While video streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ have aggressively adjusted their models to maximize revenue, the music world has remained comparatively steady. Unfortunately, that might be about to change. According to a new report, major record labels have begun putting serious pressure on several of the music streaming giants, including Spotify and Apple Music.
“I think that real music fans have discovered there are better ways to ... share their music taste than relying on this big company,” [Richie Assaly] said.
Music journalist Emilie Hanskamp of Toronto said she’s seeing “boycotts at a rate that we have never seen before."
“The idea of this platform was always supposed to be a way to discover and share music from the indie level upwards,” she said. “And now increasingly we are realizing that that is not the case and that in fact in many cases, it works against most artists.”
In the movies and television business, you see studios also setting up streaming services to compete with Netflix, and you also see Netflix setting up studios to compete with Hollywood.
Now, why are the record labels unable or unwilling to set up their own individual streaming services?
I am guessing the answer will illuminate why Spotify and Apple Music cannot copy Netflix.
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If I was going to do this, I wanted to get my daughter a fully operational smartwatch, and not some kiddie version that wouldn’t really help her learn how to navigate the computerized world. To some extent, I wanted her to confront the capabilities, confusions, and risks of online life, so she could learn how to manage them herself. I have owned and used smartwatches for some time, and I surmised that their many limitations compared with smartphones—and the uselessness of most of their apps—would make one a perfect candidate for this process.
This year, between today and December 7, Apple will donate $5 with every purchase made through Apple Pay at an Apple Store, Apple Store Online, or the Apple Store app.
The problem: not everyone uses the same phone operating system. In my house, I have an iPhone and my wife has an Android. This means when I inevitably leave my phone in a hotel couch, she can't really help me find it. Sure, she could call my phone number, but I usually have my ringer off and Do Not Disturb enabled. (I'm annoying like that.) She obviously can't use Apple’s Find My iPhone, which doesn’t run on her Android device. And while both Apple and Google offer tools to see the location of paired devices from a computer, the computer that's nearby may not be set up with the proper permissions.
Am I doomed to keep track of where my phone is, like a functional adult? No, thanks to a simple app called RingIt by Belgian developer Gaëtan Van Den Berge. This application, which is free for both Android and iOS, exists to make it easier for Android users to help iPhone users find their phone, and vice-versa. Just open the app, hit a button, and the other person's phone will ring—loudly—helping them to find their phone.
There was a time when the iPhone didn’t bother with a traditional file manager. Apple insisted you didn’t need one, and documents effectively lived ‘inside’ apps. That was fine for the odd Pages file, but things got messy as the iPhone grew more capable and you wanted to hop between apps and devices.
Apple addressed this with the Files app in 2017. It’s seen plenty of improvements since and is now a capable file manager reminiscent of a stripped-down macOS Finder. But sometimes it’s not enough. So this roundup looks at what Files does well and three alternatives to consider when you need more.
Following the tragedy, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a support message on X earlier today and confirmed that Apple will donate to relief efforts.
If you have lost your only Apple device, and all your friends and families are using Windows or Androids or whatever else, you can still do a Find My on the web. Just borrow your friends and families' phones or tablets or computers and login on to iCloud on the web.
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The European Commission said that Apple has notified it that Apple Ads and Apple Maps met the Act's two thresholds to be considered "gatekeepers".
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[Apple] said Apple Ads is not a large player in the online advertising services market in the EU, and has minimal share compared to rivals such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok or X, and that it does not use data from other Apple services or third-party services for this service.
Apple has launched its new holiday ad A Critter Carol, which features a misplaced iPhone 17 Pro being used by woodland critters to record themselves singing a Christmas carol.
There were lots of blue screens and blue bodysuits used that allowed the forest set to be digitally extended and human performers to be removed in post-production, but the critters were all hand-crafted puppets brought to life by a small army of puppeteers controlling various body parts. And yes, the entire production was shot on an iPhone 17 Pro.
Apple’s annual Black Friday Shopping Event is now live. This year, you can score an up to $250 gift card with purchase of an eligible product, including select iPhones, Macs, Apple Watches, AirPods, and more.
Icon Composer really serves as the final step in the icon design process. It's the perfect lightweight tool for anyone who has already built their images and layers elsewhere, then brings them in to apply the slick Liquid Glass effect and make those final tweaks to colour, opacity, and contrast.
Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last several months, I’ve found both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app will open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason.
[...]
To caveat straight away: this isn’t that alarming. This is not the biggest hack or issue in the world. But it’s still very weird behavior and Apple has not responded to any of my requests for comment for months.
Okay, I am intrigued. What are the bells and whistles that exist in Apple's Podcast app that can cause this strange behavior? If we go back to the days of reading XML files and sending MP3s to QuickTime APIs, will there be less security concerns?
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With “Pluribus,” Vince Gilligan has what most series creators would envy: a show that generates constantly evolving conversation. Those who watch are careful about spoilers, often refusing to discuss the show with anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
Once a viewer is indoctrinated, however, they may find it difficult to refrain from puzzling over its message. Is it a parable about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence and the fawning tendencies of large language models? That we can answer with a firm “No,” since Gilligan said as much in several interviews, including a recent Variety profile. When he first conceived of the show nearly a decade ago, ChatGPT didn’t exist.
Companies want you to download apps. Here in Taiwan it’s particularly bad: I’ve had shop staff tell me about some discount if you download their app, and when I decline, say something like “It’s really easy! Here, just give me your phone and I’ll do it for you.” Once when I was setting up my phone plan, the staff wanted my phone to, idk, note my IMEI or something, and then when I wasn’t paying attention, installed a local e-commerce app, using my new phone number and name as login details, then proudly told me, “Now you get 300NTD off your first phone bill!” Thanks, for 10$ I can get weekly text and email spam from Shopee, great.
So first tip, in Taiwan, never hand your phone over the counter.
What is happening with the monetise & weaponise strategy, instead, is this progressive fracture and disconnect between tech companies and regular people. A disconnect where people at various levels of tech-savvy feel equally at odds with the behaviour of many tech companies. I certainly don’t view tech as an ally or as something that should benefit me or improve my life anymore. More like a user of technology, I increasingly feel used and lied to by it; I feel like a mere instrument that exists to guarantee its survival — a battery, like humans are to machines in The Matrix universe.
It aims to create a lightning-fast browsing experience on Apple platforms, and prioritize user privacy.
With Bartender 6, you get to be in control of your menu bar, so you get to choose how it looks and behaves.
CarPlay is such a boon that we take for granted. Any attempts to veer further into Apple’s control, or swerve back to automakers, ruin that. Staying between the lines is pretty key to CarPlay’s success.
The challenge is the first against India's antitrust penalty law that since last year allows the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to use global turnover when calculating the penalties it imposes on companies for abusing their market dominance.
I am thankful that there are still so many things to be thankful about. Thank you for reading.
The former head of Apple’s App Review team has claimed that an anti-fraud push has seen innocent developers’ accounts terminated without warning or evidence. Apple is holding onto millions in developer payouts too, he claims.
In a Substack post called ‘The App Store’s new scandal’, former App Review boss Phillip Shoemaker claims that he has spoken to multiple developers who have been wrongly accused of fraud by Apple.
Apple TV has pulled upcoming French thriller “The Hunt” (“Traqués”) from its December slate, and now we know why: Creator and director Cédric Anger has been accused of ripping off the series’ story from the 1973 novel “Shoot,” by Douglas Fairbairn, which previously was adapted into the 1976 film “Shoot.”
[...]
“The broadcast of our series ‘The Hunt’ has been temporarily postponed,” Gaumont said in a statement shared with Variety. “We are currently conducting a thorough review to address any questions related to our production. We take intellectual property matters very seriously.”
Apple has expanded its role in travel with a new integration tool developed with Delta Air Lines, enabling AirTag location data to flow straight into Delta’s baggage systems.
Completed within the past few weeks, the API builds on Share Item Location, a feature released last year to help airlines find lost AirTagged luggage.
Apple recently teamed up with Japanese fashion brand ISSEY MIYAKE to create the iPhone Pocket, a limited-edition knitted accessory designed to carry an iPhone. However, it is now completely sold out in all countries where it was released.
Satechi's FindAll series is an upgrade over the AirTag with different form factors and the option to recharge via MagSafe or Qi, but it does lack Precision Finding. For something that you're likely to lose indoors or in close quarters where it's difficult to hear sound, it might be worth opting for an AirTag for access to Precision Finding, but for general tracking and item left behind notifications, Satechi's trackers are great.
Last year, Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a Mac app that lets you string holiday lights from your menu bar and across the top of your Dock. This year, Simon is back with an update to the Mac app and a new version for the iPhone and iPad.
You can manually create your own playlists by hand, while a Smart Playlists option can apply your own rules to do the job automatically.
One of the benefits of there being so many journal apps out there is that there really is something for everyone, so there's no harm in testing out Google and Apple's offerings first—they are, after all, completely free. But for journaling apps that really invest in user design and features, there are much better options out there.
Apple requested the timeline be delayed in a letter to the Department of Commerce on Nov. 14, just weeks after the state passed a new law allowing certain economic development projects to reset their base periods.
I do not know how accurate is the story about Apple's 'fraud crackdown' affected the wrong developers. But I've always believe that Apple should do more to earn their keep of the developers' revenues.
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The regulator suspects that the tech giant's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, introduced in iOS 14.5 and later versions, could limit third-party apps' ability to collect user data for personalised ads while favouring Apple’s own advertising service.
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"It is no surprise that the data tracking industry continues to oppose our efforts to give users back control over their data, and now intense pressure could force us to withdraw this feature, to the detriment of European consumers," [Apple] said in an emailed statement.
It’s true that Apple does not present users with the tracking consent dialog for its own apps. However, that’s not because the company secretly allows its own apps to access this data. Instead, Apple doesn’t give itself the option of doing so, and therefore doesn’t need to present the permission pop-up.
Whenever iOS 26.2 detects a date or time inside a note, message, email, or any other written form of text, it offers a new ‘Invites’ option.
Caffeine Clock feels like a throwback in the best way. It does one job and does it well, letting you focus on what matters: how much caffeine is in your system right now, and when it will taper off.
Encrypted messaging platform Signal now offers secure backups on iPhone, letting users save and restore messages if they lose access to their device.
Last month, we featured 15 great examples of apps that have adopted Apple’s Liquid Glass design language and latest APIs. Today, the MacStories team is sharing nine more of our favorite updates that take advantage of Apple’s latest technologies.
Earlier this year, it looked like time was up for ZRX: Zombies, Run!, a popular fitness app that mixed couch-to-5K plans with postapocalyptic audio storytelling. Now, cocreator and author Naomi Alderman has announced that she’s bought back the franchise from the brink.
Singapore's police have ordered Apple and Google to prevent the spoofing of government agencies on their messaging platforms, the home affairs ministry said on Tuesday. [...] Under the order, Google and Apple will need to prevent accounts and group chats from displaying names which spoof "gov.sg" and other Singapore government agencies, or filter such messages out.
The home affairs ministry said Apple and Google have committed to complying with the order, and they urged the public to update their mobile apps to ensure that the latest safeguards are in place.
The affected jobs included account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, as well as the staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective major customers.
[...]
Some of the affected workers said the move was driven by an effort to shift more sales to third-party resellers, which the company refers to as the channel. Some organizations prefer to work with those indirect sellers, they said, and the change helps Apple lower internal costs like salaries.
Call me old fashioned, but I believe when you hired people to work for you, and they are doing good work, and you are making good profits, you don't simply abandon them and ask them to reapply for other jobs. You should already know what are their strength, and you find them a different job in your big company, and you take care of them and their careers.
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Per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is taking a step back from launching any major new software features at WWDC26. This applies to iOS 27 and macOS 27, as well as all of the companies smaller platforms, like watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
For the first time since iOS 12, Apple will be focusing on software quality, rather than flashy new features.
Critics might argue that while this middle ground is technically compliant with the DMA, it’s not compliant with the intention of the DMA, which would be for the Apple Watch not to lose any functionality in the EU, and for Apple to provide APIs to allow third-party devices all of the Wi-Fi syncing features currently available to Apple Watch. Apple would argue, and I agree, that the European Commission’s intentions are incoherent in this regard. The EC insists that Apple should protect users’ privacy and security, while also insisting that Apple grant access to third-party apps and devices that can potentially compromise users’ privacy and security.
The European Commission continues to send letters to American tech giants calling on them to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). But with a barrage of appeals from the parties involved, timelines are becoming extremely drawn out.
Apple and Google have sharply criticized the DMA in recent weeks, underscoring how strained the negotiations with Europe are becoming. Last August, the Federal Trade Commission warned that certain DSA rules might conflict with American laws, particularly regarding freedom of expression and the security of United States citizens.
CNN quietly removed its stories from Apple News over the weekend, ending the cable news brand’s contract to share its content on the popular news app, Semafor has learned. The two companies are continuing to discuss a new deal that would restore CNN’s stories to Apple News.
[...]
For CNN, the hardball tactics with Apple reflect the company’s increasing push for digital monetization, and more aggressive posture towards sharing its content with tech platforms. CNN rolled out a new paid subscription offering earlier this month, and has been putting more of its reported stories behind a paywall.
As Miyake Design Studio apparently planned, the onus for the design success of the iPhone Pocket seems to be placed squarely on its owner, which is—a risky proposition given the tension it poses, as an object, with the sleek minimalism of Apple’s design philosophy.
Apple has published a new ad for the iPhone 17 Pro on its YouTube channel, highlighting the device's vapor chamber cooling and A19 Pro chip.
But here’s the thing: I handed ChatGPT Atlas an ill-formed problem. I gave it five poorly exposed photos with page curl and minimal guidance on handling the spatial relationships between images. I didn’t even tell it that one photo was from the inside of a page spread and lacked the VDOT column that would simplify matching the rows with the other photos. Nevertheless, ChatGPT Atlas figured all that out. It autonomously decided to break the images into manageable chunks, ran OCR on each, reconstructed the table structure, and placed everything in the correct order. It made decisions I would have had to make myself with traditional tools, and it made them correctly.
When I finally upgraded to a 32-inch 4K monitor, I thought my productivity would skyrocket simply because I had more screen real estate. Instead, I was dealing with floating windows. Sure, macOS comes with native split-view and Stage Manager, but on a screen this size, just snapping two windows side-by-side feels like a waste of space.
I needed thirds, quarters, and sixths — and I needed to trigger them without touching my mouse. That’s when I found Rectangle. It’s a tiny, free utility that gives macOS the window management superpowers Apple forgot to include.
Daniel Gräfe has released Timing 2025.9, adding the ability to round time entry durations in reports for cleaner timesheets.
Reincubate has issued Camo Studio 2.5, adding a Screen Capture feature that lets you share an entire display or specific app windows.
Apple will need to balance this push for a bigger audience with its core strength of premium programming. That’s why the company is taking these smaller steps toward new audiences, rather than completely shaking things up. Apple TV may have lost the plus, but its future hinges on not also losing what makes it special.
A dozen AI raters, workers who check an AI’s responses for accuracy and groundedness, told the Guardian that, after becoming aware of the way chatbots and image generators function and just how wrong their output can be, they have begun urging their friends and family not to use generative AI at all – or at least trying to educate their loved ones on using it cautiously.
No new features? Maybe Apple knows it will need all of its developers to focus on delivering the Apple Intelligence features promised a year and a half ago, as well as rejigging all its private APIs and stuff to satisfy EU's DMA, that it will be difficult to put in brand new features?
:-)
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Next month, the 39th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), will be held in San Diego, California, with a satellite event also taking place in Mexico City, Mexico. Apple is proud to once again to participate in this important event for the community and to support it with our sponsorship.
[...]
At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and advancing privacy-preserving techniques in AI and ML is an important area of ongoing research. The work Apple researchers will present at NeurIPS this year includes several papers sharing progress in this area.
If you’re a massive Pokémon trading card came enthusiast, you might found yourself with thousands of cards in your collection. Mint aims to make things easier for collectors, by giving yourself an easy way to track your whole collection, its value, and more.
Apple TV is ramping up its promotion for the upcoming streaming launch of F1: The Movie on Apple TV, timed for the Las Vegas F1 weekend and the launch of a new 50% off for 6 months deal for Black Friday.
The Sphere dominates the Vegas strip, and Apple TV took advantage of the unique shape of the structure to show a depiction of Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes inside his APX GP racing helmet.
For a country that prides itself on the global success of home-grown brands like Samsung, South Korea is seeing an increasing number of its young people opt for American alternatives.
[...]
“iPhones are emphasised for being designed in California,” Yoo said. “South Korean youth now buy iPhones for the sense of ‘freedom’ and specific style that is associated with California.”
The Las Vegas Sphere is, to me, a very interesting banner advertisement platform, and you can watch live on YouTube, and you will quickly discover that many of the advertisements do not take advantage of the banner's uniqueness, and are boring as heck.
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Building for iOS sometimes feels like archaeology: brush away enough guidelines and you hit something older and stranger. A system that can classify violence with forensic precision still can't decide if the human body is health, lifestyle, or sin.
One day I tried to ship a private intimacy tracker–nothing scandalous, just a journal for wellbeing–and App Store Connect assigned it the 16+ rating it uses for gambling apps and "unrestricted web access". The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
But rather than wait for all Electron apps to clean up their own mess, Apple seems to have intervened and implemented a foundational fix in Tahoe 26.2 that prevents any app from affecting the system in this manner going forward.
Apple TV has been delivering some of the best television shows of the last decade, and just eight months after Severance Season 2 gained the title of having the streamer’s most-watched debut ever, one of the most inventive end-of-the-world shows has stolen the crown. That show is Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, a show that has been called the "must-watch show of the year" by many critics.
Apple has enlisted Google to promote new Apple TV series Pluribus, with a hidden message appearing when looking up the show's name with Google search.
Today, Apple TV announced “The Unlikely Cook with Awkwafina,” a new eight-episode unscripted food series starring and executive produced by award-winning comedian, writer and actor Nora Lum, aka Awkwafina (“Quiz Lady,” “The Farewell”). In the series, Nora embarks on a deeply personal cross-country journey as she explores contemporary Asian American cuisine, starting with her family’s remarkable legacy.
Apple TV has put together a strong lineup to kick off 2026, including three fan-favorite shows returning soon that you still have time to catch up on.
Adding a large language model to Shortcuts means it's easier to build automations that can simplify your life.
During the shopping event, customers can get an Apple gift card with the purchase of an eligible product at an Apple Store, in the Apple Store app, and on Apple.com.
I think relying on individual consent is ridiculous. If that is the best we can do, instead of outlawing creepy and privacy-hostile behaviour in its entirety, then a browser preference seems fine. It is too bad the Do Not Track standard, originally proposed by the U.S. FTC, was not mandatory for advertisers to follow, and that its replacement is not well supported either. Maybe this is the legislative push it needs.
There is a mashup of Pluribus and Truman Show that is waiting to be created.
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Google just announced some unexpected and welcome news: Pixel 10 owners can now send and receive files with Apple devices over AirDrop. According to Google, this works with iPhone, iPad, and macOS devices, and applies to the entire Pixel 10 series. It’s limited to Google’s latest phones for now, but Google spokesperson Alex Moriconi says, “We’re bringing this new experience to Pixel 10 first before expanding to other devices.”
[...]
What it doesn’t say, however, is that it was added with any involvement from Apple — only that “we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable ‘Contacts Only’ mode in the future.”
The rulings required Apple to add support for the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi Aware standard instead of AWDL—and in fact required Apple to deprecate AWDL and to help add its features to Wi-Fi Aware so that any device could benefit from them. This wasn’t quite the imposition it sounded like; Wi-Fi Aware was developed with Apple’s help, based on the work Apple had already done on AWDL. But it meant that Apple could no longer keep other companies out of AirDrop by using a functionally similar but private communication protocol instead of the standardized version.
Google says that it is using its own implementation, and Apple's take on that is unclear. Apple has not historically supported third-party workarounds for interoperability between iPhone and Android devices, and it continually worked to put a stop to an iMessage for Android feature that Beeper attempted in 2023.
On the iPad side, Apple continues to tweak the edges of its new multitasking model, most notably the reborn Slide Over feature. This week’s feature updates all seem to be focused on kicking off multitasking functionality by dragging apps out of the Dock while in multi-window mode.
Would you trust an unsolicited caller who claimed to be from Apple if their call lined up with genuine alerts from Apple’s own website? That creates a sense of trust, and it’s exactly that feeling of authenticity that scammers are exploiting in an active campaign that’s targeting Apple users and attempting to steal their account details.
In its blog post, Apple showcases the inference performance gains of the new M5 chip, thanks to the chip’s new GPU Neural Accelerators, which Apple says “provide[s] dedicated matrix-multiplication operations, which are critical for many machine learning workloads.”
I was finally able to test local AI performance with a pre-release version of MLX and a testing environment specifically optimized for the M5, and let me tell you: not only is the hype real, but the numbers I got from my extensive tests over the past two weeks actually exceed Apple’s claims.
Apple Music has just launched a diverse lineup of new ‘Best of 2025’ playlists, and also named Tyler, The Creator as its Artist of the Year.
The Hikawa MagSafe Phone Grip and Stand functions as both a stand for the phone, and a tool for gripping it, for users with limited muscle strength or ability to hold a phone independently.
Apple Watch owners have been voicing their frustration online over changes to the Workout app that Apple introduced in watchOS 26, with many finding the redesigned interface makes starting exercises difficult and exasperating.
Cook’s tenure, which began four years after the launch of the iPhone, has been bounded by the smartphone era. Even though worldwide sales of smartphones peaked almost a decade ago, nothing new has come along to disturb the device’s centrality in consumer technology. Cook has played his hand well, building and reinforcing an empire around the iPhone with services and new gadgets such as AirPods and the Watch.
But impregnability isn’t assured. His successor will need to show that they can both co-opt AI to reinforce what Cook built while also harnessing its disruptive potential to ride the next consumer tech wave.
Based on public information so far right now, Android's 'interoperation' with AirDrop seems quite likely to be something that Apple is not involved. And if Apple is not involved, it is quite unlikely that Apple will be happy.
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Apple today announced 45 finalists for this year’s App Store Awards, recognizing the best apps and games across 12 different categories for creating exceptional experiences that inspire users to accomplish more, reimagine their daily workflows, and push creative boundaries.
Going paperless is very much like that. Here, I want to share with you the plan I used to remove most paper from my life. It should help you get started, but know in advance that you don't have to stick to it exactly every moment of every day. You can mess up. You can forget. So long as you get into the habit most of the time, you'll find yourself mostly paperless in a couple of months.
On a newly paired Apple Watch in the EU, any Wi-Fi network they have previously connected to on their iPhone will need to be manually connected to on their Apple Watch.
However, any future networks a user connects to on their iPhone will automatically be shared to their Apple Watch, so long as the iPhone and Apple Watch are in the same place at the same time. If both devices are not together, the Wi-Fi network won’t be synced.
There were rumors that Apple would both abandon and expand MLB coverage, but that information turned out to be inaccurate. Apple's deal with MLB remains the same, despite new rights agreements that MLB has established with Netflix, ESPN, and NBCUniversal.
In September, Apple controversially cancelled the launch of new series The Savant, seemingly in the wake of the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk. The company said it looks forward to releasing the show at a later time, but two months on, there’s still no release date in sight. It’s listed as “coming at a later date” in the TV app.
Meanwhile, Apple TV has perhaps just repeated the same fiasco for a second time. The service was set to premiere French-language series The Hunt on December 3, having released a trailer earlier this month. But now, all references to The Hunt have been scrubbed, including removal of the press release from the Apple TV PR newsroom and the YouTube trailer is now marked private.
Following its sweeping success at this year’s Emmys, Apple celebrated today more than 20 nominations for the 4th Annual Children’s & Family Emmy Awards.
Instead of having to click accept or reject on a cookie pop-up for every website you visit in Europe, the EU is preparing to enforce rules that will allow users to set their preferences for cookies at the browser level. “People can set their privacy preferences centrally — for example via the browser — and websites must respect them,” says the EU. “This will drastically simplify users’ online experience.”
The EU on Wednesday unveiled new proposals to simplify AI and privacy regulations, drawing fire from the tech sector for not going far enough and consumer groups for bowing to Big Tech.
[...]
Europe is scrabbling to balance tough rules with not losing more ground in the global tech race, where companies in the United States and Asia are streaking ahead in artificial intelligence and chips.
The M4 runs laps around the M1, and for just $150 more, the M4 MacBook Air is the clear winner if you’re looking for a semi-affordable MacBook this holiday.
Apple has announced pre-orders are now open for the Vision Pro with M5 chip and Dual Knit Band in Korea and Taiwan, preceding a launch in both countries on Friday, November 28.
Neumann has released Virtual Immersive Studio (VIS), a spatial audio positioning application designed exclusively for Apple Vision Pro. The software enables users to control Logic Pro in a three-dimensional augmented reality environment using gestures and spatial computing.
The Moment Pro Camera II brings new features like natural processing and Open Gate, while continuing features that previously earned top App Store status in the photo and video category.
With a refined interface that makes it feel like a native Mac app, it offers advanced features like a customizable multi-pane layout and enhanced file operations.
Clockify’s unobstrusiveness has made it a natural fit for my productive sprints and a cure for my poor planning.
A three-day court hearing into the matter, scheduled to conclude on 21 November 2025, starts today. Its purpose is to determine if Which? should be granted permission by the Competition Appeal Tribunal to act as a class representative on this matter, so that it can pursue compensation on behalf of the 41 million UK iCloud users it claims were affected by Apple’s behaviour.
Which? first filed its complaint against Apple in November 2024, and stated at the time that its intention was to secure £3bn in compensation for the UK-based Apple device users it claims were “unfairly” locked into using the iCloud service.
We already know how watching other people’s lives on social media can negatively affect our self-esteem and satisfaction with our own lives. Apparently, using apps to track your own calories or fitness activities can have a similar effect. The latest research from scientists at University College London (UCL) and Loughborough University suggests that fitness apps can actually become major demotivators.
What we can say, on an individual level, is that BNPL is getting more dangerous. The industry “has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt,” according to a New York Times Magazine feature on people who just started shopping, missed the fine print, and got in real trouble.
As this holiday shopping season kicks off, read the fine print. Or better yet, don’t buy now or pay later. The US economy may thank you for it.
If you just want something -- not need, just want -- and you can't afford that something, please try not to do Buy Now Pay Later. Instead, just do without.
Life is stressful enough. Don't add additional months and years of stress to your life for something you don't need.
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Corollary: there are many things that you do need, but there are even more things you think you need, but you actually don't need.
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Thanks for reading.
It started with a pie-in-the-sky idea: What if 3D printing — historically used to create prototypes — could be leveraged to produce millions of identical enclosures to Apple’s exact design standards, with high-quality recycled metal?
“It wasn’t just an idea — it was an idea that wanted to become a reality,” says Kate Bergeron, Apple’s vice president of Product Design. “Once we asked the question, we immediately started testing it. We had to prove, with continuous prototyping, process optimization, and a tremendous amount of data gathering, that this technology was capable of meeting the high standard of quality we demand.”
My everyday computing needs revolve around researching, typing, and photo-editing, and the iPad Pro excels at all of them. As such, I will continue to use it as my main work machine for the foreseeable future. It has essentially replaced my MacBook Air M2.
Nevertheless, I will also keep my MacBook around for activities that remain macOS exclusives, such as HomePod mini OS recovery. My world has flipped: My iPad Pro is now a functional laptop replacement… and I only need to keep my Mac around for specific, uncommon use cases.
As a user, I prefer the old model where the updates are presented on a reasonable schedule in a way that makes sense to me. This is a feature update that’s well tested, this is a bug fix update, and I can see what’s happening (I love reading release notes) and when I want to update each app. But the App Store model has ruined this because developers are constantly pushing updates, and they happen in the background (sometimes breaking things at the worst time) without showing any release notes.
Ookla has found that Apple’s custom N1 networking chip that integrates the Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread radios in the iPhone 17 family “delivers a clear step-change in real-world Wi-Fi performance” when compared to the Broadcom chip used in the iPhone 16 models.
Starting this Wednesday, November 19, the feature will be available to residents of Illinois.
The announcement confirmed that the feature will be supported at Chicago's O'Hare and Midway airports, as well as at Lambert airport in St. Louis, Missouri.
Apple today announced an expansion of AppleCare+ coverage in India, with new options for monthly and annual plans, and the addition of Theft and Loss for iPhone for the first time.
Klarna is now available as a buy-now, pay-later option when using Apple Pay in Denmark, Spain, and Sweden, with France to follow in the coming weeks. This financing option lets you pay for your Apple Pay purchase in monthly installments.
Apple has just released a batch of surprise firmware updates for various accessories that you might otherwise never suspect could get new firmware, including the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and even an Apple power adapter.
The new feature displays data like duration, energy, distance, and elevation in Gentler Streak’s hallmark beautiful interface, with color-coded graphs that make it easier to see how each activity contributed to your week.
The EPA investigated Apple's facility after receiving a complaint about it, discovering that Apple had not properly labeled hazardous waste containers or controlled air emissions from a solvent waste tank, among other violations.
Apple fixed the waste management issues and installed a device to control air emissions. Apple is also paying a $261,283 penalty.
In all of my life, I find it much easier to 'talk' to a computer than to converse with a human. Computers are deterministic. You can figure out why the computer is telling you what it is telling you, and even though debugging sessions can be long, it is achievable. Even Eliza.
Then, Gen AI has to come along, and I may need to find something new to talk to.
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Thanks for reading.
A new document in Apple’s Developer blog confirms that users in Japan will be able to reassign the side button to launch third-party voice-based conversational apps, rather than Siri.
The free Apple Sports app on the iPhone was released in additional European countries today, including Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Ukraine, and others.
The market for third-party iMessage apps has largely dried up, but Apple seems keen to keep it going. Over the weekend, the company debuted a new iMessage sticker pack for its Arcade title Sneaky Sasquatch.
ChronoSync 12 adds support for remote triggering of synchronizer tasks via ChronoAgent.
The release now enables you to add, edit, and delete comments on PDFs (with a new comment sidebar view, too).
Opened in 2014, the Livat Centre is one of the most popular shopping malls in Beijing. The mall has a Scandinavian design and is anchored by IKEA, as a result of being owned by Sweden's Ingka Group, the world's largest IKEA franchisee.
Tech companies have become such a central part of the Irish economy that we’re now alarmingly reliant on the income they bring, even if the benefits are rarely felt by the average citizen. Since the mid-2010s, the relocation of intellectual property assets by companies like Apple to Ireland has grossly distorted its GDP — to the extent that Ireland is often left out of EU GDP calculations to avoid skewing the data. This kind of “economic froth,” as named by Cliff Taylor in a 2023 Irish Times article, creates an unhealthy reliance on America’s continued offshore manufacturing of products like tech and pharma — a situation that is now under serious risk as the Department of Finance forecasts that the Trump administration’s mooted tariffs could cost Ireland €18 billion in lost trade.
First, we find out who are using AWS us-east-1. Now, we find out who are using Cloudflare.
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Ryan Jones found himself in the depths of travel agony a few years ago, waiting out a flight delay, when he came up with the idea for a product that would have saved him from this pit of despair.
Before he finally took off, the entrepreneur had made up his mind: He was going to build the world’s best flight-tracking app.
Fall of 2026 will see, Gurman says, three releases: the top-tier iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone. That release, he says, will be followed in spring of 2027 by the non-Pro iPhone 18, 18e, and (maybe) a new iPhone Air.
This staggered, more diverse pattern of iPhone releases will last for “years to come,” Gurman thinks.
Gurman outlines that Apple’s Mac Pro strategy “doesn’t look set to change anytime soon.” Apple is no longer working on an M4 Ultra chip, and the Mac Pro that was slated to include that chip “was also nixed,” he says.
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“From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro,” Gurman writes. “The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.”
Gurman said that Apple Fitness+ may be merged into a broader new Apple Health+ service launching next year. If so, he said that Apple Fitness+ would no longer be available as a standalone subscription service.
When thinking about legacy, as anyone in Cook's position after his long tenure now must, certainly there's a desire to go out "on top". And there may be no better time than after that next earnings release.
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Not only do things look nice and stable for Apple now, but there are potentially storm clouds on the horizon with AI bubbles and what not. If the stock market were to tank – for any reason, independent of Apple – Cook might have a harder time leaving.
Some of the world's best-known leaders are leaving the next generation to sort out historic technological, political and economic changes.
We’d hazard a guess that a lot of Mac users haven’t opened the Shortcuts app and, if they have, they’ve done very little other than have a quick look. That’s to be expected. Shortcuts can, at first glance, feel just a tad too complex and it’s not always immediately apparent how useful it can be. But if you spend even a short amount of time playing around with this app, you can certainly reap the benefits.
Last year, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg shared that WhatsApp reached 100 million monthly users in the U.S., with over half on iPhone. WhatsApp saw peak new downloads—over two million—from Apple’s App Store in both May and July of this year, according to app-data tracker Appfigures.
Yes, blue-bubble snobs are breaking out of Apple’s walled garden. Why? Big groups.
While the guilt of killing a tree (even if its virtual) ends up forcing me into focusing, it still adds some level of anxiety around tasks that are meant to be positive.
Finch flips that approach. When you complete a task, you get rainbow stones, which you can use to buy new clothes for your bird or furniture for its space. Each task you complete daily also increases your bird’s energy. When your bird reaches the maximum energy for the day, it goes on an adventure. The best part is that you don’t need to complete all your tasks for the day to go on an adventure.
Let's hope Mr Tim Cook picks his successor wisely, and does not have to pull a Bob Iger and return back from retirement in, say, end of 2028 / early 2029.
Either that, or stay as chairman of the board for quite a few more years.
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Thanks for reading.
The longer, crossbody model held Carey's phone securely, and she felt confident wearing it around New York throughout the day. She also put it through some impromptu testing. "I've been swinging it around and stuffing other items in it," she said. "I've even tied it around my neck as a scarf and put it on my foot as a sock."
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I'm no fashion expert, but fashion writer Tiffany Lo is, and she told me "the design embodies Issey Miyake's signature pleat pattern and the idea of crafting it from a single piece of fabric. It's instantly recognizable."
I don’t think there are many people, if any, outside Apple’s top executive team and board of directors who have any insight into Cook’s thinking on this. That “several people” spoke to the FT about this says to me that those sources (members of the board?) did so with Cook’s blessing, and they want this announcement to be no more than a little surprising.
Two things I am wondering on this lazy rainy (where I live) Sunday afternoon.
Thing one: how many of Apple customers buying the iPhone pockets are intending to not open the 'limited edition' product, and sell them for profit in a later date?
Thing two: will whatever the material Apple has cosen reamin intact and doesn't disintegrate by itself inside the packaging after a few years?
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Thanks for reading.
Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed.
But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.
Updates are now largely automatic or even, in the case of many software-as-a-service apps, mandatory. This means changes will be introduced without any warning. So, I kind of get why this has become a standard, but it is rooted in something that also kind of stinks.
The jury agreed with Masimo that the Apple Watch's workout mode and heart rate notification features violated Masimo's patent rights, a Masimo spokesperson confirmed.
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The California lawsuit is one branch of a contentious, multi-front patent fight between Apple and Irvine, California-based Masimo, which has accused Apple of hiring away its employees and stealing its pulse oximetry technology to use in Apple Watches.
In new filings today, the ITC said it “has determined to institute a combined modification and enforcement proceeding” to determine whether the redesigned Apple Watch blood oxygen feature is permitted under the initial ITC import ban. The decision was made following a complaint from Masimo.
Fans of new Apple TV series Pluribus can download a chapter of historical (and fictional) romance novel "Bloodsong of Wycaro" from the Apple Books app today. Written by Pluribus main character Carol Sturka, Bloodsong of Wycaro recounts the adventures of Lucasia as she sails on the Mercator, dreaming of her lost love Raban.
If you can imagine a way you’d like to manage your tasks, OmniFocus is flexible enough to enable it without ever feeling overly cluttered. And the plan for AI is in line with that: The development team wants to keep AI offline and private, and empower users to set it up however they like.
As photographers using macOS know all too well, native macOS-level support for RAW image formats can be hit-or-miss, and new support can take months or years to arrive, sometimes never arriving at all. This means that photographers must rely on third-party software to process many RAW photos, and that support in Apple’s own apps, like Photos, is spotty. However, not all is lost, as very talented engineers are working hard to overcome macOS’s own RAW limitations.
Sonny Software has released Bookends 15.2.2, featuring a new Apple-related AI feature for the reference management tool. If a unique identifier isn’t found when importing reference metadata from Bookends Browser, Bookends will use Apple Intelligence’s on-device model to extract metadata from the page.
Rockstar Games has announced that acclaimed open-world game Read Dead Redemption and its Undead Nightmare expansion pack are coming to iOS and Android early next month.
Popular iPhone accessory maker Belkin has issued a recall for three of its products, including the Belkin Auto-Tracking Stand Pro, the Belkin BoostCharge USB-C PD Power Bank 20K, and the Playa USB-C PD Power Bank 20K.
Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year.
Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.
Major League Soccer’s streaming partnership with Apple will now end three-and-a-half years earlier than the original decade-long term, according to multiple people familiar with the details. The revisions come alongside MLS’ decision to move to Apple TV in 2026 and to flip its league calendar the following year.
[...]
MLS executives will now be able to test the media rights market more quickly after the 2026 World Cup, which will be played in Canada, Mexico and the United States, and which is expected to boost Americans’ interest in the global game. The league could still extend its Apple deal or sign a new agreement with the tech titan.
Please don't surprise your customers, dear software developers; that should be the social contract between you and your customers.
Sure, I will turn on automatic updates for your software, so that you can quickly push out new features and bug fixes. I will keep my operating system up-to-date, so that you can make use of the latest and greatest APIs.
In return, please don't surprise me. Don't push out an update that changes how things are supposed to work. Don't remove features and functions willy-nilly. Don't force me to hunt for things that have been moved all over the place.
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Thanks for reading.
Beginning in the 2026 season, MLS games will be available on Apple's flagship streaming platform, which currently includes Major League Baseball games as well as scripted series like "Severance."
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While Stevenson didn't go into specifics, some terms of the deal changed as part of the move to Apple TV.
"But it's not like it was a big renegotiation because what we've been focused on is the distribution, and how to make it a better and more accessible experience for the fans," said Stevenson.
If you’re at all familiar with Issey Miyake, the Japanese label behind the iPhone Pocket, then this design should sound familiar. Miyake, the late, revered designer, pioneered the APOC (“a piece of cloth”) concept in 1997, which showcased his innovative, tech-forward approach to fashion while also reducing waste.
[...]
With Tap to Pay technology, or literal wallets that attach to your phone, you can leave the house with just your phone and navigate the world just fine. (Bonus points if your door unlocks by inputting a code — no keys!). It’s no wonder that more bags are being designed for phones themselves. Think about how popular those miniature Trader Joe’s bags were, or how the small crossbody Telfar remains an “it” bag. Brands like Free People, Baggu, Lululemon, and even IKEA are selling keychains that are just tiny versions of their existing bags. It’s not that much of a stretch to say that a sock could be next.
In the studios of GMM Grammy, a familiar melody fills the air — one that countless Thais have grown up hearing. But this time, it sounds different. Warmer. More expansive. The kind of sound that feels both timeless and new. The song is by COCKTAIL, one of Thailand’s most beloved rock bands. Their music — cinematic, emotional, deeply human — helped shape the landscape of Thai rock and paved the way for a generation of young Thai artists to pick up an instrument, write a verse, or open GarageBand for the first time.
Apple is launching a new program for mini app developers that slashes its fees for in-app purchases. On Thursday, the company announced that mini app creators who join the program take advantage of a lower 15 percent commission rate — half of the up to 30 percent rate Apple charges other developers.
[...]
The news of the program comes just hours after Apple reached an agreement with Tencent, allowing it to take a 15 percent commission on purchases from WeChat’s mini apps.
Apple on Thursday introduced a new set of App Review Guidelines for developers, which now specifically state that apps must disclose and obtain users’ permission before sharing personal data with third-party AI.
With today’s update, Apple shows that it intends to keep on strengthening its anti-copycat policies, but whether that will be enough to meaningfully reduce such knock-offs remains to be seen.
Apple is expanding availability of its new 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max to several countries that use type G plugs. The new variant of the adapter features a three-prong folding design that is distinct from the initial two-prong versions that launched in September alongside the iPhone 17 models.
Missourians and Kansans alike can now virtually navigate the metro area within Kansas City in richer detail, including Apple’s in-street viewing feature.
The whole idea behind SideTab is offering quick access to frequently visited websites and tools, and then returning to core work. In hindsight, it saves you from the clutter of split-screen multitasking and the tab crowding that is already bringing your active browser window to its knees.
The idea of swapping 4–5 monitors for one huge TV sounded pretty stupid at first. But I can't see myself going back now, though. My computer runs cooler and quieter, my desk isn't buried under stands and cables, and I actually get more done without hunting for windows across different screens. Bigger ended up being better than more. If you're buried in monitors and wires right now, one large display might be the move. It worked for me.
As someone who uses their iPhone for everything from video to gaming to communicating to podcasting, this new accessory has been a great addition to the travel pack.
Russell’s character, Army officer Lee Shaw, is alive — spoiler alert — and headed to King Kong’s Skull Island in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season two. The Legendary Television series premieres Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, Apple TV announced Thursday.
What is interesting to me is that the trackingshipment URL already contains the shipping company when it is created by the data detector. That is, Apple’s web-side service is not used to determine which courier this number corresponds to. It is only performing a straight redirect. My guess about why it is set up like this is so Apple can push minor changes to the web service if a courier changes their parcel tracking URL format instead of shipping it in the next operating system update.
Okay, a decade and a half later, Meta can now put Farmville back onto its Facebook iPhone app.
Right?
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Thanks for reading.
If you suffer from that recurring nightmare that you’re at the airport but have forgotten your wallet, fret no longer: starting today, holders of U.S. passports can create a Digital ID in Apple’s Wallet app, which can be used at TSA checkpoints across the country for domestic flights—even if you don’t have a REAL ID-compliant state ID card or driver’s license.
The bigger problem with the Digital ID is that it solves hardly any real-world problems. Although you can create a Digital ID from a passport, it’s not a replacement for a physical passport and cannot be used for international travel or border crossings. The main people who stand to benefit significantly from a Digital ID are those who fly domestically but don’t have (or frequently fail to carry) a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID. That seems like a tricky proposition to me.
The latest macOS Tahoe beta 26.2 includes a new video-calling feature called Edge Light, coming to Apple silicon Macs later this year. It’s a video effect that you can access from the menu bar, just like Backgrounds, Center Stage, and Portrait mode, that creates a virtual ring light on your Mac’s screen, helping to light your face on FaceTime, Zoom, and other video calls as the days grow shorter.
When ‘Screen’ flash is enabled, notifications will cause the iPhone display to fully light up for a brief moment before reverting to normal brightness. The effect is especially noticeable when the always-on display isn’t activated.
Tencent Holdings Ltd. has struck a deal with Apple Inc. that will see the iPhone maker handle payments and take a 15% cut of purchases in WeChat mini games and apps, resolving a high-profile dispute that’s dogged the world’s largest smartphone arena.
China’s social media leader and the US company will soon disclose details of their agreement, which comes after more than a year of talks, according to people familiar with the discussions. To qualify, developers need to sign up to certain Apple software requirements, such as one to help parents share their child’s age range, one of the people said. They asked not to be named as they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
[...]
At 15%, Apple’s taking half the usual fee that it charges many developers on in-app purchases, but it’s making inroads in a growing segment of entertainment. Mini games, contained entirely within WeChat contributed to 32.3 billion yuan ($4.5 billion) in social network revenue for China’s most valuable company in the September quarter.
Apple's extended return policy went into effect today for the 2025 holiday shopping season. The policy applies to most products sold by Apple online and in its stores, but there are a few exceptions, including most carrier-financed iPhones.
Apple has announced its next round of Apple Arcade titles. In a press release today, the company revealed that games including PowerWash Simulator, SpongeBob Patty Pursuit 2, and more will launch on Apple Arcade on December 4.
1Password is introducing a new “unlock experience” to its desktop app, which allows users to set it to unlock when logging into a device with Face ID, Touch ID, a PIN, or a password.
The EU argued that having competing app stores would result in lower commissions and therefore lower app prices for consumers. However, an Apple-funded study carried out by The Analysis Group says it checked for reductions in app prices after commissions were reduced and says it can find very little evidence of this.
After several years of reporting on and obsessing over how private equity works and why, I finally understand the root of my misconceptions about capitalism. I had thought that the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication was to make it more profitable, to strengthen the fundamentals of its business model in hopes of a lucrative exit years down the road.
That is not the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication (or any business). The point is to make the private equity firm more profitable. The Denver Post and Deadspin and Vice News are just widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value. Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like. That allows — requires! — a private equity firm to divorce its incentives from that of its own portfolio company, making it, at best, agnostic to whether the company lives or dies. In many cases, the best decision for the firm is the one that directly undermines the company it controls. The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.
The reasons women’s careers are at higher risk from AI are complex, but experts agree on a few common patterns. Women are overrepresented in clerical and administrative roles – which often involve repetitive tasks that AI can already perform efficiently. While these roles may not vanish entirely, partial automation could reduce job quality, stripping responsibility, stagnating wages and increasing insecurity.
At the same time, women and girls remain underrepresented in the creation, deployment and regulation of technology. We are less likely to pursue tech careers or use digital services – and disproportionately more likely to experience online harassment. Gender imbalances in AI leadership exacerbate these problems: research from Cloudera, a platform for managing big data and AI, found that 68% of UK-based female IT decision-makers worry about the lack of women in senior AI positions, and over half believe this contributes to biased AI outputs – especially as AI leadership remains overwhelmingly male.
People who mocked Apple's line about the concept of a piece of cloth obviously, I think, did not even read the wikipedia page of Mr Issey Miyake.
But, Apple should have also describe it better.
(And, no, I already have enough pockets.)
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Similarly, a lot of people also did not find out what Apple's Digital ID thing is and is not before writing entire articles and blog posts.
(I am not saying if this Digital ID thing is or is not a good idea.)
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Thanks for reading.
Apple spent a decade trying to reject the idea that the iPad is a computer, trying to invent a third space in the computing ecosystem. But the iPad, and the iPad Pro in particular, is not a third thing. It’s a laptop. A damn good one, even. The hardware, the operating system, the accessory ecosystem — everything is in place for this to be not just a full-fledged computer, but maybe the best computer Apple makes. Now Apple just needs to finally let it act like it.
The Apple Invites app was updated today with an option that allows guests to specify the number of adults and children they’re bringing to an event.
Last month, Apple announced that Emergency SOS via satellite would be coming to Mexico before the end of the year. Today is that day, as the feature has now officially launched in Mexico.
The new Apple Watch app is as beautifully animated as The Outsiders users have grown accustomed to expecting, and Gentler Stories suggests wearing your Apple Watch overnight in addition to recording your training sessions with it, in order to get the best results.
Apple updated Xcode today with multiple welcome bug fixes, including some performance updates to its new AI-assisted coding features.
It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore. You’re just renting access until someone decides to move the paywall. It’s convenient, sure, but it also feels like losing control over something that used to be ours.
If iPadOS is going to look and feel more and more like macOS, starting with this year's version with its fancy windowing and traffic lights…
And that Mac computers are going to look and feel like an iPad, with the rumored touchscreen Macs coming in a couple of years…
Is there still a future with both iPads and Mac computers?
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Or is Vision Pro or Vision or Glasses the real future of computers, and Apple is now milking both iPads and Macs for all their worth?
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Thanks for reading.
ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items.
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iPhone Pocket features a ribbed open structure with the qualities of the original pleats by ISSEY MIYAKE. Born from the idea of creating an additional pocket, its understated design fully encloses iPhone, expanding to fit more of a user’s everyday items. When stretched, the open textile subtly reveals its contents and allows users to peek at their iPhone display. iPhone Pocket can be worn in a variety of ways — handheld, tied onto bags, or worn directly on the body.
It was Miyake who designed Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs. Now, all these years later, your iPhone can have a turtleneck of sorts for itself, too.
Given the choice, Apple would have rolled out its first custom-designed Mac chips on its own terms, probably at a high-profile event in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park. But given that it was November 2020, the company was forced to release a 45-minute video instead.
No amount of in-person theatrics would have upstaged the star of that show, the M1 processor. Five years later, it’s clear that the arrival of Apple silicon has utterly changed the trajectory of the Mac.
There is one oddity in the Mac landscape: the unsynchronized rollout of different chips.
I’m glad I took the time to pore over the differences between the Classic and Unified views. Otherwise, I would never have realized that Unified view flipped the previous behavior of initiating a call with a tap anywhere on a recent or missed call. That alone is enough to make Unified view my choice, but even beyond that change, I think it’s better. Even when it comes to something as basic as phone calls, there’s room for improvement.
The update changes how the Horizontal & Vertical Align Center commands are used for multiple selected layers, now using the optical bounds of selected layers instead of automatically centering in the canvas.
When building snippets, the Date Picker Fill-in lets you select any date (past, present, or future) from a visual calendar and insert it directly into your Snippet as it expands.
Use it to explore the night sky, keep track of upcoming celestial events, and dive into detailed facts and figures about stars, planets, constellations, and more.
It is much faster than Apple Music's own Mac UI, loads songs flawlessly, and does its one job of curating all your albums very well. On the surface, Albums may look like a one-trick pony, but the moment you start exploring it, you'll realize that it has a lot of amazing features for you to enjoy.
Along with additional power, the cases provide protection for the iPhone 17 lineup.
Why the Info panel presented by clicking the “(i)” button next to Sequoia in the “Other Updates” section defaults to installing the upgrade to 26.1 Tahoe, I don’t know. But it sure makes it seem like we need to be more careful than we actually do if we want to stick with MacOS 15 Sequoia for now.
I suspect that if Apple did offer an ad tier, it would probably be the most tasteful and elegant set of ad prerolls and breaks in the business. But I think that in the end, it won’t be able to resist the pull of video ads.
As a literary translator, I’m drawn to precisely that which defies easy equivalence: rhythm, play, idiosyncrasy, cultural specificity, the shimmer of ambiguity. My work happens where languages don’t line up, where meaning must be reimagined rather than decoded and flattened. What I fear is that people will come to think of language as only what machines can translate, forgetting everything outside that frame. If technology promises to end the language barrier, we should ask: What else will it erase?
Some random thoughts…
The iPhone Pocket is not available in white. Sir Jony has really left the building.
How difficult is it to do something like this with a single 'piece of cloth'? Or, to put it another way, how long before we see copycats?
I am still a bit sad that Apple didn't name its Singapore store just Apple Orchard.
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Thanks for reading.
Algorithm fatigue has been building for some time. Apple made human curation a central selling point of its music service, enlisting big names like Jimmy Iovine and Zane Lowe. But recently, the rebellion against the algorithm has picked up steam.
[...]
At this stage, anti-algorithm is itself an entire genre of content. Particularly on YouTube, where creators make videos about ditching streaming, stopping doomscrolling, and how the algorithm has flattened culture.
Of course, once something becomes a trend, it’s only a matter of time before companies start trying to figure out how to cash in.
Despite being among the biggest companies in the world, with a market cap of nearly $4 trillion and more than $55 billion of cash on hand, it has never been one to do the sort of deals that its competitors have done, and Cue’s comments suggest that it has no plans on changing that.
I remember the uproar when iPhone photos began dominating Flickr. That first iPhone had a 2MP camera and no zoom! Why would anyone think it was a proper camera? Yet before long, I’d ditched my digital camera too, and used my iPhone for everything. I still do. Because from the start, Apple got the fundamentals right – and has pushed photography forward ever since.
The Swiss National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning iPhone owners about a phishing scam that claims to have found your lost or stolen iPhone but is actually trying to steal your Apple ID credentials.
[...]
The phishing message contains a link to the alleged Find My website that shows the device's location.
However, instead of leading to Apple's official website, it redirects to a phishing page with a login prompt that mimics Apple's Find My website.
"I mean, my character is really based on me and my own fears and anxieties. We sort of exaggerate them and we apply them to a job that is not my main job but is a job that I really relate to, because I run a production company with a few other people and we choose in some ways which movies get made and which ones don’t, and which actors we hire and which ones we don’t, and what notes we give and which ones we don’t. And I’m constantly dealing with the things my character is dealing with and being afraid that I’m letting down people that I’m a big fan of, and being afraid that I am not a part of the team in the way that I want to be a part of the team, and being afraid I’m making the wrong choices as to which movies I’m getting behind and which ones I’m not. Am I being too business-minded? Am I really nurturing creativity? Am I making these choices for the right reasons? That’s all based on my own fears."
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"Yes. It’s gotten very meta. It does feel like I’m running a fake movie studio at times. I’m having directors’ agents call me to pitch their clients to be the directors of fake movies on our show, which is very weird and very meta. And I’m having to actually turn down directors I’m a big fan of because the movie, the fake movie, maybe isn’t quite right for the fake package we have in our heads. So yeah—it’s gotten very strange."
Apple has removed two of the most popular gay dating apps in China from the App Store after receiving an order from China’s main internet regulator and censorship authority, WIRED has learned. The move comes as reports of Blued and Finka disappearing from the iOS App Store and several Android app stores circulated on Chinese social media over the weekend. The apps appear to still be functional for users in the country who already have them downloaded.
“We follow the laws in the countries where we operate. Based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China, we have removed these two apps from the China storefront only,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email. Apple clarified that the apps have not been available in other countries for some time. “Earlier this year, the developer of Finka elected to remove the app from storefronts outside of China, and Blued was available only in China.”
I want to say this little website is assembled without using any algorithms. It's all human effort. One human effort.
But then, I'm sure there are plenty of algorithms out there to determine what I see and read when I browse and search to bring you this little website.
So, I will not say that no algorithms are involved in the making. I will just say: there are still humans involved in the production.
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Thanks for reading.
After spending a decade and a half in the brains of a meth kingpin and a slimeball attorney, Gilligan wanted his next protagonist to be a force for good. “I wrote on ‘The X Files’ for seven years, and I started to take for granted the idea of heroes. Mulder and Scully were heroic. They were trying to save the world. At a certain point, you do umpteen million episodes of that, and you think, ‘I’m ready for an antihero or a bad guy,’” Gilligan says. (He famously pitched “Breaking Bad” as the story of a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips to Scarface.) “But at this point in humanity and in world history, I think we need more good guys again. We need more heroes.”
Not that Carol is a traditional TV hero, of course. As Seehorn puts it, she’s an “emotional hot mess” who “can’t control her anger”; Gilligan uses the words “reluctant” and “inept.” “The folks who rise to the occasion, despite the fact that they’re scared and lonely and sad and would rather have someone else take this mantle from them,” he adds, “those are the interesting characters to me.”
Vince Gilligan's genius is in the deft way he marbles brutality, humanity and humor into a single creation in which each element retains its punch, but the whole still makes sense. After all, what makes Breaking Bad a brutal watch in the early going is how quickly you get to things like dissolving bodies in acid and being left to contend with the muck that remains. But what makes it delightful is the absurd sight of Walt in his underpants and a gas mask, tearing down a dusty road in an RV while bodies slide around in the back.
Pluribus, too, is a brutal watch as Carol finds herself deep in grief, walking through empty buildings, driving deserted neighborhoods, experiencing the arid desolation of a frictionless life. But the collaboration between Gilligan and Seehorn also is built on how funny she is, how perfectly suited to both his willingness to plumb deep wells of sadness and the playfulness that made him an ideal collaborator with Bob Odenkirk, even back when Saul was mostly Breaking Bad comic relief.
There are a lot of apps to help you manage your tasks on the market, but Focii is a special one. With its ultra minimal interface, there’s no noise to interrupt the most important part of the ideation process: actually jotting down the idea without forgetting it.
The lukewarm reception for the Air is the only blemish on what is shaping up to be a blowout holiday quarter for Apple, thanks to more popular iPhone 17 models. It demonstrates Apple’s challenge in innovating around its flagship product and raises questions about whether Apple’s next form factor—a foldable iPhone—will resonate.
Okay, I've watched the first two episodes of Pluribus, and it is great. (In my opinion, of course. But then, so is the opinion of many critics too, mind you.)
And I do agree with creators of this show: if possible, do start watching the show without knowing anything about the premise and the plot. You will be pleasantly surprised.
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Thanks for reading.
Pluribus, which premieres its nine-episode first season (a second was part of the original pickup) Friday on Apple TV, is a Rhea Seehorn vehicle through-and-through. It’s a pure and, at times, solo showcase that might have worked to some degree with other actresses of a similar quality, but delivers its blend of emotional drama, broad comedy and unsettling horror thanks to Seehorn’s versatility.
The Pluribus creator, whose new show premiered the first two episodes Friday on Apple TV+, made sure to note in the credits of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series that the production did not rely on AI.
“This show was made by humans,” reads the credits, following a list of acknowledgments from the producers.
With tvOS 26.2, Apple is changing the way that profiles work on the Apple TV. It's now possible to create a profile without an Apple Account, which is particularly useful for guest profiles and profiles for children.
The strap would certainly be convenient for travel, for being out and about where you need to have your iPhone close at hand, or in some professions where you’re often needing to use your phone.
However, the strap can rub uncomfortably against your neck and shoulder at times, and the phone looks silly when the strap is removed — two drawbacks worth considering.
Rogue Labs has launched Flight Sight, which combines Apple Immersive Video, 3D helicopter models, spatial maps, and more for Apple Vision Pro users.
This is how Steve laid out his plan to us at the ad agency when he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s. The customer experience was all-important.
From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience.
That was Steve’s red line. Cross it if you dare.
For a remarkably long stretch, Apple’s in-house icons represented the pinnacle of an art form worth celebrating. They were exquisitely crafted, and quite obviously the work of the most talented artists in the field. Apple’s application icons in the OS 26 releases — MacOS Tahoe especially, because MacOS has the most first-party apps — look like they’re the work of people who have zero artistic ability whatsoever.
I've just started watching Pluribus, and I was thinking after the first few scenes: If this show premiered during the strange times of 2020, I may not be able to continue watching.
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Thanks for reading.
Every year, Apple’s Swift Student Challenge celebrates the creativity and ingenuity of student developers from around the world, inviting them to use Swift and Xcode to solve real-world problems in their own communities and beyond. Submissions for the 2026 challenge will open February 6 for three weeks, and students can prepare with new Develop in Swift tutorials and Meet with Apple code-along sessions.
Former Swift Student Challenge winners Brayden Gogis, Adrit Rao, and Sofia Sandoval have experienced firsthand how app development can unlock creativity and curiosity, strengthen their critical thinking, and lay the foundation for exciting careers. By harnessing cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and spatial computing, they’ve gone on to craft full-fledged apps and games imbued with warmth and a uniquely human touch.
In a letter seen by Computerworld, Apple Vice President Kyle Andeer has come out swinging against yet another investigation into the company’s business. Apple faces a pair of inquiries under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a sprawling piece of legislation that pretends to make the online world safer and probably won’t.
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The problem is that the two investigations arguably reflect requirements made under the DSA’s companion law, the Digital Markets Act. Apple isn’t happy, and its latest furious complaint against EU regulators pulls no punches in pointing out the futile and contradictory hypocrisy in play.
“We are concerned that these new inquiries are cynical attempts to distract from the core problems caused by the Commission’s misguided DMA enforcement efforts,” the letter says.
“I want people going into it knowing as little as possible,” Gilligan says. “Some people don’t roll that way. Some people want to know the ending before the beginning. Different strokes for different folks, but that’s not my jam. I like knowing as little as possible. So I'm trying to extend that to the audience.”
If a mystery man talks directly to you by name through your television, and you're not dreaming or hallucinating, it's safe to assume the world has shifted. How and why is the question that winds through Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan's delightful new series. Pluribus plays like George Orwell meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it still has Gilligan's distinctive voice, blending the real and the outlandish. After all, how preposterous was it for a high-school science teacher to become a drug lord, as Walter White did in Breaking Bad, or for a slimeball lawyer like Saul Goodman to be the hero we root for? Here Gilligan wraps timely social commentary in sci-fi tropes – and centres the story around a prickly but sympathetically down-to-earth heroine – to create one of the smartest, most entertaining shows of the year.
Now, you can take full advantage of Apple Music’s robust lyrics features even when offline.
After teasing its development last year, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has now launched BeeBot: an AI-powered social app for iPhones that talks to you about what’s happening nearby.
The choice to shoot practically aligns with Apple’s love of tactile detail and camera-first artistry, a point emphasized by Tor Myhren, Apple’s VP of marketing communications, in a speech at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last summer. Myhren said Apple would continue to value human artistry even as it embraces AI tools.
What Apple needs is a version of Apple Intelligence that isn’t stupid, is reliable and dependable for a broad baseline of tasks and queries, and that users can trust to be utterly private. What Google needs to keep Gemini at the forefront of AI is a lot more than “baseline dependability”. Gemini needs a leading-edge wow factor that Siri and Apple Intelligence do not.
Apple today announced plans to expand renewable energy capacity in Australia, beginning with a solar project now under construction in Lancaster, Victoria. Before 2030, Apple’s growing portfolio of renewable energy projects in Australia will generate over 1 million megawatt-hours of clean electricity annually on behalf of its users.
I don't know why, but the version of Apple's website for the country where I am in is still branding the streaming service as "Apple TV+".
But I do see the new 'vibrant' Apple TV branding when I watch the latest episode of "Down Cemetery Road" earlier today.
So, maybe Apple just forgot to update all its web pages?
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Thanks for reading.
Fascinated and alarmed, economists and policymakers are debating how AI — and especially much anticipated artificial general intelligence, or AGI — will reshape the workforce. Techno optimists argue that technology has historically been a powerful driver of economic growth, spurring new industries with novel jobs. That’s what happened with the advent of the automobile, after all: The ranks of carriage makers, horse breeders and stable owners melted away as jobs opened up in the emerging oil industry, and then in brand new sectors like motor hotels — motels — and drive-in theaters. Why couldn’t the same happen with AI?
But others hold that the changes wrought by AI are of a different scale. International Monetary Fund economists have estimated that AI may affect as many as 40 percent of all jobs as AI-driven machines replace work that was traditionally performed by people, much of it skilled. And even where jobs aren’t lost, work by human beings could become less valuable, causing wages to fall, says Anton Korinek, an expert on the economics of AI at the University of Virginia.
Apple Inc. is planning to pay about $1 billion a year for an ultrapowerful 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google that would help run its long-promised overhaul of the Siri voice assistant, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
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The model will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring that user data remains walled off from Google’s infrastructure. [...] While the partnership is substantial, it’s unlikely to be promoted publicly. Apple will treat Google as a behind-the-scenes technology supplier instead.
Apple on Tuesday released the first beta of iOS 26.2 to developers, and it appears that the software will allow users in Japan to install alternative app marketplaces on their devices when it is released to the public in December.
With iOS 26.2, Apple is adding a prompt that allows iPhone users in Japan to select a preferred search engine. [...] iPhone users in Japan can select from Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo Japan, or Ecosia, the same options available globally in the Safari settings.
Apple told French publication Numerama that in iOS 26.2, iPhone won’t be able to sync Wi-Fi details to Apple Watch like it can now. This is due to DMA requirements. [...] Apple says it’s necessary to protect the privacy of its users.
For one thing, users sometimes get locked out of their cloud accounts, which makes it impossible to retrieve their files. For another, not everything on your Mac is stored in iCloud. Things like settings, applications, and customizations aren't easy to recover should something happen to your Mac. It's also a lot faster to retrieve files from a local backup than a cloud one, which is important if you're backing up things like videos or photo libraries. Finally, there's a certain peace of mind that comes from being in control of your backup, as opposed to it being in the hands of a company.
For these reasons I recommend you make a full local backup of your Mac. There are many ways to do this, including using third-party software. For most people, though, I recommend something that might sound old-fashioned: an external hard drive and Apple's own Time Machine.
There’s a new setting, ‘Prefer Single-Touch Actions,’ that will disable the new slider for alarms and timers and bring the single-tap ‘Stop’ button back instead.
They feature over two dozen security fixes for lots of core components of the operating system and frequently-used libraries. Among the most concerning are App Store, Mail, and Spotlight vulnerabilities.
This navigation feature makes use of Gemini’s conversational and summarization capabilities to sift through the Google Maps corpus of 250 million businesses (with ratings, reviews, photos, and other info) and other reliable web sources.
Overall, Tahoe has been a solid update for me, particularly with the recent 26.1 release. These icons, however, make me sad. Perhaps one day, it will again be possible for icons to have shape and personality. We have the technology.
The BBEdit icon in my Dock looks undignified, and it makes Apple looks small.
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Thanks for reading.
After being delayed due to the regulatory uncertainty of rules surrounding the Digital Market Act, Apple has now confirmed that the flashy Live Translation feature for AirPods Pro and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation will be available in the European Union from next month.
The new device — designed for students, businesses and casual users — will target people who primarily browse the web, work on documents or conduct light media editing, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is also targeting would-be iPad buyers who might prefer a traditional laptop experience instead.
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Apple plans to sell the new machine for well under $1,000 by using less-advanced components. The laptop will rely on an iPhone processor and a lower-end LCD display. The screen will also be the smallest of any current Mac, coming in at slightly below the 13.6-inch one used in the MacBook Air.
In iOS 26.2, there's a new option to set an alarm to go off when creating a reminder in the Reminders app. When adding a reminder, selecting a time and then toggling on the "Urgent" option will cause an alarm to go off at the designated time.
Available inside the app’s attachment screen, you can create tables of varying sizes and add content to them like text and lists.
watchOS 26.2 tweaks the Sleep Score feature that's available for the Apple Watch, changing the labeling for point ranges to better match how people might be feeling after a restless night of sleep.
Apple Podcasts will soon include automatically-generated chapters for shows in English and allow creators to add links at specific timestamps in their episodes. Timed links may also be added to episodes automatically whenever creators mention another podcast.
[...]
With the timed links feature, creators can “provide links to Apple Music, Apple News, Apple Podcasts, Apple TV, and more” timestamped to appear at specific points in their episodes.
Upon tapping the new Enhanced Safety Alerts option, users in supported regions will be able to toggle switches for earthquake alerts and imminent threat alerts, in addition to a privacy option that shares “your approximate location with Apple to improve the timeliness and reliability of Enhanced Safety Alerts”.
In iOS 26.2, there's a new Liquid Glass slider that lets you customize the appearance of the clock. When you select the "Glass" option, you can use the new slider to make the time look almost entirely clear, or give it a more frosted, solid look.
The app allows you to read and react to messages, send replies, and more, directly on your wrist. A connected iPhone with the WhatsApp app installed is required, and you will need to update the app to the latest version that was released today.
Apple accidentally shipped the new App Store with sourcemaps enabled. This allowed them to download Apple’s complete front-end codebase straight from the production site.
[...]
In practice, this is not a huge leak, and doesn’t immediately pose any security or privacy risks to Apple, to developers, or to users. Still, it is a rare misstep, as disabling sourcemaps in production tends to be an elementary step for such projects.
Hey, if Apple will equip the rumored low-cost laptop with tons of storage so that I can store all the iCloud photos (and videos) on the device, this may well be something I can target to replace my existing Mac setup some day.
But, please: no butterfly keyboards.
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Thanks for reading.
Probably the biggest news is a new setting that allows users to choose between Clear and Tinted versions of Apple’s signature Liquid Glass design. Many readers we’ve heard from like Liquid Glass or didn’t notice a substantial difference when they updated to iOS and iPadOS 26, but for some, the design change was a regression in readability. With iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26.1, users can opt for a Tinted version of Liquid Glass that reduces transparency, increasing the design’s opacity and enhancing contrast.
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With iOS and iPadOS 26.1, the ‘Stop’ button for an alarm set in the system Clock app now requires a slide to stop gesture, which echoes the Slide to Unlock gesture of the original iPhone.
iPadOS 26.1 reintroduces Slide Over, a multitasking feature that was removed with the multitasking overhaul in iPadOS 26.
Slide Over works alongside the window-based multitasking functionality in iPadOS 26, so you can open up multiple app windows and still swipe over to quickly access a Slide Over app. Only one Slide Over app is supported at a time in iPadOS 26.1, and the feature is accessible by tapping on the green window resizing button and choosing Enter Slide Over.
Dropping the plus symbol was promised to come with a vibrant new brand identity. The first sign of this new identity appears in iOS 26.1, which updates the Apple TV app icon to include a splash of color.
Now we can see that same inspiration in the new Apple TV intro, which includes a color graphic and a new music tone created by FINNEAS.
If brevity is the soul of a hit, Finneas may be about to have his biggest hit ever. Apple commissioned the multiple-Oscar/Grammy winner to write a theme so short that it’s not even being called a theme, but a “mnemonic” — the short series of sounds that will precede every Apple Original show and film going forward. It won’t get him the attention or name recognition that being the co-creator of smashes like “Birds of a Feather” has. But in the long run, should it stick around for years, it might become his most widely heard piece of music, as well as his shortest.
The "Your Tree on Battersea" campaign encourages participants to "express their creativity on iPad" by drawing and submitting original Christmas tree designs. Hosted by British comedian and presenter Munya Chawawa, the project will culminate with 24 winning public entries being displayed on Battersea Power Station's river-facing chimneys and wash towers, alongside digital artwork from artists and public figures, including Sir Stephen Fry and David Shrigley OBE.
It only took 17 years, but the App Store is now accessible on the web. Apple launched the new interface on Monday, allowing you to browse, search, and share apps from a web browser.
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What you can’t do is install or update those apps on your devices. At least some of that is because there’s no link to your Apple account: instead, this is really just a catalog.
As detailed by Apple, Adrift tells the story of the Robertsons, “a young British family whose dream to sail around the world becomes a fight for survival”.
In addition to a cinematic sound design and a “searing original score,” Adrift is hosted by Becky Milligan, who spent more than two decades at the BBC before joining Blanchard House as a producer and host.
On the revamped Apple TV website, there's a new, more colorful Apple One logo available.
Apple plans to end support for the previous version of Apple Home on February 10, 2026, according to an updated support document published today. Apple previously said that the older architecture would no longer be supported as of fall 2025, but customers now have a few more months to update.
You might wonder why I have an Apple Home scene called Banana Room and another called Lemon Room. I wonder this, too.
Snapseed is a bit like the peeling an onion, and the more you explore, the more layers and possibilities you find.
Panic has released Transmit 5.11.1, adding support for renaming files larger than 5 GB in AWS S3.
A wave of state laws aimed at protecting kids is pushing small and medium-sized software developers into the middle a of a battle between app stores and social media giants over who is responsible for verifying user ages.
The Texas App Store Accountability Act, which takes effect Jan. 1, offers the first test. The law requires developers like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to receive and process age information collected by their app stores and to obtain parental consent for downloads. Critics argue that the definition of an app store is broad enough that the law comes into play every time Amazon Inc.'s Kindle sells a book or Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox sells a game.
Apple has been playing around with its Apple logo quite frequently in the past few years, but that was mostly with events like WWDC or marketing materials, like wallpapers for new stores. The logos on devices such as iPhones and Mac computers remain single-colored.
Is the colorisation of the logo in product names -- Apple TV, and Apple One -- the start of a new design trend for the company?
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But while I know a list is essential for my survival at the store, I’ve never been able to work out a reliable meal planning and grocery list-making system. Every week I write out a list by hand, and every week I forget something crucial. So I asked myself, as I so often do when confronted with a problem, “Is there an app that can just fix this for me?” As it turns out, there isn’t a single app, which seems to be the case whenever I think one piece of productivity software or one paper planner is going to change everything for me. But on my journey to find the elusive perfect solution, I did pick up some pretty good tools.
But what makes the K98M special for a mass-market Logitech board is that it’s fully hot-swappable with standard Cherry MX-compatible key switches and uses an internal gasket mount for a semi-soft typing feel. Logitech is taking some belated cues from enthusiast keyboards.
From the creator of Hidden Folks comes something entirely different – a strategic tower defense game that oozes with the developer’s trademark charm. Rift Riff’s lovely sound design, fluid animations, and silly monster designs make it instantly inviting, while a smart gameplay loop keeps the dopamine hits coming.
Every single one of these systems works for someone. Getting Things Done genuinely transforms lives for people whose brains work a certain way. Bullet Journaling provides structure that some people desperately need. The problem comes when we treat these systems as complete, hermetically sealed units that you either adopt wholesale or reject entirely.
The magpie knows better. It understands something that productivity gurus spend entire books dancing around: good ideas are where you find them. The optimal approach isn't to pledge allegiance to one system and defend it against all competitors. The optimal approach is to steal liberally from everything and build something that actually functions for your specific brain.
The London police service told MPs that the tech giant neglects to use a national database of stolen devices that could stop it from accepting snatched phones.
[...]
But the company has warned that IMEI number blocking could still be abused by people impersonating the phone’s owner and making false claims of theft.
It has also said that these measures would not stop phones from being broken down for parts.
I am still using Todoist for my to-do list, but the way I use it, and the way I diverge from the classical Getting Things Done has changed multiple times over the years.
I probably still need some sort of to-do list for the rest of my life, but I do hope that the list of to-dos will get significantly shorter some day.
(Or, maybe not. Maybe I will get so forgetful I will need all sort of items in my list, from medications to remember to brush my teeth.)
(Or, well, if I still have teeth.)
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Thanks for reading.
Dropla is an iPad app that serves as a shelf of sorts for your files. You can also think of it as a universal clipboard for just files. In essence, it takes advantage of multi-tasking features on the iPad, to allow you to have a universal spot to temporarily drop your files when you want to deal with them in multiple apps across your iPad.
I’m a little more accepting of how I operate. I thought the experiment would have revealed a secret, magical path to productivity, but it turns out it’s hard work to make yourself do hard work.
When the big moment comes, the little hand will jump back to the left, and your perception of quantifiable time as a fixed law of the universe will be shattered. Truth will be exposed as an artificial construct, and everything you believe is meaningful will be replaced with a void.
I live in a location on this planet where there is no saving of daylight. We are getting twelve hours of sunlight every day of the year, and the clock always move at a pace of 1 second per second.
(Yes, I know that, technically, what I just wrote is an over-simplification.)
So, all these springing forward and falling back of the clock around the world doesn't really affect me, except for one tiny aspect: one of the daily puzzle game I play on my iPhone.
In half of the year, the daily puzzles arrive just at my lunchtime. Just nice.
In the other half of the year, the daily puzzles arrive after my lunch hour, and I am just getting back to work. No puzzles for me during lunch.
I am not complaining. I have plenty things I can do during my lunch.
But this is how Daylight Saving affects me.
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I've never learn any Fortran nor Cobol. Which means I am not earning the big bucks maintaining old codes that nobody knows how to debug.
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Thanks for reading.
The AirPods Pro 3 are not perfect hearing aids, but for $249, they’re an excellent first stop for the 28 million Americans with untreated hearing loss. They’re affordable, accessible, and their ubiquity is helping to dissolve stigma.
I still mostly wear my Jabras, which are purpose-built tools built for a single job. But I keep AirPods in my pocket for music, calls, and those times I just don’t feel like dealing with something stuck deep inside my ear canal. Sometimes, 80% of the performance for 15% of the cost is fine.
The internet has been rumbling about autocorrect for the past few years, since even before iOS 26. But there is at least one concrete difference between what autocorrect is now and what it was several years ago: artificial intelligence, or what Apple termed, in its release of iOS 17, an “on-device machine learning language model” that would learn from its users. The problem is, this could mean a lot of different things.
In response to a query from the Guardian, Apple said it had updated autocorrect over the years with the latest technologies, and that autocorrect was now an on-device language model. They said that the keyboard issue in the video was not related to autocorrect.
Long-press on a pinned item in iOS 26 and you can set a custom ‘Tap Action’ for it. [...] Basically, you can customize each of your pins to do something a little different when you tap on it.
Parekh essentially gave a heads up that Apple's Mac revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 might not grow significantly compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, given there will be fewer new Macs released this quarter than were in the year-ago quarter.
In other words, he implicitly suggested that Apple has no further Mac releases planned for 2025.
In a social media post today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple will be making a donation of an undisclosed amount towards Hurricane Melissa relief efforts.
Happy Saturday. And this is the day where I start to expect to get to listen to Christmas music on all the playlists in my Apple Music library.
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Thanks for reading.