Apple

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 (Neutral)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 (Don't Buy), 13" MacBook Air (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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 (Neutral)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

Apple News & Mac Rumors Breaking All Day

The first two episodes of Apple’s new Gordon Ramsay-produced series are now available. Here’s what you need to know about this high-stakes culinary documentary.

more…

NSO, the Israeli company behind iPhone spyware Pegasus, is being acquired by a group of investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds. Here are the details.

more…

Apple’s long-rumored HomePod with a screen—which I used to call ‘HomePad’ but now seems likely to be called ‘HomePod Touch’—is expected to launch in early 2026. Here are two reasons it can’t come soon enough.

more…

The recent uncertainty around M5 MacBook Pro launch timing may be starting to clear up, as a new report indicates the base M5 MacBook Pro is launching soon, while higher-end models aren’t coming until later.

more…

Earlier this year, iOS 18.4 brought support for Matter’s implementation of robot vacuums into HomeKit. I’ve been testing a few various models over the past few months, and SwitchBot has done a fantastic job. I’ve been using the SwitchBot K11+ for the past three months, and I am excited to talk about it this week.

more…

Optimizing and perfecting my Mac setup is one of my favorite things to do. I love my M4 MacBook Pro, and surrounding it with accessories that improve my productivity is key to my workflow.

Here’s a rundown of the current products on my desk as I write this very story …

more…

Apple Vision Pro recently got a big visionOS 26 software update, and its first hardware revision is coming soon. But what may prove more critical to Vision Pro’s long-term success is another recent development: live sports are coming soon in Apple Immersive Video.

more…

All signs indicate Apple’s M5 iPad Pro launch is imminent. Even though Apple hasn’t made any announcements yet, here’s why I’m already convinced to splurge on two optional M5 iPad Pro upgrades.

more…

Today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break deals are now ready to go starting with the return of all-time pricing on $200 off the list price to deliver the best deal in several months. Those offers also join a particularly notable all-time low on the 46mm Jet Black Apple Watch Series 10 at $129 off and ongoing M3 iPad Air models starting from $449. Head below for a closer look at everything. 

more…

Apple Notes gets more powerful every year, and iOS 26 brought its own batch of new features. With new capabilities comes the threat of feature bloat, but Notes has a clever solution that makes its ever-growing set of tools more easily accessible in iOS 26.

more…

Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, hasn’t had the best year. Beyond being the face of Apple’s AI struggles, the leader has also had several key responsibilities stripped away recently. And now, Bloomberg reports that Apple “is searching for a replacement” for Giannandrea.

more…

The latest Apple TV+ show is here: The Last Frontier is a new crime thriller from the creator of The Blacklist. The first two episodes are available now. Here are full details and a sampling of early reviews.

more…

The iPhone Air has surprisingly good battery life for users with light-to-medium daily usage habits. But if you are going to be away from a charger for a long time, especially going travelling like on a plane, you’ll probably want to carry some extra juice with you.

Apple has made its custom MagSafe Battery for iPhone Air, that fits precisely beneath the camera plateau on the back of the phone. But another big competitor in this space is Anker, with the Anker Nano Power Bank in a similar size promising 5,000 mAH capacity at half the price of Apple’s offering. But how much extra battery life should you actually expect to get from these power banks, and which is best?

more…

Apple has announced what it describes as a “major evolution” of its Apple Security Bounty program. The company says the program has paid out more than $35 million to more than 800 security researchers so far.

Today’s announcement touts the “next major chapter” for the program, including doubling the top award to $2 million for “exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks.”

more…

Benjamin and Chance cover all the new changes in beta 2 of iOS 26.1, as Apple tidies up some loose ends in the new Liquid Glass design, and (kinda) brings back Slide Over on iPad. Also, Meta’s launch of smart glasses with displays apparently prompted a change to the Vision Pro roadmap, and the F1 streaming deal is apparently nearly done.

And in Happy Hour Plus, the duo compares MagSafe power banks for the iPhone Air. Subscribe at 9to5mac.com/join.

• Sponsored by Private Internet Access: The world’s most transparent VPN provider. Go to piavpn.com/9to5Mac to get 83% off with 4 months free.
• Sponsored by NordStellar: Don’t wait until your company’s data is already for sale on the dark web. Protect your business today at nordstellar.com/happyhour.

more…

As Apple COO Jeff Williams prepares to retire at the end of the year, the company is reorganizing several of the divisions that once reported to him, according to Bloomberg. Here’s what’s changing.

more…

Together with our friends at iMazing– one of the most advanced and comprehensive iPhone management platforms available on both macOS and Windows– we’re giving away Apple’s new iPhone 17 (Pro or Air) to one lucky reader. You can enter the giveaway now using the form below and get a closer look at the new iMazing 3.4 available now.

more…

TIME Magazine has included Apple’s new AirPods Pro 3 among the 300 best inventions of the year, thanks to new features such as live translation and heart rate tracking. Here are a few highlights from this year’s list, including a second Apple product featured in the Special Mentions section.

more…

Update: This story has been updated with additional details from Charter.

This coming season, Apple Vision Pro users will be able to watch select Los Angeles Lakers games live in an immersive feed. Here are the details.

more…

iOS 26 is a packed update for Apple Music changes, including a new feature that’s long been at the top of my wish list: pinned music.

more…

This is Rumor Replay, a weekly column at 9to5Mac offering a quick rundown of the most recent Apple product rumors, with analysis and commentary. Today: M5 product launches ‘imminent,’ a curious MacBook Pro rumor, and a foldable iPhone update. Here are this week’s Apple rumors.

more…

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the “California Opt Me Out Act”, which will require web browsers to include an easy, universal way for users to opt out of data collection and sales. Here are the details.

more…

watchOS 26 launched recently, and many users are still discovering everything new with the latest Apple Watch update. Two of the biggest additions are brand new health features: hypertension notifications and sleep score.

more…

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Backblaze: Never lose a file again. Use code “9to5daily” at checkout for 10% off or try for free. 

more…

Recently, Backbone launched new Pink and Purple editions of their Pro and One controllers, with a focus on design and casual gaming.

more…

Earlier this week, Apple shipped a brand new firmware update for AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods 4. But now just a couple days later, new beta firmware has arrived too.

more…

Apple TV+ has a packed fall lineup, and one of its most anticipated debuts—Pluribus—is a cryptic new sci-fi drama series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Today the first trailer for Pluribus arrived, offering a glimpse at what to expect.

more…

Apple kicked off last month’s iPhone keynote with a video dedicated to design, leading with this famous quote from Steve Jobs: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Apple has now uploaded this video separately to its YouTube channel.

more…

While the Amazon fall Prime Day sale has officially ended, today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break is still loaded with some big-time price drops. Not only are we tracking up to $110 off M4 Mac mini configurations from $499, but we also still have as much as $800 off M3 Pro MacBook Pro machines for folks looking to save a ton on a previous-gen model. Alongside the ongoing lows on AirPods 4 and $120 off AirPods Max, we spotted a very rare chance to score a new Amazon low on the most affordable M4 iPad Pro you can buy. All of that and more awaits below, just make sure you go check out the all-new 9to5Toys site design too!

more…

Apple TV+ keeps adding to its strong lineup for the coming months. Yesterday the streamer announced the return of one of its best-reviewed series, and today a film, The Family Plan 2, got a release date in a prime holiday slot.

more…

iOS 26.1 is the next major update coming to the iPhone, and it’s expected to launch very soon. Here are three of my favorite new iOS 26.1 features so far based on the beta release.

more…

Netflix launched into the world of gaming in 2021 with a focus on mobile titles, but now the streamer is ready to push harder into the living room too. The company has announced five party games coming to Netflix soon, just in time for holiday gatherings.

more…

Eve Outdoor Cam is a sleek outdoor video camera for HomeKit, with integrated LED floodlight ideally designed to light up your driveway at night. I’ve been a fan of the Eve Indoor camera for a while, and my experience with the Outdoor Cam is similarly positive. HomeKit cameras are better than ever, thanks to significant user interface upgrades to the Apple Home app in iOS 16.

And HomeKit Secure Video support means clips are saved to your iCloud account in an end-to-end encrypted manner. To make things even more compelling, this set up requires no additional monthly subscription to use, assuming you pay for some iCloud storage. So how does Eve Outdoor Cam and the state of HomeKit Secure Video fare? Very well, for the most part …

more…

The last and final day of the fall Prime Big Deal Days sale at Amazon is quickly coming to a close. That said, there is still a giant selection of price drops live on Apple gear, from MacBooks to iPads, and AirPods to iPhone, Mac mini, and just about everthing in between. We are even tracking the best prices ever offered on Apple’s latest accessories for iPhone 17 that just released last month. It all awaits down below.

more…

Apple has announced a significant expansion of its Emergency SOS via satellite feature for iPhone and Apple Watch Ultra. The company says the feature will launch to users in Mexico later this year, joining existing availability of Find My via satellite and Messages via satellite in the country.

more…

Since it launched in beta last June, Dia has required an invite. Today, The Browser Company announced that its AI-powered successor to Arc is now generally available on macOS. Here’s how it works.

more…

Although Meta hasn’t announced it yet, some WhatsApp users are already seeing the revamped interface adopting Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language. Here’s what it looks like.

more…

To celebrate Amazon Prime Day and the debut of the new Elite 30 V2 portable power station, BLUETTI is offering some of its biggest discounts ever. On top of that, 9to5Mac readers get a special code for additional savings on all BLUETTI Prime Day deals.

more…

watchOS 26 launched last month as a major Apple Watch update. It brought a new Apple Notes app, Apple Intelligence features, Control Center upgrades, and more. One new feature is especially unique: ‘hints’ have been added to watch faces in watchOS 26 as a companion of the Smart Stack.

more…

You can now use your Apple Account for new and existing accounts on GitHub. Here’s how it works.

more…

The iPhone lineup got a big infusion of change this year, with a brand new iPhone Air model and more distinct Pro line. But the changes are just beginning, as next year is rumored to bring Apple’s first ever foldable iPhone. Here are three reasons why that foldable might be the first ‘iPhone Ultra.’

more…

Late last week, Discord reported on a breach that happened recently related to its third-party customer support partner, Zendesk. But new information indicates the stolen data could be worse than originally thought, including millions of government photo IDs.

Update 1: Zendesk sent the following statement: “Our investigation indicates this incident did not arise from a vulnerability within Zendesk’s platform. Zendesk’s own systems were not compromised.”

more…

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Backblaze: Never lose a file again. Use code “9to5daily” at checkout for 10% off or try for free. 

more…

A new report today from analyst Jeff Pu has details on what to expect from next year’s highly-anticipated iPhone 18 Fold. According to Pu, Apple will use a combination of titanium and aluminum for the device.

Bloomberg previously described the device as resembling “two titanium iPhone Airs side-by-side.”

more…

A new state law in Texas will soon require apps to enforce a form of ‘age assurance’ with users, and in response, Apple has announced changes coming for apps available in Texas.

more…

I’ve owned an iPhone Air for nearly three weeks now, and Apple’s brand new model keeps impressing me. One standout feature I haven’t written about yet is the screen size—but it’s proven exactly what I’d hoped for.

more…

The final 24 hours of the Amazon fall Prime Big Deal Days sale is now underway, but we aren’t done just yet. Amazon has actually lowered the price on select M4 MacBook Air models to deliver new all-time lows at up to $245 off. Alongside the ongoing AirPods 4 deals from $89, we also spotted the best deal yet on Apple Watch Series 11 at $50 off, iPhone 16 Pro/15 Pro Max models up to $790 off the original list prices, massive $800 price drops on M3 Pro MacBook Pro models, iPad deals, Mac mini discounts, and loads of accessories. Everything awaits below. 

more…

Apple Watch recently gained the ability to alert users to potential hypertension. From today, the high blood pressure detection feature will be available for more international users.

more…

In a leaked image and a note from a trusted leaker, Samsung is allegedly going to be copying the “Cosmic Orange” color that Apple just introduced with the iPhone 17 Pro.

more…

Apple TV+ offers a growing library of critically acclaimed titles, including one top-reviewed series you’ve probably never heard of: Drops of God. Now, Apple has just announced that season 2 of Drops of God is coming soon.

more…

Next year’s MacBook Pro is expected to be a significant upgrade on the current model, with the headline believed to be a total redesign that’s both thinner and lighter.

The rumors include three specific features, and I got a chance to preview all of them thanks to an early chance to try a Windows laptop going on sale later this month …

more…

Ah, 2010. The year when Apple launched the iPad, but the limelight was stolen by something else entirely: Antennagate. Soon after the launch of the iPhone 4, users discovered that when they held the phone in a typical grip for a phone call, the number of bars shown for signal strength immediately dropped dramatically.

Apple responded in a number of ways, including Steve Jobs famously suggesting that users were holding the phone wrong, but the issue was resolved by changing just 20 bytes of code …

more…

Although Apple is on record as saying that it wants to see the EU’s Digital Markets Act either repealed or substantially revised, it is reportedly close to reaching a settlement with the antitrust regulator.

In public, the two have engaged in a pretty fierce war of words, but a new report claims that they are close to reaching a behind-the-scenes agreement …

more…

The controversy over Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store is showing no signs of ending. The latest development is a former Apple marketing veteran challenging Tim Cook on the company’s human rights values.

Wiley Hodges worked for Apple for more than 20 years, the last 15 of them as a director of marketing and product management, and he’s written an open letter to Cook expressing his dismay at the decision …

more…

In the aftermath of the iPhone 17 launch, there was a bit of a ‘scratchgate’ controversy as customers noticed iPhone 17 and iPhone Air demo units in stores were already showing noticeable signs of wear on their backs. Apple investigated and commented that these marks were caused by material transfer from older MagSafe chargers being used to display the phones on the Apple Store tables.

At the time, the company said it was working to address the issue in stores. We may now be seeing the solution; Consomac spotted new MagSafe chargers in use at the Apple Store that include an outer silicone ring.

more…

It sounds like Apple will soon welcome a new hire in the podcast leadership department.

more…

Once in a while, Apple promotes an Apple Watch activity challenge, which rewards users with a special trophy, as well as exclusive animated stickers. And if you collect those, you can mark your calendar for this Friday, October 10. Here are the details.

more…

After releasing it on Android a few weeks ago, WhatsApp is now rolling out its own translation tool on iOS. Here’s how it works.

more…

The MacBook Air used to be one of my favorite Apple devices. And the latest M4 model is especially impressive. But after using an M4 iPad Pro, there’s one feature that has made it hard to use a MacBook Air again: the iPad’s tandem OLED display.

more…

AltStore, one of the first and most popular third-party app stores, has just announced a Series A funding round, a new board member, and plans to expand its platform to at least three new countries. Here are the details.

more…

Prime Day has rolled around again, If you’re looking to see a robot vacuum cleaner rolling around your home, there’s no better time to buy.

Roborock’s Prime Day deals let you save up to 45% from its range of award-winning robot vacuum cleaners for a limited time of just a few days.

more…

Today Apple has released brand new firmware for AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods 4. Here are the details.

more…

AirPods Max debuted nearly five years ago, and aside from a minor USB-C revision last year, there’s never been a proper AirPods Max 2. But Apple is preparing a true next generation model. Here’s what we know so far about AirPods Max 2.

more…

The long-gestating streaming rights deal between Apple and Formula 1 is apparently reaching the finish line. In his newsletter, Puck’s John Ourand reports that the two sides have nearly finalized negotiations, with an eye to announce the partnership at the upcoming U.S. Grand Prix on 17-19 October, held in Austin.

Apparently, the protracted discussions relate to a dispute over the existence of the independent F1.TV streaming service in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple — who would be paying upwards of $150 million a year for the rights — wants streaming exclusivity and therefore F1.TV to be shuttered in the region.

more…

One day after releasing macOS Tahoe 26.1 developer beta 2, Apple is now rolling out the second wave of public betas. Here’s what to expect.

more…

Apple has just released public beta 2 for iOS and iPadOS 26.1. Here’s what’s new in the latest beta updates.

more…

Apple is now rolling out public beta 2 updates for its various software platforms, including tvOS 26.1, watchOS 26.1, and more.

more…

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Backblaze: Never lose a file again. Use code “9to5daily” at checkout for 10% off or try for free. 

more…

Amazon’s 2025 fall Prime Day event is now cookin’ with price drops landing across a slate of Apple’s latest releases. We have AirPods Max (USB-C) in all colors at $120 off the list price alongside the return of the best prices ever on AirPods 4 and AirPods 4 with ANC stating from $89 shipped. Those offers also join iPad deals starting from $279 – iPad (A16), iPad mini 7, and M3 iPad Air. MacBook Air deals are flying and we have the lowest prices to date on Apple’s new iPhone 17 case collection. Everything is waiting for you down below. 

more…

There are at least five new Apple products expected to launch later this month, including a pair of Home debuts: a brand new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2. Here’s why these new Apple Home products will set the stage for an even bigger smart home rollout ahead.

more…

According to Aaron Perris, Apple has now rolled out a server-side fix for iPhone 17 and iPhone Air that were unable to download Apple Intelligence models.

This update comes after some iPhone 17 users were completely unable to use Apple Intelligence features since the devices were released almost three weeks ago.

more…

Apple has announced its lineup of new Arcade titles hitting the service in November, with four new games total. Here’s what’s coming.

more…

Have you ever had a TV streaming service like YouTube or Netflix play ads at a higher volume than the content you’re watching? Soon, that practice will be illegal in the state of California. Here are the details.

more…

The secretive AI hardware device designed by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and set to be launched by ChatGPT maker OpenAI has reportedly been delayed, as the company struggles to solve three fundamental problems.

Update: Ive referenced a “family of devices” and said that they had come up with “15-20 really compelling” product ideas – more below …

more…

A new Apple short film called The Underdogs: Blue Screen of Death has been posted to the company’s YouTube channel as part of an occasional series that was first launched back in 2019.

Eight minutes long, it’s a gentle comedy that highlights the built-in security features of Macs while also showing off a whole range of the company’s ecosystem features …

more…

The 2025 Amazon fall Prime Day sale is now officially live with loads of big-time price drops on Apple’s latest releases. From the M4 MacBook Air and just about all of the current-generation iPad releases from $279 to AirPods 4 back at the best prices of all-time, if you’re looking to upgrade, now’s as good a time as any. All of the prime time Apple deals also join a host of discounts across wide-range of Mac and iPhone accessories, including new all-time lows on the recently-released Apple iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air cases, alongside price drops on just about anything else you might have your eye on right now. Head below for a closer look at all of this year’s best fall Prime Day Apple deals. 

more…

Every now and then there is an app or utility whose usefulness is so obvious that you immediately think it ought to be part of macOS.

Folder Quick Look is a great example of this. It does one very simple job – and does it in a way that just seems like it has always been there …

more…

I may not be a fan personally, but plenty of people seem to love the new Cosmic Orange colour option for the iPhone 17 Pro. While the color is officially exclusive to just two phones, you can now have any of your devices in this color.

Dbrand skins are now available in the new color for a wide range of devices, including the iPhone Air, MacBooks, iPads, AirPods, and even Android phones and Windows laptops …

more…

The box office hit F1: The Movie is now available to buy on Blu-ray and DVD, with a special 4K Blu-ray edition also available. (It’s already been available for digital download since August.)

The disc release comes as the film’s theatrical run comes to a close, topping $189 million domestic and over $438 million worldwide. It should be available on Apple TV+ soon, but the company has still not announced a streaming date …

more…

We hear occasional good news stories where somebody is able to use Find My iPhone to track a stolen device and successfully recover it, but a new record has been set when tracking a single iPhone led to a gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.

The iPhone was tracked to an airport warehouse where it was found in a box with 894 other phones, leading to the arrest of 18 suspects and more than 2,000 recovered phones …

more…

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

In this episode of Apple @ Work, Alan West rejoins the show to talk about how IT engineers will leverage AI tools, the benefits of Apple IT conferences, and more!

more…

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

Sponsored by Backblaze: Never lose a file again. Use code “9to5daily” at checkout for 10% off or try for free. 

more…

Apple is widely expected to announce new iPads and Macs later this month, alongside an updated Apple Vision Pro. And if current inventory levels are anything to go by, the announcements could come sooner rather than later.

more…

OpenAI is rolling out an interesting ChatGPT integration with multiple apps and platforms, ahead of a broader rollout later this year. Here’s how it works.

more…

For the longest time, one of AirPods’ best features was absent from the car. But in iOS 26, Apple has made AirPods and CarPlay work better together than ever. Here’s how.

more…

Update October 7, 2025: Apple has released TestFlight 4.0.1 and it removes all references to the “Tester Matching” feature.

In an update today, Apple introduced a visual refresh to TestFlight, based on the Liquid Glass look, as well as an interesting discovery feature. Here are the details.

more…

iOS 26.1 beta 2 arrived today for developers, bringing the latest changes ahead of the release’s anticipated public launch soon. Here’s what’s new.

more…

I am so happy for the arrival of the AirPods Pro 3. I had been hanging on to my original Pro 2 models from 2022, and they had seen better days. In fact, I think AirPods are one of the best products Apple has ever shipped. Because I take them everywhere, I love having a case that makes them easier to carry and keeps them protected. The ESR Orbit Hybrid Case for AirPods Pro 3 is designed with MagSafe in mind while adding durability, a strong lid, and a few nice extras. If you are looking for a great AirPods Pro 3 case, keep reading to learn more about why I like this one a lot.

more…

Apple redesigned the alarm screen in iOS 26 with much larger buttons than before, but now it’s making another change in iOS 26.1: there’s a new ‘Slide to stop’ gesture for dismissing an alarm as of beta 2.

more…

Taylor Swift enjoyed a highly successful first weekend for her new album, The Life of a Showgirl. What will the artist do next? It seems the answer is: revive the long-diminishing iTunes brand with a limited-edition deluxe version of The Life of a Showgirl. If anyone can spark excitement about iTunes, it’s going to be Taylor Swift.

more…

Apple released iPadOS 26.1 beta 2 to developers today, and it comes with a major returning feature: Slide Over multitasking is back on the iPad. Here’s how it works.

more…

Apple today updated its Apple Support app, bringing iOS 26 compatibility, as well as a few under-the-hood improvements.

more…

Two weeks after releasing the first developer beta of macOS 26.1, the company is now rolling out developer beta 2, ahead of its official launch in a fiew weeks. Here’s what to expect.

more…

Apple has released iOS 26.1 beta 2 for developers. The update comes two weeks after the first beta was released.

more…

watchOS 26.1 is the next noteworthy software update coming to the Apple Watch, and today Apple released developer beta 2.

more…

Apple has just released new developer beta software for Apple TV users: tvOS 26.1 beta 2 is now available to download. Here’s why the forthcoming update might be set to hold surprises for users.

more…

Apple has a new wave of beta software rolling out now, and iPadOS 26.1 developer beta 2 is available for download. Here are the details.

more…

Four years after the original AirTag debuted, Apple is expected to finally launch AirTag 2 later this month. Here’s an overview of how the two products are rumored to compare.

more…

While we are still a little over 12 hours out from the official start to this year’s 2025 fall Prime Day sale at Amazon, today’s 9to5toys Lunch Break is already loaded with early Apple deals. Alongside the return of $200 price drop on M4 MacBook Air and up to $600 off the 24GB M3 model, we also have M3 iPad Air at $150 off and M4 iMac at $150 off. Those offers also join AirPods 4 down at $90 and AirPods Max at $119 off the list price alongside AirTag from as low as $16 and the very first deal on Logitech’s new haptics-enabled MX Master 4 wireless mouse. Everything else awaits below. 

more…

After a summer of beta testing, Apple released iOS 26 to everyone last month. Now, attention has shifted to iOS 26.1. This update is available to developers and public beta testers now, and will likely be released to everyone later this month. Here’s everything you need to know about what’s new in iOS 26.1.

more…

AppleInsider News Feed

A pair of academic authors have launched a class action suit against Apple, because Apple Intelligence training used a repository of books known to contain pirated copy of their books.


Apple's Books has a license to sell 'Sleights of Mind.' Apple Intelligence has no such thing
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are both professors at SUNY Health Sciences University in New York. The pair have alleged that "Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles" and "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions" were raided without licensing to train Apple Intelligence.

In short, the pair of works may have been used in aggregate to train Apple's Foundation Intelligence Models and OpenELM language models without proper licensing. Specifically, the complainants alleged in a filing on Friday afternoon that the materials are being used to test model performance, and as filters to prevent model outputs containing copyrighted material from hitting the screens of the end user.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

An Electron bug that clashed with macOS 26 Tahoe's graphics engine caused apps like Slack, Discord, and VS Code to slow down Macs, but new updates finally fix the issue.


Electron apps don't play nice, sometimes
After macOS 26 Tahoe launched in September 2025, users noticed their Macs acting sluggish especially after a long runtime of some apps. Simple actions like scrolling or switching windows lagged, and fans spun up with no clear cause.

The common factor was Electron, the cross-platform application framework that powers Slack, Discord, Figma, and dozens of other apps. But the slowdown wasn't random, according to a report from Shameelectron.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Details surrounding the general timeline of Apple's 2026 Mac releases have surfaced, thanks to our sources that have knowledge of macOS Tahoe development and hardware testing.


The M5 MacBook Pro release appears imminent.
People familiar with the matter have told AppleInsider that a Mac with the identifier J704 is nearing release. Apple has been testing this model with a dedicated hardware-focused variant of macOS Tahoe, version 26.0.2. Other Mac models remain in the works, but they are not expected to launch just yet.

Based on the identifier J704, Apple appears to be gearing up for the debut of the base model M5 MacBook Pro. For reference, the preceding model, with the standard M4 chip, is known as the J604.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Elgato's Prompter XL brings a larger screen and sturdier frame to creators who want professional Mac-connected teleprompting without investing thousands into broadcast gear.


Elgato's new Prompter XL. Image credit: Elgato
Elgato built its reputation by adapting studio tools for home use. After the release of the El Gato Prompter, the Prompter XL continues that approach, turning the original Prompter into a full-sized model for DSLR, mirrorless, and studio cameras.

It aims at creators and professionals who want more screen space and flexibility. The sturdier design also gives users better stability during shoots.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

New guesswork, relayed by a sketchy rumor-monger, claims that the M5-powered MacBook Pro and iPad Pro very soon. Apple's historical schedules say the predictions are probably right.


MacBook Pro with M5 could be announced soon
Take the fact that model numbers for the M5 iPad Pro and M5 MacBook Pro were leaked by the FCC. Add in that a Russian YouTuber may have the new iPad Pro already.

And then there's the report that stocks of both devices are reportedly dwindling.


Rumor Score: 🤯 Likely


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has — mostly — brought back Slide Over to the iPad, while the company is looking more focused than ever on Apple Glasses, it may also be shaking up its management team. Plus speaking of teams, the Underdogs are back.


The Underdogs are back
Apple has bowed to pressure from iPad users and brought back Slide Over in the latest beta. It's a feature that used to be how iPad users could run a third app at the same time so it was superseded by iPadOS 26's windowing system, but if you liked Slide Over, you really liked it.

So far it is only in the latest beta release of iPadOS, but then it's also not complete. At present, it's a token nod toward demands of its return, though hopefully Slide Over's full functionality will be back by the time this update is officially released.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple is increasing the bounty it pays to security experts who successfully bypass iOS protections, with the top single payment now increased to $2 million.


Apple's lock icon, its symbol for privacy — image credit: Apple
The bug bounty program has routinely been criticized, and even called crippled, because of Apple's traditionally miserly approach. While the payouts are not the worst in the industry, the company has had a reputation for being reluctant to sign the checks.

Now Apple has announced that it is increasing its payouts, and offering what it calls "accelerated awards." Specifically, Apple says that as of November 2025, it is doubling its top single award to $2 million — and through a bonus system, that could grow to $5 million.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple TV+ has bought the rights to make the "Five Secrets" action thriller, beating rivals to it on the strength of its screenplay.


Apple TV+ has bought the action thriller screenplay "Five Secretts" — image credit: Apple
It still remains to be seen how Apple plans to continue making theatrical movies after "F1" was seen to be a last test. But whether for theatrical release or solely streaming, Apple Original Films is now making "Five Secrets," along with Chernin Entertainment.

According to Deadline, the project existed as a completed script written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on an as-yet unpublished short story by Julianna Baggott. The intention had been to package the screenplay — to sign star names to it — and then sell it as a production ready to go.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

As an Apple user, you have everything you need to start a YouTube channel on your iPhone or Mac right now. Here's what you need to know and what you need to avoid.


You'll want more, but you can make whole YouTube channels just with your iPhone
YouTube lets any adult upload videos, so you just need an internet connection, a free Google account, and a video to upload. That could seriously be it, and since you have an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac, you could be making a YouTube channel as easily as making an audio podcast.

But in practice, even though you probably have all of the equipment you need, and certainly all of the software, and you are easily capable of every part of the job, there is more. More that's technical, more that's editorial, and more that's simply about organizing yourself and your channel.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Stream Deck is great for running macros on your Mac, but there are ways to do it significantly cheaper. Sometimes, all it takes is a spare keyboard or a secondary numpad.


Epomaker EK21 works with Via for macros
In the pursuit of productivity, users can turn to macros as a way to get things done on their Mac. By hitting specific keys or key combinations on their keyboard, using configuration software supplied by the manufacturer, tasks can be sped up.

These are different from keyboard shortcuts, in that you often just have one action performed with keyboard shortcuts. Macros, however, can be complex enough to trigger multiple functions.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple is rumored to announce a new subscription called Health+ with an AI doctor, food tracking, and more sometime in 2026.


Apple Health could gain a subscription service
There are already several Apple subscriptions centered around entertainment, data storage, and even fitness, but the company hasn't yet breached the lucrative business of monetizing health. The App Store is filled with health apps that offer meditation services, advice, food tracking, and more, but none are Apple's.

That could change in 2026 as a Bloomberg report suggests Apple Health+ is imminent. The reorganization of responsibilities previously held by Jeff Williams has placed health and fitness under Services Chief Eddy Cue.


Rumor Score: 🤯 Likely


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Former Apple COO Jeff Williams is retiring at the end of 2025, replaced by Sabih Khan, and his other responsibilities in Health, Fitness, and watchOS are moving to Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue.


Apple Watch, health, and fitness responsibilities shift to new executives
Jeff Williams served as Apple COO from 2010 to 2025 and is finally ready to retire at the end of the year. He passed his role as COO to Sabih Khan, but his other responsibilities remained in question until now.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the health and fitness roles will fall to Services chief Eddy Cue, while watchOS is moving to SVP Software Engineering Craig Federighi.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple and Spectrum have partnered to stream a selection of live Lakers basketball games during the 2025-26 season in Apple Immersive 180-degree video for Apple Vision Pro owners.


Spectrum to offer Apple Immersive Lakers games
When Apple first announced Apple Vision Pro, sports fans began daydreaming about the potential of immersive video and live events. Up to this point, Apple has only been able to provide short clips of NFL and MLS games well after the fact, until now.

According to a wider announcement from Spectrum, Apple has partnered with them to bring select Lakers games to Apple Vision Pro. These will be provided via the Apple Immersive format, which is the 180-degree video used in Apple's immersive content.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Prime Big Deal Days may have ended last night, but you can still grab some of the year's best prices (and some new deals too) on AirPods, iPads, AirTags, and more.


Save on iPads, AirPods, and Macs with extended Prime Big Deal Days offers - Image credit: Apple

Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple TV+ lifts the curtain on "Pluribus," a new series from the creator of "Breaking Bad," following a woman immune to a world-changing virus — and the government that wants to "fix" her.


Image Credit: Apple TV+
In 2022, Apple TV+ signed a two-season, straight-to-series order with "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" creator Vince Gilligan. In July 2025, we learned that the series would star "Better Call Saul"'s Rhea Seehorn and would be titled "Pluribus."

Now, we're getting the official trailer, giving us a quick glimpse into the main character's life.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The ChatGPT maker has told a European Commission deputy that despite being hosted by Apple, Microsoft, and Google App Stores, US Big Tech's dominance in the technology world is a problem for OpenAI.


Using the ChatGPT app with Siri
OpenAI met with representatives of the Commission's antitrust lead Teresa Ribera to discuss the way Apple and other big tech firms are "entrenched," making it difficult for startups to compete. The meeting took place on September 24, 2025 with the minutes having been recently made available.

Those notes suggest that OpenAI's representatives shared their views on "competition in the dynamic and evolving markets for artificial intelligence-based service," among other things. They also pointed to the need for vigilance and "timely action" by regulators, like the EC, to avoid users being locked into specific platforms.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's decisions to remove real-time ICE monitoring app ICEblock, and archival video tool Eyes Up may be good for Apple's global finances, but it's an incredibly bad one for a company that hinges its reputation on claims it stands up for the rights of users.


ICEBlock removed from Apple App Store
It's been an interesting couple of weeks as it pertains to Apple, the App Store, and business decisions. Apple and Google caved nearly immediately to the Department of Justice's "request" to pull Immigrations and Customs Enforcement-watching and documenting ICEBlock

They cited the "objectionable content" provisions of the App Store rules. That's generally the rule that Apple uses when they don't have a technical reason to remove something, but want to remove it anyway.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Before you call your internet provider in a panic, here's how to fix your iPhone or iPad's Wi-Fi in just a few steps.


Wi-Fi
Your iPhone says it's connected, but nothing loads. Your iPad keeps dropping Wi-Fi every time you move to another room.

Whether you're dealing with random disconnects or can't get online at all, Wi-Fi problems are frustrating but often fixable on your own.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

An app meant to archive video of actions taken by ICE has been removed from the App Store, with Apple still under pressure by the Department of Justice.


Apple removes more ICE-related apps after government pressure
First, the ICEBlock app was removed from the App Store after Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed it placed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in danger. Now it seems, any and all records of the actions performed by ICE, live or historical, are being targeted by the United States government contrary to the first amendment.

According to a report from 404 Media, Apple has removed the Eyes Up app from its App Store. Unlike ICEBlock, it was an archival app that saved videos and articles that showcased the actions taken by ICE under the Trump administration.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A social media influencer known for photography work and tech reviews has been invited to Colorado by Apple, but no details have been shared beyond the gift of a backpack filled with essentials for the trip.


Apple's mysterious Colorado invite
Apple's secrecy can be exciting, but it can also sound like the opening plot points of a campy horror movie. While more details were definitely shared behind the scenes, a social media influencer has shown a cryptic invite he received from Apple.

The influencer is known as @JHawkShoots on X and seems to be an active tech reviewer, photographer, and has even started his own clothing brand. Apple has previously provided the influencer with iPhone 17 review units, and he's got about 14.4k followers.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A new analyst note provides little detail, but seems to reiterate previous claims of Apple using multiple metals in its iPhone Fold frame design.


iPhone Fold could get an aluminum frame
Previous rumors suggest the iPhone Fold will resemble two iPhone Air models stuck together by a hinge. Though, there are still questions about the materials that will be used to construct the ultra-thin device.

According to an analyst note from Jeff Pu, seen by 9to5Mac, the iPhone Fold will have a hybrid aluminum and titanium frame. No other details were provided.


Rumor Score: 🤯 Likely


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A breach of popular cross-platform communications app Discord may be incredibly serious, with a security research group claiming that 2.1 million passport and driving license photos were taken by hackers, versus the official claims of a "limited number of users."


Discord icon
On October 3, Discord issued a warning that it was the victim of a "Security Incident" that involved a third-party customer service platform. In reporting following the breach, it appears to be an attack on Zendesk.

Discord's account of the incident claims that it impacted a "limited number of users" who had contacted its Customer Support or Trust & Safety teams.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

You can still make an external macOS bootable drive, but Apple's tighter security procedures mean you have to prepare for it before your internal drive fails. Here's how to do it all, and what's been changed from before, in macOS Tahoe.


Any of these drives can be made into a macOS bootable drive with macOS Tahoe. Here's how.
The SSD storage that Macs now all use is dramatically less likely to fail than spinning hard drives were, so you may never need to start up from an external drive. Only, that booting from an external drive used to be a life-saver if your Mac wouldn't start up, and now it can only be that if you have taken certain steps in advance.

That's because while an external startup volume is a help to you with diagnosing problems or just getting on with your work, it's a potential security risk. Anyone with a drive could, in theory, boot your Mac and gain access to the data on your internal storage, or connected drives.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Developers producing iOS and iPadOS apps will have to abide by a Texas law that forces user age verification on the App Store. Apple has a new API to help developers comply.


The new Texas age verification law is viewed as a privacy problem by Apple.
In a notice to developers on October 8, Apple warns that a new state law in Texas will be enforceable from January 1, 2026.

Referred to as SB 2420, it is a bill that enforces age verification requirements on the digital storefronts like the App Store. The law applies to developers creating apps that will be distributed in Texas.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Starting on October 8, Apple Watch users in Canada can now receive hypertension notifications, expanding a feature already available in more than 150 countries worldwide.


Image Credit: Apple
Canadian users with an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or an Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, can enable Hypertension notifications in the Health app. The Apple Watch SE lineup, including the Apple Watch SE 3, cannot detect hypertension.

Apple has rolled out the feature to more than 150 countries so far, with Canada being the newest addition at the time of publication.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

It is the perfect time to upgrade your vehicle's infotainment with Wireless CarPlay, streaming apps, or even a mirrored iPhone with Ottocast. Get an additional 15% off during fall Prime Day.


Save on Ottocast CarPlay adapters with Prime Big Deal Days coupon.
If you have a vehicle with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, then it is simple to upgrade to a more modern experience. Ottocast offers three great plug-and-play options that are discounted during Prime Day.

AppleInsider readers can take an additional 15% off sitewide using code APPLEINSIDER at checkout.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider

From AirPods 4 to Beats Studio Pro, Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days discounts on headphones provide shoppers with up to $180 off.


Save on AirPods, Beats, and Bose today at Amazon.
Today is the last day to score some of the year's best prices on earbuds and headphones, with Apple's own AirPods and Beats lines up to 51% off. You can also save up to $150 on Bose's QuietComfort range of in-ear and over-ear options.

AirPods


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

You weren't holding it wrong. Fifteen years after iPhone 4's ridiculously named "Antennagate," a coder has uncovered the mistake in 20 bytes of code that made the controversy as huge as it was.


Covering this break in the chassis edge could reduce signal strength
Previously on Antennagate... In 2010, users of the iPhone 4 found that signal strength drastically dropped depending on how they held the phone. If you think "scratchgate" proves Apple is not the firm it was under Steve Jobs, note that Jobs told users to hold it right.

Now, 15 years later, coder Sam Henri Gold has demonstrated which of Apple's next reactions actually fixed the problem. It wasn't the free bumper case Apple gave away, and it wasn't the rambling lawsuits that ended with the company having to pay $15 to eligible buyers.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Synology has backed down from only allowing certified hard drives that it conveniently sells in its 2025 network attached storage device line — but the new 7.3 DSM update is far from a complete reversal of policy.


An older Synology NAS that wasn't software-limited to specific drives
In April, Synology made changes to the software running its 2025 range of network-attached storage, limiting what drives could be used with the devices. One that happened to limit that support only to its own-branded drives and excluding all other manufacturers.

It's now siix months later. After intense online criticism, Synology has decided to change its mind.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple may be close to settling its current antitrust case with the European Commission, which could mean escaping the threat of daily financial penalties over App Store policies.


An EU flag with the App Store logo
Apple is currently in the middle of an antitrust battle with the European Union over non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). If a vague report on Tuesday is to be believed, the two sides are finally getting close to agreeing on settling the matter.

Apple, as well as Meta, are in the last stages of making a deal with the EU regulator, reports the Financial Times. Actually achieving the settlement will be beneficial to Apple, in that it won't be subjected to escalating daily penalties.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple is trying out an update to the Apple Store's MagSafe chargers, hoping to quash complaints that iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air models in Apple Stores are being scratched by their display stands.


Apple's in-store MagSafe chargers are reportedly being updated with a silicone ring to prevent scratches — image credit: Consomac
First there were reports from early buyers of the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro saying that their phones were easily scratched. Then it was noticed that in-store display models were showing scratches and scuff marks from their MagSafe charging stands.

Apple then quite feebly protested that these were not scratches at all. The company claimed that they were a transfer of material from the stand that could be cleaned off the iPhone.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's decision to comply with an order to remove ICEBlock from the App Store goes against its previous stance to stand for the rights of its users, former Apple employees have declared.


ICEBlock in the App Store, pre-removal
On October 2, after receiving a demand from the Department of Justice, Apple removed the controversial ICEBlock app from the App Store. Given the legal authority of the DoJ and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Apple was seemingly compelled to comply.

While Apple may have felt it was best to take the app down, which was a crowdsourced app for revealing the location of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in the United States, some believe it wasn't the morally right decision.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

It's the perfect time of year to add locks, cameras, and other sensors to your Apple Home, and Aqara has a variety of products discounted up to 48% during Prime Big Deal Days.


Save up to 34 percent on Aqara smart home gear during Amazon Prime Big Deal Days - Image credit: Aqara, Amazon
When you're building a smart home, it's always best to start small, but it quickly becomes obvious that more is better. Getting smart lights, locks, cameras, and sensors throughout your home may seem like a daunting and expensive task, but Amazon Prime Big Deal Days can help.

Aqara is back for another round of sales of its Apple Home-compatible products that will enhance your smart home and its automation capabilities. Any of these products will integrate directly with the Home app and Aqara's app for a variety of control options.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider

Of all the very many new features in iPadOS 26, none of them make the iPad feel so different as the very many window options. Here's what we've gained — and what we've lost.


Window and document improvements in iPadOS 26 make a huge difference
If it seems ridiculous to be excited about app and document windows on an iPad, it now seems a little bit foolish to have been happy with what we had before. The new paradigm is so good that it feels as if this is the way we should always have worked on the device.

The new features are in iPadOS 26, which at present is only available in a beta test version intended for developers. There will be a public release in the next few weeks, but the safest thing is to wait for the official launch in September.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple Podcasts will soon have a new hire with NPR and Spotify credentials, Collin Campbell. There's no word on what role he will have with Apple.


Apple Podcasts could get new leadership with latest hire
Apple is always looking to hire new talent and leadership to bolster its ranks. New hires don't always indicate a change in strategy or a new product, but there's a chance changes could come.

According to a social media post from New York Times reporter Ben Mullin, first covered by 9to5Mac, Collin Campbell left NPR on Friday, October 3. While it hasn't been officially confirmed, three sources tell him that Campbell is joining Apple.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Brother's MFC-J4335DW all-in-one printer keeps things simple and affordable enough for casual printing, with trade-offs you'll want to know about before buying.


Brother MFC-J433DW INKVestment Tank printer
It's 2025, and we're still, somehow, printing. Sure, we're probably not printing as much as we used to, but the need still arises.

For me, I find that I can't quite go without a printer just yet. This is especially true because of some of my hobbies.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

If you've been looking for the perfect portable power station that doesn't break the bank or your back, the Elite 30 V2 comes in a range of colors and provides 288Wh at up to 600W, discounted by $105.


Elite 30 V2, now in color. Image source: Bluetti
Bluetti proves portable power stations don't have to be boring gray boxes with their new EcoTide Color Collection for the Elite 30 V2. It's an excellent way to get power on the go, but there are many other discounted options during Prime Big Deal Days as well.

Before we detail the deals that'll save you up to 70% off, we'd like to share more about the excellent Elite 30 V2 and how it can add some color to your Apple setup.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider

Apple is reportedly very close to making a deal to stream Formula 1 races through its Apple TV+ streaming platform — and it could be announced during the United States Grand Prix.


CEO Tim Cook during the WWDC 2025 'F1' skit - Image Credit: Apple
Ever since CEO Tim Cook slowly waved the checkered flag at the U.S. Grand Prix in 2022, and buoyed by the success of the "F1" movie, there have been murmurs of Apple being more involved with the sport. If a report about negotiations is correct, that could become a reality soon.

According to a Puck newsletter by John Ourland, Apple's negotiations with Formula 1 is finally approaching the end. The negotiations, once completed, would hand Apple the streaming rights for Formula 1 races in the United States.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's budget-friendly iPhone line is rumored to get an upgrade in early 2026, with rumors suggesting an iPhone 17e is in the works. Here's what to expect, and when.


The iPhone 17e is expected to debut in the first half of 2026.
In February 2025, Apple retired the iPhone SE line in favor of an entirely new model, the iPhone 16e. At the time, the iPhone 16e was marketed as "the most affordable member of the iPhone 16 family."

The new branding suggests that Apple's budget-oriented smartphone will receive yearly hardware upgrades, similar to the standard and Pro iPhones. Rumors of a successor product corroborate this idea.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

A new monitor is one of the easiest ways to enhance your Mac or iPad computing experience — and for Amazon's Fall Prime Big Deal Days, you can save hundreds on an upgrade for a limited time.


Monitor deals to improve your Mac computing environment
It's the fall, and it's usually the time of year that Apple brings out new hardware, like an upgraded Mac mini or a new MacBook Pro.

However, while there is the temptation to get a new Mac, you could always get that new-workspace feeling in other ways. One of those is to change one of the most important elements of your computing setup: the display.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Two nearly 20-year-old Sims spin-offs, "MySims" and "MySims Kingdom," are getting a fresh release on Apple Arcade in November.


Image Credit: EA
This November, EA is bringing two beloved classic ports to Apple Arcade — a nostalgic duo perfect for cozy, pick-up-and-play sessions. Both titles are The Sims-inspired adventures: the charming build-and-decorate original MySims and its story-driven sequel, MySims Kingdom.

MySims is a spin-off of The Sims franchise that reimagines the life-simulation series. It features a simplified cartoon-like art style and equally simplified gameplay.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The iPad mini, often seen as Apple's pocket-sized luxury, has dropped to $379 during Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days sale event.


Apple iPad mini deals are back
That $379 price makes the smallest iPad less of a splurge and more of a savvy buy for anyone craving power in a compact frame.

The iPad mini 7 with the A17 Pro chip usually retails for $499 at Apple and other big-box stores. In July 2025, Amazon cut the price to $379 during Prime Day, marking one of the tablet's lowest-ever sales.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Despite mostly ignoring the role that Find My can play to recover stolen iPhones shortly after a theft, police in the UK have managed to bust a major smartphone theft ring, after a victim tracked their iPhone with the technology.


Smartphones wrapped in foil - Image Credit: Metropolitan Police
Visitors to London have to be wary of having their iPhone or other valuables stolen more than any other part of the United Kingdom. Following an investigation and multiple raids by the Metropolitan Police, one major ring has been destroyed.

Described to the BBC as the UK's largest ever operation against phone thefts, a total of 18 suspects have been arrested. They are part of an international gang believed to have smuggled up to 40,000 stolen mobile devices from the UK to China in the last year.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's "Underdogs" have returned in a new video, with the BetterBag crew weathering the storm of a convention battered by the Blue Screen of Death thanks to Mac security.


The Underdogs in 'BSOD' - Image Credit: Apple/YouTube
Each year, Apple releases an extended video featuring the "Underdogs," a group of coworkers dealing with a problem by using Apple products. The comedic presentation for 2025 directly takes aim at Windows, with its Apple at Work video "BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)."

Referring to the worst screen to appear on a PC when there's a serious error, the video follows the group traveling to ContainerCon. As they do, they pass by a street advertising board that shows the Blue Screen of Death.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Constrained supplies of the M4 iPad Pro and the lower end 14-inch MacBook Pro at Apple retail are the best sign yet that Apple will launch M5 models very soon.


iPad Pro
Following September's iPhone event, Apple is anticipated to launch more hardware later in the fall. If supply levels through Apple's retail operations are an indicator, it could happen in the near future.

Supplies of the iPad Pro with M4 are "fairly constrained" in Apple Store locations, according to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. In an X post, he writes that online shipments for the iPad Pro have also started to be delayed until between October 21 and October 28 for some configurations.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Prime Big Deal Days is here, and you can save up to $410 on Macs, iPads, AirPods, Apple Watch, docks, and more. Here are the best deals to grab before the event ends.


Save up to $405 on Apple during Amazon Prime Big Deal Days - Image credit: Apple
Save up to 51%: Amazon's October Prime Day sale delivers up to $410 off Apple products.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Amazon's October Prime Day delivers Apple Watch discounts of up to $150 off and prices as low as $169.99.


Prime Day Apple Watch Series 10 deals are live.
Apple's last-gen Apple Watch Series 10 is on special for Prime Big Deal Days, providing up to 30% off select styles. This is for the GPS Apple Watch Series 10 in your choice of its two sizes:

Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Amazon has issued an aggressive $70 discount on Apple's iPad 11, delivering the lowest price ever for Prime Big Deal Days.


Get Apple's iPad 11 for just $279 during Fall Prime Day - Image credit: Apple
Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days event includes a special offer on Apple's 11-inch iPad that's on sale for $279, reflecting a $70 discount off retail on the standard 128GB Wi-Fi configuration for Prime members.

Grab the $279 iPad 11 deal


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

If you really don't want to have an Apple Account associated with your identity, it is possible to delete it. Here's how to eliminate the Apple-centric account.


Apple does allow you to delete iCloud account, and to temporarily close it too.
There are a few reasons to completely delete an Apple Account, formerly Apple ID, including some that are quite sensible and plausible. For example, a person may have multiple accounts set up by accident but only wants to use one and not the other.

On the other end of the scale, there are reasons such as no longer wanting to be associated with Apple or its products at all. On a more extreme level, it could be someone wishing to disassociate themselves from technology as a move to go "off-grid."


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Acasis 40Gbps Mac mini M4 Dock gives your computer great legacy connectivity, two SSD slots, and uses Thunderbolt. For once, an affordable M4 Mac mini dock that isn't bandwidth starved.


Acasis 40Gbps Mac mini M4 Dock
We do a lot of dock reviews here, for good reason. There are a lot of them, and a lot of recommendations from you, the user.

We've had multiple requests for one in particular — the Acasis 40Gbps Mac mini M4 Dock.


Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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

Ten years ago, Apple’s Phil Schiller surprised Apple enthusiasts and developers by walking out on stage at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live WWDC event and giving an open, human, honest interview to a somewhat jaded community.

I wrote this in response:

Both Apple and Phil Schiller himself took a huge risk in doing this. That they agreed at all is a noteworthy gift to this community of long-time enthusiasts, many of whom have felt under-appreciated as the company has grown.

[…]

Phil’s appearance on the show was warm, genuine, informative, and entertaining.

It was human.

And humanizing the company and its decisions, especially to developers — remember, developer relations is all under Phil — might be worth the PR risk.

This started a ten-year run of interviews by Apple executives on The Talk Show every year at WWDC that proved to be great, surprisingly safe PR for Apple.

No executive ever said something they shouldn’t have (they’re pros), no sensational or negative news stories ever resulted from them, and Apple’s enthusiastic fans and developers felt seen, heard, and appreciated.

*     *     *

For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in the meantime.)

Maybe Apple has good reasons. Maybe not. We’ll see what their WWDC PR strategy looks like in a couple of weeks.

In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way.

I hope that’s either not the case, or it doesn’t stay the case for long.

This will be the first WWDC I’m not attending since 2009 (excluding the remote 2020 one, of course). Given my realizations about my relationship with Apple and how they view developers, I’ve decided that it’s best for me to take a break this year, gain some perspective, and decide what my future relationship should look like.

Maybe Apple’s leaders are doing that, too.

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!

Basketball fans will soon be able to experience live NBA games like never before: in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro.

Chase trophies, build a dynasty, and make the calls that define champions with Football Manager 26 Touch, returning to Apple Arcade on November 4.

Developers around the world are able to bring even more intelligent experiences into their apps by tapping into Apple’s Foundation Models framework.

Apple celebrated the grand reopening of Apple Ginza on Friday, September 26, in Tokyo’s vibrant Ginza district.

Apple explains how the Digital Markets Act is forcing the company to make some concerning changes to how it designs and delivers Apple products to its users in Europe.

Apple Arcade adds the highly anticipated NBA 2K26 Arcade Edition game for sports fans to enjoy this October.

Apple announces a new investment in a working redwood forest in California, in collaboration with The Conservation Fund.

Apple today announced the grand reopening of Apple Ginza on Friday, September 26, located in the vibrant Ginza district.

Apple today previewed new Apple Immersive films and episodes from top publishers, broadcasters, studios, and brands for Apple Vision Pro.

On Friday, September 19, Apple debuted its latest lineup of products at Apple Store locations across the world.

Today, Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone — is making it even easier for fans to stay on top of the action with the launch of widgets for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Apple today released exciting new features and capabilities across each of its software platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.

Apple today released new Apple Intelligence features that elevate the user experience across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro.

Apple’s new and expanded features to help parents protect kids and teens online are now available across Apple devices.

Last night, Apple TV+ scored a record-breaking 22 wins at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series for The Studio.

Apple fans can pre-order and upgrade to the groundbreaking iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max starting Friday, September 12.

Apple today introduced iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max with a striking new design that delivers a dramatic leap in performance.

Apple today debuted the all-new iPhone Air, the thinnest iPhone ever made, with pro performance.

Apple today announced iPhone 17, featuring the new Center Stage front camera, a 48MP Fusion Main camera, and a new 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide camera.

Apple today introduced Apple Watch Series 11, offering the most comprehensive set of health features yet.

Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.

The M5 MacBook Pro release date is both soon and in 2026. It seeems those who want the fastest variants must wait.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

If you’re uncomfortable with apps tracking your movements, here’s how to stop them using your iPhone's built-in location settings.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple is reportedly prepping a Health+ service that will use AI to dispense advice on exercise and eating right.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The new teaser for "Pluribus" season 1 -- from Vince Gilligan of "X-Files" and "Breaking Bad" fame -- provokes nervous laughter.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The affordable Dragon G3X wired gaming headset is built for long sessions, clear comms and serious style, all without costing a fortune.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 10, 1993, Apple released the Macintosh Color Classic II (aka the Performa 275). The computer became a collector's item.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Streaming Friday: Action-packed "The Last Frontier" season 1 looks like a high-stakes thriller worth watching. Check out the trailer.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The new "Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars" documentary series shows kitchens' brutal quests for glory. It's now streaming on Apple TV+.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

With COO Jeff Williams’ retirement looming, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will take on expanded roles in health, fitness and watchOS.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

This SleepEez deal will have you sleeping soundly. These tiny earbuds block out distractions and lull you into deep, uninterrupted sleep.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Thinborne, a small Texas company, designs super-thin iPhone cases out of aramid fiber, a material used in aerospace and military industries.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

From AirPods to Studio Display, find the best Apple deals in Prime Big Deal Days 2025 with our handy guide.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The Belkin Stage PowerGrip adds to an iPhone the grip that DSLR camera users are familiar with. It’s also a wireless power bank.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 9, 1991, Apple was ordered to pay out $26.5 million to The Beatles' record label and holding company Apple Corps.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

User scored a good deal on MacBook Air and then found himself a convert to Mac, upgrading everything as a newly minted "Apple fanboy."

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Read our hands-on PNY Duo Link V3 review for insights on its USB-C and USB-A features and impressive data transfer speeds.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Applying for a leadership role, switching industries or just to be ready for change? ResumeInventor's résumé templates have you covered.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

You have a few options on your iPhone to screen calls: one aptly named Call Screening, as well as Live Voicemail and Silence Unknown Callers.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple Watch users in Canada now have access to hypertension notifications, which can help detect signs of high blood pressure early.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple will bring the iPhone and Apple Watch Ultra 3's life-saving Emergency SOS via satellite feature to Mexico later this year.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

This powerful scanning app offers loads of features at a low price. Turn your iPhone or iPad into a full-service scanner with iScanner.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

We'll help Apple fans choose the best Sony headphones for iPhone, including great noise-canceling cans and earbuds.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

An iPad deal offers big discounts on Apple's most affordable tablet: the entry-level iPad 11 with 128GB storage.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 8, 2014, Apple said it was "surprised" after GT Advanced Technologies, its one-time iPhone sapphire glass supplier, went bankrupt.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

SSD deals bring top-quality portable drives to well below their list prices. Expand your Mac’s capacity without emptying your wallet.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Save a whopping $150 on the 2025 M3 iPad Air with a deal on both 13-inch and 11-inch versions in a range of specs and colors.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Stop scrolling endlessly or trying to remember exact wording. Just type what you recall; CopyMagic clipboard manager for Mac will find it.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Here's how to see if you have the latest AirPods firmware, which brings bug fixes, plus how to force an update if you don’t.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Meta’s latest WhatsApp update for iPhone adds in-app translation with support for 21 languages for smoother, multilingual conversations.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Discover the latest Twelve South deals with discounts up to 44% on essential travel accessories. Act fast before they are gone!

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple seeded the second beta versions of iOS 26.1 and macOS Tahoe 26.1 to developers and the public, letting them test these upcoming operating systems.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Amazon Prime Big Deal Days' Logitech sale give your Mac setup some crucial new gear to play with, and at great prices.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

These Anker deals on laptop chargers, power banks and docks are pretty sweet. We pick some of the very best options.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Save on Apple’s most portable tablet. A new iPad mini deal on the 7th-gen tablet knocks as much as 20% off the cost.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

In a new Beats Pill deal, you can get the powerful little portable speaker for $100 off. It got a complete overhaul less than a year ago.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Transform your iPhone gaming with a Backbone controller for an experience that feels like a console on the go.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Amazon Prime Big Deal Days bring savings on official Apple cases to protect your new iPhone 17. There are many designs and colors to choose.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

This year's Amazon Prime Day MacBook Pro and Air deals can net you up to $350 off, with great savings across both laptop lines.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 7, 2011, two days after the death of Steve Jobs, Apple opened iPhone 4s preorders. The next-gen phone added Siri to the mix.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The Underdogs, a fictitious team of nerdy Apple users, star in "BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)," a funny video set at a tech convention.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Save on a highly adjustable rotating desktop monitor from Mobile Pixels. It packs 99% color accuracy and maximum connectivity options.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple’s existing M4 iPad Pro and MacBook Pro are facing supply shortages hinting at an imminent launch of their M5 model.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The second iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.1 betas bring notable changes, including a new gesture to dismiss alarms, Slide Over multitasking on iPads and more.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

You can hoard Apple trackers for yourself or make the whole family a bit more organized for less money, thanks to this epic AirTag deal.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Here's your chance to get a wicked deal on AirPods Max with USB-C, Apple's noise-canceling over-ear headphones.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Understand the hurdles OpenAI encounters while developing the AI companion that potentially could be a new rival for iPhone and Android.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 6, 1997, Michael Dell uttered an infamous quote about Apple's fortunes, saying he would shut down the company completely.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Discover incredible AirPods deals with prices as low as $90 for Apple’s best earbuds. Upgrade your audio experience today!

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

The new AirPods feature grabbed headlines when Apple announced it. We set up an AirPods Live Translation test to see how well it works.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple reportedly sees strong demand for the iPhone 17 in China, with sales far outpacing those of the iPhone 16.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Here’s what rumors tell us about a possible Apple October event, with a new iPad and MacBook supposedly on the agenda, and maybe more.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Multiple learning modes like matching games, dictation and Q&As immerse you in your language goals with the Qlango language learning app.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 5, 2011, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer. A look at a fascinating legacy after Steve Jobs' death.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Don’t miss a great deal on the Navee ST3 Pro Electric Scooter, which I highly recommend because I enormously enjoy riding mine.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

On October 4, 2011, Apple introduced the world to its intelligent voice assistant. The Siri launch marked the culmination of a long-term goal.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Making Sense of Technology

Dave and I chat this week about a reader comment we received on the recent episode about AI. With the new iPhone release, we discuss the advantages of iCloud for users. There are some rumors swirling around Apple’s CEO succession plan and who might be stepping up to the plate. Follow this podcast CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes:

• Great Mariners story
• Listener comment
• Five Perks for iPhone Users Who Pay for iCloud Storage
• Two new things in iOS 26.1 Beta 2
• New TAG Heuer Smartwatches Now 'Made for iPhone'
• Apple’s next CEO

Shows and movies we're watching

• The Girlfriend, Amazon Prime
• Alien Earth, Hulu

Dave and I chat this week about a reader comment we received on the recent episode about AI. With the new iPhone release, we discuss the advantages of iCloud for users. There are some rumors swirling around Apple’s CEO succession plan and who might be stepping up to the plate. Follow this podcast CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes: Great Mariners story Listener comment Five Perks for iPhone Users Who Pay for iCloud Storage Two new things in iOS 26.1 Beta 2 New TAG Heuer Smartwatches Now ‘Made for iPhone’ Apple’s next CEO Shows and movies we’re watching The Girlfriend, Amazon Prime Alien Earth, Hulu

I've had my new AirPods Pro 3 for a couple of weeks,so Dave and I talk about the sound quality and the quality of the new noise cancellation. Apple announced the artist that will play the Super Bowl halftime show and there is a bit of controversy with its choice. There are rumors of Apple announcing five new products, all due to be released in October—we take a look at each of them. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• AirPods Pro 3 Music Producer review
• Bad Bunny confirmed as Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show performer
• AirPods Pro 3 Teardown: Still a Tragedy
• Apple will launch 5+ new products in October, here’s what’s coming
• Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses

Shows and movies we're watching

• A Nearly Normal Family, Netflix
• Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, Apple TV+
• Apple TV drops Mr. Scorsese trailer, Apple TV+

I’ve had my new AirPods Pro 3 for a couple of weeks,so Dave and I talk about the sound quality and the quality of the new noise cancellation. Apple announced the artist that will play the Super Bowl halftime show and there is a bit of controversy with its choice. There are rumors of Apple announcing five new products, all due to be released in October—we take a look at each of them. Follow this podcast Show Notes: AirPods Pro 3 Music Producer review Bad Bunny confirmed as Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show performer AirPods Pro 3 Teardown: Still a Tragedy Apple will launch 5+ new products in October, here’s what’s coming Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses Shows and movies we’re watching A Nearly Normal Family, Netflix Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, Apple TV+ Apple TV drops Mr. Scorsese trailer, Apple TV+

Apple's recently announced products have begun to arrive. I recieved my new AirPods Pro last week, so Dave and I talk about the new noise cancellation and if there is any difference in the sound. We also look at the new AirPod tip sizes and if those make any difference. Dave tells us about a phone call he had with Apple Support that he didn't like very much. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: OpenCase: A remarkable new iPhone case with an open space in the back so you can use a variety of accessories like a wallet and more. Go to https://theopencase.com/ to get 10 off. Show Notes:

• The new Apple shiny have arrived

Shows and movies we're watching

• Gracepoint, Peacock
• America’s Team, Netflix
• Pantheon, Netflix

Apple’s recently announced products have begun to arrive. I recieved my new AirPods Pro last week, so Dave and I talk about the new noise cancellation and if there is any difference in the sound. We also look at the new AirPod tip sizes and if those make any difference. Dave tells us about a phone call he had with Apple Support that he didn’t like very much. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: OpenCase: A remarkable new iPhone case with an open space in the back so you can use a variety of accessories like a wallet and more. Go to https://theopencase.com/ to get 10 off. Show Notes: The new Apple shiny have arrived Shows and movies we’re watching Gracepoint, Peacock America’s Team, Netflix Pantheon, Netflix

Dave got a chance to try out the translation feature on iOS this week. It's an app I've used many times during my travels to other countries. Apple did well again in this yeqar's Emmy Awards, and we talk about my favorite new product, the AirPods Pro. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: Private Internet Access: Go to https://www.piavpn.com/dalrymple to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free! Show Notes:

• Apple and the Emmys
• The back of Britt Lower’s acceptance speec
• Some Tahoe new shiny
• Your Mac Can Auto-Join an iPhone Hotspot in macOS Tahoe
• New Recovery Assistant
• AirPods Pro 3 First Look
• AirPods Pro 3 Use Acoustic Seal Test for Optimizing Sound Quality and ANC
• iOS 26 can notify you when your AirPods case is running out of battery

Shows and movies we're watching

• Hostage, Netflix
• ER, 30 YEARS later

Dave got a chance to try out the translation feature on iOS this week. It’s an app I’ve used many times during my travels to other countries. Apple did well again in this yeqar’s Emmy Awards, and we talk about my favorite new product, the AirPods Pro. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: Private Internet Access: Go to https://www.piavpn.com/dalrymple to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free! Show Notes: Apple and the Emmys The back of Britt Lower’s acceptance speec Some Tahoe new shiny Your Mac Can Auto-Join an iPhone Hotspot in macOS Tahoe New Recovery Assistant AirPods Pro 3 First Look AirPods Pro 3 Use Acoustic Seal Test for Optimizing Sound Quality and ANC iOS 26 can notify you when your AirPods case is running out of battery Shows and movies we’re watching Hostage, Netflix ER, 30 YEARS later

It was Apple's annual iPhone event this week where the company unvieled new AirPods Pro, Apple Watches, and a new line of iPhones. Dave and I talk about the product and give our thoughts on each one of them. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at https://linkedin.com/dalrymple to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes:

• Design Is How It Works
• AirPods Pro 3
• Apple Watch Series 11
• Apple Watch Ultra 3
• iPhone 17
• iPhone Air
• iPhone 17 Pro

Shows and movies we're watching

• 1923, Paramount+
• Godless, Netflix

It was Apple’s annual iPhone event this week where the company unvieled new AirPods Pro, Apple Watches, and a new line of iPhones. Dave and I talk about the product and give our thoughts on each one of them. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at https://linkedin.com/dalrymple to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes: Design Is How It Works AirPods Pro 3 Apple Watch Series 11 Apple Watch Ultra 3 iPhone 17 iPhone Air iPhone 17 Pro Shows and movies we’re watching 1923, Paramount+ Godless, Netflix

Apple has announced its September iPhone event. Dave and I talk about all of the products we expect to see and which ones we'd buy. Meta is using a lot of books to train its AI dataset, but it doesn't have permission to use them all. It seems the company is using books, including 15 that Dave wrote, without permission. Android is taking a page from Apple's app playbook and will soon require all apps to be registered by verified developers. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Meta's AI dataset
• Apple Event Announced for September 9: 'Awe Dropping'
• Five Things to Expect From Apple's 'Awe Dropping' September 9 Event
• Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers

Shows and movies we're watching

• Yellowstone, Peacock
• Kpop Demon Hunters, Netflix
• Rewatch of The Last of Us, HBO

Apple has announced its September iPhone event. Dave and I talk about all of the products we expect to see and which ones we’d buy. Meta is using a lot of books to train its AI dataset, but it doesn’t have permission to use them all. It seems the company is using books, including 15 that Dave wrote, without permission. Android is taking a page from Apple’s app playbook and will soon require all apps to be registered by verified developers. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Meta’s AI dataset Apple Event Announced for September 9: ‘Awe Dropping’ Five Things to Expect From Apple’s ‘Awe Dropping’ September 9 Event Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers Shows and movies we’re watching Yellowstone, Peacock Kpop Demon Hunters, Netflix Rewatch of The Last of Us, HBO

This week, Dave and I discuss the value of getting a new, but previous generation of MacBook instead of a brand new one. We also talk about Steve Wosniak and his views on wealth. Samsung is gaining market share from Apple in the U.S.—could this have anything to do with foldable phones? Follow this podcast Brought to you by: CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes:

• The 15" M3 MacBook Air is on sale for $1199
• Woz
• Highest-grossing sports film of all time
• Morgan Stanley says Apple stock could be ‘turning the corner’
• Samsung taking market share from Apple in U.S. as foldable phones gain momentum
• Apple Wallet app just made Amazon returns easy

Shows and movies we're watching

• Patience, PBS
• Superman
• Black Doves, Netflix

This week, Dave and I discuss the value of getting a new, but previous generation of MacBook instead of a brand new one. We also talk about Steve Wosniak and his views on wealth. Samsung is gaining market share from Apple in the U.S.—could this have anything to do with foldable phones? Follow this podcast Brought to you by: CleanMyMac: Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code DALRYMPLE for 20% off at clnmy.com/TheDalrympleReport Show Notes: The 15″ M3 MacBook Air is on sale for $1199 Woz Highest-grossing sports film of all time Morgan Stanley says Apple stock could be ‘turning the corner’ Samsung taking market share from Apple in U.S. as foldable phones gain momentum Apple Wallet app just made Amazon returns easy Shows and movies we’re watching Patience, PBS Superman Black Doves, Netflix

We've heard about Apple looking at releasing an AI robot in the past. The rumors are back and they also include Apple's foray into home security and smart displays. Apple's rumored revamped Siri will supposedly allow users to take action within an app using only Siri voice commands. MacRumors has a list of Apple's upcoming products that Dave and I talk about. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: Private Internet Access: Go to https://www.piavpn.com/dalrymple to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free! LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at https://linkedin.com/dalrymple to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes:

• Apple Plots Expansion Into AI Robots, Home Security and Smart Displays
• Apple Testing Revamped Siri With Apps Like Uber and YouTube
• Leaks: Apple’s coming products
• Apple Reportedly Planning to Offer In-Store iPad Repairs
• Amazon announces same day groceries, free for prime members

Shows and movies we're watching

• Dope Thief, Apple TV+
• Titans: The Rise of Hollywood, Netflix
• Sunday Best, Netflix, Ed Sullivan documentary

We’ve heard about Apple looking at releasing an AI robot in the past. The rumors are back and they also include Apple’s foray into home security and smart displays. Apple’s rumored revamped Siri will supposedly allow users to take action within an app using only Siri voice commands. MacRumors has a list of Apple’s upcoming products that Dave and I talk about. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: Private Internet Access: Go to https://www.piavpn.com/dalrymple to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free! LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at https://linkedin.com/dalrymple to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes: Apple Plots Expansion Into AI Robots, Home Security and Smart Displays Apple Testing Revamped Siri With Apps Like Uber and YouTube Leaks: Apple’s coming products Apple Reportedly Planning to Offer In-Store iPad Repairs Amazon announces same day groceries, free for prime members Shows and movies we’re watching Dope Thief, Apple TV+ Titans: The Rise of Hollywood, Netflix Sunday Best, Netflix, Ed Sullivan documentary

Dave's Apple Pencil died, so he replaced it with a new one. He gives us his thoughts on using it. Apple has committed more money to the U.S. as they partner with Corning to make glass for iPhone and Apple Watch in this country. ESPN is launching a new streaming service, but Dave and I are having trouble understanding how it's going to work for them. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Apple increases U.S. commitment to $600 billion, announces American Manufacturing Program
• Apple and Corning partner to manufacture 100 percent of iPhone and Apple Watch cover glass in Kentucky
• Apple’s new $100B US commitment got it a 100% chip tariff exemption
• Apple chipmaker TSMC says it too is exempt from US tariffs
• ESPN flagship streaming service to launch August 21

Shows and movies we're watching

• The One that Got Away, Acorn TV
• HBO gets some BritBox

Dave’s Apple Pencil died, so he replaced it with a new one. He gives us his thoughts on using it. Apple has committed more money to the U.S. as they partner with Corning to make glass for iPhone and Apple Watch in this country. ESPN is launching a new streaming service, but Dave and I are having trouble understanding how it’s going to work for them. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Apple increases U.S. commitment to $600 billion, announces American Manufacturing Program Apple and Corning partner to manufacture 100 percent of iPhone and Apple Watch cover glass in Kentucky Apple’s new $100B US commitment got it a 100% chip tariff exemption Apple chipmaker TSMC says it too is exempt from US tariffs ESPN flagship streaming service to launch August 21 Shows and movies we’re watching The One that Got Away, Acorn TV HBO gets some BritBox

Apple rarely has sales, but Amazon does. They are offering $200 off a new M4 MacBook Air—Dave and I look through the options of other models and see what the best deal is. Apple Music has a new feature in iOS 26 allowing users to pin items to the top of the page. Apple is starting its Manufacturing Academy in Detroit beginning in August. We look at some of the details of that initiative. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Amazon Is Selling M4 MacBook Airs for $200 Off
• Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19
• iOS 26: How to Use the New Music Pins Feature
• Apple stuff, signed by Steve Jobs, Woz, even Tim Cook

Shows and movies we're watching

• After The Flood, BritBox
• Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Paramount+
• Anora, Hulu

Apple rarely has sales, but Amazon does. They are offering $200 off a new M4 MacBook Air—Dave and I look through the options of other models and see what the best deal is. Apple Music has a new feature in iOS 26 allowing users to pin items to the top of the page. Apple is starting its Manufacturing Academy in Detroit beginning in August. We look at some of the details of that initiative. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Amazon Is Selling M4 MacBook Airs for $200 Off Apple Manufacturing Academy opens in Detroit on August 19 iOS 26: How to Use the New Music Pins Feature Apple stuff, signed by Steve Jobs, Woz, even Tim Cook Shows and movies we’re watching After The Flood, BritBox Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Paramount+ Anora, Hulu

It was a sad week for me and many other music fans around the world, as we learned that Ozzy Osbourne died. Ozzy meant a lot to me and my music. I'll miss him. Dave and I talk about using captions while watching TV, and we take a look at AppleCare One, Apple's new device insurance subscription. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• RIP, Ozzy
• Peter Cohen and Jim at Ozzfest
• Apple TV Captions
• Apple introduces AppleCare One
• Messages on iOS 26 will make it harder to fall for phishing scams

Shows and movies we're watching

• Tucci in Italy, Disney+
• The Bear, Season 4, Hulu
• Billy Joel: And so it goes, HBO

It was a sad week for me and many other music fans around the world, as we learned that Ozzy Osbourne died. Ozzy meant a lot to me and my music. I’ll miss him. Dave and I talk about using captions while watching TV, and we take a look at AppleCare One, Apple’s new device insurance subscription. Follow this podcast Show Notes: RIP, Ozzy Peter Cohen and Jim at Ozzfest Apple TV Captions Apple introduces AppleCare One Messages on iOS 26 will make it harder to fall for phishing scams Shows and movies we’re watching Tucci in Italy, Disney+ The Bear, Season 4, Hulu Billy Joel: And so it goes, HBO

Dave installed the latest beta of watchOS and found a new gesture that he really likes. I have one that I use a lot as well, so I'm not sure I'll change. Apple TV+ shows recieved an incredible amount of nominations for this year's Emmy Awards. The new tvOS now allows users to switch the keyboard to a grid, which is a welcome change. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Cal Raleigh, man of the people, The Big Dumper, wins Home Run Derby
• watchOS 26. Flick it
• Apple gets an astonishing 81 Emmy nominations
• Apple TV lets you change your search keyboard from linear (one line, across the screen) to a grid
• ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory

Shows and movies we're watching

• Mobland, Paramount+
• Ballard, Prime Video, from the Bosch universe
• Ya Never Know, Tom Selleck autobiography

Dave installed the latest beta of watchOS and found a new gesture that he really likes. I have one that I use a lot as well, so I’m not sure I’ll change. Apple TV+ shows recieved an incredible amount of nominations for this year’s Emmy Awards. The new tvOS now allows users to switch the keyboard to a grid, which is a welcome change. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Cal Raleigh, man of the people, The Big Dumper, wins Home Run Derby watchOS 26. Flick it Apple gets an astonishing 81 Emmy nominations Apple TV lets you change your search keyboard from linear (one line, across the screen) to a grid ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory Shows and movies we’re watching Mobland, Paramount+ Ballard, Prime Video, from the Bosch universe Ya Never Know, Tom Selleck autobiography

The turmoil at Apple is not new, but what is new is how some of the companies top AI engineers are leaving the company. The latest was lured away by Meta, who have just invested $3.5 billion in its artificial intelligence projects. Apple's longtime Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, has announced he's retiring. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes:

• Apple faces AI talent turmoil as senior Siri researcher departs
• Apple announces chief operating officer transition
• Apple Loses Key AI Executive to Meta's Multimillion-Dollar Hiring Spree
• Meta Invests $3.5 Billion in World’s Largest Eye-Wear Maker

Shows and movies we're watching

• Black Snow, AMC+
• Kleo, Netflix
• MurderBot, Apple TV+

The turmoil at Apple is not new, but what is new is how some of the companies top AI engineers are leaving the company. The latest was lured away by Meta, who have just invested $3.5 billion in its artificial intelligence projects. Apple’s longtime Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, has announced he’s retiring. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes: Apple faces AI talent turmoil as senior Siri researcher departs Apple announces chief operating officer transition Apple Loses Key AI Executive to Meta’s Multimillion-Dollar Hiring Spree Meta Invests $3.5 Billion in World’s Largest Eye-Wear Maker Shows and movies we’re watching Black Snow, AMC+ Kleo, Netflix MurderBot, Apple TV+

Dave got a new speaker assistant for his home... and it's powered by Alexa. We talk about how much better Alexa is than Siri and even throw in some comments about Gemini, Google's AI assistant (spoiler, it's better than Siri too). We also talk about charging one device off of anotherfor instance, charging your AirPods using your phone. And we look at some of the new features of Apple's new OSes. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Charge AirPods (or Even an iPhone) With Your iPhone
• iOS 26 Brings New Functionality to HomePod
• A few iOS 26 Best and Hidden Features
• iPhone Users Upset About Apple Promoting F1 Movie With Wallet App Notification

Shows and movies we're watching

• Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix
• Sally, Disney+

Dave got a new speaker assistant for his home… and it’s powered by Alexa. We talk about how much better Alexa is than Siri and even throw in some comments about Gemini, Google’s AI assistant (spoiler, it’s better than Siri too). We also talk about charging one device off of anotherfor instance, charging your AirPods using your phone. And we look at some of the new features of Apple’s new OSes. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Charge AirPods (or Even an iPhone) With Your iPhone iOS 26 Brings New Functionality to HomePod A few iOS 26 Best and Hidden Features iPhone Users Upset About Apple Promoting F1 Movie With Wallet App Notification Shows and movies we’re watching Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix Sally, Disney+

Have you ever shared your ETA with someone? Most of us have. Dave has a suggestion for how ETA should work in the future. We talk about the Apple's new design, Liquid Glass, and what drove the company to move in that direction for its OSes. We also talk about a new lawsuit that Apple faces over iCloud storage. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes:

• WWDC: The Bento Boxes
• On AR being the driver for Apple's Liquid Glass
• Apple must face consumer lawsuit over iCloud storage, US judge rules
• YouTube's Latest Move Against Ad Blockers: Video Delays

Shows and movies we're watching

• Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix
• Trailer to upcoming Springsteen biopic

Have you ever shared your ETA with someone? Most of us have. Dave has a suggestion for how ETA should work in the future. We talk about the Apple’s new design, Liquid Glass, and what drove the company to move in that direction for its OSes. We also talk about a new lawsuit that Apple faces over iCloud storage. Follow this podcast Brought to you by: LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Show Notes: WWDC: The Bento Boxes On AR being the driver for Apple’s Liquid Glass Apple must face consumer lawsuit over iCloud storage, US judge rules YouTube’s Latest Move Against Ad Blockers: Video Delays Shows and movies we’re watching Anatomy of a Scandal, Netflix Trailer to upcoming Springsteen biopic

Apple's annual WWDC was this week and there is a lot to unpack. We look at reactions from the keynote and dive into some of the announcements, like the new Liquid Glass interface, and of course, all of the new OS releases. There are some other featues that were announced as well, like AirPods translation that we'll talk about, as well. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• MGSeigler on WWDC
• Apple supercharges its tools
• AirPods are more versatile than ever with studio-quality audio recording and camera remote
• visionOS 26
• iPadOS 26
• Apple Intelligence gets even more powerful
• macOS Tahoe 26
• watchOS 26
• iOS 26
• Joanna Stern interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak

Shows and movies we're watching

• Dept. Q, Netflix
• Secrets We Keep, Netflix
• Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, Hulu

Apple’s annual WWDC was this week and there is a lot to unpack. We look at reactions from the keynote and dive into some of the announcements, like the new Liquid Glass interface, and of course, all of the new OS releases. There are some other featues that were announced as well, like AirPods translation that we’ll talk about, as well. Follow this podcast Show Notes: MGSeigler on WWDC Apple supercharges its tools AirPods are more versatile than ever with studio-quality audio recording and camera remote visionOS 26 iPadOS 26 Apple Intelligence gets even more powerful macOS Tahoe 26 watchOS 26 iOS 26 Joanna Stern interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak Shows and movies we’re watching Dept. Q, Netflix Secrets We Keep, Netflix Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, Hulu

The podcast takes a little twist this week as Dave and I talk about our love of popcorn and Dave's new gadget to help him get the perfect batch every time. We also talk about some of the rumors surrounding WWDC and what we should expect from the keynote on Monday. One of the things that is supposedly changing is the numbering of all the OSes begining with this year's releases. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Popcorn Gadget
• Apple Denied
• WWDC: What to expect
• Sky
• Apple OS numbering rebrand
• Apple, says nah

Shows and movies we're watching

• Dept. Q, Netflix
• Stick, Apple TV+
• Fountain of youth, Apple TV+

The podcast takes a little twist this week as Dave and I talk about our love of popcorn and Dave’s new gadget to help him get the perfect batch every time. We also talk about some of the rumors surrounding WWDC and what we should expect from the keynote on Monday. One of the things that is supposedly changing is the numbering of all the OSes begining with this year’s releases. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Popcorn Gadget Apple Denied WWDC: What to expect Sky Apple OS numbering rebrand Apple, says nah Shows and movies we’re watching Dept. Q, Netflix Stick, Apple TV+ Fountain of youth, Apple TV+

The biggest news this week was the purchase of Jony Ive's company, io, by OpenAI for $6.5 billion dollars. According to the reports, I've's company is a device startup. Sam Altman said he is “excited to try to create a new generation of AI-powered computers.” Epic Games and Apple are continuing to spare, although it seems like the battle is coming to an end. Follow this podcast LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Insta360 X5 Camera: Insta360 X5 Camera. To bag a free invisible selfie stick worth US$24.99 with your purchase, head to store.insta360.com and use the promo code "dalrymple", available for the first 30 standard package purchases only. Show Notes:

• Epic Games v. Apple: the fight for the future of the App Store
• Jony Ive to lead OpenAI’s design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company
• Check out the video of OpenAI's Sam Altman and Jony Ive
• What would you do if Steve Jobs quoted something you wrote?

Shows and movies we're watching

• Better, Hulu
• Netflix saves Sesame Street

The biggest news this week was the purchase of Jony Ive’s company, io, by OpenAI for $6.5 billion dollars. According to the reports, I’ve’s company is a device startup. Sam Altman said he is “excited to try to create a new generation of AI-powered computers.” Epic Games and Apple are continuing to spare, although it seems like the battle is coming to an end. Follow this podcast LinkedIn Jobs: LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. Terms and conditions apply. Insta360 X5 Camera: Insta360 X5 Camera. To bag a free invisible selfie stick worth US$24.99 with your purchase, head to store.insta360.com and use the promo code “dalrymple”, available for the first 30 standard package purchases only. Show Notes: Epic Games v. Apple: the fight for the future of the App Store Jony Ive to lead OpenAI’s design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company Check out the video of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Jony Ive What would you do if Steve Jobs quoted something you wrote? Shows and movies we’re watching Better, Hulu Netflix saves Sesame Street

Apple has introduced some new features in Apple Maps including a Detailed City Experience for the Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco. Maps also now has insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources, most notably the Michelin Guide. Did you know Pope Leo has his own trading card? Not only that, it set a new sales record, topping LeBron James. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Pete Rose reinstated
• Pope Leo XIV trading card sets Topps Now sales record, exceeds LeBron and Wemby milestone cards
• Apple Maps brings a custom Detailed City Experience to the Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco
• Apple brings insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources to Apple Maps
• CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, begins rolling out
• Universal Music Group and Apple Music announce Sound Therapy

Shows and movies we're watching

• Bad Sisters, Apple TV+
• It’s not TV. It’s HBO. Max.
• Conan O’Brien the Kennedy Center, Mark Twain prize for American humor, Netflix

Apple has introduced some new features in Apple Maps including a Detailed City Experience for the Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco. Maps also now has insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources, most notably the Michelin Guide. Did you know Pope Leo has his own trading card? Not only that, it set a new sales record, topping LeBron James. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Pete Rose reinstated Pope Leo XIV trading card sets Topps Now sales record, exceeds LeBron and Wemby milestone cards Apple Maps brings a custom Detailed City Experience to the Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco Apple brings insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources to Apple Maps CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, begins rolling out Universal Music Group and Apple Music announce Sound Therapy Shows and movies we’re watching Bad Sisters, Apple TV+ It’s not TV. It’s HBO. Max. Conan O’Brien the Kennedy Center, Mark Twain prize for American humor, Netflix

Some people have never used a cassette tape to listen to music, my kids being among them. This week Dave takes a little side route into one of his thoughts on listening to cassettes. We have spent a lot of time talking about things that Apple has done wrong this past year in regards to AI and Siri, so this week we change things up and talk about the things we love about Apple and what they have done right. Follow this podcast Show Notes:

• Dan Moren (Six Colors, Host of Inconceivable podcast) was on Jeopardy last night!
• Meta is reportedly working on facial recognition for its AI glasses
• Apple files appeal
• Is LLM memory going to Become the New iMessage Lock-in?
• Apple's new "Hands on with Apple Intelligence" video
• Apple, Google, and possible Gemini deal

Shows and movies we're watching

• Murder is Easy, BritBox
• Black Bag, Peacock

Some people have never used a cassette tape to listen to music, my kids being among them. This week Dave takes a little side route into one of his thoughts on listening to cassettes. We have spent a lot of time talking about things that Apple has done wrong this past year in regards to AI and Siri, so this week we change things up and talk about the things we love about Apple and what they have done right. Follow this podcast Show Notes: Dan Moren (Six Colors, Host of Inconceivable podcast) was on Jeopardy last night! Meta is reportedly working on facial recognition for its AI glasses Apple files appeal Is LLM memory going to Become the New iMessage Lock-in? Apple’s new “Hands on with Apple Intelligence” video Apple, Google, and possible Gemini deal Shows and movies we’re watching Murder is Easy, BritBox Black Bag, Peacock

Apple news, app reviews, and stories by Federico Viticci and friends.

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Chris tries to sell us some new Logitech gear, Matt tries to sell some old challenges, and both of them try to sell Niléane on something from IKEA. In the Cozy Zone, the gang review their charging habits. And let’s just say, one dad […]

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Chris tries to sell us some new Logitech gear, Matt tries to sell some old challenges, and both of them try to sell Niléane on something from IKEA. In the Cozy Zone, the gang review their charging habits. And let’s just say, one dad likes to over-engineer everything, while the other dad is in desperate need of a new USB-C cable. MacStories Unwind This week, John stumbles upon a restaurant with a thing for the Italian navy, Federico explores the Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and John has a movie pick. Comfort Zone, Episode 70, ‘When Did You Guys Do That?!’ Show Notes Main Topics Logitech MX Master 4 Logitech Signature Slim Solar+ keyboard Other Stuff We Talked About Helium Browser Aura Browser HÖSTULOTA Lampe USB à LED VATTENKAR monitor stand Cozy Zone For even more from the Comfort Zone crew, you can subscribe to Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is a weekly bonus episode of Comfort Zone where Matt, Niléane, and Chris invite listeners to join them in the Cozy Zone where they’ll cover extra topics, invent wilder challenges and games, and share all their great (and not so great) takes on tech. You can subscribe to Cozy Zone for $5 per month here or $50 per year here. MacStories Unwind, ‘Unwinding Delayed But Not Denied’ Show Notes Unplugged Segment John visits Florence, which is decorated with the Italian ensign flag Picks Federico’s Pick: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles John’s Pick: The Lost Bus on Apple TV+ Unwind Deal In honor of the release of Tron Ares… Tron Tron Legacy …both just $4.99 in the TV app. MacStories Unwind+ We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week. To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page. MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media. If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Brad Linder, writing for Liliputing: Earlier this year Synology announced that you’d need to use Synology-branded hard drives in its 2025 line of “Plus” branded network-attached storage devices if you wanted full functionality. While you could theoretically use a non-Synology drive with the Synology DiskStation DS225+, DS425+, DS925+ and other models, you’d be unable to create data […]

Brad Linder, writing for Liliputing: Earlier this year Synology announced that you’d need to use Synology-branded hard drives in its 2025 line of “Plus” branded network-attached storage devices if you wanted full functionality. While you could theoretically use a non-Synology drive with the Synology DiskStation DS225+, DS425+, DS925+ and other models, you’d be unable to create data storage pools, or use volume deduplication. As Linder reports, six months later, Synology has reversed course on what was a widely unpopular decision among Mac and PC users that was viewed by many as a way to lock them into overpriced drives unnecessarily. The change of direction was revealed in a Synology press release announcing DiskStation Manager 7.3, the OS that runs the company’s Plus line of NAS hardware. This is great news for Mac users who felt betrayed by Synology’s previous announcement. However, as Linder also points out it does not change the fact that the same “Plus” series of 2025 NAS hardware does not include hardware-accelerated transcoding of H.264 and HEVC video, which previous models supported. → Source: liliputing.com

Liquid Glass is the sort of change that takes some getting used to from the perspective of both users and developers. The design language shifted a lot over the course of the summer beta season, which made developers’ lives tougher than in some years. This has resulted in a variety of Liquid Glass implementations across […]

Liquid Glass is the sort of change that takes some getting used to from the perspective of both users and developers. The design language shifted a lot over the course of the summer beta season, which made developers’ lives tougher than in some years. This has resulted in a variety of Liquid Glass implementations across our favorite apps, which is a fascinating study in the range of designs Liquid Glass encompasses. Today, we wanted to share some of our favorite implementations of Liquid Glass and other features debuted this fall by indie developers. We’ll have more coverage in the weeks ahead, but let’s dive into some of the best OS 26 updates we’ve seen so far. Devon Art of Fauna From developer Klemens Strasser, Art of Fauna is a unique jigsaw puzzle game with a focus on accessibility and animal conservation. Each puzzle features a gorgeous wildlife illustration from the 18th or 19th century and can be solved either by aligning pieces of the picture or by rearranging written descriptions of the animal pictured phrase by phrase. Everything about the app, from the font to the colors to the complexity of the puzzle phrases, can be adjusted to fit each user’s needs. With its beautiful artwork, intuitive gameplay, ambient sound design, and adaptability, it’s no wonder the app won an Apple Design Award for Inclusivity this year. Version 1.8 of Art of Fauna came out alongside iOS 26 with Game Center integration and Liquid Glass design elements in its navigation buttons. But the most interesting new feature is integration with a new app from the team behind Structured called Awake. Put simply, Awake is an alarm clock app that helps you wake up by challenging you to accomplish a task before you can disable your alarm in the morning. With this integration, you can choose to make an Art of Fauna puzzle your morning mission, starting your day with some brain training and a beautiful puzzle. In Awake, you can select the difficulty level of the puzzle you’re presented with each morning, as well as whether you’d like the app to prefer unplayed puzzles over previously played ones. Art of Fauna is available on iPhone and iPad. It can be downloaded from the App Store and includes ten puzzles for free. There are 100 other puzzles available from five different biomes that can be purchased all at once for $8.99 or in packs of 20 for $2.99 each. 20% of all proceeds from the app are donated to nature preservation causes, and you can learn more about the supported causes in the app’s Giving Back section. Play Marcos Tanaka’s watch later utility is a go-to for many – myself included – when it comes to saving, organizing, and watching YouTube videos. With its latest update, version 2.6, Play has added several features enabled by iOS 26. First up is a Liquid Glass redesign. The sidebar, toolbar, and buttons are all elevated above the content and incorporate the transparent glass material. Buttons and view transitions now feature some fun animations, too, like when the ‘+’ button morphs into the Add Video popover once it’s tapped. The on-device Apple Intelligence model has enabled Tanaka to add a couple of new AI features as well. Each video’s detail view now includes a ‘Generate’ button that will create and present a text summary of the video’s contents. For those who want to get an idea of what a video is about before watching it, or for those who want a quick refresh on a video they’ve watched before, this feature will come in handy, and it’s a clever application of the on-device model now available to developers. Also, when adding tags to a video, Play can now suggest tags based on a video’s contents, both existing tags and new tags that you can create. Play is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple TV and can be purchased from the App Store for $2.99. Additional features, like subscribing to channels within the app and searching video transcripts, require a subscription to Play Premium, which costs $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $99.99 for a lifetime subscription. Things To-do app Things is putting its own spin on a Liquid Glass redesign with version 3.22. Its classic icon has been updated to fit the new design language. Buttons glow and dynamically morph into menus when pressed. The shape of the interactive blue-tinted ‘+’ button even slightly gives way if you grab it with your finger and move it around the screen. It’s a lot of fun to play with. What strikes me most about this update, though, is how very Things-y it still looks while staying in step with Apple’s new design direction. I think Things is the perfect example of an app maintaining a modern aesthetic even as it stays true to its unique design and heritage. It fits in perfectly with iOS 26; at the same time, it’s a natural progression of what came before, not a solid break. The new version of Things also incorporates platform-specific features introduced this year. The app is embracing iPadOS 26’s menu bar with an excellent set of menu items and keyboard shortcuts, including a ‘New Window’ item and the ability to create a tutorial project from the Help menu. Things controls are now available in Control Center on watchOS and macOS, and the app integrates with the Mac’s revamped Spotlight, too. And on visionOS, Things is one of the first third-party apps to offer visionOS-native widgets, a great option for keeping track of tasks on the Vision Pro. Things is available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. Each version can be purchased separately from its respective App Store: $9.99 for the iPhone and Apple Watch version, $19.99 for the iPad version, $49.99 for the Mac version, and $29.99 for the Vision Pro version. Things Cloud, the company’s cross-platform syncing service, is included with the purchase of the app on any platform. Widgetsmith David Smith and team have taken the opportunity with version 8 not only to update Widgetsmith’s design with Liquid Glass, but to reimagine the app’s main interface to make it easier for users to organize, create, and redesign their beloved Home Screen widgets. Between its glassy new navigation bar and rethought layout, the app has never looked better. The Widgets tab now features the ability to sort your widgets by size, type, and theme, with horizontally scrolling lists to make it easier to see an overview of your collection and find exactly what you need. Widget creation has been consolidated into a single screen accessed via the (nicely tinted) ‘+’ button in the upper-right corner. Once you’ve chosen a widget size and need to pick its type, you can take advantage of the new search bar – bottom-aligned, of course – to find the kind of widget you’re looking to make. Another big change has come to the way you apply themes to widgets. Now, when you’re editing a widget and get its theme just right, you can instantly apply that theme to any of your other widgets without the need to navigate away from the one you’re working on. In combination with the recent addition of automatic widget theming based on an image, this feature can help you get your new aesthetic up and running in no time. The latest version of the app also includes new backgrounds to match the latest iPhone models. Widgetsmith is available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro. It can be downloaded for free from the App Store, with some features like weather, interactive widgets, and photo filters requiring a subscription to Widgetsmith Premium, which costs $1.99/month or $19.99/year. Jonathan Sequel Popular media tracker – and MacStories Selects award winner – Sequel was recently updated for OS 26 on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, introducing some solid functional changes. Firstly, Sequel has been updated with Liquid Glass, and for my money, it’s one of the nicest implementations of a complicated new design system. Transparency feels good, and the content really sings with an enjoyable scrolling experience that doesn’t sacrifice information or legibility. Developer Roman Lefebvre has also taken the opportunity afforded by the new design to add a tab bar along the bottom of almost every screen. This tab bar addresses a long-standing issue that occasionally bothered me, which was the lack of quick access to the app’s three core sections: Saved, Collections, and Search. Previously, you needed to swipe back or go to the top of the screen to access them, but now, each of those sections is a quick tap away, down at the bottom of the screen near your thumb. Search is also more powerful, combining searches of your saved items with titles from the web. There’s even a handy new ⌘ + F shortcut to instantly access the search bar on the iPad and Mac. Sequel is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro as a free download. Additional features, such as Trakt syncing, release notifications, notes, and more, are available with a Sequel+ subscription, which costs $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $99.99 for a lifetime subscription. Croissant Croissant is my go-to app for cross-posting to multiple social media platforms. The app supports posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads with unlimited accounts. It has been updated with Liquid Glass, which has been carefully applied; however, the more significant updates are elsewhere. Firstly, there is a new Home view that combines drafts and recent posts in one unified view. It can be helpful to have, but if you still prefer to launch straight into the Compose view as I do, there is an option to default to that behavior. Next up is probably one of the app’s most valuable features: Account Groups. With this, you can group certain accounts together so that when you’re choosing where to send a post, you don’t have to tap on each account individually and risk making a mistake. I’ve found this helpful when creating separate posts for my personal and podcast accounts. There are lots of other excellent quality-of-life updates, including GIF support, reordering of threads while you are composing them, and the ability to add another reply to a post you have already sent. All in all, these updates are nice and chunky, and they’re worthy of a 2.0 release. Croissant is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac as a free download. To unlock its cross-posting features, you will need a subscription, which costs $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $59.99 for a lifetime subscription. µBrowser One of the hidden gems on watchOS, µBrowser allows you to browse the web directly from your Apple Watch. There are limits to this; for instance, some websites won’t load their images, and due to Apple platform restrictions, the app can’t store cookies. But for a quick glance at a favorite site, it can be handy in a pinch, negating the need to pull out your iPhone. I use µBrowser to quickly check the day’s headlines on The Verge or The Onion, and version 4.0 makes it even easier to do so with the addition of Control Center controls. This new feature in watchOS 26 allows third-party apps to place controls alongside current Control Center residents, such as iPhone Ping and Water Lock. I now have a bookmark that, when tapped, launches µBrowser directly into The Verge. It’s small but clever. µBrowser is available for $1.99 on the App Store. Countr Countr is an app that, well, counts! It allows you to manually count anything by creating a named item and then manually adding to the count as needed. You can even make a whole list of named counts. With version 4.0, Countr has been fully updated for all the 26 OSes and now supports Count Groups, which you can add your counts to and create group totals from. For example, I could count the number of words I write each week in my MacStories Weekly column for Club MacStories members, grouped by month, and compare the total over several months. You can also get more advanced with multipliers, but in a nutshell, that’s what Countr is for. In addition to adopting the new Liquid Glass design, Countr now supports multiple windows on the iPad, just in time for the introduction of the new windowing system in iPadOS 26. Version 4.0 also includes App Intents for automating your counts with Shortcuts and a completely redesigned Apple Watch app that perfectly mimics the iPhone app and features some lovely haptics. It’s a big update for a niche but useful app. Countr is available for free from the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with unlimited Count Groups and alternate app icons unlocked via a subscription that costs $0.69/month or $4.99/year. Chronicling Look, I’m someone who finds looking at charts a little boring; that’s just me. However, something I can’t deny is that Chronicling can make any chart or statistic look beautiful. Winner of Best Watch App at last year’s MacStories Selects awards, Chronicling allows you to track almost anything and has made some notable updates in version 1.6. Firstly, the entire app has adopted the Liquid Glass design, and developer Rebecca Owens has deployed the new design language thoughtfully, taking advantage of elements like minimal buttons to showcase more of the charts you create. Secondly, Chronicling has implemented Apple Intelligence to allow you to log various events simultaneously. Take, for example, the chores you might be tracking. You might have ’Bins Out’, ‘Wash Car’, and ‘Water Plants’. If you have a very productive morning and complete all three tasks simultaneously, you can quickly log them by tapping Smart Events and writing, “Log Bins Out, Wash Car, and Water Plants”. Apple Intelligence will detect these events and log them for you, providing a preview for your confirmation. I’m not a huge tracker of things, but in my testing, this technique seemed to work, if not perfectly (Apple Intelligence would very occasionally get stuck), then very well indeed. I can easily imagine someone like our own Devon, who tracks numerous tasks, finding a lot of use in this feature. Chronicling 1.6 also comes with some new Shortcuts actions and improvements to search and is available for free from the App Store. To unlock all features, a subscription is required, which costs $0.99/month, $9.99/year, or $39.99 for a lifetime subscription. John Gentler Streak By now, I’m sure MacStories regulars know I’m a big fan of Gentler Streak. I appreciate its low-key, encouraging approach to fitness and have used it continuously for a few years now. Gentler Streak’s Liquid Glass implementation is one of my favorites. The tab bar and buttons let the colors of the app’s maps and illustrations shine through without being distracting, and the wealth of information that Gentler Streak crunches about your workouts and wellness benefits from the way it fills the screen. I also appreciate how the section headers for Activities and Insights shrink as you scroll to make room for information about your workouts. The app’s functionality is largely the same as before, but the Liquid Glass animations bring it to life in a new way that seems to fit it perfectly. Some apps may work better with views that are largely static, but for a fitness app, a little bounce to encourage me to get out and get active is perfect. Gentler Streak is available from the App Store as a free download but requires a subscription or one-time purchase for some features. LookUp Vidit Bhargava spends a lot of time thinking about how we interact with apps, and it shows from LookUp’s latest update. The dictionary app, a longtime MacStories favorite, includes an excellent implementation of Liquid Glass that feels right at home. Like the other apps in this roundup, LookUp adopts the transparency of Liquid Glass both in the tab bar at the bottom of its main view and in the buttons throughout the rest of the app. Instead of adopting the more translucent frosted glass approach taken by some apps, LookUp’s tab bar and buttons are fully transparent in a way that’s reminiscent of the Photos app or Music. Unlike those apps, though, LookUp suffers from fewer legibility issues, thanks to its use of big, bold expanses of color and icons with a fill that offsets them from their backgrounds. Apart from the new design, LookUp has added three new ways to expand your vocabulary with interactive quizzes, example sentences, and conversational questions. For anyone working on growing their vocabulary – especially those for whom English isn’t their first language – these are excellent tools. What I appreciate most, though, is the thoughtful way Vidit has employed AI in LookUp. It’s always clear when the app is calling on a local or cloud model to support a feature, both visually (using a particle cloud to represent the AI generation process) and in the app’s text. It’s been fun to watch LookUp evolve over the years. It’s always been a beautiful app, but over time, it’s become a comprehensive tool for vocabulary building, drawing on the latest Apple technologies to stretch what it can do further. LookUp is available as a free download on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, with certain features requiring a $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual subscription, or a one-time payment of $59.99. Mercury Weather Mercury Weather started as a simple, beautifully designed weather app. Over time, the team at Triple Glazed Studios has built on that foundation, adding features without sacrificing the app’s design. With iOS 26, Mercury Weather 3.0 has adopted Liquid Glass, which suits the app well. The map, share, and globe buttons are all transparent, as are the elements in the satellite view. The app’s icon has been updated too. It’s a terrific implementation of iOS’ new design language that doesn’t get in the way of the app’s utility. Instead, Mercury Weather is right at home on iOS 26 with a fresh, modern look. Version 3.0 adds new features as well. One that I was happy to see, since we’re in the heart of hurricane season here in North Carolina, is hurricane and tropical storm tracking. The update shows a storm’s position, forecast cone, and other relevant data. There’s a new storm widget that comes in all available sizes and can be configured to show certain storm regions and other details. Another addition to Mercury Weather is tide forecasts for the U.S. and Canadian coasts. You’ll see current conditions and a 48-hour forecast when you’re in a coastal location or browsing one. Finally, Mercury Weather has added UV index and air quality data to its offerings. The current UV index is located under the current conditions in the app’s main view and can be tapped to get a 24-hour UV forecast. Air quality forecasts appear in the app whenever the AQI is predicted to reach moderate or high levels. If you passed on Mercury Weather before, now is a good time to take another look. With version 3.0, the app’s feature set is far deeper than when it launched, and its design and widgets make it a delight to use. Mercury Weather 3.0 is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch as a free download from the App Store, with monthly and annual subscription options as well as a one-time payment option. Todoist Todoist is a great example of how Liquid Glass doesn’t have to distract users. The app adopts the new tab bar style with the search button expanding horizontally when tapped with a bouncy animation. The selection bubble is present when moving across tabs, too. What you won’t find, though, is distracting text bleeding through the tab bar or buttons. The text is there, visible under the navigation elements, but I don’t find it distracting, especially when using a light theme where the tab bar and buttons have a frosted glass look that provides contrast against the app’s content. Text shines through more in dark mode, but most of Todoist’s tab bar uses filled icons that set them off nicely from the dark background. Overall, I like the effect a lot. My lists scroll beneath the tab bar and buttons from the top of my iPhone to the bottom, making the app feel more expansive. Todoist is available as a free download from the App Store for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and as a separate download on the Mac App Store, with certain features requiring a subscription. Matter Like Todoist, Matter, which is a read-later app for the iPhone and iPad, is a text-heavy app where how Liquid Glass is implemented matters a lot. The tab bar and other buttons in the main view use a frosted glass treatment that’s similar to Todoist. Plus, the tab bar shrinks, animating to the left to only show the selected tab and the search button when you begin scrolling a list. The design is similar when you view an article, except that the buttons move offscreen as soon as you begin scrolling, allowing what you’re reading to fill the page. It looks amazing. Matter has also added an Inbox tab, simplified its navigation, and made lists more readable. It’s a complete package that takes the design to a new level beyond a simple “check the box” Liquid Glass approach. Also included in the update are new text to speech voices that are easily the best of any read-later app I’ve tried. The AI-generated voices are more natural sounding, making listening much easier and more enjoyable than other apps. If, like me, you haven’t used Matter in a while, it’s a great time to revisit it. There’s a lot to be said for its elegant, simple approach to reading. Matter is available on the App Store as a free download with certain features requiring a subscription. World Clock Widgets My son is in Ireland, Federico is in Rome, and I have friends scattered across time zones here and abroad. I usually have a pretty good internal clock for everyone’s local time, but it all gets thrown out the window when I travel. Plus, the mental load of looking at the clock at home and doing time zone math in my head is just more than I want to deal with some days. That’s why I’ve been using World Clock Widgets for a long time now. My favorite feature is the Live Activity that shows me the time in Ireland and Rome and is triggered by a Focus mode that starts when I wake up in the morning. But there’s a lot more to World Clock Widgets than that. The app has been updated with Liquid Glass touches that you’ll notice in the treatment of buttons on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The glass style widgets look great on your iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen and the Mac’s desktop, too. As always, there are a lot of widgets, from small simple designs to extra large complex ones, to suit a variety of needs. My favorite new feature, though, is World Clock Widgets’ integration with AlarmKit. You can set an alarm based on the time anywhere in the world, and no matter where you are, the alarm will go off at the scheduled time. Another great addition is app actions, which appear in Spotlight search and give you quick access to time zone conversions as well as the time in cities you’ve saved in the main app. When you travel across time zones, or if you work with a remote team, World Clock Widgets can’t be beat. The app is available on the App Store as a free download with ads, which can be removed with a one-time payment of $4.99. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Well, that didn’t take long. In yesterday’s second developer beta of iPadOS 26.1, Apple restored the Slide Over functionality that was removed with the debut of the new windowing system in iPadOS 26.0 last month. Well…they sort of restored Slide Over, at least. In my review of iPadOS 26, I wrote: So in iPadOS 26, […]

Well, that didn’t take long. In yesterday’s second developer beta of iPadOS 26.1, Apple restored the Slide Over functionality that was removed with the debut of the new windowing system in iPadOS 26.0 last month. Well…they sort of restored Slide Over, at least. In my review of iPadOS 26, I wrote: So in iPadOS 26, Apple decided to scrap Split View and Slide Over altogether, leaving users the choice between full-screen apps, a revamped Stage Manager, and the brand new windowed mode. At some level, I get it. Apple probably thinks that the functionality of Split View can be replicated with new windowing controls (as we’ll see, there are actual tiling options to split the screen into halves) and that most people who were using these two modes would be better served by the new multitasking system the company designed for iPadOS 26. At the same time, though, I can’t help but feel that the removal of Slide Over is a misstep on Apple’s part. There’s really no great way to replicate the versatility of Slide Over with the iPad’s new windowing. Making a bunch of windows extra small and stacked on the side of the screen would require a lot of manual resizing and repositioning; at that point, you’re just using a worse version of classic windowing. I don’t know what Apple’s solution could have been here – particularly because, like I said above, the iPad did end up with too many multitasking systems to pick from. But the Mac also has several multitasking features, and people love the Mac, so maybe that’s fine, too? Slide Over will be missed, but perhaps there’ll be a way for Apple to make it come back. The unceremonious removal of Slide Over from iPadOS 26 was the most common comment I received from MacStories readers over the past month. I also saw a lot of posts on different subreddits from people who claimed they weren’t updating to iPadOS 26 so they wouldn’t lose Slide Over functionality. Perhaps Apple underestimated how much people loved and used Slide Over, or maybe – like I argued – they thought that multitasking and window resizing could replace it. In any case, Slide Over is back, but it’s slightly different from what it used to be. The bad news first: the new Slide Over doesn’t support multiple apps in the Slide Over stack with their own dedicated app switcher. (This option was introduced in iPadOS 13.) So far, the new Slide Over is single-window only, and it works alongside iPadOS windowing to put one specific window in Slide Over mode. Any window can be moved into Slide Over, but only one Slide Over entity can exist at a time. From this perspective, Slide Over is different from full-screen: that mode also works alongside windowing, but multiple windows can be in their full-screen “spaces” at the same time. On one hand, I hope that Apple can find a way to restore Slide Over’s former support for multiple apps. On the other, I feel like the “good news” part is the reason that will prevent the company from doing so. What I like about the new Slide Over implementation is that the window can be resized: you’re no longer constrained to using Slide Over in a “tall iPhone” layout, which is great. I like having the option to stretch out Music (which I’ve always used in Slide Over on iPad), and I also appreciate the glassy border that is displayed around the Slide Over window to easily differentiate it from regular windows. I feel, however, that since you can now resize the Slide Over window, also enabling support for multiple apps in Slide Over may get too confusing or complex to manage. Personally, now that I’ve tested it, I’d take a resizable single Slide Over window over multiple non-resizable apps in Slide Over. Between improvements to local capture and even more keyboard shortcuts, it’s great (and reassuring) to see Apple iterate on iPadOS so quickly after last month’s major update. Remember when we used to wait two years for minor changes? → Source: sixcolors.com

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, Federico and John demystify Model Context Protocol (MCP), covering how it works, where it’s heading, and practical examples of what it can do. On AppStories+, Federico and John experiment with whether AI can make sense of the information firehose. NPC: Next Portable Console […]

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, Federico and John demystify Model Context Protocol (MCP), covering how it works, where it’s heading, and practical examples of what it can do. On AppStories+, Federico and John experiment with whether AI can make sense of the information firehose. NPC: Next Portable Console This week, John and Brendon get excited about the rumors of an Anbernic DS clone, dig into weird and interesting news from Xiaomi, debate the merits of computer coasters, and update listeners on more pricey Windows handhelds and Lego’s Game Boy set. On NPC XL, John shares his first impressions of GeForce Now’s NVIDIA 5080 performance, and he and Brendon wonder what Microsoft is thinking with recent changes to Game Pass. First, Last, Everything Andrew Fyfe is a musician originating from Scotland. After starting out gigging in bands and crossing paths with the likes of Biffy Clyro and Lewis Capaldi, Andrew started learning about artificial intelligence. Now living in Japan, Andrew is the CTO and co-founder of Neutone, a company introducing AI to the music-making process, aiming to do so in a way that respects artists and doesn’t replace creativity. AppStories, Episode 455, ‘Making Sense of MCP: The Standard Connecting AI to Apps’ Show Notes Links and Show Notes Background Model Context Protocol (MCP) MCP Documentation MCP GitHub Repository Claude Desktop Extensions One-click MCP server installation for Claude Desktop Getting Started with Custom Connectors Using Remote MCP ChatGPT Developer mode Simon Willison on MCP Security Apps and Services Smithery.ai Zapier MCP Integration Shortwave Email Client Notion MCP Server Club MacStories on MCP HyperContext Behind the Scenes of My iOS and iPadOS 26 Review Why I Landed on Shortwave for Email and Stuck with It AppStories+ Post-Show FeedBin RSS Service Kagi News NPC, Episode 51, ‘Anbernic DS and Nose-Bleed Windows Handheld Prices’ Show Notes The Latest Portable Gaming News The Anbernic RG DS is “Almost Ready” for Prime time Xiaomi Turns Camera Bump into Retro Handheld The Xiaomi Pad Mini is the best Android tablet you can’t buy - here are my hands-on thoughts Qualcomm’s ultrathin Snapdragon X2 mini PC prototypes feature AirJet solid state cooling OneXfly Apex handheld gaming PC with AMD Strix Halo is on the way ASUS’ ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X Are Coming Soon: Here’s What You’ll Pay The Most Powerful Handheld in the World Lego Nintendo Game Boy review: a brick masterpiece just shy of perfection Behold: The Lego Game Boy has already been modded to play games for real NPC XL GFN Thursday GeForce RTX 5080 Coming to GeForce NOW Updates to Xbox Game Pass: Introducing Essential, Premium, and Ultimate Plans Xbox Cloud Gaming comes out of beta with improved 1440p resolution Subscribe to NPC XL NPC XL is a weekly members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month. Each week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon, and John record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic that is released alongside the “regular” NPC episodes. You can subscribe here. First, Last Everything, Episode 5, ‘Andrew Fyfe, CTO of Neutone’ Show Notes Andrew and Neutone Official Neutone website Neutone Blog Neutone on Instagram Neutone on TikTok Neutone on YouTube Introduction to Tone Morphing with Neutone Morpho – YouTube Andrew on X Andrew on LinkedIn Andrew’s Picks Andrew’s ‘First’: The Electric Guitar on Wikipedia Andrew’s ‘Last’: BEAM by Lunacy Audio Andrew’s ‘Everything’: VoxAC30 handwired Something The JooJoo Tablet MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media. If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

OpenAI announced a lot of developer-related features at yesterday’s DevDay event, and as you can imagine, the most interesting one for me is the introduction of apps in ChatGPT. From the OpenAI blog: Today we’re introducing a new generation of apps you can chat with, right inside ChatGPT. Developers can start building them today with […]

OpenAI announced a lot of developer-related features at yesterday’s DevDay event, and as you can imagine, the most interesting one for me is the introduction of apps in ChatGPT. From the OpenAI blog: Today we’re introducing a new generation of apps you can chat with, right inside ChatGPT. Developers can start building them today with the new Apps SDK, available in preview. Apps in ChatGPT fit naturally into conversation. You can discover them when ChatGPT suggests one at the right time, or by calling them by name. Apps respond to natural language and include interactive interfaces you can use right in the chat. And: Developers can start building and testing apps today with the new Apps SDK preview, which we’re releasing as an open standard built on the Model Context Protocol⁠ (MCP). To start building, visit our documentation for guidelines and example apps, and then test your apps using Developer Mode in ChatGPT. Also: Later this year, we’ll launch apps to ChatGPT Business, Enterprise and Edu. We’ll also open submissions so developers can publish their apps in ChatGPT, and launch a dedicated directory where users can browse and search for them. Apps that meet the standards provided in our developer guidelines will be eligible to be listed, and those that meet higher design and functionality standards may be featured more prominently—both in the directory and in conversations. Looks like we got the timing right with this week’s episode of AppStories about demystifying MCP and what it means to connect apps to LLMs. In the episode, I expressed my optimism for the potential of MCP and the idea of augmenting your favorite apps with the capabilities of LLMs. However, I also lamented how fragmented the MCP ecosystem is and how confusing it can be for users to wrap their heads around MCP “servers” and other obscure, developer-adjacent terminology. In classic OpenAI fashion, their announcement of apps in ChatGPT aims to (almost) completely abstract the complexity of MCP from users. In one announcement, OpenAI addressed my two top complaints about MCP that I shared on AppStories: they revealed their own upcoming ecosystem of apps, and they’re going to make it simple to use. Does that ring a bell? It’s impossible to tell right now if OpenAI’s bet to become a platform will be successful, but early signs are encouraging, and the company has the leverage of 800 million active users to convince third-party developers to jump on board. Just this morning, I asked ChatGPT to put together a custom Spotify playlist with bands that had a similar vibe to Moving Mountains in their Pneuma era, and after thinking for a few minutes, it worked. I did it from the ChatGPT web app and didn’t have to involve the App Store at all. If I were Apple, I’d start growing increasingly concerned at the prospect of another company controlling the interactions between users and their favorite apps. As I argued on AppStories, my hope is that the rumored MCP framework allegedly being worked on by Apple is exactly that – a bridge (powered by App Intents) between App Store apps and LLMs that can serve as a stopgap until Apple gets their LLM act together. But that’s a story for another time. → Source: openai.com

Amazon’s Big Deal Days runs today and tomorrow (October 7–8), so I thought I’d share some of the best deals I’ve discovered so far. We’ll be keeping an eye out for other deals and posting them on the MacStories Deals accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, too, so be sure to follow either for the very […]

Amazon’s Big Deal Days runs today and tomorrow (October 7–8), so I thought I’d share some of the best deals I’ve discovered so far. We’ll be keeping an eye out for other deals and posting them on the MacStories Deals accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, too, so be sure to follow either for the very latest finds. For prices, be sure to visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Portable SSDs: Samsung T9 and Lexar Armor 700 Events like Big Deal Days are always a great opportunity to pick up fast external SSD storage. I’ve used Samsung’s T line of external drives for years, starting with the T5. Lately, I’ve switched to the company’s T9 portable SSDs because they feature USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which offers the fastest transfers you can get short of something like Thunderbolt 4 or 5, delivering 2,000 MB/s. That’s plenty fast for working with big files or moving a bunch of smaller files from one device to another. I’ve used the T9 for Carbon Copy Cloner backups, Time Machine backups, editing in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, and moving my ROM library from one handheld device to another, and it’s been reliable in every case. During Big Deal Days, the biggest discount is on the 2TB model, with the 1TB model a close second. Depending on your storage needs, you can’t go wrong with either. More recently, I also started using Lexar’s Armor 700 Portable SSD. In fact, it was one of these drives that we used to transfer huge video and audio files from Apple’s podcast studio at WWDC back to my hotel room for editing. Like Samsung’s T9, Lexar’s drive features 2,000 MB/s transfer speeds, plus an aluminum case for heat dissipation, a rubberized exterior to help protect against drops, and IP66 water and dust resistance. I’ve been using the 1TB model of the Armor 700, but it’s the 4TB model that’s on the deepest discount during Big Deal Days. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Logitech: MX Keys S, Keys-to-Go 2, and POP Mouse Logitech has gone all-in for Amazon’s big sales event, too. There are a bunch of keyboards, mice, and other accessories on sale, but I’d focus on these three: The MX Keys S for Mac was my go-to keyboard for years. I’ve switched to Apple’s Magic Keyboard more recently, but if you’re looking for an alternative low-profile keyboard made for the Mac, this is a great pick. Keys-to-Go 2 is the keyboard I throw in my bag when I need to connect to a handheld gaming device, or when I want a keyboard “just in case” but don’t want to carry my iPad’s Magic Keyboard case. The replaceable watch battery it came with is still going strong, and the integrated cover keeps it from getting damaged. It’s not the most ergonomic keyboard ever designed, but it’s perfect for lightweight travel. I got a POP Mouse for the same reason I have Logitech’s Keys-to-Go 2 keyboard. It’s a good lightweight on-the-go mouse I can connect to multiple devices. I love that it comes in bright colors, too. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Displays: ASUS ProArt and LG Ultragear OLED My Apple Studio Display has served me well, but I’ve been eyeing a couple of alternatives lately that would be great for work and gaming. The first is the ASUS ProArt Display PA278QV. Asus’ ProArt lineup is packed with excellent Studio Display alternatives that are a fraction of the cost. The PA278QV is a 27” 1440p 75Hz IPS display with 100% sRGB, 100% Rec. 709 wide color gamut, and lots of I/O. When it comes to gaming, the LG 27GS93QE Ultragear OLED Gaming Monitor is even more tempting. It features a 27” OLED display with a 240Hz refresh rate, a 0.03 ms response time, and support for NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. That’s a gaming word salad that adds up to an excellent display at a very good price during Big Deal Days. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Entertainment: 8BitDo Ultimate 3-Mode Controller and Beats Studio Pro Headphones Speaking of gaming displays, now is also a great time to pick up a controller. The 8BitDo Ultimate 3-Mode Controller, which was released earlier this year, is a great pick. It features Hall effect joysticks and works with the Xbox, Apple devices, Windows, and Android, making it a terrific all-around choice. I’ve had an Ultimate 3 since earlier this summer and love it. The build quality has a premium feel, and it’s one of the most comfortable controllers I’ve ever used. Beats Studio Pro Wireless Headphones are also on sale during Big Deal Days and pair nicely with gaming and music setups. The Studio Pros include spatial audio, active noise cancellation, lossless audio over USB-C, and 40 hours of battery life. With support for Apple and Android baked in, the Studio Pros are versatile too. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Audio Automation: Elgato’s Stream Deck XLR The Elgato Stream Deck XLR is also discounted during Big Deal Days. We all use our Macs for video and audio calls more than ever. With Elgato’s Stream Deck XLR, you can plug an XLR microphone directly into a Stream Deck and use it to automate your calls and recording sessions, all while consolidating the number of devices you need to have on your desk. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Systems: TP-Link’s Deco BE85 There are a bunch of Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems on sale during Big Deal Days, but I highly recommend looking at TP-Link’s Deco BE85 system. Both Federico and I have been running this one since the spring, and it’s been a big upgrade to my wireless network. I’ve noticed the biggest difference when working with large files that I need to upload or download from my laptop and when I’m streaming games on services like NVIDIA GeForce Now. Having used Eeros, Orbis, and Asus systems in the past, I’ve found the TP-Link Deco system the easiest to manage and its Wi-Fi 7 support a big step up from my prior Wi-Fi setups. For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront. Alright, folks, that’s it for now. As I said at the top, I’ll be posting any additional finds on the MacStories Deals accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, so give one of those a follow and brace yourself for a barrage of savings. Also, as always, for more gear recommendations, don’t miss the MacStories Setups page, where Federico and I share our favorite gadgets for work and play. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Yesterday, Digital Foundry published their review of the iPhone 17 Pro, which as you’d expect, focuses on the Pro model’s gaming capabilities. Tested against iPhone 13 and 15 Pros and using a series of benchmark tests as well as real-world gameplay, Digital Foundry’s tests revealed significant improvements in several areas, including: GPU performance; Ray tracing […]

Yesterday, Digital Foundry published their review of the iPhone 17 Pro, which as you’d expect, focuses on the Pro model’s gaming capabilities. Tested against iPhone 13 and 15 Pros and using a series of benchmark tests as well as real-world gameplay, Digital Foundry’s tests revealed significant improvements in several areas, including: GPU performance; Ray tracing capabilities; Second-generation dynamic caching; and Improved thermals. Benchmarks are one thing, but Digital Foundry’s tests also revealed real-world benefits to the iPhone 17 Pro, such as: a 60% performance increase over the iPhone 15 Pro on Resident Evil Village, the elimination of freezing and big frame rate drops in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, more reliable 30 fps gameplay in Death Stranding. Those are significant improvements in just two generations of the A-series chips. What really caught my eye, though, was the impact of cooling. The iPhone 17 Pro uses a vapor chamber and aluminum chassis to help cool the device and keep its chips running at full speed longer. When Digital Foundry placed the 17 Pro on a desk fan, it became clear just how important that cooling is. Running a benchmark stress test with air blowing across the back of the iPhone 17 Pro reduced the performance drop by roughly 50%. With those sorts of results, I expect external cooling solutions like this X5s telescopic controller and FX5 Cooler combo from GameSir to become a popular accessory in the coming year, so of course, I’ve ordered one and will report back soon. → Source: youtu.be

Gamery is the ultimate video game library app for iPhone and iPad—designed to look and feel right at home on Apple platforms. With a simple, stunning design now refreshed for iOS 26 and a beautiful new app icon, Gamery makes managing your games as sleek and enjoyable as playing them. Everything is thoughtfully built to […]

Gamery is the ultimate video game library app for iPhone and iPad—designed to look and feel right at home on Apple platforms. With a simple, stunning design now refreshed for iOS 26 and a beautiful new app icon, Gamery makes managing your games as sleek and enjoyable as playing them. Everything is thoughtfully built to feel fast, fluid, and perfectly native across Apple devices. Importing your games has never been easier. Gamery offers powerful importing options for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Epic Games Store, and more, so you can build your collection in seconds instead of hours. A brand-new Home tab keeps you updated with monthly PlayStation Plus titles, Xbox Game Pass releases, and Epic Games Store freebies, so you never miss what’s new. Once your library is set up, Gamery helps you stay organized with powerful filters, collections, unified search, and widgets for quick access right from your Home Screen or Lock Screen. Whether you want to track your playthrough progress or just browse your collection in style, Gamery keeps everything in one beautifully designed place. And on iPad, use the power of multiple windows and keyboard shortcuts to move through your library with ease. If you love great design, powerful features, and effortless importing, Gamery makes tracking your games simple, beautiful, and fun. Download Gamery today for free and check out some limited-time discounts for the Gamery+ subscription by visiting gamery.app/sale. Our thanks to Gamery for sponsoring MacStories this week. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Niléane gets sporty and frosty, Chris is drowning in new Apple products, and Matt oversees the battle for the nicest iPhone wallpaper (where everyone wins). MacStories Unwind This week, Federico tries to recover from a rough week, John brings some Southern cooking to the […]

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: Comfort Zone Niléane gets sporty and frosty, Chris is drowning in new Apple products, and Matt oversees the battle for the nicest iPhone wallpaper (where everyone wins). MacStories Unwind This week, Federico tries to recover from a rough week, John brings some Southern cooking to the show, Federico has a long backlog of videogames to attend to, and John has an Apple TV+ show and an album to share. Magic Rays of Light Sigmund is joined by 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller to highlight Paul Greengrass’s emotional California fire triumph-over-disaster movie, Apple Music’s next Super Bowl half-time show headliner, and the indefinite postponement of The Savant. Comfort Zone, Episode 69, ’Nice’ Show Notes How would you have done our challenges? How would you answer the question at the end of the show? Let us know! Want more from the gang? Cozy Zone is a bonus podcast every Monday where we let loose on all sorts of fun topics. You can get cozy with the Comfort Zone crew for just $5/month or $50/year, which not only makes the bonus episodes possible, but supports Comfort Zone, too. Main topics Apple Sports comes to more countries FotMob Frosty Everything Apple announced in September Other stuff we talked about Tapback wallpaper set (🚨 WARNING, downloads may not work…) Chris’s wallpaper (alt link) Briar Rose wallpaper Cozy Zone For even more from the Comfort Zone crew, you can subscribe to Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is a weekly bonus episode of Comfort Zone where Matt, Niléane, and Chris invite listeners to join them in the Cozy Zone where they’ll cover extra topics, invent wilder challenges and games, and share all their great (and not so great) takes on tech. You can subscribe to Cozy Zone for $5 per month here or $50 per year here. MacStories Unwind, ’Nights, Weekends, and Holidays’ Show Notes Links and Show Notes Links and Show Notes Unplugged Southern Cooking Pecan Pie Pimento Cheese Dip Fried Okra Picks Federico’s Pick: Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles Triple Click Tactics episode Hades II Donkey Kong Bananza Hollow Knight: Silksong Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Pokémon Legends: Z-A Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo Despelote Mika and the Witch’s Mountain John’s Pick: Slow Horses, Season 5 on Apple TV+ Michigander by Michigander MacStories Unwind+ We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week. To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page. Magic Rays of Light, Episode 186, ‘The Lost Bus, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl, and The Savant’s Postponement’ Show Notes Special Guest Co-Host Chance Miller * 9to5Mac * 9to5Mac Daily * 9to5Mac Happy Hour Highlight * The Lost Bus * Paradise by Lizzie Johnson Apple Audio * Beats Fit Pro * MKBHD’s AirPods Pro 3 Review Trailer Talk * Knife Edge: Chasing Micheline Stars * Loot S3 * Down Cemetery Road * Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost Apple Original News * Global sensation Bad Bunny to perform at Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show | NFL * Schmigadoon! Is headed to Broadway | Entertainment Weekly * The Hunt First Look * The Savant Postponed | Deadline Releases * The Sisters Grimm * Immersive: Elevated — Maine Apple Arcade Releases * Dominoes: Classic Tile Game+ by MobilityWare * Piffle+ by Hipster Whale * Thomas & Friends: Let’s Roll+ by StoryToys Extras * Chief Of War — The Olowalu Massacre | Apple TV+ * Chief of War — Another Take with Temuera Morrison | Kahekili Fights Kūpule Scene | Apple TV+ * Chief of War — Another Take with Jason Momoa | Cliff Fight Scene | Apple TV+ * Highest 2 Lowest — Spike Lee & Denzel Washington’s Collaborative History | Apple TV+ * Foundation — Foundation, Fact, or Fiction | Apple TV+ * Platonic — Season 2 Bloopers | Apple TV+ * Pluribus — Taking Out the Trash | Apple TV+ * Slow Horses — See London the Slow Horses Way | Apple Maps The Watchlist * Rabbit Trap * Caught Stealing * Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale * Spinal Tap II: The End Continues * The Toxic Avenger * The Naked Gun * Bring Her Back * Shell * Steve * The Threesome * Twinless * One Day in October Up Next * Abbott Elementary * Chad Powers MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media. If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Late yesterday, Apple pulled ICEBlock and similar apps from the App Store under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, according to Fox Business News. ICEBlock is a crowd-sourced app used to track the location of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their […]

Late yesterday, Apple pulled ICEBlock and similar apps from the App Store under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, according to Fox Business News. ICEBlock is a crowd-sourced app used to track the location of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so, [Attorney General Pam] Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital. In a statement to Fox, Apple acknowledged pulling ICEBlock and similar apps saying: We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store. Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, which briefly held the top spot in the App Store’s social networking category, told Fox that the app has more than 1.1 million users. Aaron told Fox Business News that he intends to fight ICEBlock’s removal. → Source: foxbusiness.com

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, Federico and John follow up after a week with new Apple hardware and dig into watchOS and visionOS 26. On AppStories+, John is mixing up his link and data organization systems - again. This episode is sponsored by: Claude – Get 50% off […]

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts: AppStories This week, Federico and John follow up after a week with new Apple hardware and dig into watchOS and visionOS 26. On AppStories+, John is mixing up his link and data organization systems - again. This episode is sponsored by: Claude – Get 50% off Claude Pro, including access to Claude Code. NPC: Next Portable Console This week, AYANEO introduces it’s most affordable handheld yet, but it’s not part of its budget line of devices. Plus, Qualcomm’s new chips pack a punch and the GDP Win 5 pack a punch, while Sony expands its Pulse line with desktop speakers. This week on NPC XL, Federico’s disenchantment with the Sony PS5 kicks off a conversation about what’s been a very weird console generation. First, Last, Everything This week, Jonathan is joined by Esther Huybreghts. Esther is the Co-founder of the multi-award-winning app, PokPok. Since the app launched in 2021, it’s won an App Store award, an Apple Design award, and many other commendations. Pok Pok was also recently included on TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2025. Pok Pok is a really special app, and Esther talked about its inception, plans for the future, and staying strong against negative – and sometimes hateful – feedback. AppStories, Episode 454, ‘AirPods Pro 3, iPhone Air, and a Cable Quest’ Show Notes Hardware Update AirPods Pro 3 iPhone Air iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone 17 Pro Max: The First Three Days - MacStories watchOS and visionOS 26 watchOS 26: The MacStories Review Moving From the Apple Watch Ultra 1 to the 3 visionOS 26: The MacStories Review UVSee Portal: Remote Play NPC, Episode 50, ‘Budget or Power Play: AYANEO and GPD Move in Opposite Directions’ Show Notes The Latest Portable Gaming News AYANEO Pocket Air Mini is an entry-level Android handheld that sells for under $100 Qualcomm’s New Chips Qualcomm Debuts Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, Its Next-Gen Laptop Chips Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Introducing Pulse Elevate – Sony Interactive Entertainment’s first wireless speakers for desktop gaming GDP Win 5 Follow-Up The Most Powerful Handheld Is Here! GPD Win 5 First Look - YouTube The Most Powerful Handheld - GPD Win 5 - Quick Look - YouTube Subscribe to NPC XL NPC XL is a weekly members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month. Each week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon, and John record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic that is released alongside the “regular” NPC episodes. You can subscribe here. First, Last Everything, Episode 4, ‘Esther Huybreghts’ Show Notes Get 25% off Pok Pok: https://my.playpokpok.com/checkout?promocode=MACSTORIES25 Snowman Games Alto’s Odyssey on the App Store and Apple Arcade Pok Pok Official Site Pok Pok on the App Store Pok Pok — Calm Learning Videos for Kids on YouTube Pok Pok wins an Apple Design Award in 2021 Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Pok Pok —- Esther’s ‘First’ pick: FUJIFILM Digital Q1 Esther’s ‘Last’ pick: Kobo sn Esther’s‘ Everything’ pick: Apple iPad Pro on Wikipedia ‘Something’: Builder.ai - “How This A.I. Company Collapsed Amid Silicon Valley’s Biggest Boom” - The New York Times(Gift Article) MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media. If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

There’s a lot coming to Apple TV+ this month, and this is your handy guide to all of it, including trailers, and calendar links you can use to be sure you don’t miss their premieres. Let’s dig in. The Lost Bus (October 3) First off this month is The Lost Bus, which is premiering this […]

There’s a lot coming to Apple TV+ this month, and this is your handy guide to all of it, including trailers, and calendar links you can use to be sure you don’t miss their premieres. Let’s dig in. The Lost Bus (October 3) First off this month is The Lost Bus, which is premiering this Friday. The movie, which is directed by Paul Greengrass, stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. The story is based on the real-world events of the 2018 Camp Fire in California and is based on the 2021 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” by Lizzie Johnson. McConaughey plays a school bus driver trying to get a group of students and their teacher to safety during the fire. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar The Sisters Grimm (October 3) Also debuting on October 3rd is “The Sisters Grimm,” a new animated series that follows two orphaned sisters who navigate a town packed with people from fantasy and fairy tale stories. The series is based on Michael Buckley’s bestselling book series and features the voices of Ariel Winter as Sabrina and Leah Newman as Daphne. The series blends discovery, fantasy and adventure designed to appeal to all ages. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar The Last Frontier (October 10) The Last Frontier is a thriller starring Jason Clarke as Frank Remnick, a U.S. marshal in charge of wilderness in Alaska. The story follows the crash of a prisoner transport plane, which sets violent inmates loose across the rugged landscape. The series, which explores the mysteries behind the crash airs the first two episodes of a 10-episode run beginning next week. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar Loot, Season 3 (October 15) Loot is one of my favorite Apple TV+ comedies. Now in its third season, the series returns on October 15th. In season three, Maya Rudolph’s Molly Wells and her assistant head to a remote island to embark on what will be a 10-episode season that airs on Wednesdays. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar Mr. Scorsese (October 17) Mr. Scorsese is a 5-part documentary that follows the career of filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Directed by Rebecca Miller, the documentary follows Scorsese’s life and artistic journey from NYU film student to legendary director through interviews with luminaries such as Robert De Niro, Mick Jagger, and Steven Spielberg, as well as unprecedented access to the director himself and his archives. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (October 24) Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, which is directed by Ben Stiller, tells the story of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. The documentary will debut on October 17th in theaters with the Apple TV+ debut coming the following week. Stiller explores what Apple calls a “home, where the lines between creativity, family, life and art often blurred,” an intriguing framing that should make the documentary a great complement to Mr. Scorsese. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar Down Cemetery Road (October 29) Down Cemetery Road is an eight-episode thriller written by Morwenna Banks, who wrote Slow Horses, one of my all-time favorite shows, for Apple TV+. The series is based on the book of the same name by Mick Herron who also wrote the Slow Horses book series. The story follows the disappearance of a girl from an Oxford suburb after a house explosion. The series, which stars Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson promises to be an exciting conspiratorial story full of twists and turns, which is the sort of show I love. Add to your Calendar: iCal Google Calendar That’s up for now. If you’re not listening to MacStories Unwind, please give it a try. I’m sure you’ll hear more about some of these shows and movies from me and Federico in the coming weeks as they debut. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Source: Logitech. Today, Logitech introduced an updated version of its MX Master series mouse dubbed the MX Master 4. It’s a good upgrade, but the changes are largely incremental; while I like it a lot, the MX Master 4 won’t be for everyone. Logitech sent me the MX Master 4 to try, and I’ve been […]

Source: Logitech. Today, Logitech introduced an updated version of its MX Master series mouse dubbed the MX Master 4. It’s a good upgrade, but the changes are largely incremental; while I like it a lot, the MX Master 4 won’t be for everyone. Logitech sent me the MX Master 4 to try, and I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks, so I thought I would share what the experience has been like so far. I’ve been a fan of Logitech’s MX Master line of mice since the 2S, and before the MX Master 4 showed up at my door, I was using the MX Master 3S mouse for Mac. It’s comfortable, has a great scroll wheel, and is highly customizable. However, the soft touch surface over most of the top did mean it got dirty quite easily. Source: Logitech. That’s changed with the MX Master 4. Gone is most of the soft ribbed surface of the 3S. Instead, both of the MX Master 4’s buttons and most of its body are made of hard plastic. There is still some soft touch material along the right-hand side and under the surface where you place your thumb, which helps you grip the mouse. However, the top surfaces where my MX Master 3S got dirty are all hard surfaces that shouldn’t discolor and are easy to wipe off. At first glance, it’s easy to mistake the MX Master 4 for the 3S. The overall shape of the top of the mouse is similar, but you’ll notice that there are fewer seams around the buttons, and the slope of the underside that rises to meet the top of the mouse is more dramatic. The effect is a more sleek, modern look. On the bottom of the mouse, which is flatter than the 3S’s, you’ll also find a different pattern for the smooth pads that help the MX Master 4 glide along your table or desk. According to Logitech, the six black screws on the bottom of the mouse are designed to make the mouse easier to take apart for recycling or repair, too. Also gone is the silver strip of plastic along the base of the MX 3S as well as the silver underside. Instead, everything about the MX Master 4 is color-matched, with the buttons also encased in a semi-transparent plastic that gives the device a more futuristic look. Source: Logitech. As for connectivity, Logitech has finally updated its wireless Bolt receiver with a USB-C connector. Logitech says that the new receiver and antenna in the MX Master 4 combine for a 2× stronger connection than the 3S. With USB-C adoption so widespread today, most people should have no trouble finding a place to plug in the Bolt receiver. However, you can also connect via Bluetooth, and like the mouse that it replaces, the MX Master 4 can be paired with up to three different devices. Logitech has also incorporated haptic feedback into the MX Master 4. As you use it, you’ll feel tactile responses from automations, shortcuts, and notifications. For example, when you first set up the mouse and download its software, you’ll feel haptic responses acknowledging that your mouse has been properly set up. And if you use the Actions Ring feature, a menu of shortcuts that can radiate from your pointer thanks to Logitech’s Options+ software, you’ll get haptic feedback when you mouse over the options, as well as when you select one. The Actions Ring has been given a dedicated button on the MX Master 4 that sits under your thumb, and it shows a lot of potential. The feature reminds me of a Stream Deck or a similar device like Logitech’s own Creative Console. Instead of hardware, though, the Actions Ring is hardware-activated software that allows you to assign different actions to its buttons that can change based on the app you’re using. I haven’t used the Actions Ring extensively yet, but the convenience of having a dedicated button for frequently used menu items and other actions under my thumb is something I’m excited to spend more time with. Other notable features of the MX Master 4 include the quietest button clicks of any MX Master mouse yet, up to 70-day battery life, and optical tracking of up to 8,000 DPI. Source: Logitech. The updates to the MX Master 4 are not monumental, so 3S users whose mice are in good shape may want to hold off on updating. However, if you’ve never tried the MX Master series of mice, or if you’re still using an older 2S or similar model, the new MX Master 4 is an excellent upgrade. The build quality is superb, plus the inclusion of haptics and the highly customizable Actions Ring add to the overall experience of using the MX Master 4. The MX Master 4 mouse comes in Graphite and Pale Gray globally and Black and Graphite Charcoal in North America and Europe. The MX Master Mouse for Mac comes in White Silver and Space Black and doesn’t include the Bolt receiver but is otherwise the same as the MX Master 4 mouse. Both variants are available now for $119.99 directly from Logitech and will ship in October. Amazon has the MX Master 4 in stock, too, listing October 5 as the delivery date. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

Source: Apple. Earlier today, Apple published a press release highlighting some of the apps that are taking advantage of its new Foundation Models framework. As you’d expect, indie developers and small teams are well-represented among the apps promoted in the press release. Among them are: Smart Gym Stoic Journal Motivation CellWalk VLLO Detail Signeasy Essayist […]

Source: Apple. Earlier today, Apple published a press release highlighting some of the apps that are taking advantage of its new Foundation Models framework. As you’d expect, indie developers and small teams are well-represented among the apps promoted in the press release. Among them are: Smart Gym Stoic Journal Motivation CellWalk VLLO Detail Signeasy Essayist Agenda OmniFocus 4 It’s a group of apps that does a great job of demonstrating the breadth of creativity among developers who can leverage these privacy-first, on-device models to enhance their users’ experiences. Apple’s happy to see developers adopting the new framework, too. Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said: We’re excited to see developers around the world already bringing privacy-protected intelligence features into their apps. The in-app experiences they’re creating are expansive and creative, showing just how much opportunity the Foundation Models framework opens up. From generating journaling prompts that will spark creativity in Stoic, to conversational explanations of scientific terms in CellWalk, it’s incredible to see the powerful new capabilities that are already enhancing the apps people use every day. Judging what we’ve seen from developers here at MacStories, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. I expect you’ll see more and more of your favorite apps adding features that take advantage of the Apple Foundation Models in the coming months. Access Extra Content and Perks Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade. What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan. Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more; Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts; Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio. Learn more here and from our Club FAQs. Join Now

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]

POLL: What iPhone are you ordering today? POLL RESULTS HERE (edit: fixed link to a better view! Thanks /u/Rytoxz!) (edit 2: I can't change the colors of the pie chart so I can't make it match the phone's colors. Try to view it on a computer, if you can - hovering over the results will tell you what choice the the percentage corresponds to) NOTE: This survey does not require you to sign in to Google, so results might be skewed as anyone can vote multiple times. Hey /r/Apple! In an attempt to curb the number of threads about pre-order choices/configurations, shipping statuses, etc, we are asking that all discussion about it remain in here. We are setting the sort of this thread to new so that users receive the latest updates at the top of the thread when they open the comments. Links: Landing pages: iPhone iPhone 17 iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone Air Apple Watch Apple Watch Series 11 Apple Watch SE 3 Apple Watch Ultra 3 AirPods AirPods Pro 3rd Gen Buying pages iPhone iPhone 17 iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone Air Apple Watch Apple Watch Series 11 Apple Watch SE 3 Apple Watch Ultra 3 AirPods AirPods Pro 3rd Gen Other helpful links iPhone Upgrade Program iPhone Compare Page Apple Watch Compare Page AirPods Compare Page submitted by /u/exjr_ [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/chrisdh79 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/chrisdh79 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/HelloitsWojan [link] [comments]

Archive link: https://archive.ph/DhwvD submitted by /u/iMacmatician [link] [comments]

✨ Apple Intelligence summary: Apple is significantly expanding its Security Bounty programme, doubling the top award to £1.6 million for exploit chains similar to sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks. The programme will also introduce Target Flags, a new way for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards. These updates, effective November 2025, aim to encourage advanced research on critical attack surfaces and provide insights to protect users of over 2.35 billion active Apple devices worldwide. submitted by /u/favicondotico [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Tom42-59 [link] [comments]

Apple takes CONTROL! You will soon be able to enter the Oldest House on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro alongside Mac. Play with a game controller, or tap into the action with touch controls. Discover a world unknown when Control arrives on these platforms in early 2026. submitted by /u/Fidler_2K [link] [comments]

“Live translation in your ears.” 🎧 – Time Magazine Special Mention: Watch Series 11 ⌚️ submitted by /u/Designer-Border-711 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/spearson0 [link] [comments]

This is definitely one of the nicest intros Apple's ever done. submitted by /u/VaderCraft2004 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Snoop8ball [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/HelloitsWojan [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/nohup_me [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/FollowingFeisty5321 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/HelloitsWojan [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/iMacmatician [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/adobeflashcrashed [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/chrisdh79 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/digidude23 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/iMacmatician [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/favicondotico [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/FollowingFeisty5321 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/lemonfunction [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/HelloitsWojan [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]

Always used windows and Samsung (z fold) prior to this year. So far I love Apple TBH. Never thought I would ever say this. submitted by /u/YngFijiWtr [link] [comments]

This feature was removed some time ago, but how would you feel if they brought it back? I personally miss it dearly and would prefer to use my phone in landscape mode. Thoughts? submitted by /u/CanadianDave [link] [comments]

16e also doesn’t have Action mode. I was actually kind of surprised to find out submitted by /u/Mysterious_Bug_5760 [link] [comments]

First one is from where I am seated with 1x. Second one is from the same seat with 8x. submitted by /u/avicenne13 [link] [comments]

I upgraded from the iPhone 12 mini to iPhone 16 pro max. Why didn’t I get the 17, is because I wanted titanium. submitted by /u/TheFabUV [link] [comments]

Am I the only one that thinks the pink iphone 15 makes me want to bite the translucent camera bump? It looks like such a good candy submitted by /u/Dazzling_Effort_2168 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/NOT_NativeEN_Speaker [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/random__zeus [link] [comments]

iPhone SE Gen 1 to IPhone 14 Pro Max submitted by /u/skullfucyou [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/OtherwisseBerry [link] [comments]

It feels like a good upgrade from the 11 pro max 🫠 submitted by /u/gmcc14 [link] [comments]

I don’t even know why to be honest. The 13 pro max feels like a brick with the 15 pro max feeling slightly less like a brick while this feels like the 11 pro max aka the most ergonomic phone I’ve ever had and I’m still of the opinion that the straight edges were a huge mistake ergonomics wise. submitted by /u/Eclipsetube [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Prudent_Zucchini1561 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Parking-Cow4107 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Anne-77 [link] [comments]

The upgrade was overdue! So much faster and feels amazing. submitted by /u/International-Eye208 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Desert_Eagler [link] [comments]

T submitted by /u/mrbiggzstuff [link] [comments]

Yesterday my mom’s phone burst into flames at work. She reached for it to plug it in, and noticed the screen was glitching out. A huge plume of smoke came out and then it started hissing, and finally it caught fire in a shower of sparks — seemingly for no reason whatsoever. They had to evacuate her department and they threw the device in her recycling bin and doused it with the fire extinguisher (hence the pics) What happened with it? She hasn’t had issues with it before, and it never suffered any bad drops. What does she do with it now? Thanks!! submitted by /u/teeraveis [link] [comments]

Finally got my iPhone Air and decided to try going caseless for the first time. Picked up a camera lens protector so I can put it down without worrying about scratches. Didn’t go with a clear one since most of the pics I saw had bubbles or that weird trapped air look. Went with a metal-blue protector instead and it looks super clean. Also threw on a wet-skin that is transparent for the back, went with a wet-apply one since i really wanted it to stick good and not have any airbubbles, went on smooth, totally invisible. People who’ve held the phone didn’t even realize it had a skin. It feels really nice in the hand too. Now I don’t have to worry about scratching the back or the Apple logo when I use my MagSafe charger or the Anker Nano battery pack. submitted by /u/ScootCS [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/poshpolly [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/rustyscythe [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/gtibzl [link] [comments]

On the left is iPhone 15 pro. On the right it's my new iPhone 17 pro. The settings are same. Tell me, is this normal camera behavior or should I return it? submitted by /u/George_Mountain_ [link] [comments]

N submitted by /u/macsneaker [link] [comments]

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” —Steve Jobs, The New York Times, 2003 “Neon: 1. Shinjuku” by Hannah Peel & Manchester Collective https://apple.co/Neon-Shinjuku #AppleEvent #AppleDesign #iPhone17 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 Underdogs are ready for their first-ever trade show until a PC outage strikes and the Blue Screen of Death threatens their beloved Container Con. Thanks to the security of their Apple products, the Underdogs are unaffected and experience extraordinary success. See how the magic of Mac, iPhone, and iPad comes together to help the Underdogs meet potential clients, bag new business, and even lend a hand to a fellow packaging company. This is Apple at Work. Learn more (U.S.): https://apple.co/3Itt6ax Original Music by Hauschka: https://apple.co/Underdogs-Hauschka 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.

Commissioned by Apple. @jacksonwang on the set of “Let Loose” with 8x optical-quality zoom. #ShotoniPhone17Pro #Shorts

This is iPhone 17 Pro. With a durable design and 48MP Pro Fusion camera system, it’s the ultimate Pro. It has a heat-forged aluminum unibody, and Ceramic Shield now protects the back, while on the front the new Ceramic Shield 2 has 3x better scratch resistance. iPhone 17 Pro is loaded with the most cinematic camera we’ve ever made, featuring an 8x optical-quality zoom to get even closer to the action. Learn more about iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max: https://apple.co/47RqgGB “Come Rain Or Come Shine” by Connie Francis https://apple.co/Come-Rain-Or-Come-Shine #iPhone17Pro #iPhone17ProMax 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.

It’s a win-win whichever you choose: iPhone 17 Pro, our most pro iPhone yet, or iPhone Air, our thinnest iPhone ever. #GuidedTour #iPhone #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #iPhone17

Meet the new iPhone family: iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Air and iPhone 17. Which one will you choose? #GuidedTour #iPhone #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #iPhone17

We’ll guide you through the big news about the powerful iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the all-new iPhone Air—our thinnest iPhone ever, and the amazing iPhone 17. It’s a win-win whichever you choose: find out which new iPhone is right for you. While you watch, you’ll get a closer look at the new colors and features that make this such an impressive iPhone lineup. 00:09 - Introduction 02:40 - iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max 05:11 - iPhone Air 07:05 - iPhone 17 08:29 - Trade In Compare the new iPhone lineup: https://apple.co/46d6dQe Meet the new iPhone family: https://apple.co/3IcNhco #GuidedTour #iPhone #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #iPhone17 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.

Real people share how Apple Watch has changed and even helped save their lives—a fitness story in New York, a teen’s struggle with mental health in the UK and powerful health and safety stories from the U.S., Japan, and Canada. Learn more: https://apple.co/4meEXH7 #AppleWatch #AppleEvent #Apple 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.

This is iPhone Air. Super thin. Strikingly light. Shockingly strong. Powered by the new A19 Pro chip, which is built for Apple Intelligence. Fitted with our new 18MP Center Stage front camera and an advanced 48MP Fusion camera system that enables Dual Capture, Action mode, next-generation portraits, and much more. All with remarkable all-day battery life. Learn more about iPhone Air: https://apple.co/46i77el “Lambent Rag” by Clark https://apple.co/Clark-Lambent-Rag #iPhone #iPhoneAir #AppleEvent #Apple 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.

Introducing iPhone 17 Pro. Built from solid aluminum, a unique unibody encases our biggest battery with our longest battery life. The most powerful chip made for iPhone is cooled by an entirely new thermal system. Ceramic Shield protects the back as well as the front, and the display is 3x more scratch resistant. The most cinematic camera we’ve ever made captures ProRes RAW video. With a 56 percent larger sensor, the 8x optical-quality zoom gets you even closer to the action. It’s the first phone to offer genlock, for precise video synchronization and creating Hollywood-level effects. The ultimate Pro. iPhone 17 Pro. Learn more about iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max: https://apple.co/4ngsB2a “New Age Crisis” by Jean Dawson https://apple.co/New-Age-Crisis #iPhone #iPhone17Pro #AppleEvent #Apple 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 world’s best in-ear Active Noise Cancellation, with up to 2x more noise cancelled than AirPods Pro 2. Exceptional sound quality. All-new heart rate sensing during workouts. A more secure in-ear fit. IP57 dust, sweat, and water resistance. A clinical-grade Hearing Aid feature. Live Translation to communicate across languages. And improved battery life with up to 8 hours of listening time. Learn More: https://apple.co/3If6cDp “BLUH BLUH BLUH” by _BY.ALEXANDER https://apple.co/BLUH-BLUH-BLUH #AirPods #AirPodsPro #AirPodsPro3 #AppleEvent #Apple World’s best Active Noise Cancellation evaluation tested in July 2025 in accordance with IEC 60268-24 as compared with best-selling commercially available wireless in-ear headphones. Built-in heart rate monitor is intended for use during workouts with the Fitness app and compatible third-party apps on iPhone running iOS 26 and later. AirPods Pro 3 are dust, sweat, and water resistant for non-water sports and exercise. The Hearing Aid feature has received FDA authorization. This feature is supported on AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with a compatible iPhone, iPad, or Mac with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, or macOS Sequoia and later, and is intended for people 18 years old or older with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. Live Translation works when paired with an Apple Intelligence–enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later. Supports English (UK, U.S.), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain). For more information, see https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/. Battery life depends on device settings, environment, usage, and many other factors. 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.

Here’s a quick recap of the good things coming your way: iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Air — the thinnest iPhone ever, iPhone 17, AirPods Pro 3, Apple Watch SE 3, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11. Watch the full keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3KnMyojEQU #Apple #AppleEvent #iPhone17 #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #AppleWatch #AirPods 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.

Here’s major news from our latest event. Featuring iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Air, iPhone 17, AirPods Pro 3, and Apple Watch Series 11. #Apple #AppleEvent #iPhone17 #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #AppleWatch #AirPods

Watch the special Apple Event to learn about iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro. Plus Apple Watch Series 11, Apple Watch SE 3, Apple Watch Ultra 3, AirPods Pro 3, and more. To watch the event interpreted in American Sign Language (ASL) or hear it narrated via Audio Descriptions, please click here: https://youtu.be/deRUwoigBLg 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:59 AirPods Pro 3 00:13:07 Apple Watch Introduction 00:17:32 Apple Watch Series 11 00:23:05 Apple Watch SE 3 00:25:35 Apple Watch Ultra 3 00:29:43 iPhone 17 00:40:37 iPhone Air 00:54:15 iPhone 17 Pro “Neon: 1. Shinjuku” by Hannah Peel & Manchester Collective https://apple.co/Neon-Shinjuku “BLUH BLUH BLUH” by _BY.ALEXANDER https://apple.co/BLUH-BLUH-BLUH “Cisco Bay” by Loaded Honey https://apple.co/Loaded-Honey-Cisco-Bay “Dream” by Neggy Gemmy https://apple.co/Neggy-Gemmy-Dream “Obsession” by Oliver Sim https://apple.co/Oliver-Sim-Obsession “U-Bahn Ride (feat. Beaks)” by 1tbsp https://apple.co/1tbsp-U-Bahn-Ride “Mr Man” by Deki Alem https://apple.co/Deki-Alem-Mr-Man “We’ve Got A Good Thing Going” by Tseba https://apple.co/Weve-Got-A-Good-Thing-Going “Kneel” by Nilüfer Yanya https://apple.co/Nilufer-Yanya-Kneel “JV Gets the $$$” by Junior Varsity https://apple.co/Junior-Varsity-JV-Gets-The “Rainbow” by ATRIP https://apple.co/ATRIP-Rainbow “Bikini” by Nick León & Erika De Casier https://apple.co/Nick-Leon-Bikini “Lambent Rag” by Clark https://apple.co/Clark-Lambent-Rag “Touchdown” by NNAMDÏ https://apple.co/NNAMDI-Touchdown “New Age Crisis” by Jean Dawson https://apple.co/New-Age-Crisis “New York” by Addison Rae https://apple.co/Addison-Rae-New-York “All Night” by The Dare https://apple.co/The-Dare-All-Night “[Eyes On You]” by Bas & Galimatias https://apple.co/Bas-Eyes-On-You “Come Rain Or Come Shine” by Connie Francis https://apple.co/Come-Rain-Or-Come-Shine #AppleEvent #iPhone17 #iPhone17Pro #iPhoneAir #AppleWatch #AirPods #Apple 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 simple act of filming can be challenging for people with Parkinson’s. Often they are unable to capture their own memories. For Brett, Bette, and Ellen, every moment matters. With Action mode on iPhone, they can capture smooth hand-held videos and reclaim the joy of filming their favorite moments — supported by accessibility features like Voice Control, which help them operate the camera and navigate their iPhone with ease. “For someone like me, who’s been using cameras for 30 years, it being an option again is kind of life-changing.” — Brett Learn how people with Parkinson’s can use Action mode: https://youtube.com/shorts/X7Y262xvV94?feature=share Learn more about how to use Voice Control on iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg22JaZWAgs Learn more about how to use Touch Accommodations on iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TTOhANVkrA Learn how to track medications on iPhone: https://apple.co/474st0R Audio Descriptions: https://youtu.be/gR71flmTSrw #ShotOniPhone #Apple #Parkinsons #ActionMode 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’s 2025 iPhone lineup is finally here — and after weeks of testing all three models, I’m breaking down everything you need to know about the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro / Pro Max, and the brand-new iPhone Air. In this video, I’ll compare design, display, battery, performance, and cameras across every model — plus help you decide which one is worth your money. I’ll also give you my personal pick and why I think it’s the best all-around iPhone for 2025. If you’re deciding between the Air’s ultra-thin titanium design, the Pro’s new camera plateau and aluminum build, or the classic 17’s perfect balance of price and performance, this guide will help you figure it out. 📲 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!

This video is sponsored by Setapp. Try Setapp with an extended 30-day trial here - https://stpp.co/macrumors30 tvOS 26 might not have made as many headlines as iOS 26 or macOS Tahoe, but this update quietly brings some really useful upgrades to your Apple TV. From new personalization options like Liquid Glass posters and profiles on wake, to quality-of-life changes like default audio output and better FaceTime support — there’s a lot to explore here. In this video, I’ll walk you through the best tvOS 26 tips and tricks to help you get more out of your Apple TV, plus a few bonus pro tips for making your setup even smarter and more comfortable. 👇 Watch the whole video to see how to: • Personalize your Apple TV with new Liquid Glass posters • Automatically load your profile on wake • Use Apple Music Sing with your iPhone as a mic • Set your favorite third-party speaker as your default output • Use FaceTime with live captions and translation • Customize screen savers and more • Plus: hidden tips like color calibration, sleep timer, and remote tracking 🌐 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 00:20 – Liquid Glass + Posters 01:18 – Profiles on Wake 02:52 – Profiles: Dev login API 03:05 – Sponsor: Setapp 04:34 – Apple Music Sing (iPhone Mic) 05:19 – Default Audio Output (3rd-party) 06:03 – FaceTime: Redesign + Captions/Translate 07:04 – Custom Screen Savers 07:36 – Bonus Tips Intro 07:47 – Find Your Remote (iPhone) 08:20 – Night Mode: Reduce White Point 09:01 – Sleep Timer 09:35 – Grid Keyboard 10:07 – Color Calibration (iPhone) 10:46 – Up Next Queue on Home 11:14 – Picture-in-Picture 11:52 – Outro 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 all-new Powerbeats Fit are finally here, and they bring some big updates over the Beats Fit Pro. We’re talking a smaller case, more flexible wingtips for a better fit, improved battery life, and all the Apple H1 chip features like ANC, Transparency, Spatial Audio, and Find My support. In this video, I go hands-on with the Powerbeats Fit and walk through all the new features, plus I’ll share my thoughts on the design, fit, comfort, and sound quality. 👉 Powerbeats Fit are available now for $199 in Jet Black, Gravel Gray, Spark Orange, and Power Pink. 🌐 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!

Keep your phone protected & charged - use our link https://ridge.com/RUMORS to get a Ridge Power Bank 10% off! Sponsored by Ridge. The iPhone Air is Apple’s thinnest and lightest large iPhone yet, and after using it as my main device for the past couple of weeks, I have a lot of thoughts to share. From its titanium design and feather-light form factor, to the new Ceramic Shield 2 display, battery life, and camera limitations — this review covers it all. In this video, we’ll break down: • The design and build quality of the iPhone Air • Durability and real-world comfort • Display improvements including anti-reflective coating & 120Hz • Battery life and heat performance with the A19 Pro chip • Camera performance and what you miss with only one lens If you’re trying to decide between the iPhone Air, iPhone 17, or the Pro models, this video will help you figure out which one is right for you. Would you be able to live with less battery and just one camera in exchange for a super thin and light iPhone? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! 🌐 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 00:32 – Design 02:10 – Sponsor: Ridge 03:49 – Color Options 05:23 – Durability 06:06 – Display 06:58 – Performance 08:26 – Battery 10:06 – MagSafe Battery 11:11 – Living with one camera 12:53 – Selfie Camera & One Speaker 14:16 – 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!

I’ve been using the iPhone 17 Pro Max for a full week, and this thing is an absolute tank. In this video, I’m breaking down my experience with the design, durability, cameras, battery life, thermals, and more. The Cosmic Orange and Silver models I’ve been testing have held up perfectly, but there’s already some controversy around scratches on the Deep Blue variant. I’ll also share my thoughts on the new Ceramic Shield 2 display, the 8x telephoto lens, the 18MP front camera, and the insane battery performance powered by Apple’s new A19 Pro chip. If you’re deciding between the iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max, or even the iPhone Air, this video should help you figure out if the Pro Max is worth it after one week of real-world use. 🌐 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 00:21 – Design & durability 02:40 – Display durability 04:40 – Brightness & thermals 06:07 – Battery life 06:28 – Size & ergonomics 07:06 – Front camera 07:53 – Rear cameras & telephoto 09:45 – 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!

iOS 26 is officially here, and while most of the big updates have already been covered, there are a ton of hidden features, secret tricks, and small quality-of-life improvements that make the iPhone experience even better. In this video, we’ll break down some of the best unknown features in iOS 26 – from one-handed gestures to custom ringtones, smarter Photos search, Messages drafts, call-back reminders, MagSafe case-matched icons, and so much more. If you’re running iOS 26 on your iPhone, you’ll definitely want to check these out. #iOS26 #iPhoneTips #Apple 🌐 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 has just released its brand-new, budget-friendly Apple Watch SE 3, and it’s a much bigger upgrade than many expected. In this video, I break down everything that’s new compared to the Apple Watch SE 2 from 2022, including the addition of an Always-On display, faster charging, Apple’s new S10 chip, smarter health tracking features like sleep scores and sleep apnea detection, and even 5G connectivity for the first time. With all of these changes — and at the same $249 starting price — the SE 3 might be the most compelling Apple Watch upgrade in years. #AppleWatchSE3 #AppleWatch #Apple 🌐 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 & What’s New 00:18 – Always-On Display 01:00 – Durability & Glass Upgrades 01:21 – Faster Charging 02:03 – Sleep Tracking & Sleep Apnea 02:26 – Sleep Scores Explained 03:02 – Women’s Health Features 03:16 – New S10 Chip 03:50 – New Gestures (Double Tap & Wrist Flick) 04:36 – On-Device Siri Improvements 05:03 – 5G Connectivity 05:18 – Sizes & Colors 05:28 – Wrap Up / 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!

I’ve had more time with Apple’s brand-new iPhone 17 lineup — the iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max, and the super thin and lightweight iPhone Air — and here are my updated second impressions. From colors like Silver, Cosmic Orange, and Black, to the new aluminum build, rounded edges, upgraded 48MP cameras with 8x zoom, improved 18MP front camera with Center Stage, and the new vapor chamber cooling system… there’s a lot to cover. The iPhone Air continues to surprise me with how thin and light it is, while still packing a massive 6.5” display. Battery life and single-camera limitations are things I’ll be testing next, but early signs are super promising. Of course, the displays across all three models are stunning: ProMotion, Ceramic Shield 2, anti-reflective coating, and scratch resistance that’s already showing great results. 📲 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!

This video is sponsored by Casekoo. Visit the links below to receive up to 33% off a case for your new iPhone 17! #CASEKOO #MagicStand360 #iPhone17promax #iPhone17pro #iPhone17? US Amazon: https://amazn.so/macrumors UK Amazon: https://amazn.so/macrumorsuk Website: https://casekoo.com/macrumors I’ve been using the new iPhone 17 for a little over a week, and this year Apple gave the standard model some huge upgrades that make it feel more Pro than ever. From the new 6.3-inch OLED display with 120Hz ProMotion, to Ceramic Shield 2 with insane scratch resistance, to the new 48MP Ultra Wide camera and big jump in battery life, the iPhone 17 is a massive improvement over last year’s iPhone 16. In this video, I’ll break down what’s new, what’s actually better in day-to-day use, and how it compares directly to the iPhone 16 after a week of real-world testing. Should you upgrade? Let’s find out. 🌐 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 00:37 – Size & form factor (6.3” sweet spot) 01:07 – Display upgrade (OLED, 120Hz ProMotion, Always-On) 01:35 – Ceramic Shield 2 durability (no scratches) 02:17 – Anti-reflective coating & brightness (1000 / 1600 / 3000 nits) 02:41 – Sponsor: Casekoo 04:23 – Design & new colors (Mist Blue, Lavender, Sage, etc.) 04:53 – A19 performance & thermals 05:50 – Front camera: 18MP, Center Stage, auto orientation 06:41 – Rear cameras: 48MP main + 48MP ultra wide (macro), thoughts on telephoto 07:30 – Battery life (30 hrs) & faster charging (40W / 25W MagSafe) 08:18 – Connectivity (Apple N1, Bluetooth 6) 08:46 – Final thoughts: 17 vs 16 and who should upgrade 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!

iPadOS 26 is here, and Apple is making the iPad feel more Mac-like than ever. From windowed apps and the iconic traffic light buttons to a dynamic menu bar, Exposé, advanced file management, and even the Preview app — this update pushes the iPad closer to being a true laptop replacement. In this video, I walk you through all the new Mac-inspired features in iPadOS 26, including: • Windowed multitasking with resizing and tiling • Mac-style red, yellow, and green stoplight controls • Exposé for a smarter app switcher • A dynamic menu bar with app-specific commands • A supercharged Files app with default app settings • Folders in the Dock and customization options • The Preview app with Apple Pencil support • Real background tasks like video exports in Final Cut Pro The line between iPad and Mac has never been thinner. Is this the year the iPad finally replaces your laptop? Let me know in the comments! 🌐 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 – iPadOS 26 Overview 00:37 – New Windowed Apps Mode 01:25 – Resizing & Tiling Windows 01:39 – Mac-Style Traffic Light Buttons 02:16 – Exposé App Switcher 02:37 – New Menu Bar 03:09 – Files App Upgrades 03:54 – Preview App on iPad 04:16 – True Background Tasks 04:44 – 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!

This video is sponsored by Setapp. Try Setapp with an extended 30-day trial here - https://stpp.co/macrumors30 macOS 26 is finally here, and this might be Apple’s best Mac update in years. In this video, I’ll walk you through all the new features — from the Liquid Glass design and Control Center updates to the brand-new Spotlight with Actions, clipboard history, and app shortcuts. You’ll also see how macOS 26 brings the Phone app to the Mac for the first time, plus smaller but super useful features like Markdown export in Notes, auto-categorized lists in Reminders, and pinned collections in Photos. On top of that, two new apps join the lineup: Journal and Games — giving Mac users new ways to stay organized and entertained. Performance has been rock-solid throughout the beta and now with the public release, and I think macOS 26 really nails the balance between fresh design, smarter tools, and Apple ecosystem consistency. What’s your favorite new macOS 26 feature? Spotlight? The Phone app? Let me know down in the comments! 👍 Don’t forget to subscribe for more Apple coverage, macOS tips, and hands-on reviews. 📲 Read more: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/16/10-macos-tahoe-features/ 🌐 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 00:25 – Design Updates 01:23 – Spotlight Improvements 02:08 – Actions & Shortcuts 02:51 – Launchpad is now "Apps" 03:07 – Sponsor: Setapp 04:22 – Control Center 05:13 – Shortcuts Automations 05:42 – Finder Customization 06:03 – New Apps 07:18 – Other Small Updates 07:56 – Performance 08:41 – Wrap Up 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!

Switch to Tello today and start saving on wireless plans for your new iPhone 17 by visiting https://tello.com/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=macrumors&src=partner&mdm=cpc&cmg=macrumors Apple’s iOS 26 update is FINALLY here, and in this video we’re breaking down all the new features you need to know. From the brand-new Liquid Glass design language to call screening, Hold Assist, live translation, Visual Intelligence upgrades, and even fun extras like Automix in Music and the new Games app — there’s a lot to cover. What do you think of iOS 26 so far? 📲 Read more: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/15/apple-releases-ios-26/ 🌐 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 00:25 – New Liquid Glass Design 01:20 – Icon & Lock Screen Customization 02:00 – Sponsor (Tello) 03:20 – Phone & Messages Updates 04:37 – Live Translation 05:02 – Visual Intelligence 05:34 – Apple Maps Visited Places 05:53 – Music Automix 06:09 – New Games App 06:26 – Photos App Redesign 06:46 – Final Thoughts & Performance 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!

It’s been one week with Apple’s brand new AirPods Pro 3, and the upgrades are more noticeable than you might think. The low end is punchier, ANC and Transparency are improved with new microphones and software, and the new memory foam–wrapped silicone tips make for the best fit yet. In this video, I share my one-week-later review of AirPods Pro 3, covering sound quality, noise cancellation, fit, and even the case changes that might surprise you. If you’re wondering whether AirPods Pro 3 are worth upgrading from AirPods Pro 2, this review might help you decide. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 – Intro 00:40 – Sound Quality 01:19 – Case Changes 02:00 – Fit & Ear Tips 03:09 – Heart Rate Tracking 04:30 – Noise Cancellation 04:56 – Transparency Mode 05:20 – Mic Test 05:50 – Battery Life 06:27 – Final Thoughts 🌐 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 just announced its 2025 lineup: AirPods Pro 3, Apple Watch Series 11, Ultra 3, and SE 3. I went hands-on with all of them, and here’s everything you need to know. AirPods Pro 3 refine the experience with a more comfortable fit, better-balanced sound with stronger low end, improved transparency mode, and a lighter case with a new capacitive button. Apple Watch SE 3 is the biggest upgrade to the budget model in years, now with an always-on display, S10 chip, Double Tap, 5G, temperature sensing, sleep apnea detection, on-device Siri, fast charging, and more. Apple Watch Series 11 brings 5G, better durability, a jump to 24 hours of battery life, hypertension detection, and the new Sleep Score feature. Apple Watch Ultra 3 adds satellite connectivity for emergencies and messaging off-grid, the largest and fastest-refreshing display ever on an Apple Watch, a huge battery life boost, and new safety and fitness features. This lineup is all about refining the Apple ecosystem across health, safety, and performance. Which new product are you picking up? 🌐 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 00:43 – AirPods Pro 3 03:35 – Apple Watch SE 3 04:42 – Apple Watch Series 11 05:42 – Apple Watch Ultra 3 07:55 – Wrap-Up 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 17 Pro and Pro Max are finally here, and I have to say — these feel like the most complete Pro iPhones Apple has released in years. The new design is gorgeous, with a full-width aluminum camera bump and a two-tone aluminum + glass look that feels incredibly premium in the hand. Apple also added a new anti-reflective coating to the displays (same sizes as last year) that makes them less reflective and more scratch resistant. Inside, the A19 Pro chip and 12GB of RAM power everything, and the Pro Max gets a massive battery — even if it’s slightly thicker this year, that’s a trade-off I’ll gladly take. Cameras are a huge step up too, with a 48MP telephoto capable of 8x optical crop. Other highlights: vapor chamber cooling for better sustained performance, the return of the camera control + action buttons, and a brand-new dual video recording feature in the Camera app. And let’s not forget the colors — Apple finally gave us an orange Pro model! It’s a darker orange, almost bronze, and it looks stunning. Dark blue and matte black also stand out this year, making this one of the toughest color decisions yet. 🌐 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, iPhone, iPad, Mac News and Rumors

Apple is planning to release a base MacBook Pro with a standard M5 chip before higher-end models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, according to AppleInsider's sources with "knowledge of macOS Tahoe development and hardware testing."


The report said a MacBook Pro with an M5 chip is "nearing release," and Apple has apparently been testing this model with an unreleased macOS 26.0.2 version.

14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are expected to follow in early 2026, with macOS 26.3 preinstalled, the report added. Following beta testing, macOS 26.3 will likely be released in January.

There is precedent for a decoupled launch. Apple updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip in November 2020, but 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips did not debut until October 2021. Then, the 13-inch MacBook Pro was updated with the M2 chip in June 2022, with 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips following in January 2023.

That trend stopped once the 13-inch MacBook Pro was discontinued. The entire 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro lineup was updated with M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips all at once in October 2023, and 14-inch and 16-inch models with M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips debuted simultaneously in October 2024.

Last month, U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) documents surfaced for only a single unreleased MacBook Pro model, which further suggests that Apple might be planning to release a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip soon, followed by higher-end models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips early next year.

In fact, this split launch could explain why rumors flip flopped between late 2025 and early 2026 timeframes. Ultimately, it sounds like it will be both.

Other devices expected to be updated with the M5 chip this year include the iPad Pro and the Vision Pro. It is still not clear if Apple plans to host an October event, or if it will announce new products with press releases and shorter videos only.

An early unboxing video for the next iPad Pro already revealed that the M5 chip will offer up to 12% faster multi-core CPU performance, and up to 36% faster graphics performance, compared to the M4 chip in the current iPad Pro. The chip still has a 9-core CPU, and it is manufactured with TSMC's third-generation 3nm process.

Bigger changes to the MacBook Pro are expected with the two-generations-away models, with rumored upgrades including an OLED display, touchscreen capabilities, a thinner design, built-in cellular connectivity, and M6 chips manufactured with TSMC's advanced 2nm process, for even greater year-over-year performance gains.

New models of the MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Studio are not expected to launch until next year, but the report did not mention the Mac Pro desktop tower.Related Roundup: MacBook ProTag: AppleInsiderBuyer's Guide: MacBook Pro (Don't Buy)Related Forum: MacBook Pro
This article, "Apple Rumored to Launch MacBook Pro With M5 Chip Before M5 Pro and M5 Max Models" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

This week was Prime Big Deal Days, and although the event is officially over, we're still tracking great leftover discounts on Amazon. This includes ongoing low prices on AirPods 4, MacBook Air, iPads, and more.

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.

AirPods

• What's the deal? Take up to $120 off AirPods Max, AirPods 4, and more


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

$40 OFFAirPods 4 for $89.00
$61 OFFAirPods 4 (ANC) for $118.99
$79 OFFAirPods Pro 2 for $169.99
$120 OFFAirPods Max USB-C for $429.00

Numerous AirPods models have been discounted this week, with the most notable being the AirPods 4 for $89.00, down from $129.00. The AirPods Pro 2 are also at a solid $79 discount right now.

Apple Accessories

• What's the deal? Get record low prices on AirTag, iPhone 17 cases, and more


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

$9 OFFAirTag for $19.99
$34 OFFAirTag 4-Pack for $64.99
UP TO 25% OFFiPhone 17 Cases at Amazon

There are a few accessories on sale for Prime Day, including a new all-time low price on the iPhone 17 Pro TechWoven Case, now available for $44.00, down from $59.00. You'll also find great deals on Apple Pencil Pro, MagSafe Charger, and the AirTag 4-Pack.

Sony, Samsung, and Best Buy

• What's the deal? Get low prices during sitewide sales


• Where can I get it? Sony, Samsung, and Best Buy


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

UP TO 50% OFFSony Fall Sale
SITEWIDE DEALSSamsung Fall Sale
SITEWIDE DEALSBest Buy Techtober Sale

Prime Day competitor sales popped up this week, and all of these events are still going on today, with great deals found at Sony, Samsung, and Best Buy. This includes deals on Sony's popular noise-canceling headphones, Samsung's TVs, and much more.

iPads

• What's the deal? Take up to $150 off iPads


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

$70 OFF128GB Wi-Fi iPad for $279.00
$100 OFF128GB Wi-Fi iPad mini 7 for $399.00
$150 OFF11-inch M3 iPad Air (128GB Wi-Fi) for $449.00

Amazon Prime Big Deal Days saw big markdowns on iPads, and we're still tracking all-time lows for the 11-inch iPad. You can also find a steep $150 discount on the M3 iPad Air today.

MacBook Air

• What's the deal? Take $200 off M4 MacBook Air


• Where can I get it? Amazon


• Where can I find the original deal? Right here

$200 OFF13-inch M4 MacBook Air (256GB) for $799.00
$200 OFF15-inch M4 MacBook Air (256GB) for $999.00

Prices on the M4 MacBook Air start at $799.00 for the 13-inch 256GB model, down from $999.00. If you're looking for the larger model, you can get the 15-inch 256GB computer for $999.00, down from $1,199.00. Both of these are record low prices.

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 as we head into the holidays? 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, "Best Apple Deals of the Week: AirPods 4 for $89, AirTag for $64.99, and More Prime Day Sales Still Available" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

A selection of Los Angeles Lakers games during the 2025-26 season will be live streamed in the Apple Immersive format on the Apple Vision Pro.


The 3D games will be streamed in the forthcoming Spectrum SportsNet app on the Vision Pro, starting early next year, according to Apple. A schedule will be shared later this year. A subscription to a Spectrum internet plan or Spectrum SportsNet+ is needed to watch the live broadcasts, and visionOS 26 is also required. In addition, the live broadcasts are only available within Lakers broadcasting territory, in Southern California, Southern Nevada, and Hawaii.

Apple Immersive videos are 180-degree 8K recordings, captured with Spatial Audio.

"Viewers will feel the intensity of each game as if they were courtside, with perspectives impossible to capture in traditional broadcasts," says Apple.

Apple Immersive footage of the games will be captured with Blackmagic Design's new URSA Cine Immersive Live camera, which will be available for purchase next year.

Full game replays and highlights in the Apple Immersive format will be available on demand in both the Spectrum SportsNet and NBA apps on the Vision Pro, one to three days after the conclusion of each game, according to Apple.

More details were shared by TechRadar. Related Roundup: Apple Vision ProTags: Apple Immersive, NBABuyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro
This article, "Some Los Angeles Lakers Games Will Get 3D Live Streams on Vision Pro" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with ColorWare to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a pair of custom-painted AirPods Pro 3. It's been under a month since Apple released the AirPods Pro 3, so ColorWare didn't waste any time getting started on custom options.


If you're not familiar with ColorWare, it's a company that's been customizing Apple products for over two decades now, and if you want AirPods in a color other than white, ColorWare can make it happen.

ColorWare products are available in hundreds of unique colors and finishes. You can get any color of the rainbow in a gloss, matte, metallic, or metallic matte finish. Want ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ in a glossy black? No problem. Bright orange, shiny gold, or dusky, matte blue? ColorWare has all of those options.


There's also a neon hi-vis color, and a set of illusion shades that have iridescent, shifting colors. You can get the AirPods and the case all the same color or choose separate, custom colors for each earbud and the case.

Aside from the custom color, the ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ work just like the stock version from Apple. The ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ offer improved Active Noise Cancellation, better audio quality, a new fit with foam-infused ear tips, and heart rate sensing.


Custom ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ from ColorWare are priced at $439, and that's the same price ColorWare has charged for prior versions of the AirPods too. The price includes the earbuds and the case, but you can also get customized earbuds for $389. And for another $20, you can get any text or symbol you want engraved on the AirPods.

You can also get other custom Apple products from ColorWare, like the Apple Pencil, AirPods 4, Mac mini, AirPods Max, and AirTags.

ColorWare uses a multi-step coating process that includes primer, a proprietary color formula, and an X2 liquid plastic coating that protects the color. Custom painting is guaranteed for 12 months.


ColorWare's ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ have only been available for a couple weeks, but they've proven so popular that they're backordered until January. If you want custom-colored AirPods, you might want to order now before the wait gets longer. MacRumors readers who win our giveaway will get to skip the line.

We have three sets of ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ to give away to MacRumors readers. To enter to win, use the widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner(s) and send the prize(s). You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, following us on Instagram, following us on Threads, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years or older, UK residents who are 18 years or older, and Canadian residents who have reached the age of majority in their province or territory are eligible to enter. All federal, state, provincial, and/or local taxes, fees, and surcharges are the sole responsibility of the prize winner. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.


ColorWare Giveaway
The contest will run from today (October 10) at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time on October 17. The winner will be chosen randomly on or shortly after October 17 and will be contacted by email. The winner will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before a new winner is chosen.Tag: Giveaway
This article, "MacRumors Giveaway: Win Custom-Colored AirPods Pro 3 From ColorWare" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple's retail store at The Forum in Carlsbad, California will be receiving an all-new design.

Apple Carlsbad as of 2021
The store will be temporarily closed for renovations starting Wednesday, October 15, according to Apple's website. The location will be updated with a modern design and amenities, with a dedicated Apple Pickup station for online orders likely to be added.

Apple has not indicated when the original store will reopen, but these remodeling projects often take many months to be completed.

In the meantime, Apple will be opening a temporary store in the same plaza in Carlsbad, with a grand opening set for Saturday, October 18, at 10 a.m. local time. Apple says the temporary store will be located "just down to the right" from the original location, with the store's address set to shift from 1923 Calle Barcelona to 1925 Calle Barcelona.

Carlsbad is a coastal city in the County of San Diego. Apple opened its store there in 2008.Tag: Apple Store
This article, "Apple Store in Greater San Diego Area to Receive All-New Design" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

On this episode of The MacRumors Show, we talk through Apple's plan to unveil three new entry-level devices early next year.

Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel for more videos
The iPhone 17e is expected to be a minor upgrade over this year's 16e, launching in early 2026. The main upgrade is likely to be the A19 chip from the iPhone 17, with few other changes expected. It is possible that the device could get the Dynamic Island and an ‌iPhone‌ 15-style design, but realistically that is likely to occur on a subsequent generation.

The 12th-generation iPad is finally due to support Apple Intelligence thanks to an upgrade to the A18 chip, arriving in the Spring.

The biggest launch in terms of entry-level devices next year is an all-new low-cost MacBook. It is rumored to be the first consumer Mac to feature an A-series chip designed for the ‌iPhone‌, adopting the A18 Pro from 2024's iPhone 16 Pro models. It is expected to feature a 13-inch display and come in the same silver, blue, pink, and yellow color options like the ‌iPad‌.

To meet its lower price point, the device is likely to make compromises such as using an older design or display components, 8GB of memory, or even just a single USB-C port, compared to the MacBook Air. The machine is expected to launch in early 2026 with a price point somewhere below the $999 ‌MacBook Air‌, but above the ‌iPad‌.

We discuss the importance of each of these new devices, who they are likely to appeal to, and how they're likely to launch. The MacRumors Show has its own YouTube channel, so make sure you're subscribed to keep up with new episodes and clips.

Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel!

You can also listen to ‌The MacRumors Show‌ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or your preferred podcasts app. You can also copy our RSS feed directly into your podcast player.



If you haven't already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up to hear our discussion about the latest leaks regarding the next-generation iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, Studio Display, and Vision Pro.

Subscribe to ‌The MacRumors Show‌ for new episodes every week, where we discuss some of the topical news breaking here on MacRumors, often joined by interesting guests such as Kayci Lacob, Kevin Nether, John Gruber, Mark Gurman, Jon Prosser, Luke Miani, Matthew Cassinelli, Brian Tong, Quinn Nelson, Jared Nelson, Eli Hodapp, Mike Bell, Sara Dietschy, iJustine, Jon Rettinger, Andru Edwards, Arnold Kim, Ben Sullins, Marcus Kane, Christopher Lawley, Frank McShan, David Lewis, Tyler Stalman, Sam Kohl, Federico Viticci, Thomas Frank, Jonathan Morrison, Ross Young, Ian Zelbo, and Rene Ritchie.

‌The MacRumors Show‌ is on X @MacRumorsShow, so be sure to give us a follow to keep up with the podcast. You can also head over to The MacRumors Show forum thread to engage with us directly. Remember to rate and review the podcast, and let us know what subjects and guests you would like to see in the future.Tag: The MacRumors Show
This article, "The MacRumors Show: iPhone 17e, Low-Cost MacBook, and iPad 12 Rumors" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

In a statement shared with 9to5Mac this week, Apple announced that it will be launching its Emergency SOS via satellite feature in Mexico later this year.


Apple's satellite features are available on all iPhone 14 models and newer. The features include Emergency SOS via satellite, Find My via satellite, Messages via satellite, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, with availability of each varying by country.

• Emergency SOS via satellite: Text emergency services via satellite.


• Find My via satellite: Update your location in the Find My app via satellite.


• Messages via satellite: Send and receive iMessage and SMS messages via satellite.


• Roadside Assistance via satellite: Text select roadside service providers via satellite.

The features are powered by Globalstar's network of satellites in low Earth orbit.

The features are available to use when you are in an area without Wi-Fi or cellular coverage — otherwise, there is only a demo mode. To access the features, open Control Center and scroll down to the page with "Satellite." Tap on that to open Apple's Connection Assistant, which lists all of the satellite features available in your country.

Apple has yet to charge a fee for any of its satellite features. Last month, the company announced it is providing existing iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users with an additional year of free access to the entire suite of satellite features on those devices.

Below, we have outlined where the satellite features are available.

Emergency SOS via satellite

• Australia


• Austria


• Belgium


• Canada


• France


• Germany


• Ireland


• Italy


• Japan


• Luxembourg


• Mexico (Later this year)


• The Netherlands


• New Zealand


• Portugal


• Spain


• Switzerland


• U.K.


• U.S.

Find My via satellite

• Australia


• Austria


• Belgium


• Canada


• France


• Germany


• Ireland


• Italy


• Japan


• Luxembourg


• Mexico


• The Netherlands


• New Zealand


• Portugal


• Spain


• Switzerland


• U.K.


• U.S.

Messages via satellite

• Canada


• Mexico


• U.S.

Roadside Assistance via satellite

• Australia


• U.K.


• U.S.

The minimum iOS version required for each feature varies by country.

International travelers who visit a country where the features are available can use the feature while visiting, except if they bought their iPhone in Armenia, Belarus, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Russia, according to Apple.

iOS 26 beta code included references to Weather via satellite, but Apple has yet to announce such a feature, and it is unclear if it remains in development.Tag: iPhone Satellite Features
This article, "Apple's Free Satellite Features on iPhone Available in These Countries" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple has announced a major overhaul of its bug bounty program that doubles the top reward to $2 million for exploit chains that can match the sophistication of mercenary spyware attacks.


With bonuses for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities found in beta software, Apple says its total payouts could exceed $5 million. The company claims this represents "the largest payout offered by any bounty program."

The program now places greater emphasis on complete exploit chains rather than individual vulnerabilities, reflecting the reality that real-world attacks typically chain multiple bugs together. The rewards for remote-entry vectors have also been substantially increased, although categories not commonly seen in actual attacks will receive lower payouts.

As part of the overhaul, Apple is introducing "Target Flags," which are inspired by capture-the-flag games. When a researcher successfully exploits a vulnerability, they can capture a specific flag that proves exactly what level of access they achieved, such as code execution or arbitrary read/write capabilities.

These flags can be verified by Apple, so researchers who submit reports using them can receive notification of their bounty award immediately after Apple validates the captured flag. The payment is also issued in an upcoming payment cycle, meaning researchers won't have have to wait until Apple releases a software fix, which can take months. Previously, researchers often had to wait for Apple to patch a vulnerability before receiving payment.

The updated program comes into effect from November 2025. Apple is also expanding categories to include one-click WebKit sandbox escapes worth up to $300,000 and wireless proximity exploits over any radio worth up to $1 million. A complete Gatekeeper bypass on macOS now earns $100,000.

More information on the changes can be found on Apple's Security Research website. Apple says it has paid out over $35 million to more than 800 researchers since launching the public program in 2020.Tag: Apple Security
This article, "Apple Introduces $2M Bug Bounty for Spyware-Level Exploits" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple is set to reorganize its health and fitness divisions under its Services group, according to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The move comes as longtime chief operating officer Jeff Williams prepares to depart at the end of this year.


Services chief Eddy Cue will reportedly gain oversight of Apple's health and fitness teams, with the groups being consolidated under health lead Sumbul Desai. Meanwhile, Fitness+ head Jay Blahnik will report to Desai in the new structure. Both teams had previously reported to Williams.

Gurman suggests the reorganization is being timed with Apple's plans to launch a new Health+ subscription service, which he first reported on in March. The offering is said to feature an AI assistant providing personalized recommendations on nutrition, exercise, and sleep. Apple plans to launch the new service next year.

Elsewhere, Gurman reports that Craig Federighi will add watchOS to his software oversight, while hardware chief John Ternus – tipped to eventually succeed Tim Cook in the CEO role – will assume sole control of Apple Watch hardware engineering.

Cue already manages Apple's streaming services, iCloud, Maps, and other digital offerings, and placing health and fitness under his Services umbrella suggests Apple wants to transform its wellness initiatives into a more significant revenue stream.

Williams has been transferring his responsibilities since announcing his retirement in July, with supply chain and operations duties moving to new operating chief Sabih Khan.Tags: Bloomberg, Health, Mark Gurman
This article, "Apple's Health and Fitness Teams Report to Eddy Cue in Reshuffle" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Chinese smartphone maker Vivo has taken some inspiration from Apple's Liquid Glass design language for its latest operating system update, OriginOS 6. Unveiled this week, OriginOS 6 has the same rounded buttons and translucent glass look as iOS 26.


In a demo video, a Vivo smartphone features an interface that could be easily mistaken for ‌iOS 26‌. There's a Liquid Glass clock, Control Center, squircle icons, glass-like rounded buttons, translucent app folders and dock, translucent notifications, and even wallpapers that shift with a 2D to 3D effect like Apple's Spatial Scenes.

There is no mistaking the Liquid Glass design influence even though Vivo references water when describing the operating system. "With OriginOS 6, every swipe, scroll, and tap flows like never before. No lags. No stutters. Just effortless motion built for the way you move," reads some of the marketing material for the update.


Vivo is a Chinese smartphone maker that sells its devices in China, India, and other countries. Most Vivo smartphones are not available for purchase in the United States, but Vivo recently received certification for the Vivo X300 FE, which it will sell in the U.S.Tag: Vivo
This article, "iOS 26 Liquid Glass Design Copied by Android Smartphone Maker" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Belkin today announced the launch of the Stage PowerGrip, an accessory that pairs a camera grip with a power bank.


The PowerGrip includes a 9,300 mAh battery that can provide a full charge to Apple's iPhones. Included magnets allow it to attach to the back of a MagSafe-compatible iPhone.

It can charge at 7.5W wirelessly, but plugging an ‌iPhone‌ in with the included retractable USB-C cable speeds up charging. With the wireless charging capabilities, the included cable, and an extra USB-C port, up to three devices can be charged at one time. The charger is limited to 15W total, so it's best used to charge an ‌iPhone‌ and smaller devices like an Apple Watch or AirPods.

The PowerGrip connects to an ‌iPhone‌ over Bluetooth, and a button on it can be used as a camera shutter button for snapping photos. It can be used in multiple orientations for filming, or it can serve as a stand. There's also a connector so it can be attached to a tripod mount. A digital display provides a readout on remaining capacity.

Belkin's Stage PowerGrip can be purchased from the Belkin website or from Amazon.com for $80.Tag: Belkin
This article, "Belkin Launches Hybrid Camera Grip and Power Bank" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Sora, OpenAI's app for creating AI-generated video, has been downloaded more than one million times. OpenAI's Sora lead, Bill Peebles, shared the information on social media network X last night.


Peebles said that Sora hit one million app downloads even faster than ChatGPT did, with interest in the app soaring despite the fact that it's invite only and only available in the U.S. and Canada at the current time.

Sora was released at the end of September. It's designed to generate AI videos using realistic videos of real people and their friends. Each user uploads a "cameo" or short video, which they can then use with AI prompts.

The app includes an option for users to share their cameos, allowing select people or anyone on Sora to generate AI video with their likeness. Sora has been criticized for producing AI slop, but that hasn't affected its popularity. It continues to be the top free app on Apple's App Store.

Sora uses OpenAI's Sora 2 video generation model that can handle complex movements for realistic, cinematic, and anime-style video. Sora 2 supports generating audio, so all the video creations on Sora are accompanied by sound.

OpenAI designed Sora to display content based on people the user follows or interacts with, and the app polls users regularly on their wellbeing. There are controls to modify what's displayed in a feed, and OpenAI says that it is meant to be used with friends, which is why it's invite only.

Sora is free to download, and OpenAI is not restricting video generation to subscribers for now. [Direct Link]Tag: OpenAI
This article, "OpenAI's Sora AI Video App Hits 1 Million Downloads" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple has invited a group of social media influencers to Colorado this week for an unusual event involving group hiking, trail running, and other outdoor activities designed to showcase the company's recently launched iPhone 17 Pro Max, AirPods Pro 3, and Apple Watch Ultra 3.


An invitation was shared on X (Twitter) by photographer Johnny Hawk, featuring a simple message: "Hi Johnny. We're so excited to welcome you to Colorado. Please enjoy this bag of essentials to use during your time here. See you soon!" The card is accompanied by a black backpack emblazoned with Apple's logo and a white flask.

When news of the mysterious Colorado gathering first surfaced, there was some speculation online that it might relate to Apple's anticipated October product refresh, which is expected to include new iPad Pro models with M5 chips and an updated Vision Pro, with potentially other updates also coming. Apparently, that's not the case at all.

The Rocky Mountain gathering appears to be just another aspect of Apple's marketing campaign for its been-and-gone iPhone 17 fall event. In follow-up posts on X and Instagram, Hawk revealed that he had been brought to Colorado's rugged terrain by Apple to test how the new iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watch perform in demanding outdoor conditions.

• Apple Event This October? Here's the Latest on What to Expect

Apple has occasionally held regional events for influencers to preview products in unique settings, but these have usually occurred in major metropolitan centers like New York City. So far we've not heard rumors of anything in that vein taking place this month.
This article, "Apple Hosts Unusual Colorado Event to Showcase Latest Hardware" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple today released new beta firmware that's designed for the AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3, and AirPods 4. The firmware is limited to developers at the current time, and it has a build number of 8B5014c.


The firmware comes as Apple is testing the iOS 26.1 update. It likely adds support for Live Translation in new languages, including Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Chinese (both Mandarin Traditional and Simplified).

With iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe, Apple added a beta firmware update installation option that's available from the AirPods settings interface when the AirPods are connected to an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, which facilitates beta testing.

Developers can use the beta option to turn on beta downloads.
This article, "Apple Releases New Beta Firmware for AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple today shared a short teaser video for Pluribus, an upcoming sci-fi drama series hailing from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.


Pluribus stars Emmy-nominated actress Rhea Seehorn, who also starred in the Breaking Bad spinoff series Better Call Saul. In the "genre-bending" series, Apple says "the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness."

In the teaser video, which is shrouded in mystery, Seehorn plays a woman named Carol. A fictional U.S. government official appears on her TV screen, promising to "figure out" what makes her "different" from the others, so that she can "join" them.


"Join us, Carol," reads the description for the YouTube video.

The first two episodes of the nine-episode first season will be released on Apple TV+ on Friday, November 7, and a new episode will follow every Friday through December 26. Apple has already picked up the series for a second season, too.

Pluribus is produced by Sony Pictures Television, and Gilligan serves as one of the executive producers and as a writer for some episodes.

Over the past few months, Apple has shared several mysterious clips from the show.

P.S. If you dial 202-808-3981, an automated message related to the show will play, and there is an option to sign up for promotional Apple TV+ text messages.






Tag: Apple TV Plus
This article, "Apple TV+ Teases Mysterious New Show From 'Breaking Bad' Creator" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

MacRumors videographer Dan Barbera has been testing all four of Apple's new iPhones for the last few weeks, so if you're still thinking about getting one an iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max, or iPhone Air, you'll want to watch his latest video.

Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Dan walks through the features that set each iPhone apart, and he goes over what factors you'll want to consider when choosing a new device.Related Roundups: iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone AirBuyer's Guide: iPhone 17 (Buy Now), iPhone 17 Pro (Buy Now), iPhone Air (Buy Now)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "Video: Which New iPhone is Right For You?" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Earlier this year, Apple finally launched CarPlay Ultra, the long-awaited next-generation version of its CarPlay software system for vehicles. However, now nearly five months later, CarPlay Ultra is still limited to just one luxury vehicle brand.


CarPlay Ultra features deeper integration with a vehicle's instrument cluster and systems, built-in apps for radio and climate controls, rear-view camera feed support, and more. The connected iPhone provides app-related data, while the vehicle provides information like the current speed, fuel level, tire pressure, engine temperature, and more.

The interface is tailored to each vehicle model and automaker's identity, and drivers can choose from various preset design options.


CarPlay Ultra is currently limited to newer Aston Martin vehicles in the U.S. and Canada. Fortunately, if you cannot afford a $250,000 luxury vehicle, the software system will eventually be available in more affordable vehicles.

In May, Apple said many other automakers planned to offer CarPlay Ultra, including Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. At the time, it said CarPlay Ultra would begin expanding to more vehicles around the world "in the next 12 months," which would be by May 2026.

Apple first previewed the next generation ‌of CarPlay‌ all the way back at WWDC 2022, and at the time it shared a long list of automakers that were committed to offering the software system. The list is more than three years old, and it is not entirely accurate anymore.

The list was as follows:

• Acura


• Audi


• Ford


• Honda


• Infiniti


• Jaguar


• Land Rover


• Lincoln


• Mercedes-Benz


• Nissan


• Polestar


• Porsche


• Renault


• Volvo

According to a previous report from the Financial Times, there are at least five automakers on that list that have since confirmed that they have no plans to offer CarPlay Ultra, including Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Polestar, Renault, and Volvo.

BMW, Ford, and Rivian also publicly backed away from CarPlay Ultra, but Porsche seemed to remain committed to offering it eventually.

That likely rules out Ford's luxury brand, Lincoln, too.

All in all, here is where things stand currently.

Currently Offers CarPlay Ultra

• Aston Martin

Will Offer CarPlay Ultra

• Hyundai


• Kia


• Genesis


• Porsche

Won't Offer CarPlay Ultra

• Audi


• BMW


• Ford


• Lincoln


• Mercedes-Benz


• Polestar


• Renault


• Rivian


• Volvo

General Motors controversially ditched the regular version of CarPlay in its new electric vehicles, so it is likely to pass on CarPlay Ultra too. That means vehicles from brands like Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC are unlikely to offer CarPlay Ultra.

It is extremely unlikely that software-focused Tesla would offer CarPlay Ultra either.

Unclear

• Honda


• Acura


• Toyota


• Lexus


• Nissan


• Infiniti


• Mazda


• Subaru


• Mitsubishi


• Jaguar


• Land Rover


• Chrysler


• Dodge


• Jeep


• RAM


• Volkswagen

Related Roundup: CarPlayTag: CarPlay UltraRelated Forum: HomePod, HomeKit, CarPlay, Home & Auto Technology
This article, "These Vehicle Brands Plan to Offer Apple's CarPlay Ultra" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Amazon is hosting big discounts across the entire M4 MacBook Air lineup, with deals that represent all-time lows across every model of the computer. In total, you'll find $200 off the M4 MacBook Air notebook right now, with both 13-inch and 15-inch models on sale.

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.

Prices start at $799.00 for the 13-inch 256GB model, down from $999.00. If you're looking for the larger model, you can get the 15-inch 256GB computer for $999.00, down from $1,199.00.

$200 OFF13-inch M4 MacBook Air (256GB) for $799.00
$200 OFF15-inch M4 MacBook Air (256GB) for $999.00

Of course, you'll also find all of the 512GB models of the 13-inch and 15-inch M4 MacBook Air on sale this week. If you prefer shopping at Best Buy, the retailer is matching these deals as well, and you won't need any membership to see the final deal prices.

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 as we head into the holidays? 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, "Take $200 Off Every M4 MacBook Air on Amazon" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

While it is unclear if Apple will host an October event this year, or stick to press releases, rumors suggest it will announce several new products this month.

The graphic for Apple's "Unleashed" event in October 2021
Below, we have recapped everything to know about a potential Apple event this October.

When
The table below outlines when Apple teased its October launches over the past four years.
































Year Announcement/Teaser Event/Tagline Event/Press Releases 2021 Tuesday, October 12 "Unleashed" Event Monday, October 18 2022 Tuesday, October 18 "Take Note" Teaser Tuesday, October 18 2023 Tuesday, October 24 "Scary Fast" Event Monday, October 30 2024 Thursday, October 24 "Mac Your Calendars" Teaser Monday, October 28 to Wednesday, October 30


Apple recently announced its next quarterly earnings call will be held on Thursday, October 30, and Apple's Chatswood Chase store in Australia will be reopening on the same day. Earnings calls and store openings are sometimes timed with product launches, so we could see announcements in the last week of October.

What

A handful of Apple products are expected to be updated as early as this October, with the following new features and changes rumored:

• iPad Pro: A seemingly-legitimate unboxing video has revealed that the next iPad Pro will be equipped with an M5 chip, but lack any major external design changes. It was also reported that the next iPad Pro will feature two front cameras, but the unboxing videos do not show this, so such a change is not guaranteed.


• Vision Pro: A faster M4 chip or M5 chip, a more comfortable "Dual Knit Band" head strap, and potentially a Space Black color option. The next Vision Pro was accidentally confirmed by FCC documents that were supposed to remain confidential.
• Apple TV: A faster A17 Pro chip that will support next year's revamped version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, and likely Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support. A built-in FaceTime camera has been rumored for a future Apple TV, but it is unclear if that will arrive with the next model specifically.


• HomePod mini: S9 chip or newer with support for next year's revamped version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, likely Apple's N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7 support, improved sound quality, a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for proximity features, and potentially new color options like Red.


• AirTag: Up to 3× longer item tracking range vs. current AirTag, a more tamper-proof speaker, and "very low" battery life alerts.

What about Macs? Apple's next 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max chips will reportedly enter mass production soon, but it is unclear if some or all of the models will launch in late 2025 or or early 2026. While new Macs are often unveiled in October, there is precedent for a launch earlier in a year too, as Apple announced MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips in a January 2023 press release.

Apple is reportedly also planning a lower-priced MacBook with an A18 Pro or A19 Pro chip, but the rumored launch timeframe for that is also late 2025 or early 2026, so it is unclear if it would be announced this October. This model would likely be the spiritual successor to the MacBook Air with an M1 chip, which is still sold by Walmart in the U.S. for $599.
This article, "Apple Event This October? Here's the Latest on What to Expect" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple has announced that its retail store at the Chatswood Chase shopping mall in Australia will reopen on Thursday, October 30, at 9:30 a.m. local time.


Apple is expected to release new products this month, and the company's next earnings call is on October 30, so the store could be reopening during a busy launch week.

Apple Chatswood Chase has been closed for renovations since July 2024. When it reopens, it will feature an all-new design and updated amenities, including an Apple Pickup station for customers to collect orders placed through Apple's online store. Apple has yet to share photos of the new store, though, so the exact design remains to be seen.

Chatswood Chase is located in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, on the North Shore.

Earlier this month, Apple permanently closed its store in Hornsby, which is located further north on Sydney's North Shore. Apple said all affected retail employees would be given the opportunity to work at the Chatswood Chase store.

Elsewhere in Australia, Apple moved its store in Perth into a historic bank building in June.

Thanks, @AbstracTech!Tag: Apple Store
This article, "Apple Store Near Sydney Reopens With All-New Design Later This Month" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

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

Now that macOS Tahoe 26 is out, you might be interested in making a bootable installer drive for the latest MacOS release. Bootable installers drives are super useful as they can be used to easily perform clean system installs, install or update multiple Macs to Tahoe without having to download the installer/update multiple times, and ... Read More

Amazon is cutting $200 off the price of all M4 MacBook Air models, starting at $799 for the 13″ Air, and $999 for the 15″ Air. 13″ M4 MacBook Air ($200 off) 13″ M4 MacBook Air 16GB / 256GB for $799 (MSRP: $999) 13″ M4 MacBook Air 16GB / 512GB for $999 (MSRP: $1,199) 13″ ... Read More

While the most significant visual change in iOS 26 is the Liquid Glass interface, you’ll also find some pretty notable design overhauls of commonly used iPhone apps. The Phone app is one such example, with the new Phone app design in iOS 26 being wildly different from the prior versions, featuring a new cluttered design ... Read More

The Liquid Glass interface appearance is a fairly significant change in macOS Tahoe, bringing a lot of transparency, translucency, and shininess to the Mac interface appearance. While some users enjoy the new look, other Mac users may find it distracting, cumbersome, or difficult to read and interact with, and perhaps even conducive to causing eye ... Read More

Apple has released the second beta versions of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS Tahoe 26.1. The new beta builds are available for all enrolled beta testers, and offer continued refinement of the new operating systems. iOS 26.1 beta includes a new “Slide to Stop” feature for turning off alarm clocks on iPhone, which aims ... Read More

AirTags are super useful personal trackers with many uses from tracking a bag, purse, dog, cat, luggage, backpack, car keys, package, bike, car, or just about anything else you can imagine wanting to keep an eye on through the Find My network. Amazon is currently offering the AirTag 4-pack for just $65 ($16 per AirTag), ... Read More

The Mac command line tool tart continues to offer one of the simplest and fastest ways to setup a new virtual machine, and setting up a Tahoe VM is no exception. Whether you’re a developer, tinkerer, tester, or just someone who wants to give the latest MacOS Tahoe 26 operating system a trial run without ... Read More

Homebrew is a powerful command line package manager that allows you to easily install, update, and manage popular command line programs and tools, as well as traditional graphical apps with cask (and third party tools like Applite help you manage cask through the GUI too). It’s a popular tool with advanced Mac users and those ... Read More

While the most obvious change to macOS Tahoe 26 is the newly rounded and translucent Liquid Glass interface appearance, there are also a variety of neat new features and customization options that you’re sure to appreciate easily well. Let’s review some of the most useful tips for macOS Tahoe that you’ll want to check out, ... Read More

If you’re a Mac user who watches system resource use by keeping an eye on Activity Monitor, htop, top, or any other monitor of deeper system processes, you may have seen a process called “com.github.squirrel” and wondered what it is, and perhaps even wondered if it’s bad. Is it dangerous or malware? github.squirrel has a ... Read More

Apple has released iOS 18.7.1 for iPhone and ipadOS 18.7.1 for iPad. The small software updates include security patches, and are offered as alternatives to iPhone and iPad users who either don’t want to install iOS 26 onto their device yet, or cannot for compatibility reasons. No new features or major changes are expected in ... Read More

Apple has released MacOS Sequoia 15.7.1 and MacOS Sonoma 14.8.1 as security patch releases for Mac users who are not yet running the Tahoe operating system, of which MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1 was just released. The updates are focused on security patches and do not include any other changes or features for the Sequoia or Sonoma ... Read More

Apple has issued MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1 as a software update for Tahoe users. The update focuses primarly on resolving an issue for Mac Studio owners who were not able to install the initial MacOS Tahoe 26 release onto the M3 Ultra version of the Studio. Apparently other bug fixes and security improvements are included as ... Read More

Apple has released the first update for iOS 26.0.1, which includes a handful of bug fixes specifically aimed at the new iPhone 17 lineup, as well as addressing an issue for all devices where Home Screen icons can appear blank after using various Liquid Glass customization settings, and another issue where VoiceOver might disable itself ... Read More

Gamers and Mario enthusiasts in particular are sure to get a kick out of Super Mario Brothers Remastered, a fan-made unofficial remake of the original Nintendo Super Mario Bros game that includes new levels, new options and game modes, new characters, a level editor, physics improvements, and more. Super Mario Bros Remastered is not meant ... 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