ve been using for over a year).³

Live LUFS normalization

Since Voice Boost is mostly about high-quality volume analysis and loudness normalization, I went straight to the top, implementing the ITU BS.1770–4 standard that gives us the LUFS measurement seen in high-end audio editors.

Overcast now measures and adjusts podcast levels using this broadcast-standard perceptual loudness algorithm, at full quality, with no preprocessing.

Voice Boost 2 normalizes all podcasts to –14 LUFS — a level I chose because it closely matches the volume of Siri and most iOS turn-by-turn navigation voices, so when you’re listening to a podcast while driving, navigation interruptions are less jarring.

Most professionally produced podcasts are already mastered to similar volume levels, so Voice Boost 2 won’t overcompress them with aggressive processing — it’ll only apply as much correction as necessary to make them all the same volume.

A brief tutorial on clipping and distortion

This is about to get nerdier, but bear with me. (Yes, nerdier than ITU broadcast-loudness standards.)

Given a loudness measurement for the incoming audio, quieter podcasts need to be amplified to reach the target. But perceived loudness isn’t the peak of the incoming audio stream — it’s more of an average. Quiet-sounding audio can still have brief moments of loud peaks.

When increasing the volume of digital audio, the biggest challenge is not “clipping” during the peaks — not having any part of the signal pass above the volume ceiling of 0 dB. (It’s a negative scale. This is also why the LUFS value above, which is closely related to the decibel scale used here, is negative.)

Here’s the highest the signal should go, showing the individual audio samples (green dots) that can be processed by a podcast app before the DAC transforms them into audio (smooth green line):

It’ll sound right as long as the audio doesn’t cross above that top line (0 dB). Increase the volume even slightly too far, and some of the samples just slam into it and stay there, losing the tops of their smooth curves:

And that sounds terrible.

But I can’t just cap all the samples right below the limit and call it a day — that’s called a brickwall limiter — because then the shape of the audio line will actually represent different frequencies, telling the DAC to add noise that wasn’t really there.

Here, the bottom of each image shows the frequency breakdown:

The unclipped signal (left) shows only its original frequency of about 2100 Hz, but a basic brickwall limiter (right) results in the unwanted introduction of a bunch of extra frequencies.

That’s distortion. (If this is interesting to you, learn more about audio sampling theory here.)

Lookahead limiter

Avoiding audible distortion requires a lookahead limiter, which looks… ahead (😎) at the audio coming down the pipeline, and smoothly ramps the volume amplification down as a loud peak is approaching, then back up again afterward, just enough to avoid clipping and audible distortion, but so quickly that you don’t notice.⁴

After Voice Boost 2’s complete 32-bit audio processing pipeline, the last stage is a lookahead limiter, configured such that it can’t clip, no matter what audio comes through.

This gives vast flexibility in volume processing without sacrificing quality.

Voice Boost 2 also incorporates a dynamics compressor, but over time, I’ve kept reducing its strength as I’ve found it less necessary. Proper LUFS processing with a great lookahead limiter provides excellent volume normalization with almost no compression needed afterward.

True-peak detection

There’s one more way to introduce clipping that needs to be guarded against.

Digital audio is represented by samples that represent a point in time (green dots, again) on a sound wave (green line). But the sampled points don’t always land at the exact peaks of those waves:

The most common way to measure the peak of a waveform is to find the greatest absolute sample value. By this method, the top waveform peaks here would measure about –6 dB and –1.5 dB, respectively.

But the actual peak amplitudes of these waves is –1 dB! A simple limiter could still output clipped audio because it’s not seeing the true peaks.

Voice Boost 2’s limiter performs true-peak detection, rather than simply measuring sample peaks, to avoid this type of clipping and further reduce distortion.

Mastering-quality processing for everyone

Voice Boost 2 is a mastering-quality audio-processing pipeline that applies broadcast-standard loudness normalization, light compression and EQ, and a true-peak lookahead limiter to your podcasts, in real time, without sacrificing quality or battery life.

And it runs at less than 1% CPU usage on an iPhone SE.⁵

I intend to expose some of its customizability to customers in future updates, but I wanted to develop and ship the best default settings first to keep the app simple and usable to everyone. Now that it’s available to everyone, I may still subtly tweak the defaults in response to feedback. But as I’ve refined the settings during the beta period to be more universal, less customization has been necessary.⁶

Having achieved its goals of being more consistent and less aggressive, Voice Boost 2 is intentionally transparent. It’s not promoted more in the app or even labeled “Voice Boost 2”. It’s still Voice Boost — just better now.

If I did my job well, you’ll hardly notice it at all. You’ll have no idea that your podcasts are being remastered in your pocket.

But I’ll know. And the handful of you who really care will know. And that’s enough for me.

Voice Boost 2 is in today’s update (2020.1), along with these new features:

• AirPlay 2: Overcast can now play to HomePods and other AirPlay 2 devices much more responsively, with full-blown Smart Speed and Voice Boost, on iOS 13.1 and above.⁷
• Skip intros/outros: There’s a new per-podcast setting to skip a given number of seconds from the start and/or end of its episodes.
• Clip-sharing from private feeds. In retrospect, this restriction was unnecessary, so I lifted it.
• Restored iOS 12 compatibility. Going 13-only so soon was a mistake. Hear why on Under The Radar 181 and 183.

As usual, all of this is free for everyone in Overcast.

1. Those awesome Trey Anastasio acoustic shows are pretty quiet. ↩︎

2. Apple doesn’t make all of their audio APIs available on all platforms: some are Mac-only and never came to iOS, and watchOS has an even smaller subset than iOS. The more I can accomplish in my own code, the less I depend on Apple’s choices for which APIs they make available to developers. ↩︎

3. It’s just a command-line tool for now. You don’t want it. (But if you do… someday, maybe.) ↩︎

4. This all happens in milliseconds. ↩︎

5. At 1X, with Smart Speed enabled.

   Smart Speed was actually entirely rewritten as part of Voice Boost 2, but it’s less interesting. It performs the same job as before, but much more efficiently, and taking advantage of the measured loudness when Voice Boost is also enabled. ↩︎

6. For instance, I also built a de-esser into Voice Boost 2, but it slowly became unnecessary as I improved the other processing, so it’s not currently enabled. ↩︎

7. Smart Speed is a big deal here, I think — I’m not aware of any other podcast apps with silence-skipping over AirPlay 2.

   (Or LUFS normalization, or true-peak lookahead limiters.) ↩︎

In light of today’s rumor that a Pro Mode may be coming that seems to offer benefits in the opposite direction,¹ I wanted to re-make the case for a Low Power Mode on macOS — and explain why now is the time.

Modern hardware constantly pushes thermal and power limits, trying to strike a balance that minimizes noise and heat while maximizing performance and battery life.

Software also plays a role, trying to keep everything background-updated, content-indexed, and photo-analyzed so it’s ready for us when we want it, but not so aggressively that we notice any cost to performance or battery life.

Apple’s customers don’t usually have control over these balances, and they’re usually fixed at design time with little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer priorities.

The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they’ll need it.²

Mac laptops need Low Power Mode, too. I believe so strongly in its potential because I’ve been using it on my laptops (in a way) for years, and it’s fantastic.

I’ve been disabling Intel Turbo Boost on my laptops with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro most of the time since 2015.

In 2018, I first argued for Low Power Mode on macOS with a list of possible tweaks, concluding that disabling Turbo Boost was still the best bang-for-the-buck tweak to improve battery life without a noticeable performance cost in most tasks.³

Recently, as Intel has crammed more cores and higher clocks into smaller form factors and pushed thermal limits to new extremes, the gains have become even more significant. Here’s some thermal testing from my 8-core 16-inch MacBook Pro:

16-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2019, 2.4 GHz 8-core i9)   Power Temp. Geekbench 5 single/multi xcodebuild Normal 82W 90°C 1260/7386 39 sec. No Turbo 31W−62% 65°C 669/5206−46/29% 62 sec.+59%

With Turbo Boost disabled, peak CPU power consumption drops by 62%, with a correspondingly huge reduction in temperature. This has two massive benefits:

• The fans never audibly spin up. When Turbo Boost is enabled, the fans annoyingly spin up every time the system is under a heavy sustained load. Disable it, and it’s almost impossible to get them to be audible.
• It runs significantly cooler. Turbo Boost lets laptops get too hot to comfortably hold in your lap, and so much heat radiates out that it can make hands sweaty. Disable it, and the laptop only gets moderately warm, not hot, and hands stay comfortably dry.

I haven’t done formal battery testing on the 16-inch, since it’s so difficult and time-consuming to do in a controlled way that’s actually useful to people, but anecdotally, I’m seeing similar battery gains by disabling Turbo Boost that I’ve seen with previous laptops: significantly longer battery life that I’d estimate to be between 30–50%.

This comes at a cost to performance, but:

• It’s not noticeable on most workloads.
• Parallel workloads are affected far less than single-threaded tasks, and most modern heavy workloads are parallelized.

• This is an 8-core laptop that’s competitive with my iMac Pro! It’s much faster than most people need (myself included) most of the time, so I can spare some performance to get other benefits.

  A fast laptop isn’t very useful if your hands are too sweaty to type, the battery dies in the middle of a flight, or the loud fans ruin your audio recording.

• When I really want to maximize performance, Turbo Boost Switcher Pro lets me quickly toggle it in the menu bar, so switching between modes is easy.

The vast majority of the time I’m using it, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is a much better laptop with Turbo Boost disabled.

It’s still fast enough to do everything I need (including significant development with Xcode), while remaining silent and cool, with incredible battery life.

But soon, I bet I won’t be able to do this anymore.

Turbo Boost Switcher Pro relies on a kernel extension that’s grandfathered into Apple’s latest security requirements, but it can never be updated — and when macOS Catalina loads it for the first time, it warns that it’ll be “incompatible with a future version of macOS.” I suspect that this is the last year I’ll get to run the latest OS and be able to turn off Turbo Boost at will, making all of my future laptop usage significantly worse.

Please, Apple, make this feature official: give us a Low Power Mode for macOS that disables Turbo Boost to keep our laptops cool, quiet, and long-lasting at times when those are more important to us than speed.

1. My guess is that “Pro Mode” doesn’t raise the peak performance, but instead raises the fan speeds to allow longer sustained operation at high Turbo Boost speeds. ↩︎

2. Low Power Mode has been so successful on iOS that Apple also thought it worthwhile to add a Low Data Mode to iOS 13, offering similar control over data usage. (Mac owners can get similar functionality with the excellent TripMode.) ↩︎

3. As I wrote back then, disabling discrete GPUs and Photos analysis are other obvious contributors to a good Mac Low Power Mode. ↩︎

After my first day with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, I’m very optimistic about it.

🎧  Hear more on today’s Accidental Tech Podcast!

Two years ago, I wrote a wishlist to fix the MacBook Pro, and the 16-inch doesn’t actually deliver most of it. But time and technological progress are slowly getting Apple off the hook:

• The ports are unchanged. We’ll still need dongles. But USB-C is gradually becoming more common, and dongles are slowly — very slowly — getting less shitty.
• The Touch Bar isn’t optional. But a new hardware Esc key removes one of its biggest drawbacks, and accidental input should be reduced by the increased spacing between the Touch Bar and the top row of keys.
• The power brick still lacks its previous conveniences. There’s still no cable management, safety breakaway, or charging LED. But third parties are slowly filling some of these gaps.
• The headphone jack is still on the right (wrong) side, despite most single-sided headphone cables entering the left earcup. But the need for wired headphones is decreasing over time.

Addressing those would be nice, but as I wrote then, they paled in comparison to one huge issue: the butterfly keyboard.

The MacBook Pro must return to scissor keyswitches. If Apple only changes one thing about the next MacBook Pro, it should be this. It’s far more important than anything else on this list. […]

The Magic Keyboard’s scissor switches feel similar, but with a bit more travel, and all of the reliability and resilience of previous keyboard generations. […]

The Magic Keyboard only needs one change to be perfect for the MacBook Pro: returning to the “inverted-T” arrow-key arrangement by making the left- and right-arrow keys half-height again. This arrangement is much more natural and less error-prone because we can align our fingers by feeling the “T” shape, a crucial affordance for such frequently used keys that are so far from the home row.

That’s exactly what they’ve done, and I couldn’t be happier.

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro is a great computer in most other ways, but so were the MacBook Pros from the last few years. They were fast, powerful, capable workstations… but the butterfly keyboard took away from it all.

Not anymore.

I’m on cloud nine. Look at this glorious keyboard! An Esc key! Inverted-T arrow keys! A millimeter of key travel! Enough spacing between the keys for our fingers to accurately orient themselves! And keystrokes will probably work, 100% of the time, for years!

Five years ago, nobody would’ve considered any of these noteworthy, and readers would’ve suspected you weren’t of sound mind if you included them in a review.

Five years ago, laptop keyboards were fine. Everyone was pretty much satisfied with the ones they had, they worked, and we never had to talk or think about them.

Today, finally, we begin heading back to that world.

The butterfly keyboard was an anomaly — it was a huge departure from everything else we’d ever used, mostly not in good ways.

The new keyboard is very similar to the recent desktop Magic Keyboard, and I expect it to have a wide appeal, just as the Magic Keyboard does. It has slightly less travel and spacing, but the overall feeling is very similar — and it’s nothing at all like the butterfly keyboard.

I absolutely love it — not because it’s the most amazing keyboard in the world, but because it’s completely forgettable in the best possible way. It just feels normal again.

There’s a lot more to love about the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The screen and battery are bigger, but the size and weight barely increased. It’s almost as fast as my iMac Pro, and the new thermals can sustain higher performance. The speakers and microphone got huge, unexpected improvements.

And I didn’t get everything I wanted. But many of my wishlist items fall outside of what Apple is likely to ever do, and all of them are much less important than making the computer’s primary input device functional, acceptable, and reliable. Now we have the luxury of being able to complain about less-urgent wishes.

The biggest change is that I finally don’t feel like it’s constantly fighting me. Its design doesn’t feel spiteful. It’s a computer that doesn’t seem to hate being a computer. I’m not afraid to use it in the world, and I’m not avoiding using it because it’s unpleasant. The butterfly keyboard was the opposite, it never got better, I never got used to it, and good riddance to it.

Following in the footsteps of the fantastic iMac Pro, updated Mac Mini, and upcoming Mac Pro, the release of the 16-inch MacBook Pro ends a painful chapter of neglect and hubristic design of the Mac. Apple has finally turned the ship around.

We haven’t had long enough to fully test it yet. There may be flaws or shortcomings discovered over time — there usually are (and always have been). But frankly, it could catch fire twice a week and it would still be my favorite laptop Apple has made since 2015. Fortunately, upon initial usage, nothing bad really jumps out.

The new MacBook Pro has no massive asterisks or qualifications. It’s a great computer, period, and it feels so good to be able to say that again.

For the first time in years, without any major exceptions, we can see that Apple loves computers as much as we do.

🎧  Much more detail and discussion in the podcast!

Today’s Overcast update (2019.6) brings some great new features.

But first, I need to set low expectations for iOS 13, watchOS 6, and macOS Catalina updates this fall. Halfway through the summer, I’ve made much less progress than expected, having been overwhelmed by the required OS changes, my own technical and design debts, and unusually rough betas.

Rather than shipping a big iOS update, a standalone Watch app, and a Mac app on day one, these will probably come incrementally over the next year.

Fortunately, I haven’t stopped improving the app in the meantime.

Per-podcast customization, longer clips

You can now set download-vs.-stream and auto-delete behavior per podcast, one of the most frequently requested features over the last few years. (Sorry it took so long — it required a lot of server-side work for uninteresting reasons.)

I’ve also raised the clip-sharing length limit to 90 seconds. When I debuted this feature, I had to guess how it would be used and received, and 60 seconds seemed like a good limit. In practice, that’s sometimes a bit too short to capture a complete thought. 90 seconds should be better — most clips won’t need to be that long, but it’ll be nice to have the headroom when you need it.

“Suggestions for You” replacing Twitter

Overcast has had a Twitter-powered social-recommendations feature since version 1.0 in 2014, which made sense at the time: I didn’t have any popularity data to generate recommendations from, and social networks were nicer places to be than they are today.

But after five years, only 10% of active users have connected a Twitter account in Overcast, and only 0.2% of new podcast subscriptions have actually been added via Twitter recommendations.

Not only was the feature not providing much value to the 10% of people who enabled it, but the other 90% of Overcast’s customers haven’t been getting personalized recommendations at all.

In the meantime, I’ve accumulated five years of popularity data, so I tried writing my own recommendation engine. It worked — and it’s better.

Overcast now offers its own data-driven recommendation engine, and I’ve removed Twitter integration entirely.

Podcasts in the new “Suggestions for You” section of the Add Podcast screen are based on the shows you subscribe to, and what else their subscribers subscribe to, which gives much better recommendations without involving any social networks.

Most importantly, it works for all of Overcast’s customers.

*     *     *

As always, Overcast is free in the App Store. Give it a try.

Something big changed at Apple around the beginning of 2017.

They had encountered significant turbulence in the product line over the preceding years, especially Macs. It was a rough time to be a pro Mac user.

The “trash can” 2013 Mac Pro addressed only a fraction of the needs solved by the previous “cheese grater” towers, aged quickly without critical upgrade paths, and suffered from high GPU-failure rates from its cooling solution — all because its design prioritized size and appearance over performance and versatility in the one Mac model that should never make that tradeoff.

Over the next few years, it became clear that the Mac Pro was an embarrassing, outdated flop that Apple seemed to have little intention of ever updating, leaving its customers feeling unheard and abandoned. I think Apple learned a small lesson from it, but they learned a much bigger one a few years later.

The current MacBook Pro generation launched in late 2016, and I think Apple was truly caught completely by surprise when the new Touch Bar, sparse USB-C-only port offerings, high prices, and highly polarizing butterfly keyboard were met with harsh criticism, mixed reviews, and high failure rates. This one really hurt: while the Mac Pro is a niche machine for the highest-end and most-specialized needs, the popular MacBook Pro is the lifeblood of the Mac.

By the end of 2016, in addition to the generally buggy, neglected state macOS seemed to be perpetually stuck in, Apple had replaced its entire “pro” Mac lineup with controversial, limiting products that seemed optimized to flex Apple’s industrial-design muscles rather than actually addressing their customers’ needs.

The only company that can make computers for our OS seemed incapable of making good computers anymore. Each update threatened to remove or break things we needed or loved. Their newest designs felt punitive, rather than feeling like a celebration of computing.

Then, in April 2017, out of nowhere, Apple held a Mac Pro roundtable discussion with the press to announce that they were in the early stages of completely redesigning the Mac Pro.¹

The follow-up briefing a year later promised that the new Mac Pro would be released in 2019, and publicized the existence of a “Pro Workflow Team” of real pro users working inside Apple to inform the direction of their pro hardware and software.

It sounded like they’d gone from not listening to their customers at all to an institutionalized process of listening. And the newly designed Macs released since then have been great.²

The late-2017 iMac Pro, which I’m using to write this, is the best Mac I’ve ever owned by far. It’s versatile, incredibly powerful, beautiful, and silent. It’s so good that I’ll probably never really need a Mac Pro again,³ and if this was the only new “Mac Pro”, I’d be mostly fine with that.

The late-2018 Mac Mini replaced a pitiful, punitive, neglected relic with a practical, powerful mini-Mac-Pro. Apple could’ve let it die, or replaced it with a tiny, no-port marvel of uselessness, but instead, they made a computer so good that I started and ended a YouTube mini-career just to review it.

And the 2019 Mac Pro, finally unveiled last week, looks to be absolutely killer — it’s the first true successor to the tower Mac Pro, which saw its last real update almost a decade ago in 2010.⁴ It’s big, bulky, ludicrously fast, and almost obscenely upgradeable — exactly what a Mac Pro needs to be, and far better than any of us expected.

The new Mac Pro is, truly, a celebration of computing.

Even more importantly than any hardware releases, macOS itself has also seen massive engineering effort recently. For the first time in a decade, the Mac was a major focus of WWDC, with great new APIs poised to usher in a huge wave of fresh software.

To be fair, this story hasn’t ended yet. The Mac Pro isn’t actually out yet (and will be very expensive), they still need to resolve the problematic MacBook Pro with its next generation (rumors are promising), and the lack of standalone Apple displays under six thousand dollars really hurts the Mac Pro story.⁵

But I’m optimistic for the first time in years.

It’s hard to tell when Apple is listening. They speak concisely, infrequently, and only when they’re ready, saying absolutely nothing in the meantime, even when we’re all screaming about a product line as if it’s on fire. They make great progress, but often with courageous losses that never get reversed, so an extended silence because we’re stuck with a change forever is indistinguishable from an extended silence because the fix isn’t ready yet.

But there has clearly been a major shift in direction for the better since early 2017, and they couldn’t be more clear now:

Apple is listening again, they’ve still got it, and the Mac is back.

1. Based on what we’ve learned since, they had likely started the project a very short time before holding the roundtable. ↩︎

2. I’m excluding the 2018 MacBook Air because it feels like a stopgap that wasn’t originally planned to exist — the no-Touch-Bar 13” MacBook “Escape” seemed intended to replace it — that was rushed into the 2016-era generation mid-cycle, rather than being the first of a new design. Even so, with the large exception of the butterfly keyboard, it’s quite good. ↩︎

3. This doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t buy one. ↩︎

4. The 2010/“2012” Mac Pro was so good, and so upgradeable, that it’s still in surprisingly widespread use today for needs that weren’t possible or compelling on the “trashcan” successor. ↩︎

5. And the MacBook Pro. A very common setup for developers — Apple’s largest identified segment of pro users — is a 15” MacBook Pro connected to an external monitor, for which a good solution no longer exists. Developers would be much better served by a $1,500-ish standalone version of the iMac’s 5K display than a $6,000 XDR reference monitor for professional video colorists. ↩︎

Sharing podcasts has never been easy, but I’ve always tried to lead the way with Overcast, with publicly shareable episode links and optional recommendations from your Twitter friends since version 1.0 in 2014.

Podcast sharing has been limited to audio and links, but today’s social networks are more reliant on images and video, especially Instagram. Podcasts need video clips to be shared more easily today.

I’ve seen some video clips from tools specific to certain podcast networks or hosts, but they were never available to everyone, or for every show. So people mostly just haven’t shared podcast clips, understandably, because it has been too hard.

Not anymore.

▶️ ↩️

This remark on Unco by Stephen Hackett inspired me to finally solve this problem in a way that worked easily, for all podcasts, for both podcasters and listeners to use.

With today’s 2019.4 update¹, you can now share audio or video clips, up to a minute each, from any public podcast. Simply tap the share button in the upper-right corner.

You can generate an audio clip, or portrait, landscape, or square video, using your current Overcast theme setting.

In order to help spread podcasts further, I didn’t want to be heavy-handed in the Overcast branding — not everyone wants to advertise for one specific podcast app when promoting their shows. So the “Shared with Overcast” badge is optional, and if you’d like, you can also add an Apple Podcasts badge.

Finally, I wanted to extend the same app-agnosticism to Overcast’s share links. While this design still needs a lot of modernization, I’ve done a small refresh:

Now, for non-logged-in visitors, Overcast’s public sharing pages display badges for other podcast apps and the RSS feed for any podcast listed in Apple Podcasts.

It’s important for me to promote other apps like this, and to make it easy even for other people’s customers to benefit from Overcast’s sharing features, because there are much bigger threats than letting other open-ecosystem podcast apps get a few more users.

For podcasting to remain open and free, we must not leave major shortcomings for proprietary, locked-down services to exploit.² Conversely, the more we strengthen the open podcast ecosystem with content, functionality, and ease of use, the larger the barrier becomes that any walled garden must overcome to be compelling.

One of the most common shortcomings we hear is that podcasts are hard to share. Hopefully, Overcast’s new clip-sharing feature changes that, and other apps build similar features soon.

So go get Overcast and start sharing your favorite moments. It’ll help me, of course, but more importantly, it’ll help your favorite shows gain listeners, and it’ll strengthen the amazing, open, standards-based world of podcasting.

1. Like Slopes and Castro, I’ve changed to a date-based version-numbering scheme — 2019.4 is the fourth update released in 2019, the next version will be 2019.5, and so on — partly because version numbers don’t really matter anymore, but mostly because I no longer wanted to delay completed features until a major-version change or worry that I didn’t do enough to justify a certain number. ↩︎

2. YouTube was able to dominate video because it made everything easy in a medium that (at the time) was very hard to do elsewhere. If a proprietary service takes a very hard aspect of podcasting and makes it very easy, it may rapidly rise to prominence.

   Other major shortcomings I’m concerned about: the difficulty of getting sponsorships for small shows (“AdSense for podcasts”), and the complexity of creation and publishing (“Tumblr for podcasts”). This is probably why Spotify bought Anchor. ↩︎

▶️

The first thing someone does in a podcast app is add some podcasts, and most active Overcast users add at least two new podcasts each month.

Over 80% of podcasts are added to Overcast by searching, with the vast majority as searches for a specific podcast by name (rather than searching for generic keywords, such as “business”).

Good search is a critical, differentiating feature of any podcast app.

I’m not satisfied if the podcast you’re looking for is somewhere in the middle of a long list — I want it to be the first one, displayed quickly, after typing the fewest characters possible. I’ve been building toward this by analyzing years of popularity statistics and anonymous search data.

Instant Search is the next step in Overcast’s search evolution. It combines a small local cache with a highly optimized search service to give the most relevant results immediately as you type, even after only a single letter.¹

It’s a dramatic, delightful improvement to a critical, frequently used feature. This was a lot of fun to build, and I’m proud of it.

See for yourself! Overcast is free on the App Store.

1. If Instant Search isn’t instant right after you update, the cache hasn’t fully downloaded yet. It’s downloaded weekly, only on Wi-Fi, and is less than 5 MB. ↩︎

Watch my video review of the new iPad Pro in both sizes.

Rather than try to be comprehensive, I focused on what matters most to me: size choice between the 11” and 12.9”, the Smart Keyboard Folio from my perspective as a frequent 10.5” Smart Keyboard user, the new Pencil, and why “getting work done” isn’t important to me.

Watch the video review

I hardly ever think about my Mac Mini, but it serves a vital role for my family as our home-theater mixer, Plex server, ScanSnap server, Apple Photos backup, and Backblaze host for our NAS.¹ Almost every port on the back is in use, and it runs 24/7, reliably, in total silence.

Until last week, I thought it would be the last Mac Mini that Apple ever made.

And when rumors started swirling about an imminent Mac Mini update, I assumed the worst: if it came at all, it would be a tiny box with a slow, ultra-low-power processor and almost zero ports, optimizing for small size instead of versatility.

I don’t think this was an unreasonable fear after the 2014 Mac Mini update, which made many key aspects much worse without making anything much better. It seemed clear then, and for the following four years that it went without an update, that Apple held the Mac Mini and its customers in very low regard.

Not anymore.

The 2018 Mac Mini is real, and it’s spectacular.

It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age.

Ports! Glorious ports!

Number one — and this is a big one these days, especially for this product — is that it’s not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports. If the previous one served a role for you, the new one can probably do it just as well, and probably better and faster, with minimal donglage.²

It’s the same size as the old one, which is the right tradeoff. I know zero Mac Mini owners who really need it to get smaller, and many who don’t want it to get fewer ports or worse performance.

The point of the Mac Mini is to be as versatile as possible, addressing lots of diverse and edge-case needs that the other Macs can’t with their vastly different form factors and more opinionated designs. The Mac Mini needs to be a utility product, not a design statement. (Although, even as someone tired of space-gray everything, I have to admit that the Mini looks fantastic in its new color.)

The base price has increased to $800, and that’s not great. It’s partly justifiable because it’s much higher-end than before — the processors are much better, the architecture is higher-end and includes big advances like the T2, and all-SSD is standard — but it’s still an expensive product in absolute terms.

Apple lent me a high-end configuration for review — 6-core i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD — which would cost $2499 (much of which is the SSD). This would’ve sounded crazy to spend on a Mac Mini a few years ago, but when it’s specced up like this, it’s targeting a much higher-end market than the previous model could. Compared to similarly specced iMacs and MacBook Pros, the pricing is generally reasonable.

And this can truly be a pro desktop, with just one exception.

Benchmarks

The big story to me is how incredibly fast this thing is. Granted, I’m testing the fastest CPU offered, but damn.

Geekbench results are very strong. The i7 Mac Mini scored better on single-core performance than every other Mac today (!) at 5912, and its multi-core score of nearly 24,740 beats every Mac to date except the iMac Pro and the old 12-core 2013 Mac Pro.

“Performance-competitive with pro Macs” was not high on my prediction list for a Mac Mini update, but here we are.

As the rate of CPU advancement has slowed dramatically over the last few years, Apple has found other ways to improve performance. The T2 is great for lots of security reasons — I wouldn’t buy a new Mac these days without it — but what you’re seeing here is its strength as a ridiculously fast SSD controller.

This Mac Mini builds my app, Overcast, much faster than my maxed-out 13-inch MacBook Pro, and about as quickly as my 10-core iMac Pro! Obviously, to achieve this result with only 6 cores, it’s not maxing out the CPU 100% of the time — it hits it in bursts while juggling a lot between the SSD and memory — but the result is that it’s incredibly fast as a development machine.

The Blackmagick Disk Speed Test shows that the raw SSD performance is effectively identical to the other T2 Macs shipped to date, and a huge improvement over the four-year-old Mac Mini.

A lot of people use Mac Minis as media or Plex servers, so I ran an H.265 transcoding test with ffmpeg. This maxes out all CPU cores, so the results predictably scale with the core count: the 6-core Mac Mini was much faster than the 4-core MacBook Pro, but the 10-core iMac Pro beat them both.

But if an app supports the T2’s hardware HEVC encoder,³ it can go much faster. And since every T2 so far performs identically, all T2 machines — from the 2018 MacBook Air to the iMac Pro — encode HEVC this way at the same speed, and all in complete silence because they’re barely touching the CPU.

I wasn’t able to notice any quality differences between the videos encoded with x265 and the T2’s hardware acceleration.

The only spec that lets it down is the Intel GPU. It’s fast enough for common tasks, but if your workload benefits from a strong GPU, you’re better off going for an iMac or a 15-inch MacBook Pro, or considering an eGPU setup.

Many Mac lines rely on Intel’s integrated GPUs to fit their physical and thermal needs, and Intel has been incredibly inconsistent over the last few years in delivering updated CPU-GPU combinations that would be suitable for many Macs.

We often blame Intel’s CPU roadmap (or Apple’s seeming indifference) for the lack of updates to certain Mac lines, but Intel’s GPU offerings are often the bigger issue. This is Intel’s fault, but it’s Apple’s problem — and Apple passes that problem right along to its customers.

But that’s it — aside from price, that’s the only downside. The GPU sucks. Everything else is awesome.

If you don’t need a strong GPU — and honestly, most Mac Mini use-cases don’t — this is a solid pick for a general-purpose Mac, even at the base-level configuration. Spec it up, and it’s more like a mini-Mac Pro.

A few assorted notes, with apologies for stealing Gruber’s format:

• It’s silent at idle. The i7’s fan noise does become clearly audible when it’s under heavy load: it’s in the ballpark of a modern MacBook Pro, but quieter.

  Interestingly, I disabled Turbo Boost to simulate the base i3 model’s thermals, and couldn’t get the fan to spin up audibly, no matter what I did. Those who prioritize silence under heavy loads should probably stick with the i3.

• This is the first non-iMac desktop Mac that lets you plug in a 5K display, at full quality, without dual cables or other unreliable hacks. We finally have 5K Retina Mac options beyond the iMac! Unfortunately, we still don’t have any great standalone 5K displays. (The LG UltraFine isn’t.)

• You can upgrade the RAM again! I never would’ve guessed this was coming, and I believe it’s the first time in a long time that an Apple product’s direct successor became more upgradeable and serviceable.

  I still recommend getting it with the right amount of RAM from Apple if possible, since third-party RAM has historically been a mess of unreliability and finger-pointing, but if you need that, it’s back. (The security screws inside — TR6? — still need some iFixit tools to get past.)

I Can’t Believe The Mac Mini Is This Awesome, I Can’t Even Say “Again” Because It Never Was

A new Mac Mini could’ve been so much worse. At many times in its past, it has seemed unloved, neglected, and downright punitive — a similar pattern to Apple’s other headless desktop, the Mac Pro. It seemed for a while that Apple lacked any interest in making Macs anymore, especially desktops.

Last year, with the introduction of the absolutely stellar iMac Pro, Apple showed us a glimpse of a potential new direction. It was downright perfect — a love letter to the Mac and its pro desktop users, and a clear turnaround in the way the company views the Mac for the better.

We didn’t know until now whether the iMac Pro’s greatness was a fluke. But now we have another data point: the last two desktops out of Apple have been incredible. After this, I have faith that they’re going to do the new Mac Pro justice when it finally ships next year.

The new Mac Mini is a great update, out of nowhere, to a product we thought would never be updated again.

Of course, with Apple’s track record on the Mac Mini, it may never be updated after this. This is either the first in a series of regular updates with which Apple proves that they care about the Mac Mini again, or it’s the last Mac Mini that will ever exist and we’ll all be hoarding them in a few years. We can’t know yet.

But today, this is a great update, a wonderful all-arounder for lots of potential needs, and just a fantastic little computer.

1. I do this via iSCSI, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It breaks and requires a new $200+ iSCSI initiator with almost every macOS update — which is why my Mac Mini still runs Sierra. In the near future, I’ll just directly attach some giant external hard drives to the Mac Mini and stop using the NAS. ↩︎

2. Unless you used optical audio, audio input, or the SD-card reader. (Shit, I use optical in and out.) ↩︎

3. ffmpeg can do it by specifying -c:v hevc_videotoolbox instead of -c:v x265. I also needed -vtag hvc1 for the output MP4s with either codec to be playable on macOS.

   Compressor uses the T2’s HEVC acceleration when encoding 8-bit HEVC, but not 10-bit. ↩︎

Quick, what time is it?

If that took you a bit longer than usual to tell the time on the Apple Watch’s new default Infograph face, you’re not alone:

• John Gruber finds it “far too busy”
• Jason Snell finds it “pretty and packed with features”, but misses hour numerals
• Zac Hall removes almost everything to improve legibility
• David Smith wrote his own complications (!) to improve contrast

I’ve configured mine acceptably, but Utility is still far more legible for telling the time at a quick glance:

Infograph, Utility

Infograph suffers from two major issues:

• The center complications reduce the contrast between the dial and hands, often making the hands hard to locate. This is avoidable with customization, although the defaults should be much more conservative.
• It takes too much cognitive effort (and therefore time) to distinguish the current hour. This is simply a flawed design.

It’s faster and easier to read analog time with the 1–12 numerals displayed on a watch, but many people prefer the cleaner look of a watch that uses lines, dots, or other shapes as hour markers instead. (Watch people call these “indices”.)

And it’s absolutely possible to design a highly legible dial with hour indices in many different styles. Here are some classics and modern takes:¹

Across a wide variety of brands, styles, and price points, a few key design principles are clear:

• The hour markers for 12 (and often 3/6/9) are more prominent.
• The hour indices are much larger than the minute markings.
• The hour hands nearly touch the hour indices.

These all improve legibility by making it as fast and easy as possible to know which hour is being indicated (and minimize the chance of an off-by-one error), first by orienting your eyes to the current rotation with the 12 marker, then by minimizing the distance between the hour hand and the indices it’s between.

Apple Watch’s analog faces all fail to achieve these principles:²

Color, Simple, Explorer

Color, Simple, and Explorer have easily distinguished hour markers, but Explorer’s are a bit too far from its hour hand.

None of them have distinguished 12 markers to aid in orientation.

While Explorer omits minute markings altogether, Simple bafflingly uses 30-second markings in place of its minute track, making time-telling even harder. I’ve never seen another watch with sub-minute markings identical to its minute markings.

Activity Analog, Utility, and Infograph without most complications

Activity Analog’s hour markers are faint and far from its hour hand, and the central activity rings quickly eliminate the hands’ contrast against the dial as they progress.

Utility (when configured without numbers) improves legibility slightly with its bold hour indices, but they’re still too small and too far from its hour hand, and there’s no differentiation for the 12 index.

Infograph is similar, but even worse: its hour indices are more faint, it uses 30-second markings instead of minute markings, and its default Calendar display wipes out the top three indices. (At least you can tell which way is up.)

Even with almost no complications, the basic essence of the Infograph dial has poor time legibility.

When it’s being used as Apple seems to intend, time-telling at a glance is so difficult that many people have actually suggested setting the digital time as the center complication, at which point the hands are just a nuisance and we should stop pretending it’s an analog face.

It’s great for Apple to offer a wide variety of Apple Watch faces, but most of them are short-lived novelties at best. We’re three years and four generations into the Apple Watch, and almost every Watch owner I know still uses the same handful of “good” faces.

If you want digital time with a good deal of complications, Modular is your only good choice (or Infograph Modular on the Series 4).³ If you want analog time with numerals, Utility is the only good option. If you want indices instead of numerals — probably the most popular analog watch style in the world — I don’t think there is a good option.

By now, we’ve seen Apple’s design range that they’re willing to ship as Watch faces, and while it seems broad at first glance, it’s actually pretty narrow.

And we’re restricted to the handful of good watch faces that Apple makes, because other developers aren’t allowed to make custom Watch faces.

The Apple Watch is an amazing feat of technology. It’s a computer. It can display anything. With no mechanical or physical limitations to hold us back, any watch-face design from anyone could plausibly be built, enabling a range of creativity, style, and usefulness that no single company could ever design on its own.

But they won’t let us. In a time when personal expression and innovation in watch fashion should be booming, they’re instead being eroded, as everyone in the room is increasingly wearing the same watch with the same two faces.

Open this door, Apple.

1. You can even see which model the Apple Watch’s hand shape comes from, which is not a coincidence. ↩︎

2. For Apple Watch faces offering multiple hour/minute styles, I selected the best one that didn’t have hour numerals, and most complications were disabled. ↩︎

3. Special shout-out to my favorite digital face, Solar. ↩︎

I apologize for the low battery level. Busy day.

It all started with the watchOS volume widget.

You see, Overcast’s previous Apple Watch app really sucked. I did my best with the capabilities of watchOS 1–4, but I couldn’t give people what they really wanted:

1. Standalone podcast playback on the Apple Watch without an iPhone. I briefly offered it through some bad hacks, but had to remove it.
2. Volume control on the Watch, which is increasingly important with the popularity of AirPods.

That’s why I nearly jumped for joy during the watchOS 5 announcement in June, when Apple unveiled most of my list of watchOS changes needed to make good podcast apps.

After a very busy summer, standalone Apple Watch playback is back in Overcast, and it’s actually good this time!

It’s not perfect:

• No cellular. Apple hasn’t released a good way to do cellular audio streaming in watchOS, and the bad ways wouldn’t be very useful.
• Sending podcasts to the Watch is slow. Overcast shrinks them to reduce the transfer time, but when (and how quickly) podcasts transfer is tightly controlled by watchOS to preserve battery life. Transfers still sometimes wait forever or silently fail.

Programmers like me can’t accept that something is just slow, so I’ve decided to make transfer speed irrelevant. Nobody cares how slowly podcasts transfer if it happens while they’re asleep!

Auto-Sync to Watch automatically tries to send your most recent podcasts to your Apple Watch whenever it gets a chance.¹ You can still send episodes manually from the queue button on an episode (≡⁺), but in my testing, I never needed to. Just pick up your Watch and go, and it’ll already have plenty of podcasts for your outing, all without having to manually sync anything or wait for slow transfers.

The Overcast 5.0.1 update, due out in a few days, makes Watch transfers even more reliable. (Sorry. Found a better way after 5.0 was approved.)

And Watch-crown volume control! Finally, the best way to use Overcast from your Apple Watch isn’t to delete it, letting the Now Playing app show up instead.

That’s where the other half of my summer workload began.

The watchOS volume widget offers minimal customization: just the color of the circle. I couldn’t make the line width a little narrower to match the rest of Overcast’s thin-line aesthetic. But that iOS 7-era thin-line aesthetic looked dated, and I’d wanted a design refresh for a while.

I decided to start modernizing the app’s design, screen by screen. I couldn’t do it all in one summer, so I started with the screen that needed the most help: Now Playing.

The previous Now Playing screen in Overcast 4.

The biggest problem of the previous design was the center artwork area, a scrollable set of “pages” that had speed and effects controls offscreen to the left, and the episode notes offscreen to the right.

Nobody ever found them. I’ve been getting emails almost every day from people asking where the speed controls were because they set them once and couldn’t find them again, or saying how they’d really like my app more if it offered speed controls. The only indication in the interface was three “page dots” below the scrollable area, but that wasn’t enough.

The new design maintains the same scrollable pages, but now as obvious, tactile cards. In my testing, everyone figured these out immediately.

Put differently, it’s like you’re navigating this through a phone-shaped window in the middle:

This design is not only more discoverable, but it allows me to fit more controls on screen, and in more reachable areas. Unlike the previous design, I can also fit the same controls on all devices, from the iPhone SE to the iPad Pro.

Designing a good Now Playing screen for a music or podcast app that’s nice, clean, and highly discoverable is incredibly difficult. I think I’ve finally found a good balance.

I’ve given chapters (when present) their own card with durations and inline progress bars. I’ve also finally revamped the sleep timer to ditch the ugly alert sheet, give it a proper UI for fast input, and show the remaining time in more useful ways:

There are lots of other improvements throughout the app as well. Some of the highlights:

• Search your podcasts and current episodes from the main screen, or go into a podcast’s screen to search its entire archive.
• Refreshed the podcast screen a little. (More to come.)
• Siri Shortcuts support, of course.

Plus smaller fixes and improvements:

• CarPlay performance is much better, especially for people with large collections.
• Podcasts now display their estimated release frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) if it can be inferred.
• Tap-to-load on images now loads all images from the same domain at once.
• Tons of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Overcast 5 requires iOS 12 and watchOS 5, and as always, it’s free.

Update your devices, then go get Overcast!

1. Up to 20 episodes are auto-synced today. This number will change as I refine the balance of resource usage. Auto-Sync to Watch is on by default and can be turned off in Nitpicky Details. ↩︎

Laptop battery life is decreasingly relevant to me as more airplanes offer power outlets. But sometimes you lose that lottery, as I did on my latest 8-hour daytime flight.

Apple’s “Up to 10 hours” claim doesn’t apply to my work,¹ which is usually a mix of Xcode, web browsing, and social time-wasting, so I knew I’d have to seriously conserve power.

Sometimes, you just need Low Power Mode: the switch added to iOS a few years ago to conserve battery life when you need it, at the expense of full performance and background tasks.

There’s no such feature on Mac laptops, but there should be. It could:

• Disable the discrete GPU on 15-inch models unless required for hardware reasons²
• Pause Photos syncing and analysis
• Pause Spotlight indexing
• Reduce the frequency of Time Machine backups
• Don’t download or install software updates
• Don’t download new content in iTunes
• Auto-dim the screen after a shorter time
• Let third-party apps detect Low Power Mode and reduce their background operations to only essential work

And the big one:

• Reduce the processor’s maximum wattage or disable Turbo Boost

Back in 2015, I experimented with disabling Turbo Boost and discovered that it reduced performance by about a third, but also boosted battery life by almost as much. Since then, I’ve been running Turbo Boost Switcher Pro to automatically disable Turbo Boost when I’m running on battery power, and it has been wonderful: I made it through that 8-hour flight only because Turbo Boost was off.

Over the last few days, I’ve run battery tests on my 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro with the (awesome) 2.7 GHz i7 and my 2015 2.2 GHz 15-inch³ to see how far I could push the battery life using Volta, which can disable Turbo Boost and/or set wattage limits on the CPU.

My test was based on the “Heavy” script from last time, but using xcodebuild every few minutes with Overcast’s current codebase (which is larger and includes some Swift). Improvements are in green and performance reductions are in red:

15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro (2.2 GHz quad-core i7)   Battery life Geekbench single/multi xcodebuild Normal 3:36 3963/13864 43.9s No Turbo 5:06+42% 2796/9917−29/28% 63.4s+44% 13-inch 2018 MacBook Pro (2.7 GHz quad-core i7)   Battery life Geekbench single/multi xcodebuild Normal 3:09 5412/18983 34.3s 28W 3:28+10% 5401/16326−0/14% 37.4s+9% 18W 4:05+29% 5248/14133−3/26% 43.5s+27% 12W 4:44+50% 4818/11835−11/38% 48.2s+41% No Turbo 5:05+61% 3624/13324−33/30% 48.9s+43% 6W 6:24+103% 4065/7596−25/60% 76.1s+121%

It’s impressive how much faster this new 13-inch model is than the best laptop ever made due to significant CPU and SSD improvements.

Dropping the wattage to 6W, the thermal limit of the fanless 12-inch MacBook, interestingly (but not surprisingly) makes it perform effectively identically to the best 12-inch MacBook in Geekbench. This is an extreme option, but one I’d occasionally take if offered. It roughly doubles compilation times, but also doubles the battery life.

This ratio holds for most other configurations: the gain in battery life is about as large as the loss in heavy-workload performance. That’s a trade-off I’d gladly make when I need to maximize runtime.

The best bang-for-the-buck option is still to just disable Turbo Boost. Single-threaded performance hurts more than with wattage-limiting, but it’s able to maintain better multi-threaded performance and more consistent thermals, and gets a larger battery gain relative to its performance loss.

And Volta, which offers both wattage limits and Turbo disabling, requires disabling System Integrity Protection to install an unsigned kernel extension, which I really don’t recommend. Turbo Boost Switcher, which doesn’t offer wattage control, works with SIP using a signed extension and its Pro version has more convenient features for automatic toggling.

For now, I’m going to continue to happily run Turbo Boost Switcher Pro to selectively give myself better battery life, and I recommend it for anyone else with the same need.

But what I ultimately want is for a true Low Power Mode built into macOS that could provide this sort of CPU throttling and software changes, which would ultimately achieve even greater gains.

1. Whose work does get 10 hours out of a MacBook Pro? None of the use-cases on the marketing page — Photography, Coding, Video Editing, 3D Graphics, and Gaming — are likely to achieve even half of that in practice. ↩︎

2. I’ve heard that 15-inch models are wired such that the discrete GPU is required when external displays are connected. Otherwise, whether it’s used or not is a software decision, and gfxCardStatus can override it in certain conditions. ↩︎

3. It’s not brand new, so it’s not a perfect comparison, but the battery only had 90 cycles before this test. ↩︎

Overcast 4.2 is out now. It enhances privacy in two major areas:

Anonymous sync by default

Overcast has offered anonymous sync accounts since 2014. They’re fully functional, but they lack email addresses or passwords, so they can’t log into the website. A login token is stored in iCloud so the account can be accessed after a restore or upgrade, or from other devices you own.

Previously, the login screen pushed email logins. But with four years of perspective, feedback, and usage data, I now think that’s the wrong move. Only a single-digit percentage of customers use the website, and the iCloud token-sync method solves cross-device logins for almost everyone.

Your personal data isn’t my business — it’s a liability. I want as little as possible. I don’t even log IP addresses anymore.

If I don’t need your email address, I really don’t want it.

68% of Overcast accounts have email addresses today. To reduce that as much as possible, I’ve made major changes to account handling:

The previous login screen (left) and the new one.

In Overcast 4.2, the login screen now prominently encourages anonymous accounts by default.

If you already have an account in iCloud, it’ll pop up a dialog box over this screen asking if you want to use it.

And the first time you launch 4.2, people with email-based accounts will be encouraged to migrate them to anonymous accounts:

The migration prompt that shows on the first run.

Finally, you can now change your account between email-based and anonymous whenever you want.

Blocking ad-tracking images

In most podcast apps, podcasts are downloaded automatically in the background. The only data sent to a podcast’s publisher about you or your behavior is your IP address and the app’s name. The IP address lets them derive your approximate region, but not much else.

They don’t know exactly who you are, whether you listened, when you listened, how far you listened, or whether you skipped certain parts.

Some large podcast producers are trying very hard to change that.

I’m not.

Big data ruined the web, and I’m not going to help bring it to podcasts. Publishers already get enough from Apple to inform ad rates and make content decisions — they don’t need more data from my customers. Podcasting has thrived, grown, and made tons of money for tons of people under the current model for over a decade. We already have all the data we need.

One of the ways publishers try to get around the limitations of the current model is by embedding remote images or invisible “tracking pixels” in each episode’s HTML show notes. When displayed in most apps, the images are automatically loaded from an analytics server, which can then record and track more information about you.

In Overcast 4.2, much like Mail (and for the same reason), remote images don’t load by default. A tappable placeholder shows you where each image will load from, and you can decide whether to load it or not.

I believe I’ve done this in the most secure way possible — I’m actually displaying the show notes using a strict Content Security Policy — and I would love to hear from anyone who finds a way to inject auto-loading remote images or execute arbitrary JavaScript in show notes.

Bug fixes

Overcast 4.2 also includes a bunch of minor fixes, and two big ones:

• Fixed the major slowdowns and high battery usage that resulted from extremely large podcast artwork.
• Password-protected episodes are now supported on password-protected feeds.

Get it now in the App Store!

Overcast 4.1 is now in the App Store with some small but nice new features.

Smart Resume is actually two features:

1. It jumps back by up to a few seconds after having been paused to help remind you of the conversation.
2. It slightly adjusts resumes and seeks to fall in the silences between spoken words when reasonably possible.

Both are subtle but noticeable benefits (my favorite kind), especially when you’re being interrupted a lot, such as while following turn-by-turn navigation directions.

Smart Resume is on by default, and can be turned off in Nitpicky Details.

Delete episodes 24 hours after completion: Before, episodes could either be auto-deleted immediately upon completion, or not at all. There’s now a third option, auto-deleting 24 hours after completion, which will soon be the default for new accounts.

The 24-hour threshold is only enforced after a successful sync, so it won’t auto-delete anything in the middle of an extended offline period, such as a long flight.

Auto-deletion, either immediate or after 24 hours, also no longer applies to Premium subscribers’ Uploads.

Password-protected podcasts: Some private podcast feeds, including many paid and members-only podcasts, require a username and password via HTTP Basic Auth. You can now add these in the Add URL screen.

Password-protected podcasts, and other private feeds such as Patreon bonus feeds and anything using the <itunes:block> tag, do not show up in search or recommendations.

Noteworthy bug fixes:

• Resuming playback after quitting in the background, especially on very long podcasts and/or when using AirPods, no longer occasionally results in glitchy noises and incorrect durations.
• Playback under certain conditions no longer stalls, requiring pausing and playing again.
• Downloads now fail less often.
• Playback controls no longer disappear occasionally.
• Smart Speed total savings now appear at the bottom of the Settings screen for locales that use commas as their decimal separator.¹
• Extremely large playlists now only show the most/least-recent 500 episodes to improve app performance for users with very high subscription counts.

There’s also one removal: rotation support on iPhone. (The iPad app still rotates.) iPhone rotation has always been disabled by default, and had been buried in Nitpicky Details for a long time, so very few people have ever used it. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly difficult to support and maintain, especially with the modern complexities of rotation and the dramatically increased workload of supporting the iPhone X in landscape.

iPhone rotation has simply proven far too costly to maintain for its extremely low usage, and it had to go to free up more of my time for more highly demanded features. I apologize to the few people who did use it, and I hope this isn’t too disruptive for you.

The rest is all good news. Go get Overcast now!

In the next update, I’ll be addressing the biggest design failure of Overcast 4: the non-discoverability of the Effects and Notes pages in the Now Playing screen. Expect the return of an ancient user-interface tool known as “buttons”.

1. This was Overcast’s oldest known bug, which had been there since 1.0: some users, mostly in central Europe, wouldn’t see Smart Speed totals. It turned out to be one of the most interesting and obscure bugs I’ve seen.

   The total-time-saved value is stored on-device as it accumulates, then gets sent to the server to be combined with any listening you do on other devices. The overall total is read back from the server, and the local total is reset, on each sync.

   I was using an NSNumberFormatter to read the total value from Overcast’s server as a double. My server always sends values with U.S.-style number formatting, using a period as the decimal separator (e.g. “1234.5”). But by default, NSNumberFormatter uses the device’s locale, so in countries that use a comma as the decimal separator (e.g. “1234,5”), it was interpreting the server’s numbers with periods as invalid and returning zero. So the Settings screen thought they hadn’t saved any time, and hid the time-saved label.

   Fortunately, it was an easy fix: setting that NSNumberFormatter locale to en_US to match what the server was sending. And since the accumulated local totals were still being sent and added properly, the correct historical data is there — it just wasn’t being displayed correctly. ↩︎

The Apple TV app is now available to download from Google Play on Android mobile devices.

Today, Apple introduced the Apple Health Study, which aims to further understand how technology can play a role in improving health and wellbeing.

Apple today introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that allows users to create custom invitations to gather friends and family.

Apple Music is bringing Kendrick Lamar fans a rich collection of exclusive content ahead of his highly anticipated Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show.

Apple community partners Ellis Marsalis Center for Music and Arts New Orleans put the city’s aspiring young artists in the spotlight.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first quarter ended December 28, 2024.

Starting today, fans can sign up for MLS Season Pass to catch all the action throughout the 30th anniversary season.

Apple today unveiled a new Black Unity Collection to honor Black History Month, and celebrate Black culture and community.

Apple’s newest store in Miami opened this Friday, January 24, in the city’s dynamic downtown district.

Apple Miami Worldcenter offers a new destination for customers to discover and buy their favorite Apple products — all in one place.

Apple today previewed Apple MixC Hefei, the first store in the dynamic city and the first in China’s Anhui province.

Apple Arcade is kicking off the new year with an exciting slate of game launches, along with big updates to existing hits.

Apple’s products and features are built from the ground up with innovative privacy protections, including Siri.

Apple Fitness+ kicks off the new year with its biggest lineup of programming, bringing users more ways to stay active and mindful in 2025.

Apple is excited to unveil the most downloaded apps and games of the year across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Arcade.

On Thursday, December 12, His Majesty King Charles III visited Apple’s Battersea office in London.

Voice Memos now offers the ability to layer a vocal on top an existing instrumental recording on iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The 2024 App Store Awards recognized 17 apps and games that empowered users’ creativity, introduced a world of new adventures, and more.

The release of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 introduce new Apple Intelligence features.

Apple today launched three new live global radio stations on Apple Music.

Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos

A video reveals the final design of Apple's rumored 5.5mm slim iPhone 17 Air in all its glory, highlighting the Pixel-like rear camera bar.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Turn your dream vacation into reality with discounted flights, via a lifetime subscription to Dollar Flight Club Premium Plus+.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Got great song ideas or lyrics? AI-powered music generator Supermusic can transform them into fully realized tracks in an instant.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

The Dvorak layout is a different way of arranging the 26 letters on the keyboard, with all of the most common letters on the center row.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 17, 1997, Apple introduced the PowerBook 3400, a laptop the company labeled the most powerful portable computer on the market.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple's sleek, stylish computer is available with a big discount. This M4 iMac deal drops the all-in-one to a lifetime low price of $1,150.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple plans to refresh its $1,599 Studio Display monitor in 2026 with mini-LED panel for higher brightness and better picture quality.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

This week on Cult of Mac's podcast: Tim Cook's tease about "the newest member of the family" fuels speculation (and a predictions game)!

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Get ready for the iPad 11, as rumors point to internal upgrades and AI features coming to this much-anticipated budget tablet from Apple.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 16, 2000, Apple unveiled the Pismo PowerBook. FireWire and expandability made it one of Apple's best laptops ever.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

With Columns AI, you can quickly and easily use your data to automatically generate bar charts, line graphs and other presentation tools.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple's $3,500 mixed-reality headset, Vision Pro, will reportedly gain Apple Intelligence support with the upcoming visionOS 2.4 update.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Excellent “Severance” season two ratings make the Apple TV+ series the most-watched on streaming. “Silo” still does well, too.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple may be forced to postpone the launch of the much-anticipated AI-enhanced Siri due to development problems.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Upgrade movie night with the Xgody Gimbal 5 mini projector, which streams your favorite shows and movies from Netflix, Apple TV+ and more.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 15, 1982, Steve Jobs appeared on the cover of "Time" magazine for the first time, becoming the face of tech entrepreneurship.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

iMessage effects can add much more meaning, emotion and fun to your texting. You can add bold, italics, underline and many animated effects.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Get an AI tool that brings top AI models like ChatGPT, Mistral AI and more together in one interface. Enter 1minAI, the all-in-one AI tool.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

While Netflix content began appearing in the Apple TV app on Friday, turns out the integration was all a mistake. And it’s now gone.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

A Bluetti AC180 portable power station can save you from power outages and boring camping trips. Get 54% off while you can.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Need to really wow your date on Valentine's Day? Save money on software deals on Microsoft Windows and Office at CdkeySales.com.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

You'd never guess today's setup features a Mac mini, because it's mounted on the back of a Samsung ViewFinity S9 5K monitor.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

While your iPhone doesn’t have a built-in microSD card reader, adding a plug-in memory card reader is easy.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 14, 1995, Cupertino extended a lawsuit against a developer over stolen Apple code to include Microsoft and Intel.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Our "Severance" season 2 episode 5 recap finds refiners reeling from the loss of Irving B. as outie Scott S. makes a breakthrough.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Eye tracking is a pretty remarkable and ambitious accessibility feature that lets you control your iPhone entirely with your eyes.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

TikTok is once again available for download on the App Store in the US following a letter from US Attorney General to Apple.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Want a future-proof career path? Get the IT and cybersecurity training you need with this affordable bundle, on sale now for less than $25.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Find out why an Apple Studio Display mini-LED upgrade would further enhance the visual appeal of this gorgeous monitor.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

If you find that autocorrect suddenly offers up strange words, you may need to reset the keyboard dictionary on your iPhone or iPad.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple’s CEO announces a February 19 product launch, fueling speculation about a variety of rumored products.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

AirPods Max too pricey? Right now you can get acclaimed Sennheiser noise-canceling headphones for $130 off, at $250.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

The Macintosh 128K launch fuels enormous excitement among the tech press. On February 13, 1984, "InfoWorld" declared the first Mac a hit!

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Nuvyyo's Tablo picks up local TV broadcasts so you can watch or record them on your TV, phone or tablet. Read our Tablo TV review.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

HyperGear's RGB Command Station Headset Stand holds two pairs of headphones and offers dual power ports. Plus, RGB lights to set the mood!

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Alibaba’s chairman has confirmed a partnership with Apple for iPhone's AI services in China, helping it avoid local regulatory hurdles.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Refurbished M4 MacBook Pro and M4 Mac mini units in a wide range of configurations can now be purchased at considerable savings from Apple.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Get a three-year subscription to Surfshark VPN for $67.19 (reg. $430). It covers unlimited devices on macOS, iOS, Windows, Android and more.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Android phones got an official Apple TV+ app, making it easier to watch “Severance,” “Silo” and other popular shows.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Record over an hour of ProRes video from a iPhone Pro directly onto the ShiftCam Planck, a 2TB SSD smaller than the palm of your hand.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Today you can save big on an Anker MagGo charger for iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods. It folds up tiny so you can bring it anywhere.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

An Apple robot could be the company’s next big thing. Dive into the early concepts researchers are considering for a household robot.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 12, 2012, a Special Merit Grammy Award honored Apple co-founder Steve Jobs his contributions to the field of music.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

In a wireless earbuds vs. wired earbuds face-off, audiophiles might prefer wired. But AirPods Pro 2 often win for their convenience factor.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Vidnoz AI Video Generator, a free AI-powered suite of tools, streamlines video production for social media posts and business users alike.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

The comprehensive new Apple Health Study aims to better understand how technology and physical and mental well-being intersect.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple Maps and Google Maps switched the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America after President Donald Trump ordered the name change.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

This solar-powered beast is built for adventure and ready to keep your devices alive. Save on SolPro 10K Fast Charge Solar Power Bank.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Apple will seemingly launch the iPhone SE 4 next week, and not this week. Instead, it will make an Apple Vision Pro-related announcement.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

You can finally move your digital purchases, like apps, books, and movies, from one Apple account to another.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Add Apple CarPlay or Android Auto to any vehicle with this affordable car touchscreen. It's the easiest way to add a CarPlay display.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

On February 11, 2010, as iPad excitement reached fever pitch, Steve Jobs' frenemy Bill Gates waded in with his own opinion about the tablet.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Get ready for the smarter Siri! Explore the advancements coming in iOS 18.4, including Apple Intelligence and other improved features.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Say goodbye to bulky international chargers. Compact but powerful, the Rolling Square Pocket Travel Charger is the perfect travel companion.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

Sporty Powerbeats Pro 2 wireless earbuds get a redesign, updated specs and a first for Apple audio -- heart rate monitoring.

(via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

An unofficial community about Apple and all of its devices and software.

Welcome to the Daily Advice Thread for /r/Apple. This thread can be used to ask for technical advice regarding Apple software and hardware, to ask questions regarding the buying or selling of Apple products or to post other short questions. Have a question you need answered? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar. Join our Discord and IRC chat rooms for support: Discord IRC Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience. Here is an archive of all previous Daily Advice Threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type in the search bar [author:"AutoModerator" title:"Daily Advice Thread" or title:"Daily Tech Support Thread"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the titles and author.) The Daily Advice Thread is posted each day at 06:00 AM EST (Click HERE for other timezones) and then the old one is archived. It is advised to wait for the new thread to post your question if this time is nearing for quickest answer time. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/iamvinoth [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/favicondotico [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/chrisdh79 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/ControlCAD [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/chrisdh79 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/hotweiss [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/proswordfish [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/sizzsling [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/busymom0 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/tsuehpsyde [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/iMacmatician [link] [comments]

Welcome to the Daily Advice Thread for /r/Apple. This thread can be used to ask for technical advice regarding Apple software and hardware, to ask questions regarding the buying or selling of Apple products or to post other short questions. Have a question you need answered? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar. Join our Discord and IRC chat rooms for support: Discord IRC Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience. Here is an archive of all previous Daily Advice Threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type in the search bar [author:"AutoModerator" title:"Daily Advice Thread" or title:"Daily Tech Support Thread"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the titles and author.) The Daily Advice Thread is posted each day at 06:00 AM EST (Click HERE for other timezones) and then the old one is archived. It is advised to wait for the new thread to post your question if this time is nearing for quickest answer time. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Knightbear49 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Furkansimsir [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/sizzsling [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/tsar73 [link] [comments]

Is anyone actually using Apple Intelligence, regularly? What for? What is it you like or dislike about it? submitted by /u/crzylune [link] [comments]

Hey everyone! I'm excited to launch a new version of Trace today, a macOS app designed to help you understand and optimize how you spend your time. After trying countless time-tracking apps, I realized none of them gave me a clear view of where my time was actually going—so I built Trace to fill that gap. Here's what makes Trace very useful: - Built-in activity monitoring: Automatically tracks the apps and websites you visit. - Block apps & websites: Block distracting apps/sites when you need to focus (and yep, it works with Firefox!) - Visual timelines: View your app activity in a clean, color-coded timeline - Session overviews: Get daily and monthly summaries to understand your habits - Privacy-first: All your tracking data is stored locally and never leaves your device You can download Trace here: https://trytrace.app Try it out and let me know if you have any questions or feedback! submitted by /u/leqote [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/send2s [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Snoop8ball [link] [comments]

Hey everyone! I just launched Lunox, a dream interpreter & journal that offers insights from 10 different interpretation approaches, including Freudian, Jungian, Neurobiological, Islamic, Cognitive, Mythological, Shamanic, New Age, and Positive Psychology. 📝 Log your dreams effortlessly. 🔍 Explore diverse interpretations tailored to your perspective. 📊 Track dream patterns over time. Lunox Dream Interpretation is free to try, and I'd love to hear your feedback! Download it on the App Store and let me know what you think. 🚀 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lunox-dream-interpreter/id6740500884 submitted by /u/qapaq [link] [comments]

👉 https://apps.apple.com/de/app/readhero-remember-books/id6450433398 ⭐ And if you enjoy ReadHero - a quick rating/review on the App Store would mean a lot! ⭐ ------------------- 100% self made with my brother (No AI) 👨‍💻 ReadHero isn’t just another cookie-cutter app—it’s a passion project, built from the ground up with care. I personally coded everything natively (which is why there’s no Android version… yet, haha). Unlike many apps that rely on third-party tools like RevenueCat or Superwall, ReadHero is built true-native including all animations. The design? That’s all my brother. Big thanks to him 🙏 He created the logo, every graphic in the app, and the onboarding visuals. No AI-generated shortcuts—just real, handcrafted design. The Story Behind ReadHero 📚 There are plenty of book tracker apps out there, so why do we need another one? The answer is simple: because none of them truly solved my problem back then... The Problem That Inspired ReadHero: I’ve read so many great books, but after a while, I realized I barely remembered what I had learned from them. To fix this, I started taking notes—but using the default iOS Notes app for dozens of books quickly became messy and unmanageable. I needed something better, something that combined both book tracking and note-taking in a seamless way. That’s how ReadHero was born. The All-in-One Book Companion (features) 💡 ReadHero isn’t just another book tracker—it’s an essential tool for anyone who wants to read smarter. Here’s what makes it special: Book Tracker – Keep track of all the books you’ve read, are reading, or want to read. Integrated Notes Editor – Save key insights, quotes, and summaries right alongside your books. Text Recognition – Instantly save text from books with OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Custom Book Groups – Organize your collection by genre, theme, or any way you like. Reading Habit Statistics – See your progress, reading streaks, and insights on your habits. Home Screen Widgets – Add book progress and reminders directly to your Home Screen. ReadHero Streaks – Stay motivated by tracking your reading streaks and building a daily habit. If you made it to the bottom - thank you and have fun with ReadHero 🙌 submitted by /u/No_Part_1410 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/favicondotico [link] [comments]

Hey Reddit! 👋 I've always found meal tracking to be a bit of a hassle. While apps like MyFitnessPal do a great job, I found the manual logging process too time consuming. I also tried the AI-assisted apps, and while the promise is exciting, they fell short due to poor user experience. That's why I created Calorific, cutting out all unnecessary steps and making meal tracking as simple as snapping a photo. AI then pre-fills ingredients and portion sizes for you, and for more accuracy, you can scan barcodes or search through connected food databases. I've already made several updates to streamline the process, and I'm continuously working on new features and improvements to enhance the app with every update. The mission is to create an app that's as easy to use as it is accurate. You can log your first 10 meals for free to experience it firsthand, with no sign-up or payment required. To celebrate the Reddit launch, use promo code REDDITAPPLE to enjoy 50% off your first year, for a limited time only. Enter the code after tapping the "Redeem" button in the app or use this link to redeem. The regular price is 4.99/month with the annual plan or 9.99/month with the monthly plan (prices vary by country). This subscription model supports the ongoing costs of running AI models and the servers, as well as funding the bootstrapped development of Calorific. If you’re tired of complicated meal tracking, give Calorific a try here: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6645043253 I’d love to hear your thoughts! Cheers, Furkan submitted by /u/Furkansimsir [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Captaincadet [link] [comments]

Feelly – Mindfulness, Mood Tracking, and Apple Health Insights ❤️ Hey Reddit, I’ve been working on Feelly, a privacy-first mood tracking and mindfulness app that helps you understand your emotions and overall well-being. Since launching, I’ve taken feedback (especially from this community!) to refine the experience and ensure it’s truly helpful. Major features include: ✅ Mindfulness & Apple Health Integration: Updated this week, Feelly writes to Apple Health’s State of Mind data, giving you a seamless way to log and reflect on your emotions. It even nudges you to take breathing sessions when you log a stressful or bad mood. ✅ Mood Fluctuations vs. Heart Rate Insights: Feelly correlates your heart rate trends with your mood changes so you can spot patterns and take action for better mental well-being. ✅ Apple Intelligence Playground Integration: Express yourself with custom emojis that reflect your face and personality, making mood logging more personal and fun! ✅ Chat Assistant: Optional, Not Forced – I know AI integrations can be a mixed bag. After listening to feedback (especially from Reddit!), Feelly lets you turn off AI chat if it’s not for you. But if you ever want quick CBT-style reflections, it’s there to help. Valentine’s Week Special ❤️ To encourage self-care and emotional well-being, Feelly is available for $5.99 this Valentine’s Week! Whether you’re tracking moods for self-awareness or just need gentle mindfulness nudges, it’s a great time to start. Check it out here: Feelly on the App Store Would love to hear what you think! Happy to answer any questions! ❤️ submitted by /u/bsoci [link] [comments]

Reddit’s little corner for iPhone lovers (and some people who just mildly enjoy it…)

Welcome to the weekly stickied WSIB thread. Have any questions about buying, selling, trading, or giveaways? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar. As usual, if you have a serious issue with the subreddit, please contact the moderators directly. This thread is also for questions about preorders and shipments of devices Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience. Here is an archive of all previous "What Should I Buy" threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type on the searchbar [title:"What Should I Buy" author:"AutoModerator"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the title and author.) submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

General advice for those concerned about their battery from the Support FAQ Wiki: Battery health Battery health depends on usage and a variety of other factors. It is normal to see a decrease in battery health by 7-10% per year, resulting in a battery health of 80-85% after 2 years. This number can fluctuate, remain the same, or decrease quickly over a small period and should not cause undue concern. Apple recommend battery replacement when your device falls below 80% battery health if you notice reduced battery life. If it falls below 80% within the first year you may be eligable for a free battery replacement. It fails after your warranty, it's a $69-$89 USD replacement cost for a battery. Contact Apple Support here. You can find more information about battery health and performance from Apple here. You can check the cycles count with Coconut Battery for Mac or iCopyBot for Windows. Battery life Issues relating to battery life can be categorised in three ways: Normal battery life that is to be expected due to use Reduced battery life caused by a recent update, iOS indexing, an iOS bug, or a third-party application Reduced battery life, or other abnormalities such as overheating or sudden power-off, caused by device or battery aging If you experience issues with your battery: Check your battery health. If it is below 80% or you are experiencing issues you suspect are related to device or battery age, see Apple Support. If you have a new or recently updated/restored device, wait a number of days for background process to complete. If you continue to have issues, wait for a further iOS update. If you are on iOS Beta, you can expect to have a decreased battery life. Review the advice below on maximising battery life Consider restoring your device. If issues persist, contact Apple Support. Maximising battery life - the amount of time your device runs before it needs to be recharged. Use low power mode (This reduces mail fetch, turns off background app refresh and increases the auto lock timer) Remove apps from background app refresh Ensure auto lock is on Turn off auto brightness and manually reduce brightness Use dark mode if your device has an OLED display Clearing background apps from the app switcher does not improve battery life Maximising battery lifespan - the amount of time your battery lasts until it needs to be replaced. Avoid extreme temperatures If you notice that your iPhone gets hot when charging, remove it from its case Store your iPhone in a cool place, switched off, and half-charged if not using it for long periods - and charge it every 6 months when in storage submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

My iPhone is having trouble staying on—it keeps switching back and forth between the Apple logo screen. The side of the phone also looks like it’s coming apart and won’t snap back into place. How can I fix this? Is it an adhesive issue? Could it be related to not having enough storage for an update? Should I take it to my carrier (AT&T) to see if they can fix it? If they do, will they require me to stay with them longer? I’m planning to switch to an Android plan with a different carrier at some point. submitted by /u/GorillaWolf2099 [link] [comments]

So the short version is I sold it on Facebook Marketplace and got counterfeit bills in return. They looked good. Smelled like money, had the embossed parts, the hologram and even the tape down the middle. I tried to deposit it and the ATM didn’t take it. I started noticing the strips weren’t quite lined up and to make a long story short it’s clear I got scammed. I met them near my house but he parked far enough away I didn’t see his car. He also didn’t show up on my ring doorbell because it stopped the automatic recording right as he walked up. His Facebook profile is now, of course, gone as well. The police said I can come file a report if I want but there’s no point really, is there? I can’t even lock the phone because I reset it before I “sold” it. Beyond just filing a police report and feeling shame, there’s nothing else I can do right? submitted by /u/XBrownButterfly [link] [comments]

I was suspicious that my iPhone 13 Pro had more washed out colors, and so I tested it with my wife's iPhone, and it's true. I applied the same photo to both, took a screenshot of her iPhone home screen (iphone 12) and sent it to my iPhone 13 Pro. The colors on her home screen seem much more vivid, and I don't know why. (The first pic is from iPhone 12 and second is from iPhone 13 Pro) submitted by /u/Holografico [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/fleebooskee [link] [comments]

My wife’s phone recently started getting two black dots on the left side of the screen. The phone is about a month old at this point. Is this some weird setting or somethjng wrong with the display? submitted by /u/dremspider [link] [comments]

As the tittle says, I’m selling an iPhone, is it safe to share the imei with buyer? submitted by /u/Queasy_Standard_9676 [link] [comments]

I just went to the Apple store and got Apple Care on one of my iPhones, and they no longer offer the Apple Care plan without theft and loss; the only option is to get the Apple Care plan with theft and loss to my knowledge. I got it confirmed by an Apple Store Employee. Also when I went to the Apple Store the employee said Apple updated the plans a week ago. Also to my knowledge this only applies to IPhones. submitted by /u/land_rover_club_max [link] [comments]

Is the phone a goner? submitted by /u/es96es [link] [comments]

Aside from dust and dirt. Is it a usual thing for it to just be extremely loose? submitted by /u/PageGallagher15 [link] [comments]

So my mom died 13 days ago. She's my best friend and I want to preserve our text messages and photos/videos. I have them on iCloud already, but I can't view them on there. Is there a ways to scroll to the top faster? I know about clicking the top corner when in the texts, but we texted A LOT and I've been at it for an 30 minutes and I'm only to March of last year. I want to be able to reread our messages regularly. submitted by /u/TheraYogi [link] [comments]

I haven’t even done anything to cause this, I’ve not tried jailbreaking or anything, yet somehow it’s miraculously disappeared?? submitted by /u/Ready_Philosopher717 [link] [comments]

There’s a serious problem with screenshots on iPhone. For reference I’ve included a serious of them that demonstrate this. The 8 that I’ve included are from a series of 40 total screenshots. Has this always been a problem? Or could it be on purpose? submitted by /u/lwadams_ [link] [comments]

If you have multiple consecutive alarms you should probably disable "snooze". It seems that while snooze is enabled on a current alarm it can send the false message to the next alarm that you desire to snooze... rather than hear the alarm. Once the snooze timer ends it may or may not then start the next snooze cycle... postponing indefinitely the only purpose of the alarm... to be HEARD. Obviously this is an incredibly stupid design and you shouldn't have to turn off snooze... but hey here we are. submitted by /u/MilanHusk [link] [comments]

i recently merged my child self with my adult self in my camera roll, and found it really frustrating to hear that this is irreversible. i like being able to find photos of my baby self quickly by searching- however i've found a way to fix it! if you have done this and are wishing for the separation of two faces- you'll have to rename the one you want separate. after a few pics are unmerged, you can "review more photos of this person" and separate them once and for all. just a little tip! submitted by /u/Disastrous_Green_732 [link] [comments]

Before you ask, no I dont use an iPhone 5. I found my old one however but it wont turn on and gives me this message. Is there anyway to make it work? submitted by /u/Timely_Philosophy624 [link] [comments]

My new phone is coming in the mail this week and I want to start clean with 0 photos in the camera roll. I cleaned out my iCloud photos so they’re totally empty. iCloud has 0 photos in it now, but i still have 17k local photos on my current phone. Will the local photos transfer to the new iphone, or am I safe and it will only download what’s in iCloud? I can’t find the answer to this anywhere, any help is appreciated! submitted by /u/honeysaturn [link] [comments]

I know this is a known issue and I’ve tried the fixes I’ve seen but they’ve not worked. So the past week/fortnight my alarms have decided not to play a ringtone and just vibrate. Has anybody experienced this because I have no clue what to do, I haven’t changed my settings or anything. My volume is all the way up (phone is on silent but this never made a difference previously) submitted by /u/PotentialAdorable405 [link] [comments]

I’ve was going to attempt a back glass repair since it opens from the back, i’ve heard that the flash is serialised and flash photos won’t get saved on the phone, is this still an issue? submitted by /u/ohCuai [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/GeckoAJ0 [link] [comments]

I have an iPhone 15 pro max, on 18.1, and I do not have the spatial audio option in Settings->Camera->Record Sound at all. i do have Spatial Video option in Camera (not what i need). Watched YT vides, researched, what setting am i missing?? Apple Intelligence is on. submitted by /u/3pixelhobby [link] [comments]

Hi, My iPhone is producing low quality sound via Bluetooth? Both on my Tesla and also my headphones are coming out with bad quality. Sometimes it fixes itself but overall does it quite often. Any advice? submitted by /u/CryptoDaddyXo [link] [comments]

So, I have 7 days left to renew my AppleCare+. I bought the 2 year plan when I got my 14 Pro and haven’t had to use it for anything. Lately the buttons on it have been a bit hit or miss, especially volume down. I’ve to press it 2/3 times before it will actually reduce the volume. Is that something I can get a replacement device for through AC+? Or would my phone have to ‘accidentally’ break to get a new device? I’d like to get a new device because the buttons are annoying but it would feel wrong to damage my phone for the sake of paying for a new one? WWYD? There aren’t any Apple Stores where I am so it’s just Express Replacement. submitted by /u/The-ADR [link] [comments]

On imessage the message said delivered, but I had another friend try and block me and my messages to her also said delivered although she did not receive them (she has multiple apple devices if that is a reason why?) submitted by /u/Witty-Geologist1758 [link] [comments]

Or will it automatically get removed? submitted by /u/Kiwijellyfish42 [link] [comments]

I am not sure what she pressed to make them happen. If anyone has any ideas it would be much appreciated submitted by /u/Buttwip3s [link] [comments]

Meet Wei. While traveling home for Chinese New Year, he discovers his parents’ ‘90s mixtape. He’s transported to a ‘90s dream world where he falls in love with a complete stranger, rekindling his faith in love when he wakes up. The first Shot on iPhone CNY musical featuring classic hits from the ‘90s. In celebration of the Year of the Snake. Directed by Michael Gracey. Shot on iPhone 16 Pro. Learn more about iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16-pro/ Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/ZU_Fre-oldg Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

The crew takes us behind the lens of “I Made a Mixtape for You” to show the making of Apple’s first Chinese New Year Shot on iPhone musical with the latest iPhone 16 Pro. Shot on iPhone 16 Pro. Learn more about iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16-pro/ Audio Description: https://youtu.be/5iS-GTx0K7A Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Most people quit their New Year’s resolutions by the second Friday in January. It’s actually called “Quitter’s Day.” But Apple Watch gives you the motivation to run right past Quitter’s Day, and stick to your New Year’s fitness goals. Learn More: https://apple.co/49F56dB Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/4G2iRsGk8GE “Follow Me” by Special Interest: https://apple.co/Special-Interest-Follow-Me #AppleWatchSeries10 Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Now you can create unique Genmojis, right in Messages. Just describe the Genmoji you want to create, then add it to your conversation. Learn more about iPhone 16: https://apple.co/49N0XEB Learn more about Apple Intelligence: https://apple.co/4f7hHHn Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/Weoo_jZ6bqk “Anything You Like” by The Dare https://apple.co/The-Dare #iPhone16 #AppleIntelligence #Genmoji #Emoji *Descriptions for Genmojis Featured (in order of appearance):* Note: All Genmojis are unique. *Gnome* - Yard gnome tall *Foam* - White foam with cartoon eyelashes *Pink comb* - Pink comb with handle *Skeleton* - Chrome skeleton *Dog balloon* - Balloon dog electric bright white turquoise *Tomato spy* - Tomato face emoji wearing long body trench coat hat sunglasses legs red hands _(with personalization)_ *Horse* - Handsome horse in black suit and tie with flowing mane *Buccatini* - Spaghetti with peas *Socrates* - Old man white hair white beard wearing white toga robe on skis with mountains _(with personalization)_ *Anemone* - Light blue sea anemone with arms listening to music on sand *Cheese* - Cheese disco dancing with eyes *Pig* - Pigs fly with white wings *Dice* - 12 sided dodecahedron dice with numbers on all sides *Chair* - Plastic pink chair with two legs walking wearing shoes *Clock* - Grandfather clock with microphone and face *Painting* - Framed portrait black fedora light blue polo and pants black shoes gradient background _(with personalization)_ *Cardigan* - Light pink furry cardigan with flowers *Bicep* - Yellow bicep with heart emoji tattoo in center *Gizmo* - Rainbow mousetrap toy with colorful gears and springs *Lasso* - Cowgirl with lasso full body long dark hair *Candy* - Large pile of dome square shaped gumdrops dusty sugar *Can of worms* - Lots of worms inside tin can spilling out top *Gold tooth* - Gold tooth with smile with one gold tooth in mouth *Eggman* - Fried egg with arms and legs *Jelly donut* - Jellyfish with head of jelly donut *Poodle shopper* - Pink poodle holding multicolored shopping bags sunglasses walking *Rocker hand* - Yellow rock and roll fingers with black fingernails and spiky bracelet *Parrot popsicle* - Popsicle in shape of parrot *DJ* - Man with sunglasses DJ black jacket skinny tie headphones scratching records _(with personalization)_ *Green apple* - Green apple with smiley Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

For so many of us, sound and how we hear help shape the way we connect to the world around us. Yet, people with hearing loss wait an average of 10 years before getting their hearing tested and fitted for hearing aids. Leaving millions unaware they’re living with hearing loss and without the assistance they need. Now with the world’s first end-to-end hearing health experience, you have access to a Hearing Test that provides scientifically validated results within minutes and the ability to activate a clinical-grade Hearing Aid feature on your AirPods Pro 2 — right from home. Learn more about AirPods Pro 2 Hearing Health features: https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/hearing-health/ Set up the hearing aid feature on AirPods Pro 2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120992 The Hearing Test and Hearing Aid features are regulated health features that require approval and will be offered after authorization is received. Feature availability varies by region: https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/feature-availability/ Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/KSDtMqvFb3g #AirPodsPro #AirPodsPro2 #Apple "Our House" originally written by Graham Nash https://apple.co/Our-House Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.

iPhone 16 Pro powered by the A18 Pro chip. The most powerful iPhone ever is a go. A18 Pro enables Apple Intelligence with a faster Neural Engine, improved CPU and GPU, and a big jump in memory bandwidth. It also drives advanced video and photo features like Camera Control, and delivers enhanced graphics performance for console-level gaming. Learn more about iPhone 16 Pro: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16-pro/ Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/1ii0DqGHEI8 #iPhone16Pro Original composition by Steve Mazzaro https://apple.co/Steve-Mazzaro Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.

When you need to buy it fast, get it in seconds with Apple Pay. Learn more about Apple Pay: https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/ "One Track Mind" by Chromeo https://apple.co/One-Track-Mind Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/yBJ3HbvzK_I #ApplePay #PayTheAppleWay Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

With powerfully intelligent features like Magnetic Mask, Transcribe to Captions, and spatial video editing for Apple Vision Pro, Final Cut Pro 11 is the beginning of the next chapter in revolutionary storytelling. Get your free 90-day trial today https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/ Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/q1qY56rM604 #FinalCutPro #FCP #FinalCutPro11 #AppsByApple Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Coming this Thursday. ‘Open Hearts,’ the new immersive music experience from @theweeknd. See it first exclusively on Apple Vision Pro. Watch in Apple Stores where Apple Vision Pro is available, beginning November 15th. Follow the link to book a demo at an Apple Store to watch the immersive music experience: https://apple.co/3YYXuij Journey alongside The Weeknd through a surreal, haunting cityscape in this electrifying sonic voyage. Audio Description: https://youtu.be/SuBAkd0jnZk #OpenHearts #AppleImmersiveVideo #AppleVisionPro #SpatialComputing Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you'll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Apple's more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Apple Intelligence on Mac is here, with Writing Tools to help your words sound more friendly, professional, or more concise. Learn more about MacBook Pro: https://apple.co/4hsUcek Learn more about Apple Intelligence: https://apple.co/4fnRLb9 Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/QPOFpkD0mNs “Genius” by Krizz Kaliko: https://apple.co/Genius-KrizzKaliko #AppleIntelligence #Mac #MacBookPro Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Apple Intelligence on Mac is here. With Writing Tools to help you quickly summarize the key points of selected text. Learn more about MacBook Pro: https://apple.co/3CiRojJ Learn more about Apple Intelligence: https://apple.co/3YP15hN Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/5jjKHWwVVHY “Genius” by Krizz Kaliko: https://apple.co/Genius-KrizzKaliko #AppleIntelligence #Mac #MacBookPro Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Our more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Effortless power. The new MacBook Pro with M4 is built for Apple Intelligence. It provides blazing fast performance without sacrificing battery stamina. And thanks to the powerful Neural Engine, it handles AI heavy lifting without breaking a sweat. Learn More: https://apple.co/4fl8lIC Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/MsC6CxIjWOE “You Gotta Be” by Des'ree https://apple.co/You-Gotta-Be #AppleEvent #MacBookPro #M4 Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Apple’s more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

MacBook Pro features the most advanced lineup of chips ever built for a pro laptop. Phenomenal single- and multithreaded CPU performance, a GPU that can run graphics-intensive workflows with a responsiveness that keeps up with your imagination, and second-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing that makes gaming feel more immersive and realistic than ever. With faster unified memory, the M4 family of chips gives you the kind of speed and capability for multitasking you’ve never thought possible. The powerful Neural Engine and enhanced machine learning accelerators make AI processes like image upscaling and video captioning fly. And with Apple Intelligence built right into MacBook Pro, a suite of personal, private, and powerful tools are at your fingertips. Learn more about MacBook Pro: https://apple.co/3C6kZNv Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/Bf-tl2I9EJ0 “SOBER” by SIPHO. https://apple.co/SOBER-SIPHO #MacBookPro #Mac #AppleIntelligence Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Apple’s more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Watch the special Apple announcement to learn about the new MacBook Pro, now more powerful than ever with Apple Intelligence. To watch the event interpreted in American Sign Language (ASL), please click here: https://youtu.be/u4pHyN8eaqg Learn more about MacBook Pro: https://apple.co/3YrxCu3 Audio Descriptions: https://apple.co/3Yq8pjp “Hey!” by Gaspard Augé https://apple.co/HEY-Gaspard-Auge “Hello” by UPSAHL https://apple.co/UPSAHL “WICKED GYAL” by BAMBII, Lady Lykez https://apple.co/WICKED-GYAL-BAMBII “You Gotta Be” by Des'ree https://apple.co/You-Gotta-Be #AppleEvent #MacBookPro #AppleIntelligence Pricing, claims, and feature availability apply to the U.S. and may vary by region. For product details specific to your area, please refer to Apple.com. Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Apple’s more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

The all-new Mac mini is five by five inches of pure power and purpose. With a wide array of ports, now on the front and back. Redesigned around Apple silicon to unleash the full speed and capabilities of the M4 and M4 Pro chips. And built for Apple Intelligence. Mac mini is the new definition of efficiency — and the first carbon neutral Mac. Learn more about Mac mini: https://apple.co/3YIl7f1 Learn more about Apple’s commitment to the environment at https://apple.co/3YKJUOn Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/M55sJqTxoGE “Make My Day" by Swindle: https://apple.co/Make-My-Day-Swindle #Macmini #Mac #AppleEvent Welcome to the official Apple YouTube channel. Here you’ll find news about product launches, tutorials, and other great content. Apple’s more than 160,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

In a social media post today, Apple CEO Tim Cook teased an upcoming "launch" of some kind scheduled for Wednesday, February 19. Cook did not provide an exact time for the launch, or share any other specific details, so his post is a bit of a mystery. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes the post is a teaser for Apple announcing a new iPhone SE. He previously said the device would be unveiled by next week, with rumored features including an A18 chip, a larger 6.1-inch OLED display, Face ID, a USB-C port, Apple Intelligence support, and more. 📲 Read more: Tim Cook Teases an 'Apple Launch' Next Wednesday https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/13/apple-launch-february-19/ Get complete Mac protection with the Mac Premium Bundle X9 with VPN included: Limited-time offer 65% off - starting at $29.99 for 1 Mac/1 year https://offer.intego.com/MacRumorsYT_drrjsop27 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

There aren't too many 5K displays on the market that can compete with Apple's Studio Display, but ASUS recently came out with the ASUS ProArt Display 5K, which is a solid competitor. The ProArt Display 5K features a 27-inch 5K screen with 218 pixels per inch, aka retina quality. Buy ASUS ProArt 5K Monitor Here - https://amzn.to/3EBnb0J Get complete Mac protection with the Mac Premium Bundle X9 with VPN included: Limited-time offer 65% off - starting at $29.99 for 1 Mac/1 year https://offer.intego.com/MacRumorsYT_drrjsop27 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

The Powerbeats Pro 2 are officially available, and in this video, I give you my two-week review of the new earbuds from Beats that give you a look into Apple’s future! Buy here - https://www.beatsbydre.com/earbuds/powerbeats-pro-2 Get complete Mac protection with the Mac Premium Bundle X9 with VPN included: Limited-time offer 65% off - starting at $29.99 for 1 Mac/1 year https://offer.intego.com/MacRumorsYT_drrjsop27 📲 Read more: [WEBSITE LINKS HERE] 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Apple intelligence. #ai #samsunggalaxy #iphone #apple

Apple's next-generation low-cost iPhone is almost here, with rumors suggesting we're going to see it introduced as soon as next Tuesday. With a release happening in the very near future, we thought we'd highlight everything we know about Apple's newest ‌iPhone‌. 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

If you plan to give away, sell, or trade in your Mac, the first thing you should do for security and practical reasons is erase the data on it and perform a factory reset. This video/article shows you how to EASILY erase and factory reset your Mac in 2025. If you've upgraded to macOS Monterey or later on a Mac with Apple silicon or a Mac with the Apple T2 Security Chip (2017-2020 models), follow the steps to erase all content and settings instead of following the steps in this article. 📲 Read more: Apple Silicon and T2 Macs: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/erase-factory-reset-apple-silicon-mac/ Older Intel Macs: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/erase-and-factory-reset-your-mac/ 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:12 - Erase Apple Silicon or T2 Chip Macs (2017-2020) 01:33 - Erase Older Pre 2017 Mac The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Apple hasn’t refreshed the Apple TV since 2022, but rumors suggest that we’re finally going to get an update in 2025. We don’t have a full picture of what to expect yet, but we have some hints on what’s coming. 📲 Read more: [WEBSITE LINKS HERE] 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Apple today surprised us with a new Invites app, which is designed for planning events like birthday parties, vacations, and baby showers. We checked it out in our latest video to see how it works, what you can use it for, and to demonstrate all of the different features in the app. Invites is a standalone app that you can download from the App Store, but it's also got an accompanying iCloud+ service. You need an ‌iCloud‌+ subscription to create an invite to an event, but there is no subscription needed to join an event. In fact, you don't even need an Apple device. People without an Apple device can be invited to an event and can join and see event details from a web browser, similar to how ‌iCloud‌ works on any device through a browser. 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:12 - What is Apple Invites? 00:46 - Creating and Testing Apple Invites 03:47 - Does Apple Invites Work on Android? 04:19 - How to Get Apple Invites 04:59 - Final Thoughts The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Mac apps can often go under the radar, with apps for the iPhone and iPad receiving more attention. For that reason, we have a Mac-focused video series that highlights useful Mac apps we've come across. Our first picks of the year are largely simple, one-task apps that add utility to your Mac. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:21 - NotchNook - https://lo.cafe/notchnook 01:53 - Dropover - https://dropoverapp.com/ 02:33 - Shortwave - https://www.shortwave.com/ 05:20 - Ice - https://icemenubar.app/ 05:48 - Latest - https://max.codes/latest/ 06:26 - Rocket - https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/ 07:25 - Local Send - https://localsend.org/ 08:06 - Hyperduck - https://sindresorhus.com/hyperduck 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Samsung just recently announced the Galaxy S25 Ultra, its latest flagship smartphone that's designed to compete with the iPhone. We did a hands-on video last week, but this week we're back with an in-depth camera comparison. In this video, we've included blind photos from the S25 Ultra and the iPhone 16 Pro Max so you can judge for yourself which smartphone camera you prefer, but we'll let you know which is which at the very end of the video. Check out the Galaxy S25 Ultra: https://howl.link/abx8a0atqckdm 📲 Read more: See More Photos Here - https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/28/iphone-16-pro-max-vs-galaxy-s25-ultra/ 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:15 - Front Facing Camera Video Test 01:09 - Camera Samples 02:12 - Audio Eraser vs Audio Mix 03:40 - Breaking Down the Camera Samples 05:02 - Virtual Aperture on Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra 05:23 - LOG Footage Test 06:12 - Zoom Test 07:05 - The BIG REVEAL: Which camera was which? 08:18 - Final Thoughts The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Samsung has just officially announced its brand-new Samsung Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra at Unpacked 2025. I got to check out the phones and some of the new Galaxy AI features for this year and wanted to give you my first impressions of these new devices. 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:35 - S25 Ultra hardware changes 02:33 - New Galaxy AI features that seem actually useful 06:36 - New camera hardware and features The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

For the last several months, we've been hearing rumors about a redesigned version of the iPhone 17 that Apple might call the ‌iPhone 17‌ "Air," or something along those lines. It's going to replace the ‌iPhone 17‌ Plus as Apple's fourth iPhone option, and it will be offered alongside the ‌iPhone 17‌, ‌iPhone 17‌ Pro, and ‌iPhone 17‌ Pro Max. We know the ‌iPhone 17‌ Air is going to be super slim, but there have been mixed rumors on just how thin Apple will be able to make it. Rumors have coalesced around 6mm, though in a recent report, reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that he expects the ‌iPhone‌ to measure in at about 5.5mm. 📲 Read more: 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

The iPhone 16 Pro Max has been out for about 3 to 4 months now, and I think that’s a perfect time to take a quick look and give it a thorough review. I’ve been using it every day since it came out, so I figured I should share my thoughts on Apple Intelligence, Camera Control, and all of the other features that the iPhone 16 Pro Max has to offer. 🌐 Connect with Dan: 𝕏: https://twitter.com/danbarbera Instagram: https://instagram.com/danbarbera1 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@macrumors Dan's YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/danbarbera1 🎙️ Follow The MacRumors Show Podcast: https://youtube.com/@TheMacRumorsShow ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Durability over the last few months 01:09 - Is Desert Titanium the color to get? 01:38 - Battery life so far 02:54 - Camera control 03:53 - Apple Intelligence - useful or nah?' 06:20 - The cameras are still really good but how goood? The most popular Apple News & Rumors site on the Internet. Welcome to MacRumors, your ultimate destination for in-depth and insightful Mac reviews, where we go beyond the surface to bring you a comprehensive look at everything Apple & Mac! 🍎✨ 🖥️💻Thorough Reviews: We meticulously test and evaluate each product, exploring the features, performance, and understanding its capabilities. 🔍 In-Depth Analysis: Dive deep into the intricacies of Apple's latest technologies and innovations. 🌐 Mac News & Rumors: Stay up-to-date with our coverage of the latest tech news, and be the first to know about upcoming new Apple product releases, updates, and developments. 🔧 Apple Accessories: Enhance your Mac experience with our reviews and recommendations for must-have accessories. 💡 Tips & Tricks: Unlock the full potential of your Mac with our tips and tricks that make your user experience easy. Subscribe now and join our community of Mac enthusiasts!

Apple, iPhone, iPad, Mac News and Rumors

YouTube channel Front Page Tech today revealed the alleged design of Apple's widely-rumored "iPhone 17 Air" model, set to launch later this year.

"iPhone 17 Air" render created by @zellzoi for Front Page Tech
In a video uploaded today, Front Page Tech shared renders depicting what it believes is likely the final design of the "iPhone 17 Air." The device is expected to feature an ultra-thin design that measures just 5.5mm at its thinnest point, and the renders show an all-new camera bar across the top of the device's rear shell. On the left side of the bar is a single rear camera, and on the right side there is a microphone and an LED camera flash.


The renders are consistent with an alleged "iPhone 17 Air" shell that surfaced last month.

Watch the video below.


Last week, Front Page Tech shared alleged "iPhone 17 Pro" renders showing that the camera bar will apparently extend to that device as well.

Front Page Tech host Jon Prosser has been a well-known tech YouTuber for more than a decade. Like most sources, he has a mixed track record with Apple rumors, with some hits and some misses. In 2020, he was the first source to reveal the design of the AirTag, many months before it was announced. He also shared many accurate details about the iPad mini 6, months before that device was announced. On the other hand, he and others were wrong about the Apple Watch Series 7 having flat edges, although perhaps Apple tested such a design.

Prosser also claimed that iOS 19 will introduce a redesigned Camera app with a visionOS-like design, including translucent menus and buttons.

Apple is expected to announce the iPhone 17 series in September, and additional design-related rumors will likely surface before then.Tag: Jon Prosser
This article, "'iPhone 17 Air' With Ultra-Thin Design Allegedly Revealed in New Video" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Spotify users waiting to learn when the service's long-delayed high-quality premium audio service will materialize may finally have something to chew on. Bloomberg reports that the streaming service hopes to roll out a new "Music Pro" tier later this year.


The company is said to be developing the new premium subscription plan that will cost up to $5.99 per month on top of existing plans, offering high-quality audio streaming, remixing capabilities, and exclusive concert ticket access, reports the outlet.

Pricing and timing have yet to be nailed down as Spotify works to secure necessary rights from major music companies. The additional fee is likely to vary by region, with lower prices planned for "developing markets," said the publication.

The new tier is said to include AI-powered features allowing subscribers to mix songs from different artists. Spotify is also exploring various concert ticket sales strategies such as pre-sale access and premium seating options through discussions with major promoters and ticket vendors.

The new tier comes as Spotify looks to diversify its revenue streams and target devoted music fans who regularly spend money on merchandise, concerts, and fan clubs, according to the report. The company apparently believes the enhanced tier could attract millions of subscribers, despite the higher price point.

Development of the additional tier has been in the works for several years, coming after recent price increases for existing subscriptions and the introduction of audiobook offerings. Spotify previously announced plans for a Hi-Fi tier in February 2021, but a launch never materialized, even as rivals Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited began offering high-quality audio streaming within their standard subscriptions.

Given the progress of its competitors, Spotify's paid-for "Music Pro" tier will need to be a more comprehensive offering that goes beyond just improved audio quality and some AI-produced playlists. What's actually offered remains to be seen.Tag: Spotify
This article, "Spotify Readies Premium Tier With Hi-Fi Audio and AI Features" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is set to "significantly change" the iPhone's design language later this year, according to a Weibo leaker.


In a new post, the user known "Digital Chat Station" said that the ‌iPhone‌'s design is "starting to change significantly" this year. The "iPhone 17 Air" reportedly features a "horizontal, bar-shaped" design on the rear, likely referring to an elongated camera bump. On the other hand, the Pro models purportedly adopt a "large horizontal matrix design."

Last week, leaker Jon Prosser a shared render of the iPhone 17 Pro. The ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌'s three rear cameras will apparently be arranged in a familiar triangular layout, but housed in an all-new rectangular bar that extends all the way across the back of the device. The ultra-thin "‌iPhone 17 Air‌" is also rumored to feature a horizontal rear camera bar.

The first major rumor about the iPhone 17 lineup's design changes came from The Information's Wayne Ma, who said in November last year that the rear of the ‌‌iPhone 17 Pro‌‌ models will feature a new part-aluminum, part-glass design. The top half of the back will be made of aluminum and feature a "rectangular camera bump made of aluminum rather than traditional 3D glass," while the bottom half will continue to be made of glass to support wireless charging. This new aluminum camera bump will also be larger than that of previous models.

The new Weibo post also referred to an impending "large foldable model," which should increase competition in the market. The account has previously posted accurate information about the iPhone 12 mini's display, iPhone 15's upgraded sensor, and iPhone 16 Pro size increases. The ‌iPhone 17‌ lineup is expected to debut as usual in the fall.Related Roundup: iPhone 17 ProTag: Digital Chat Station
This article, "iPhone Design to Change 'Significantly' This Year" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

In macOS, the Hot Corners feature turns each of the four corners of your screen into a designated action, allowing you to quickly access certain functions built into the system, such as Mission Control, Notification Center, the Screen Saver, QuickNote, and more. Many Mac users would agree, there's something satisfying about bringing up these commonly used functions with a simple, swift cursor movement.


What isn't so satisfying, however, is accidentally triggering a Hot Corner, which can lead to all kinds of unintended desktop behavior - like application windows flying all over the place. This can happen when you lose track of the mouse cursor, or when you're working within the confines of a smaller MacBook screen. Thankfully, there's a way to tame wayward Hot Corners using modifier keys. Here's how.

How to Set Up Hot Corners With Modifier Keys

1. Launch System Settings ( ➝ System Settings...).


2. Click Desktop & Dock in the side column.


3. Click the Hot Corners... button at the bottom of the menu.
   
   
4. In the dialog that appears, click the chevrons to open the dropdown menu corresponding to the screen corner that you want to use as a Hot Corner.
   
   
5. Now, hold down a modifier key and select a function from the dropdown to assign to the Hot Corner. Note that you can use different modifier keys for different Hot Corners, and even key combinations if you prefer. We're using the Command and Shift keys in our example.
   
   
6. Repeat the action for any additional Hot Corners you'd like to set.


7. Click the OK button when you're done.

The next time you come to use a Hot Corner, hold down the modifier key(s) as you move the mouse cursor towards it, otherwise the action you assigned to that corner won't work by design.


If you want to change the modifier key associated with a Hot Corner, navigate back to the Hot Corners... menu, and tap the assigned modifier key to remove it, then hold down the new one you want to use as you click on the Hot Corner function.
This article, "macOS Tip: Set Up and Control Hot Corners With Modifier Keys" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Last month, Woot introduced a massive sale on the Braided Solo Loop and Solo Loop bands for Apple Watch, and the sale is now back for the month of February. All bands are in brand new condition and come with a one year Apple limited warranty.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Woot. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

You can get the Solo Loop for just $19.99 ($29 off) and the Braided Solo Loop for $29.99 ($69 off). Because the sale has been going on for a while now, some colors and sizes of the Solo Loop and Braided Solo Loop are selling out, so be sure to place your order soon if you want one of these cheap bands.

UP TO 70% OFFApple Watch Bands at Woot

Shoppers should note that this sale is focused on colors of the Braided Solo Loop and Solo Loop that Apple has stopped selling, and it doesn't include any of the new band colors. That being said, all of the bands in this sale are in new condition.

The entire sale is focused on Solo Loop and Braided Solo Loop Apple Watch bands, so you'll need to know the size that works best for you before you buy. Apple has a measurement tool on its website that you can use to determine your exact size.

Solo Loop

• Black/White Hues - $19.99, down from $49.00


• Blue Hues - $19.99, down from $49.00


• Green Hues - $19.99, down from $49.00


• Purple Hues - $19.99, down from $49.00


• Red/Orange/Yellow Hues - $19.99, down from $49.00

Braided Solo Loop

• Black/White Hues - $29.99, down from $99.00


• Blue Hues - $29.99, down from $99.00


• Green Hues - $29.99, down from $99.00


• Purple Hues - $29.99, down from $99.00


• Red/Orange/Yellow Hues - $29.99, down from $99.00


• Pride - $29.99, down from $99.00

If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.


Deals Newsletter
Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2025? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season!




Related Roundup: Apple Deals
This article, "Get Apple Watch Solo Loop for $19.99 and Braided Solo Loop for $29.99 in Woot's Sale (Up to 70% Off)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's software engineers have been internally testing iOS 18.5 since at least the start of February, according to the MacRumors visitor logs.


Ordinarily, the presence of iOS 18.5 in our logs would not be remarkable. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman last week reported that Apple was considering delaying or limiting at least some of its promised Apple Intelligence enhancements for Siri until iOS 18.5, due to the presence of bugs and other software engineering issues.

The new Apple Intelligence features for Siri were originally expected to debut with iOS 18.4, according to Gurman. The enhancements include on-screen awareness, understanding of a user's personal context, and deeper per-app controls. For example, during its WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother's flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps.

The first iOS 18.4 beta is expected to be released this week. Gurman said it is still possible that at least some of the Apple Intelligence features for Siri will be included in iOS 18.4, but they could be turned off by default. Even still, it is possible that the features might not be added until later iOS 18.4 beta versions, buying Apple more time.

Following the beta testing period, Apple's website suggests that iOS 18.4 will be released in April, but it is unclear if that timeframe will shift due to the reported bugs and potential delays with the Apple Intelligence for Siri rollout.

The first iOS 18.5 beta should arrive in April, and that update would likely be released in May, based on the typical iOS release schedule.

Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model.Related Roundups: iOS 18, iPadOS 18Tags: Apple Intelligence, SiriRelated Forums: iOS 18, iPadOS 18
This article, "iOS 18.5 Already in Testing as Apple Intelligence Features for Siri Potentially Delayed" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's upcoming budget iPhone might not be called the iPhone SE 4 after all, with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman lending credence to rumors of a potential name change for the device being unveiled this Wednesday.


In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman mentions Apple CEO Tim Cook's recent social media announcement about a new product unveiling on February 19, in which Cook teased the "newest member of the family." According to Gurman, this phrasing seems to imply that Apple plans to position the device as a fresh addition to the lineup rather than a continuation of the SE series.

The statement adds weight to recent claims from leakers that Apple could brand the device as "iPhone 16E" instead of iPhone SE 4. Gurman doesn't explicitly confirm this naming scheme (or potential variations of it) but he is surely aware of the rumors, and notes that a new name "makes complete sense" given the dramatic overhaul the budget iPhone is receiving. So we could indeed see an iPhone 16E, iPhone 16e, iPhone 16 SE, or something else, depending on what branding Apple has decided to go with.

The device is expected to adopt an iPhone 14-style design with a 6.1-inch OLED display, Face ID, an Action button, and significant internal upgrades including a new Apple-designed 5G modem, 8GB of RAM, and the same A18 chip found in the iPhone 16 series. The A18 chip inclusion in particular is a major departure from previous SE models, which typically recycled older iPhone designs and technology. It also means the device will support Apple Intelligence, bringing flagship performance at a much more affordable ~$500 price.

If accurate, the rebranding would mark the end of the iPhone SE line, which has served as Apple's budget offering since 2016. The move could indicate Apple's intention to bring its affordable iPhone into the flagship fold, both in terms of features and marketing.

The new budget iPhone is expected to be announced via press release on Wednesday, February 19, with pre-orders likely following shortly after.Related Roundup: iPhone SETag: Mark GurmanBuyer's Guide: iPhone SE (Don't Buy)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "iPhone 16E to Debut Wednesday? Apple's Budget iPhone May Get a New Name" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple will bring its next-generation M5 chip to the MacBook Pro in the fall, followed by the iPad Pro in the first half of 2026, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Gurman's latest claim flips the previously expected order of devices to transition from M4 to M5 chips, which was based on last year's M4 product launch order. Apple first introduced its M4 chip in an updated iPad Pro in May 2024, followed by the MacBook Pro in October, but it sounds like Apple will deviate from that timeline this time around.

Before the release of M5 MacBook Pro models, Gurman says that Apple will launch updates to the Mac Studio and Mac Pro using its current generation M4 chip series. Those machines could arrive around Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2025.

The M5 series is expected to feature an enhanced ARM architecture and is reportedly being manufactured using TSMC's advanced 3-nanometer process technology. Apple's decision to forgo TSMC's more advanced 2nm process for the M5 chip is believed to be due to cost considerations. However, the high-end versions of the M5 will still feature significant advancements over their M4 equivalents, mainly through the adoption of TSMC's System on Integrated Chip (SoIC) technology.

This 3D chip-stacking approach vertically stacks the chips, which enhances thermal management and reduces electrical leakage compared to traditional 2D designs. Apple is said to have expanded its cooperation with TSMC on the next-generation hybrid SoIC package, which also combines thermoplastic carbon fiber composite molding technology.

References to what are believed to be Apple's M5 chip have already been discovered in official Apple code. According to one report, thanks to its dual-use SoIC design, Apple also plans to deploy the M5 chip within its AI server infrastructure to bolster AI capabilities across both consumer devices and cloud services.Related Roundup: iPad ProTag: Mark GurmanBuyer's Guide: iPad Pro (Neutral)
This article, "MacBook Pro Now Expected to Get M5 Chip Before iPad Pro" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple will begin selling new MacBook Air models featuring its latest M4 chip by March "at the latest," mirroring the time frame of the M3 MacBook Air launch last year, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Apple last updated the MacBook Air line in March 2024.


Gurman's comments appeared in his latest Power On newsletter, suggesting the reporter is no further forward on learning the exact release timing of new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models. Six days ago Gurman claimed that the machines would be introduced "within weeks."

A launch has been thought to be imminent for a while now. In fact, it was originally rumored to be planned as Apple's first hardware launch of the year. However, that is now likely to be the iPhone SE 4, which is expected to be announced on Wednesday.

Apple inadvertently confirmed the upcoming M4 ‌MacBook Air‌ machines back in December when the macOS Sequoia 15.2 software update included files for unreleased "Mac16,12" and "Mac16,13" machines. The files referenced the "‌‌MacBook Air‌‌ (13-inch, M4, 2025)" and the "‌‌MacBook Air‌‌ (15-inch, M4, 2025)."

Since then, we've just been waiting for the new ‌MacBook Air‌ models to launch. As Gurman pointed out last week, existing stock of the M3 ‌MacBook Air‌ models is dwindling, suggesting new models should be arriving soon.Related Roundup: MacBook AirTag: Mark GurmanBuyer's Guide: 15" MacBook Air (Don't Buy), 13" MacBook Air (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Air
This article, "Gurman: M4 MacBook Air Models to Launch by March 'At the Latest'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman briefly touched on the future of the Pro Display XDR and a larger iMac.


This comes amid rumors of a new Studio Display with mini-LED backlighting launching by 2026.

Below, we recap the latest rumors.

Pro Display XDR 2
Released in December 2019, the Pro Display XDR features a 32-inch screen with LED backlighting, 6K resolution, a 60Hz refresh rate, P3 wide color, up to 1,600 nits of brightness, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and three USB-C ports. In the U.S., the Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999, while the optional Pro Stand costs $999 extra.

Gurman today said a new Pro Display XDR is currently "less of a priority for Apple" as an expensive, niche product.

In 2022, he said that Apple was working on an updated version of the Pro Display XDR with an Apple silicon chip, but it is unclear if that remains the company's plan as of today. In Apple's Studio Display, an A13 Bionic chip powers features such as Center Stage camera framing for video calls, spatial audio, and Siri voice commands.

While no other features have been rumored for the next Pro Display XDR, customers are hopeful for a camera, speakers, and a higher refresh rate.

Larger iMac

It has been nearly three years since Apple discontinued the 27-inch iMac, as part of its move away from Intel processors. Since then, the 24-inch iMac has been Apple's only all-in-one desktop computer, with no larger model available.

Will a larger iMac ever make a comeback? Gurman today merely said that Apple will "probably eventually get around" to it.

It might not be another 27-inch iMac, specifically, though.

In November 2023, Apple announced that it had no plans to release a new version of the 27-inch iMac with an Apple silicon chip at that time. Instead, Apple recommended pairing its standalone Studio Display with a Mac Studio or Mac mini.

But an even larger iMac could materialize one day.

In late 2023, both Gurman and Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple was developing a 32-inch iMac for release in late 2024 or in 2025. Kuo said the larger iMac's screen would feature mini-LED backlighting, which would allow for increased brightness, higher contrast ratio, and other benefits compared to LCD technology.

The late 2024 window has now passed, but a 2025 launch is still on the table, perhaps. Gurman's latest update on the larger iMac is vague, though.Related Roundups: iMac, Apple Pro Display XDR, Apple Studio DisplayTag: Mark GurmanBuyer's Guide: iMac (Buy Now)Related Forums: iMac, Mac Accessories
This article, "Pro Display XDR 2 and Larger iMac: Here's What the Latest Rumors Say" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is "exploring" the idea of showing search ads in the Apple Maps app, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.


Back in 2022, Gurman said software engineering was "already underway" to display ads in the Apple Maps app, but Apple did not move forward with the idea at the time. Today, he said Apple is "giving this notion more thought" again.

This time around, he said Apple has yet to start engineering work, so ads in the Apple Maps app might still be a ways away.

Ads in the Apple Maps app would not be the traditional banner ads that you see on websites, but rather paid search results. For example, a fast food chain could pay Apple to appear near the top of the results when a user searches for "burgers" or "fries." Many similar apps already offer search ads, including Google Maps, Waze, and Yelp.

Apple already displays search ads in the App Store, allowing developers to pay to promote their apps to users who search for relevant keywords.

Ads in the Apple Maps app would further boost Apple's services revenue.Tags: Apple Maps, Mark Gurman
This article, "Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is "ramping up" work on a new Studio Display, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.


In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the new Studio Display "should arrive by 2026," alongside Macs with M5 chips.

The new Studio Display will have a similar design as the current model, including a 27-inch screen size, according to Gurman.

The new display is codenamed J427 within Apple, he added.

Gurman did not reveal any new features or changes planned for the next Studio Display. Last week, however, display industry analyst Ross Young said Apple was developing a new 27-inch display with mini-LEDs that could launch in late 2025 or early 2026. Young believes this display could be a new Studio Display with mini-LED backlighting.

Mini-LED technology would provide benefits such as increased brightness and higher contrast ratio compared to the current Studio Display with LEDs.

Apple released the Studio Display in March 2022, alongside the Mac Studio. It has a 5K resolution, a 60Hz refresh rate, up to 600 nits brightness, a camera and speakers, one Thunderbolt 3 port, and three USB-C ports. U.S. pricing starts at $1,599.Related Roundups: Apple Pro Display XDR, Apple Studio DisplayTag: Mark GurmanRelated Forum: Mac Accessories
This article, "Apple is 'Ramping Up' Work on a New Studio Display" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

A few days ago, we reported that Apple's refurbished Mac mini pricing had a problem, and it appears that Apple has taken note.


Apple was offering a refurbished Mac mini with the M2 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage for $559, which was $50 more than a refurbished Mac mini with the M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. All other key specifications were equal.

That's no longer the case.

As noted by Tech God on X, Apple has since revised its refurbished Mac mini pricing, and the latest prices are quite impressive. In the U.S., you can now get a refurbished Mac mini with the M2 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage for just $319. And the model that previously cost $559 is now priced at $459.

Problem solved.Related Roundup: Mac miniTag: Apple Refurbished ProductsBuyer's Guide: Mac Mini (Buy Now)Related Forum: Mac mini
This article, "Apple is Now Selling a Refurbished Mac Mini for Just $319 (!)" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple appears to have enough upcoming product announcements to justify a full event this month, yet all signs indicate these reveals will be handled through a series of press releases instead.


There are a multitude of rumors from reliable sources about specific announcements in the coming weeks, so here's everything that Apple could have feasibly included in a hypothetical February event:

• iOS 18.4 preview (beta expected next week)


• New iPhone 16 color option


• iPhone SE (fourth generation)


• Apple's first custom modem chip (debuting in ‌iPhone SE‌)


• iPad (11th generation, A17 Pro or A18)


• iPad Air (11- and 13-inch, M3 or M4)


• Redesigned Magic Keyboard for ‌iPad Air‌


• MacBook Air (13- and 15-inch, M4)


• AirTag (second-generation)


• Vision Pro-related announcement (hardware refresh to add the M5 chip with Apple Intelligence support, a price drop, a significant software update, or something else)


• Apple Command Center smart home hub preview (launch later in 2025)

Tim Cook's recent social media teaser for an Apple "launch" on February 19 is widely expected to relate to the fourth-generation ‌iPhone SE‌. While the post confirms at least one product unveiling, it also suggests the company will not be holding a full-fledged event in the next few weeks.

Historically, Apple has used press releases to introduce products when the updates are more iterative, but the company has also hosted entire events for relatively modest announcements, such as the "Scary Fast" event in October 2023, which only saw the reveal of the M3 MacBook Pro and iMac models.

Several new devices are widely expected to be announced soon, including the fourth-generation ‌iPhone SE‌, the new ‌MacBook Air‌ with the M4 chip, and updated ‌iPad Air‌ and entry-level ‌iPad‌ models. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the M4 ‌MacBook Air‌ should launch within weeks, while Apple's supply chain has been preparing for the arrival of new iPads. Software references have already confirmed the existence of many of these products, so launch is almost certainly right around the corner.

Apple has occasionally held February events, but they are rare. In recent years, the company has preferred March for spring product announcements, as seen with the 2022 event that introduced the green iPhone 13, third-generation ‌iPhone SE‌, Mac Studio, and Studio Display. If Apple had opted for a February event this year, it would seemingly have had a more substantial series of announcements than some of its previous keynotes.
This article, "10+ Announcements Apple Could Have Rolled Into a February Event" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is in the middle of trickling out a variety of announcements including Powerbeats Pro 2 and an Apple TV+ app for Android phones this week, and based on a tease from Tim Cook it looks like there's at least one bigger announcement in store for next Wednesday.


While a new iPhone SE is the odds-on favorite for Wednesday's announcement, there are a few other products we're expecting to see launch in the relatively near future, so we'll have to hang tight to see just how Apple plans to roll them out. Read on below for all the details on this week's biggest stories!

Tim Cook Teases an 'Apple Launch' Next Wednesday
In a bit of an unusual move, Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased an upcoming "launch" of some kind scheduled for Wednesday, February 19.


"Get ready to meet the newest member of the family," he said in a social media post, with an #AppleLaunch hashtag.

Cook did not provide an exact time for the launch, or share any other specific details, so his post is a bit of a mystery. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes the post is a teaser for Apple announcing a new iPhone SE.

iPhone SE 4 Launch is Imminent - What to Expect
If next week's launch is indeed the next-generation iPhone SE, we're expecting a host of upgrades to modernize Apple's low-end iPhone, including Face ID, an A18 chip with Apple Intelligence support, and more.


Timing for a launch has been a bit unclear, with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously claiming it would be arriving this week and a generic listing for it popping up on a French reseller's website, but it now looks like things are lining up for a slightly later debut.

M4 MacBook Air Release Continues to Appear Imminent
There continue to be signs of a new MacBook Air with an M4 chip, indicating that we could see the machine launch in the not too distant future. A reliable source this week shared the identifiers that the ‌MacBook Air‌ will use, and those identifiers correspond to the M4 chip.


Rumors have suggested that the M4 MacBook Air has been in production for months already, and Apple itself leaked references to it in macOS Sequoia 15.2 back in December, but Apple has yet to officially announce it.

Powerbeats Pro 2 Debut With Heart Rate Monitoring, H2 Chip, Active Noise Cancellation, and More
Apple's Beats brand officially introduced the Powerbeats Pro 2 this week, bringing significant updates to the wireless earphones aimed at active users.


Among the upgrades for Powerbeats Pro 2 are Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) with Transparency mode, Personalized Spatial Audio, an H2 chip for improved power efficiency and Apple ecosystem integration, and for the first time in an Apple audio product, Heart Rate Monitoring.

Apple TV+ App Now Available on Android
Apple has debuted a new Android smartphone app on the Google Play store that will allow users on that platform to more easily subscribe to and watch Apple TV+ content, including MLS Season Pass.


Android users can access Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass by signing into their Apple Account, or subscribe directly through Google Play's billing system.

Apple Releases iOS 18.3.1 With Bug Fixes
Apple this week released iOS 18.3.1 and iPadOS 18.3.1, which offer bug fixes and security improvements including a fix for a vulnerability that "may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals."


On devices that support Apple Intelligence, some users who previously turned off the feature have found it automatically turned back on after updating, so be sure to double check your settings if you don't wish to use Apple Intelligence.

World's Thinnest Foldable Phone Launches Next Week
Apple has yet to enter the foldable smartphone market, but other manufacturers continue to press forward with their efforts and push the boundaries of what's physically possible.


Oppo has confirmed it will debut its Find N5 or OnePlus Open 2 foldable phone on February 20, with the device reportedly measuring just 4mm thick when open.

MacRumors Newsletter
Each week, we publish an email newsletter like this highlighting the top Apple stories, making it a great way to get a bite-sized recap of the week hitting all of the major topics we've covered and tying together related stories for a big-picture view.

So if you want to have top stories like the above recap delivered to your email inbox each week, subscribe to our newsletter!Tag: Top Stories
This article, "Top Stories: 'Apple Launch' Next Week, Powerbeats Pro 2 Debut, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple CEO Tim Cook teased an Apple announcement that's coming on Wednesday, February 19, and it's looking like that mystery announcement will be the next-generation iPhone SE.


We've been hearing about the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 for quite some time now, and we essentially know everything to expect. If you want a sneak peek at what's coming, read on.

Naming
Apple first introduced the ‌iPhone SE‌ in 2016, and the "SE" stands for Special Edition. Apple has used the SE naming for the last three models, but it's possible that's going to change this year.

There have been rumors that the new low-cost iPhone could be called the "‌iPhone‌ 6E" instead of the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4, but the information came from a source without a well-established track record.

The low-cost ‌iPhone‌ will have the same chip as the iPhone 16, along with a few other ‌iPhone 16‌ features, so it would not be a shock for Apple to give it a new name to better tie it into current flagship models. When announcing the upcoming product launch, Cook also said "get ready to meet the newest member of the family," which could be a reference to the ‌iPhone 16‌ family. At the same time, "family" could also just be the ‌iPhone‌ family.

Design
We're expecting the ‌iPhone SE‌ to have an ‌iPhone‌ 14-style design, with a 6.1-inch display. Its launch will mark the end of smaller iPhones, and 6.1 inches will be the smallest screen size that Apple offers.

While the current ‌iPhone SE‌ is 4.7 inches, the size difference between the 4.7-inch model and the new 6.1-inch model isn't as extreme as you might think. The updated size will be noticeable, but getting rid of those thick bezels means there's a limited increase in physical size despite the larger display.

An ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 dummy model
The ‌iPhone SE‌ is 5.45 inches tall and 2.65 inches wide with a thickness of 7.3mm, and the new model will be 5.78 inches tall, 2.82 inches wide, and a thickness of 7.8mm. Weight will increase just an ounce.

Apple used to sell a 5.4-inch ‌iPhone‌ "mini," but it was discontinued after the ‌iPhone‌ 13 mini because it didn't sell well. In the future, Apple may appease those who want a small ‌iPhone‌ with a clamshell device that folds in half, but rumors suggest that such a device is a year or more off.

If you want to know what the ‌iPhone SE‌ will look like, take a look at the iPhone 14. It'll have the same general design with an all-display design, aluminum and glass build, mute switch, volume buttons, notch, power button, and 5G antenna/SIM tray. The ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 is expected to have a single-lens rear camera, though, rather than the dual-lens setup of the ‌iPhone 14‌.


You likely saw early rumors about an Action Button or Camera Control button for the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 during the rumor cycle, but it sounds like those are not features that are coming to Apple's low-cost device after all. ‌iPhone SE‌ dummy models have not included an Action button or a Camera Control button, nor have cases designed for the device.

Both early ‌iPhone‌ cases and dummy models are often crafted based on supply chain leaks, and they're usually accurate because there's a good money in having a case ready to go right when a new device launches.

Display
The ‌iPhone‌ 12 introduced Ceramic Shield, which is stronger than typical smartphone glass and better able to hold up to drops and scratches, and it's likely the new low-cost ‌iPhone‌ will adopt the Ceramic Shield material. The current ‌iPhone SE‌ just uses a standard glass front rather than the Ceramic Shield material.

Apple is updating the ‌iPhone SE‌ with an OLED display, which means the end of LCD display technology in the ‌iPhone‌ lineup when the current model is discontinued. LCDs are still used for some Macs and iPads, but the ‌iPhone‌ lineup will be all OLED when the SE 4 launches.


The ‌iPhone 14‌ had a notch to house the TrueDepth front-facing camera and facial recognition hardware, and the ‌iPhone SE‌ will have the same notch design. There were rumors suggesting Apple could use the Dynamic Island for the ‌iPhone SE‌, but that's another feature that looks like it'll be reserved for the more expensive ‌iPhone‌ options.

No More Touch ID
With an all-display design like the ‌iPhone 14‌, Apple is eliminating Touch ID. When the current-generation ‌iPhone SE‌ is discontinued in favor of the new model, there will be no ‌iPhone‌ with ‌Touch ID‌ in the lineup.

The current ‌iPhone SE‌
‌Touch ID‌ is still used for Macs and some iPads, but Apple will transition fully to Face ID for its ‌iPhone‌ models with the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4.

There are people who prefer ‌Touch ID‌ to ‌Face ID‌, but Apple is all-in on facial recognition, and it's more secure than ‌Touch ID‌. There's a less than 1 in 1,000,000 chance that a random person could unlock your ‌iPhone‌ with ‌Face ID‌, but a 1 in 50,000 chance for ‌Touch ID‌.

Eliminating the ‌Touch ID‌ home button provides much more viewable screen space, which is a major bonus. Android manufacturers have married large display sizes with fingerprint recognition by putting sensors on the back of their smartphones, but Apple has never adopted that kind of design.

No More Lightning
The ‌iPhone SE‌ will have a USB-C port for charging, with Apple continuing its mission to phase out the Lightning port.


The ‌iPhone SE‌ is one of the last Apple devices that continues to use Lightning, and when Apple discontinues the ‌iPhone 14‌, which could happen with the ‌iPhone SE‌ launch, Lightning will be eliminated from the ‌iPhone‌ lineup. It's quite possible the ‌iPhone 14‌ will be discontinued when the ‌iPhone SE‌ launches because it makes little sense to keep a lower spec ‌iPhone 14‌ around for $599 when there's a more powerful ‌iPhone SE‌ available that costs less.

MagSafe
The ‌iPhone 14‌ added support for MagSafe, and since the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 is using an ‌iPhone 14‌ design, it will work with ‌MagSafe‌ accessories and will support ‌MagSafe‌ wireless charging. ‌MagSafe‌ is not an option for the current ‌iPhone SE‌, but ‌MagSafe‌ charging and ‌MagSafe‌ accessories have become an increasingly important part of the Apple ecosystem over the last few years.


A18 Chip and 8GB RAM
Apple plans to equip the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 with the same A18 chip that's in the ‌iPhone 16‌, which means it's going to have flagship performance at a much more affordable price. The A18 chip will allow it to last for years to come, and it's going to be the most affordable way to get Apple Intelligence in a smartphone.


With the A18 chip, the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 will support ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features, and it's going to be a huge improvement over the A15 chip in the current ‌iPhone SE‌. ‌Apple Intelligence‌ requires 8GB RAM, so the new ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 will also have double the RAM of the current model.

Storage Space
There's no concrete storage space rumor, but the rest of Apple's iPhones start with 128GB of storage, so it's quite possible we're going to see the end of the 64GB storage option this year. 64GB is simply not enough storage space, even for a low-cost ‌iPhone‌.

Camera
The ‌iPhone SE‌ could get the same 48-megapixel Wide lens that's in the ‌iPhone 16‌, which will bring a major leap in photo quality compared to the 12-megapixel camera in the ‌iPhone SE‌ 3.

An ‌iPhone SE‌ dummy model
The ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 won't have a Telephoto lens or an Ultra Wide lens, but if it does indeed use the same Wide lens, it will support next-generation portraits with focus and depth control, the newest photographic styles, and an option to crop in to 2x optical zoom.

Connectivity
Apple is going to debut its new in-house modem in the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4, and it'll give us our first look at how Apple's modem technology compares to Qualcomm's modem technology.


Apple's modem chip won't support the fastest mmWave 5G speeds, but it will connect to the more widespread 6GHz 5G networks. Apple wants to cut down on its reliance on Qualcomm, and this new modem chip is the first step.

We don't know how much Apple will promote the new modem, but expect to see a range of speed and performance comparisons where the new modem is pitted against Qualcomm's current ‌iPhone 16‌ modem.

Emergency SOS via Satellite and Crash Detection
This is speculation, but with the ‌iPhone 14‌, Apple added a Crash Detection feature that alerts emergency services if you're in a car accident. It's an important safety feature that's likely to be included in the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4.


The ‌iPhone 14‌ and later also support Emergency SOS via Satellite, and there's a good chance that'll be added to the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 too. Apple loves to promote its safety features, and they can be a major selling point, so we wouldn't be surprised to see both of these options.

Battery Life
Rumors suggest the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 will have the same battery as the ‌iPhone 14‌, which means it'll offer up to 20 hours of video playback, up to 16 hours of streaming video, and up to 80 hours of audio playback.


There's quite a bit more space in a 6.1-inch device for a battery than there is in a 4.7-inch device, so it should come as no surprise that there will be a major improvement in overall battery life.

The current ‌iPhone SE‌ offers 15 hours of video playback and up to 10 hours of streaming video playback.

Pricing
With higher-end components, the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 could be more expensive than the current model, but Apple is still aiming for a price point under $500. The ‌iPhone SE‌ 3 is priced starting at $429.


No Event
The ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 is an important new ‌iPhone‌ in Apple's lineup, but it reuses components from the ‌iPhone 14‌ and ‌iPhone 16‌, so it's not the most exciting device. Apple isn't going to hold an event to unveil the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4, instead introducing it through a press release and coverage on the Apple website.

Get ready to meet the newest member of the family.

Wednesday, February 19. #AppleLaunch pic.twitter.com/0ML0NfMedu

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) February 13, 2025

Apple did promote the launch early on social media, but without hints about just what product is coming on February 19.

Launch Date
After being introduced on February 19, Apple will likely accept pre-orders for the ‌iPhone SE‌ 4 before launching it a bit later in the month.Related Roundup: iPhone SEBuyer's Guide: iPhone SE (Don't Buy)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "Apple's Next iPhone SE Launching on Wednesday - Here's What We Know" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Facebook parent company Meta is investing heavily in AI-powered humanoid robots, according to a report from Bloomberg. Meta wants to create robots that can act like humans and help people with physical tasks, and has developed a new team in its Reality Labs hardware to work on the project.


Meta's first focus will be on robots that can do household chores, but the company's overarching goal is to develop AI, sensors, and software for robots that can be manufactured and sold to third-party companies to allow those companies to develop their own robots. Meta is aiming to be the Android of robots.

Robot technology is not currently advanced enough to allow robots to fold clothes, do dishes, or complete other household chores, but Meta feels that its work in artificial intelligence and virtual reality could boost robot development.

In 2025, Meta will spend around $65 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure, robotics, and virtual reality products. Meta plans to build some of its own hardware, and work with robotics manufacturers to build prototypes.

If Meta does end up creating a humanoid robot, it could compete with an Apple-designed robot in the future. Apple is working on both humanoid and non-humanoid robots, but the company's work on humanoid robotics is in the proof-of-concept stage and years away from launching.

Non-humanoid robots could come sooner. Apple is said to be working on a tabletop robot with an iPad-style display that's attached to a robotic arm, and such a product could come as early as 2026 or 2027.

Apple robotics researchers recently shared details on a lamp-like robot prototype with lifelike movements and human-like interaction capabilities.
This article, "Like Apple, Meta is Working on Humanoid Robots" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's smarter version of Siri that incorporates Apple Intelligence features could end up being delayed, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Apple is running into engineering problems and software bugs that could push back the launch of the new functionality.


Rumors suggested that Apple planned to introduce the new ‌Siri‌ features in iOS 18.4, but the first iOS 18.4 beta is expected as soon as next week, and it appears ‌Siri‌ won't be ready in time.

Apple has already promised that ‌Apple Intelligence‌ will be available in new languages in April, suggesting that's when the iOS 18.4 update will launch, so Apple has a limited amount of time to get ‌Siri‌ ready to go. Some features may now need to be postponed until May later, with Apple perhaps planning to introduce them in an iOS 18.5 update.

Apple has promised three ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features for ‌Siri‌, including personal context to better understand and respond to requests, the ability to do more in and between apps, and on-screen awareness to respond to requests that involve content the user is looking at. Employees testing the new ‌Siri‌ features have reportedly said that they are not yet working consistently.

Major new features rarely come as late as May, because Apple typically transitions to working on the next-generation version of iOS in June after WWDC.

Gurman says that Apple could still debut the features in iOS 18.4, but turn them off by default as testing continues until iOS 18.5, and in that case, we'd still see the new functionality in iOS 18.4. We should be getting the first iOS 18.4 beta soon, though it is not likely that ‌Siri‌ will be in the initial beta given today's report. Related Roundups: iOS 18, iPadOS 18Related Forums: iOS 18, iPadOS 18
This article, "Apple Intelligence Siri Overhaul Could Get Delayed" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple today announced that it will soon be opening a new retail store in Downtown Detroit.


Apple Downtown Detroit is "coming soon," according to Apple. The store page does not provide any further details, including an address or grand opening date.

Apple does mention that the Downtown Detroit store is now hiring.

Last year, it was reported that the Downtown Detroit store will be located on the 1400 block of Woodward Avenue, and construction was already underway.

Apple already has three stores in the Detroit area, but this would be the first location serving the city's downtown core, which has been experiencing a revival in recent years. The store could also serve customers from nearby Windsor, Ontario in Canada.

(Thanks, Filip Chudzinski!)Tag: Apple Store
This article, "Apple Announces New Downtown Detroit Store is 'Coming Soon'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple launched the original MacBook Pro 19 years ago today.


Jobs announced the ‌MacBook Pro‌ at the Macworld Conference & Expo in 2006. It was the first Mac notebook to transition from PowerPC processors to Intel's Core Duo architecture. Designed to be an Intel-based replacement for the PowerBook line, the ‌MacBook Pro‌ took a similar aluminum chassis and added an Intel Core processor, a webcam, and the MagSafe power connector. Its display was 67% brighter than its predecessor, matching the luminance of Apple's standalone Cinema Displays.

Apple claimed that the Intel processors delivered "up to four times the performance of the PowerBook G4." The transition was supported by Rosetta, a software translation layer that allowed PowerPC applications to run on Intel-based Macs.

The original ‌MacBook Pro‌ came in two configurations, both with 15.4-inch widescreen displays offering 1440 x 900 resolution. The entry-level model featured a 1.67 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and an 80GB hard drive, while the higher-end model boasted a 1.83 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 100GB hard drive. Both models included ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics cards. The 15-inch model weighed just 5.6 pounds and was only one inch thick.

It also featured two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 400 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and an ExpressCard/34 slot for expandability. The exclusion of FireWire 800 in the initial 15-inch models drew criticism from some users, but this port was later restored in subsequent revisions. Initially only available with a 15-inch display, Apple introduced a 17-inch variant in April 2006.

Over the years, the ‌MacBook Pro‌ line evolved through various design and technological iterations, including the unibody construction in 2008, the Retina display in 2012, and the controversial Touch Bar in 2016. The transition from Intel to Apple Silicon in 2020 marked the end of the Intel-based ‌MacBook Pro‌ era, as Apple moved to its proprietary M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips.
This article, "Apple Launched the MacBook Pro 19 Years Ago Today" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums