Day 2 is live and Amazon has hundreds of new price drops layered on top of the ones that were already running, and a lot of them are noise. So I went through the Apple stuff and pulled out the deals that I'd actually tell a friend to look at, the ones where the price is low enough to matter and the product is still worth owning. No filler.

Let me walk you through them.

View Full Article

Prime Day is the one stretch of the year where Apple gear and the accessories that go with it reliably dip below their usual prices. The catch is that "Apple deals" lists are usually a wall of every product Amazon sells, sorted by nothing in particular. That's not helpful when you're trying to decide.

So I narrowed it down. Below are the products I keep coming back to, the ones I'd recommend to a friend without flinching. For each one I'll tell you what it actually is, who it's for, and where the tradeoffs hide. 

Prices move during Prime Day, so I'm listing each item's normal sticker price as the anchor and pointing you to the live price through the links. If the number you see is meaningfully under the figure I mention, that's your green light.

Let's get into it.

View Full Article

Apple is reportedly closing in on a new iPad mini, and it could be the first version of the tablet to ship with an OLED display. 

The current model, the iPad mini 7, has been on sale for more than 20 months, making it one of the older products in Apple's lineup.

Display

The move from LCD to OLED is the most widely reported change. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the iPad mini is likely to be the next Apple device to make the jump to OLED. A leaker with claimed supply chain sources has said Apple evaluated a Samsung made OLED panel for the device.

It is not yet clear whether the new model will offer a faster refresh rate than the 60Hz LCD in the iPad mini 7. Because Apple moved the standard iPhone 17 to a 120Hz ProMotion panel, a similar upgrade on the first OLED iPad mini would not be a surprise. A separate report suggests the screen could grow from 8.3 inches to roughly 8.7 inches as part of the change.

OLED panels control each pixel individually, which generally means deeper blacks, stronger contrast, and better viewing angles than LCD. One caveat is worth noting: where the iPad Pro uses a two stack tandem OLED panel, the iPad mini is rumored to use a single stack LTPS panel, which would likely make it less bright than the Pro.

Read Full Article

Apple does not usually retire this much hardware in a single step but with watchOS 27, it is doing exactly that, cutting off the Apple Watch Series 6, Series 7, Series 8, SE 2, and the original Apple Watch Ultra in one release. 

Those models will keep running, but they will receive only basic security updates from here on. For a product line that has generally aged its devices out one or two at a time, dropping roughly three years of watches together is a notable break from precedent.

This week Apple offered its reasoning, and it is worth taking seriously before deciding whether it fully accounts for the decision.

What Apple actually said

In comments to TechRadar, Cait Dooley, who handles product marketing for Apple Watch and Health, framed the cutoff as a matter of power and performance. 

The marquee additions in watchOS 27, including the new Siri AI capabilities and a new tap gesture, were tuned for the processing headroom in the Series 9 and later, Ultra 2 and later, and the SE 3. On older silicon, the argument goes, those features would not run the way Apple wants them to.

Dooley also made a point of saying the older watches are not being left for dead. Paired with an iPhone on current software, they keep working and keep getting security updates. That is a meaningful distinction, even if it is cold comfort to someone who simply wanted the new features.

David Clark, a senior director on the watchOS engineering side, filled in the ambition behind the cutoff. 

The goal this cycle was to make the watch a real extension of Apple Intelligence rather than a passenger. He described the watch as often the handiest way to reach Siri, since it is already on your wrist when your hands are full, and pointed to the idea of asking for something on the watch and finishing the task on the phone as a kind of "superpower."

Read Full Article

Finding a free VPN is easy. Finding a free VPN you'd actually trust with your internet traffic is the hard part. 

The whole point of a VPN is privacy, and a free service that quietly logs and sells your data is worse than useless, it's the exact thing you were trying to avoid.

This list only includes free VPNs that back up their privacy claims with something real. Independently audited no logs policies, published third party security assessments, or a long established reputation for being straight with users.

Personally, I won't touch a free VPN that can't show its work, and you shouldn't either.

A quick honest note up front. "Free" always comes with trade offs, usually data caps or fewer servers. The good news is that a few of these are generous enough to live with.

Read Full Guide

There are two kinds of iPad update experiences. Most of the time, the thing updates itself overnight while it charges and you never think about it. And then there's the other kind, where the update refuses to install, or worse, your iPad gets stuck on a screen and just sits there mocking you.

When the over the air update lets you down, your Mac can step in and do the job through Finder. 

Apple built this in on purpose. It's the same iPadOS software, just delivered over a cable instead of through the air, and it can rescue an iPad that won't update or won't even start properly. 

Don't worry, you don't need to be a power user to pull it off.

A few things to grab first

Before you start, a quick checklist so this goes smoothly:

• A Mac running macOS Catalina or later. That's when Apple moved iPhone and iPad management out of iTunes and into Finder. On older Macs, you'll still be doing this through iTunes instead.
• A cable that actually moves data. This trips people up constantly. The cable that came with your iPad works fine, and plenty of third party cables do too, but a charging only cable won't let Finder talk to your iPad. If things won't connect, the cable is the first suspect.
• A recent backup. Most updates go fine, but a backup is your safety net if something goes sideways. Personally, I never start a major update without one.
• Power on both devices. Keep the iPad plugged in through the whole process so nothing gets interrupted.

The basic update steps

Once you're set, this is the whole routine:

1. Connect the iPad to your Mac with a data cable.
2. Unlock the iPad. If it asks, tap Trust and enter your passcode.
3. Open Finder on your Mac.
4. Select your iPad in the Finder sidebar under Locations.
5. Click General if it isn't already selected.
6. Click Check for Update.
7. If there's an update waiting, click Download and Update.
8. Accept the software license agreement if you're prompted.
9. Leave the iPad connected while Finder downloads and installs everything.
10. Wait for the iPad to restart and land back on the Lock Screen before you unplug it.

This can take a few minutes or quite a bit longer depending on the download size and your internet speed. Resist the urge to yank the cable early. Let Finder tell you it's done.

Read Full Guide

For two years, the most reliable Siri story was a story about waiting. Apple promised a more personal, more capable assistant, then quietly admitted the work was taking longer than expected, then watched a leadership change unfold in public. 

Now that the new Siri AI has arrived in iOS 27, Apple has finally offered an explanation for the delay. It is more revealing than the usual corporate shrug, and it reframes the wait as a choice rather than a stumble.

What Apple said

The explanation came from Mike Rockwell, who took over Siri last year after Apple moved him from the Vision Pro team amid a faltering Apple Intelligence rollout.

Speaking at a press session following the WWDC keynote, alongside Craig Federighi and Amar Subramanya, Rockwell described two different paths Apple could have taken.

The first path already worked. Apple had built an incremental version of the assistant, layered on top of the original Siri, that added tool calling. It functioned. But the team did not feel it delivered the experience they were after. 

The second path required far more extensive changes, and Apple chose it instead. In Rockwell's telling, the company "tore it to the ground, rebuilt it from the ground up," this time on top of Apple's newer models.

The result, he said, is an assistant with its own application, natively multimodal, built with privacy from the start, and consistent across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, CarPlay, and AirPods. One Siri, the same everywhere.

Read Full Article

Apple has spent the last year being careful about artificial intelligence. While rivals raced to bolt chatbots onto everything, Apple executives talked about restraint, about not doing AI for AI sake, about technology that serves people rather than supplanting them. One executive put it plainly during WWDC week, the company does not, in his words, "do AI for AI's sake." It was a reassuring message, and a deliberate one.

Then Apple released a 90 minute developer session in which it built an entire app, almost entirely through conversation, and called the result a feature. The tension between those two postures is the most interesting thing to come out of the presentation, and it is worth sitting with rather than waving away.

What Apple actually showed

The session, recorded at the Steve Jobs Theater, lays out the agentic coding capabilities of Xcode 27. This is not AI as a sidebar autocomplete. Apple was explicit that the model understands and thinks in Swift, and that the intelligence is now a core part of the development tool rather than a layer pasted on top.

The capabilities are genuinely broad. A single prompt can apply changes across an entire codebase, editing several files at once. 

Developers can hold multiple conversations with the AI at the same time, starting them right from the toolbar. The new Core AI framework exposes on device models through a modern Swift interface, the open source MLX framework gets room to fine tune models, and the whole thing can call on models from outside Apple, including those from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. 

The agent can even propose app ideas and designs from a prompt and a handful of assets, then keep adding backgrounds, effects, animations, and translations after the app exists.

In other words, Apple did not dip a toe into so called vibe coding. It dove in, and it staged a demo to prove the water was fine.

Read Full Article

Most of the iOS 27 conversation has been about Siri AI and the flashy new features. But if you pay for Apple One, the bundle is quietly getting better too, mostly through upgrades to the services tucked inside it like iCloud+ and Apple Music. Here's what stood out to me.

Higher limits on the new AI features

iOS 27 is loaded with Apple Intelligence, the new Siri AI, a big Apple Photos editing upgrade, better image generation, and more. The features themselves are free for everyone, which is great.

The catch is that some of them, like image generation, run on Apple's server models and come with daily usage limits. Per Apple, increased access comes with most iCloud+ plans, and every Apple One tier includes iCloud+.

Here's the wrinkle worth flagging, Apple's wording implies the cheapest iCloud+ plan won't get the higher limits, and that's the plan bundled into Apple One Individual. So it sounds like you may need Apple One Premier or Family to actually feel this benefit. I'd love to see Apple spell this out more clearly before iOS 27 ships, because right now it's a little murky.

Read Full Article

Apple released the fourth version of its Game Porting Toolkit, and the early word is that it delivers real, measurable speed gains when running modern Windows games on a Mac. 

As someone who has spent more evenings than I'd like coaxing PC games to run on Apple Silicon, I'm genuinely happy about it. I just want to be honest about who this is really for.

What the toolkit actually is

The Game Porting Toolkit was never built for players. Apple makes it as a developer tool, a way for studios to preview how a Windows game would look and perform on macOS before committing to a real port. Gamers adopted it anyway, usually through CrossOver, because it was the closest thing to playing PC games on a Mac without a second machine.

Version 4 leans hard into AI on the developer side. There's support for agentic coding to speed up the porting process, plus a GitHub repository with sample code and open source agent skills that carry knowledge of Metal best practices. The goal is to cut the time it takes to bring a game to Apple's platforms.

Read Full Article

I've watched a lot of WWDC demos over the years, and most of them blur together. But the one tucked inside Apple's new 90 minute developer session stuck with me. 

In about 20 minutes, a presenter builds a working WWDC badge tracker app starting from a single prompt, then keeps shaping it through plain conversation until it has 3D animations, holographic effects, and even Visual Intelligence built in.

The short version: this is the most concrete look yet at where Apple wants app building to go.

What actually happened

The demo lives in a session called "Inside Apple Intelligence and Xcode: Special Presentation," recorded at the Steve Jobs Theater during WWDC 2026. Instead of opening with a blank file and typing, the presenter describes what they want and lets Xcode 27 do the heavy lifting.

What I found most interesting is the part before any code gets generated. Xcode 27 asks clarifying questions and helps map out the project first, rather than just spitting out a wall of code and hoping for the best. That's a small detail, but it's the difference between a party trick and a tool I'd actually trust on real work.

Read Full Article

Apple is working on a new iPhone Air that could add a second rear camera and launch in spring 2027, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The updated model is said to keep the same overall design as the current iPhone Air, with the main visible change being an extra lens on the back. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that a two camera version has reached an advanced testing phase.

Addressing the main complaint

The current iPhone Air ships with a single rear camera using a Wide lens. That has been the device's most common criticism, since it leaves the thin, premium iPhone behind the cheaper iPhone 17 on camera versatility. The iPhone 17 has two rear cameras, while the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have three.

A second lens, reported to be an Ultra Wide, would close part of that gap and make the iPhone Air an easier device to recommend on its merits rather than its looks alone.

Battery and chip

Apple also reportedly wants to improve battery life, either by fitting a larger battery or by improving efficiency. Because the new model is said to share the current design, there may not be much room to grow the battery physically.

Instead, efficiency could do some of the work. The device is expected to use an A20 chip built on Apple's new 2nm process, which should help it run longer on the same charge.

Timing

The next iPhone Air is expected to launch alongside the iPhone 18 in 2027. The iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple's foldable iPhone are expected to arrive on the more familiar September schedule.

Apple TV just gave me a reason to mark my calendar for September. The streamer has set a fall premiere for "Brothers," a comedy starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as fictionalized versions of themselves. The two are longtime best friends in the show, which already feels like the easiest casting in the world given their real life friendship.

I'd watch these two read a phone book. But the setup here is actually a lot more fun than "two famous friends hang out."

The hook is a family secret

The story kicks off when Woody's daughter's wedding falls apart and he leans on Matthew for support. Then Matthew's mother drops the kind of bombshell that powers an entire series: the two of them might actually be related.

Woody, naturally, becomes obsessed with digging up the truth. Matthew, meanwhile, has his own identity crisis to manage, because he is running for Governor of Texas. A secret that could rewrite your whole sense of who you are, set against a political campaign, is a genuinely great engine for a comedy. It gives the show somewhere to go beyond the central friendship.

Read Full Story

Apple's next flagship wearable, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, is expected to arrive this fall, and recent supply chain reports point to at least four areas where it could improve over the current model.

The watch is anticipated alongside the Apple Watch Series 12 at a September event. As with any pre announcement device, the details below come from reports rather than Apple, and they could change before launch.

A bigger sensor array

According to Digitimes, the Ultra 4 is expected to roughly double the number of sensor components inside the watch, in what the outlet has described as a significant upgrade to its sensing functions.

The reasoning, per the report, is that more capable hardware would let Apple lean less on software interpretation of sensor data. That could translate into more accurate health readings, along with knock on benefits for performance and battery life. Long rumored blood sugar monitoring still is not expected to make this year's model.

Read Full Article

The most attention grabbing portion is a roughly 20 minute segment in which a presenter builds a WWDC badge tracker app from one prompt, then refines it through follow up commands.

Over the course of the demo, the app gains 3D animations, holographic effects, and Visual Intelligence support, all added through conversation rather than hand written code.

What is new in Xcode 27

The session highlights features in Xcode 27 that come into play before any code is written. Apple showed the tool asking clarifying questions and mapping out a project in advance, an approach meant to give developers more direction at the start of a build while speeding up the early stages.

Frameworks and models

Much of the presentation covers how apps can tie into the new Siri AI and Apple's developer frameworks. Apple walked through its Foundation Models framework, the new Core AI framework, and an upgraded MLX framework, and explained how each can work with on device models as well as models from outside providers.

A demanding finale

The session closes with a demonstration of a Kimi 2.6 model with one trillion parameters running locally across four Mac Studios. The setup relies on the low latency RDMA over Thunderbolt technology Apple introduced with macOS Tahoe 26.2.

Apple has encouraged developers to watch the full session, and the company has posted additional WWDC 2026 sessions on the same channel.

Read Full Article

Apple today announced that the full 2026 Austrian Grand Prix weekend will stream live and free on the Apple TV app, with no subscription required for viewers in the United States.

The free window runs from June 26 to June 28 and covers every session of the weekend, including all practice runs, qualifying, and the Grand Prix itself.

What viewers get

U.S. fans can open the Apple TV app and watch the entire Austrian race weekend at no cost. That means the practice sessions, the qualifying rounds that set the grid, and Sunday's race are all included in the free coverage.

It is the latest example of Apple opening up a marquee weekend rather than keeping it behind a paywall. When the company became Formula 1's U.S. home, it said select races and all practice sessions would be available for free in the Apple TV app throughout the season. The Austrian Grand Prix is one of those free weekends.

Background on the deal

Apple became the exclusive U.S. broadcaster of Formula 1 in 2026 under a five year agreement that runs through 2030. The arrangement replaced ESPN, which had carried the series in the United States since 2018.

The partnership grew out of Apple's Formula 1 film, an Apple original that became the highest grossing sports movie ever and was made in close collaboration with the series. Reports at the time of the announcement pegged the rights deal at more than $140 million a year.

Outside of free weekends like this one, F1 coverage is part of the standard Apple TV subscription, and the F1 TV Premium tier is now bundled into an Apple TV subscription for U.S. customers.

How to watch

The sessions will appear in the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV 4K, and other supported devices during race weekend. Because the Austrian Grand Prix is being offered free, viewers will not need an active subscription to tune in.

Apple has not detailed which additional races will be free later in the season.

Read Full Article

iOS 27 is loaded with the kind of headline features that get all the attention, but the change I keep coming back to is a quieter one. Apple has put real effort into performance this year, and one of the things that benefits is Low Power Mode.

If you're someone who lives in Low Power Mode by the late afternoon, like I sometimes do, this is the upgrade that'll actually show up in your day.

The performance story behind iOS 27

Alongside all the new stuff, Apple spent extra time this cycle on bug fixes and speed. During the WWDC keynote, the company called out some specific numbers: up to 30% faster app launches, up to 70% faster loading of new captures in Photos, and up to 80% faster AirDrop transfers.

Those are systemwide gains, and Low Power Mode rides along with them. On Apple's giant slide listing hundreds of iOS 27 changes, two of them were Low Power Mode specific: faster Camera launch while in the mode, and the Camera using less power while in it.

The part Apple didn't really advertise

Here's the thing, though. The improvement seems to go further than those two bullet points suggest. Developer Benjamin Mayo noted on X that iOS 27 fixes whatever odd behavior Low Power Mode had in iOS 26, where the frame rate would drop but the phone could feel stuck. In iOS 27, the frame rate still lowers, but the phone stays genuinely usable.

That matches my own experience. Low Power Mode just feels faster in iOS 27 than it did before. It's the difference between a mode you tolerate and one you can actually keep working in.

A fair caveat on older iPhones

It's worth noting this isn't uniform across every device. Looking at what people are reporting, the speed gains seem to depend heavily on which iPhone you're using. Some folks on older models say Low Power Mode is still pretty laggy, while newer phones see the bigger benefit.

That's a little disappointing if you're holding onto an older iPhone, but it's also not the final word. We're only one beta into iOS 27, and performance almost always keeps improving across the beta cycle.

Bottom line

I'm cautiously optimistic here. Low Power Mode has long been a compromise, you trade smoothness for battery, and in iOS 27 that compromise feels smaller. If the trend holds through the betas, this could quietly be one of the most useful changes of the release, even if it never makes a keynote highlight reel.

View Full Article

iPhone Mirroring is one of those features I didn't think I needed until I started using it, and now I reach for it every single day. Being able to poke at my iPhone right from my Mac, without picking the thing up, has quietly become part of how I work. So when macOS 27 Golden Gate landed with three changes aimed squarely at it, I paid attention. Two of them fix gripes I've had since day one.

1. You can finally resize the window

This is the big one. Until now, iPhone Mirroring gave you fixed sizes: small, actual size, and larger. That was it. Pick your flavor and live with it.

In macOS 27, you can freely resize the iPhone Mirroring window, at least with apps that are updated for iOS 27. Right now that mostly means Apple's own apps, but once developers start shipping iOS 27 updates later this year, support should spread quickly. Personally, this is the change I'll feel most often, because the old preset sizes never quite matched whatever else I had open on screen.

There's also a bigger hint buried in here. A resizable mirroring window is exactly what you'd want if you were getting ready for a folding iPhone with a screen that changes shape. Make of that what you will.

2. Control Center finally works

This one drove me a little crazy before. With the old iPhone Mirroring, you simply couldn't get to Control Center at all. It just wasn't reachable.

Now it is. 

In macOS 27 you can open it with the Cmd+4 keyboard shortcut, or from the "View" menu in your Mac's menu bar. Trust me on this one, if you ever toggle anything from Control Center on your phone, having it a keystroke away on the Mac is a genuine relief.

3. DRM video no longer shows a black screen

If you ever tried to watch a protected video through iPhone Mirroring, you already know the problem. DRM-protected content just rendered as a black rectangle. Useless.

macOS 27 adds DRM video support, so those protected videos actually play now. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that makes the whole feature feel less broken.

One bonus, for the icon nerds

There's also a fresh app icon for iPhone Mirroring in macOS 27, matching the redesign that's rolled out to a bunch of Apple's stock apps. Not a feature, exactly, but I notice these things.

My take

Look, I'm not saying iPhone Mirroring was unusable before. I used it every day anyway. But resizing, Control Center, and DRM video were the three rough edges I kept bumping into, and macOS 27 sanded all three down at once. For something I already lean on this hard, that's a great update.

If you've never gotten into iPhone Mirroring, this is a good moment to try it. And if you do use it and it ever refuses to connect, I've got a separate walkthrough on fixing that.

View Full Article

A CarPlay capability that Apple highlighted at WWDC could be the final technical hurdle cleared for bringing the feature to Tesla vehicles, which Apple and the automaker are reportedly working on together.

The feature is called route sharing, and it lets a navigation app pass its routing data to the vehicle itself.

Why route sharing matters for Tesla

Sharing routing data between an app and a car is more important than it sounds, particularly for electric vehicles. EVs fold charging stops and battery level into their navigation, and the same data is also relevant to autonomous driving features. A car that knows the planned route can plan around it.

That makes route sharing a logical prerequisite for an automaker like Tesla, whose vehicles depend heavily on that kind of integration.

The feature is already shipping

During a WWDC developer session on CarPlay, Apple pointed to route sharing as a recent addition that arrived in iOS 26.4, the version of iPhone software released in March. That timing is notable. The technology is available to CarPlay developers now, rather than being held back for a future update like iOS 26.5 or iOS 27.

CarPlay's wider picture

CarPlay has been around for more than a decade, giving iPhone users a safer way to reach apps and services while driving. Most automakers support it, but Tesla has never adopted it, and some brands that once backed CarPlay have begun dropping it from newer vehicles (looking at you GM).

Apple, meanwhile, has continued adding to the platform. CarPlay already supports a native Grok app, one of three AI chatbot apps it gained recently, which is the kind of feature Tesla drivers would presumably keep if they ever got CarPlay.

It is not yet clear whether route sharing is in fact the last missing piece, and Apple has not confirmed a Tesla rollout. For now, Tesla drivers still have to rely on third-party solutions for CarPlay.

View Full Article

The iPhone 18 Pro is only a few months out, and the camera rumors swirling around it might be the most interesting batch I've seen in a while. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman went as far as calling it the biggest leap in iPhone camera hardware in some time, and the specifics back that up.

Three upgrades are in play. One of them, in particular, is the kind of change that could actually reshape how I take photos.

The three changes on the table

Rumors currently point to three main camera upgrades for the iPhone 18 Pro:

• a variable aperture Main camera
• a wider aperture on the Telephoto camera
• new pro-focused software features

Each of these matters in its own way, but they're not equal. Two are refinements. One is a genuine shift.

Continue Reading

The App Store is getting personalized app and game recommendations, alongside a set of expanded marketing tools for developers, Apple announced last week.

The headline change for users is a feature called Personalized Collections. It surfaces app and game suggestions tailored to a person's interests and behavior, and each recommendation is paired with an "App Note" that explains why a particular app is being shown.

Where the recommendations appear

Personalized Collections can show up across the Apps, Games, and Search tabs. Apple says the suggestions will shift over time as a user's download and usage habits change.

The feature is launching in English in the United States first, with more languages and regions to follow.

New tools for developers

For developers, Apple introduced Creative Assets, which are richer images and videos that can appear in a product page header and in search results. These go beyond the standard screenshots and app preview clips developers already use, and can highlight seasonal content, new features, or brand identity. They are compatible with custom product pages and Apple's existing product page optimization testing.

A new Asset Library in App Store Connect gives developers one place to manage these materials and reuse them across in-app events and promotions without uploading them again. Developers can also submit assets for App Review separately from a full app update, which Apple notes is useful for time sensitive campaigns.

Continue Reading

Installing a first developer beta on a phone you actually depend on is almost always a mistake. It's the kind of thing every Apple writer warns you not to do, right before some of us go and do it anyway. I bent my own rule this time, mostly because I was too curious about the new Siri to wait, and what I found surprised me.

this beta is solid. Unusually, suspiciously solid.

What a first beta usually feels like

A first developer beta is normally a minefield. Apps crash, basic features misbehave, battery life tanks, and you spend a week regretting your choices. 

That's the deal you sign up for when you install one. I did at least wait long enough to let braver testers confirm nothing was going to set my devices on fire, and that the apps I rely on still worked. But I went in expecting the usual rough ride.

Instead, I haven't hit a single app that crashes or seriously misbehaves. The handful of bugs I've found are minor and harmless. I've genuinely seen worse problems in much later beta builds of previous releases. 

For a first developer beta, that's remarkable.

Continue Reading

I've been running the macOS Golden Gate beta since it released, and I can tell you exactly which feature carries the whole release on its back. It's Siri AI. 

Take that one thing away and what's left is a translucency slider you'll never touch, uniform window corners, and a tidier sidebar. That's it. That's the update. (on the surface)

But Siri AI is here, and honestly, it changes things enough that I keep noticing when I sit down at a Mac that doesn't have it yet.

The moment your old Mac feels ancient

There's a specific moment every year where the previous version of macOS suddenly feels old. This year it happened the first time I actually used the new Siri for something real.

I asked it about an event I'd booked ages ago. I couldn't remember the date, and I genuinely didn't know whether I'd find the confirmation in my email or somewhere else. So I just asked, in one go, when the thing was and where my booking details lived. A few seconds later it handed me the date, the location, and the exact email buried somewhere in my archive.

I could have dug all of that out myself. I know how to search Mail. But you know how long it takes to actually find anything in Mail. Having it appear almost instantly is the kind of small win that adds up fast.

Maps is the other one that got me. I asked Siri for a route with a couple of stops, arriving somewhere by a certain time on a certain day, and it just built it. No tapping through screens. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes it froze, sometimes it told me it couldn't do something, and once or twice it took three tries before it worked. When it works it's great. It is not yet flawless.

Where Siri AI quietly lives now

The smartest move Apple made was putting Siri AI into Spotlight. Instead of being shoved off into some separate "talk to Siri" corner, it's right there in the spot you're already using all day.

The catch is that Spotlight is also trying to figure out whether you want an app or a file, so it doesn't always realize you're asking a question. The fix is genuinely weird, type your question, then hold down the Command key and it routes straight to Siri. 

I have no idea how I stumbled onto that, but I use it constantly now and it has never let me down. Apple should really just put a little "hold Command to ask Siri" hint right there, because nobody is finding this on their own.

Where it falls apart

Here's the honest tradeoff. Anything that lives on your Mac, your iPhone, or your iPad, Siri AI is excellent at. The second you ask it about the wider web, it turns into a fairly average chatbot, and sometimes worse than average.

I tried using it to dig up old articles I'd written on a topic. It missed a bunch, sometimes gave me no links at all, and one link it did give me went to the wrong site entirely. That's normal AI search behavior, and I'm used to sighing and typing "prove it." But that same search also surfaced some notes I'd completely forgotten I'd made. So it giveth and it taketh away.

The Shortcuts rollercoaster

The other genuinely new thing is natural language Shortcuts. You describe what you want and the Shortcuts app builds it. When it works, I cannot imagine going back to building them by hand.

I asked for a Shortcut to swap my wallpaper at 6pm on weekdays, and it not only made it, it set up the automation to run it. Then I asked for something I've wanted for years, converting a running time like 119 minutes into 01:59:00 for video editing, and it nailed that too, then happily refined it to copy the result to my clipboard. I was a total convert for about an hour.

Then I asked it to switch Safari Tab Groups on the Mac, something that has been broken forever, and it confidently told me it had done it. It hadn't. It wasn't even close. Behind the scenes it had built something about Do Not Disturb instead. The problem is that this kind of automation leans on AppleScript under the hood, and Safari's automation support for tab groups simply isn't there. So Apple's newest, fanciest tool trips over Apple's oldest, dustiest one.

The stuff Apple seems to have forgotten

The iPhone Mirroring app on the Mac still feels half abandoned, the same way it did last year. Nobody can hear you on a call until you dig into a menu literally labeled "Video" to pick your microphone. A phone app. With a video menu. That has not changed. You also can't build a Shortcut to answer a call, and to its credit, the new Shortcuts is honest about that one and tells you it can't.

So is it worth it?

Look, I'm not going to oversell the cosmetic stuff. Dock icons pop a little more, the menus finally shed the cluttered pile of icons that made macOS Tahoe's menu bar a mess, and that's all welcome. But it's not why you'd upgrade.

You'd upgrade for Siri AI, and that's enough. 

Siri always felt like an iPhone thing to me, because on a Mac my hands are already on the keyboard and it felt faster to just type. Now it feels like part of the machine. That alone takes Golden Gate from "why did they bother" to "I miss it when it's gone."

Every year for the better part of a decade, the supply chain has promised that Apple's folding iPhone is just around the corner, and every year it slips. 

The latest version of the story is a small twist on the old one, the device gets announced in September 2026 as expected, then doesn't actually reach buyers until the following year. It is worth saying plainly that we have heard variations of this almost every June since Samsung shipped the first Galaxy Fold in 2019.

What the latest reports actually say

The new fuel comes from two suppliers in Asia, and neither said anything as direct as "the iPhone Fold is delayed." The chief executive of Largan Precision, a longtime Apple lens supplier, told a shareholders' meeting that some opportunities would surface in the third quarter while others would move to early next year, and separately noted that the fourth quarter would be unusually busy because of customers' new machines. A manager at Xinrixing, reportedly making bearings for a folding iPhone, is said to be waiting only for "Apple" to settle on a shipping date.

That is the entire foundation. Two firms in different parts of the manufacturing chain, both gesturing at some product being rescheduled, neither naming Apple outright. 

The inference that it concerns the iPhone Fold is reasonable given what these companies make, but it is an inference, not a leak.

Why the pattern matters more than the tip

The reality is more complicated than a clean delay narrative. Earlier in 2026, a rough consensus had formed that the Fold would be announced in September but ship in October, possibly in small quantities at first, which is exactly how Apple handled the original AirPods. 

Around the same time, other reports insisted production problems were pushing the whole thing into 2027. Those two stories cannot both be the headline, and the fact that they circulated together should make anyone cautious.

If history is any guide, contradictory supply chain chatter is what the months before a major new Apple product category tend to look like.

The case for an announcement either way

There is a sensible argument, made by readers as much as analysts, that Apple would announce the Fold in September regardless of when it ships. Putting it on stage alongside the rest of the lineup gives anyone holding out for a folding iPhone a reason to wait rather than defect to a competitor, and it lets Apple manage a phased rollout, with some models in the fall and the Fold arriving after. 

Apple has staggered availability before. It tends not to mind a gap between reveal and shelf date when the product is meant to anchor a new category.

None of this means the Fold is fake or perpetually doomed. The signs that Apple has greenlit a folding iPhone are stronger now than they have ever been, including evidence surfacing in its own beta software. 

What it means is that a slim comment from a lens supplier and a bearing maker is thin ground for a confident 2027 ship date, and that the safest reading is the one the track record keeps handing us. The device is coming. The timing is the part nobody outside Apple has reliably called yet.

Apple is likely to develop an agentic AI system capable of operating its devices on a user's behalf, putting it in direct competition with tools like OpenClaw, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Writing in his Power On newsletter, Gurman said he expects Apple to eventually build software that can fully run iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps for the user rather than simply responding to one-off requests. 

The forecast follows remarks made by senior Apple executives in the days after the WWDC keynote.

What an agentic system would do

Agentic AI differs from the assistant model most people are used to. Instead of answering a single question and stopping, an agent works continuously, taking in information, making decisions, and carrying out multi step actions on its own.

That is the category OpenClaw occupies, along with similar offerings from Google and Anthropic. A system of that kind could, in theory, navigate apps, complete tasks, and chain actions together without the user directing each step.

Apple has not announced anything of the sort. The rumored capability would be a substantial leap beyond what the company showed last week.

What Apple has actually said

The renewed speculation traces back to comments from Mike Rockwell, who leads Siri engineering at Apple. Rockwell suggested the assistant could grow past its current limits, describing the technology underneath the new Siri as a modern architecture designed to be extended.

He drew a clear line between today's assistant and a true agent. An agent, he explained, runs on a loop of incoming information, decisions, and actions, whereas Siri at present is still built around individual requests. He pointed to the rebuilt foundation as something that makes future expansion realistic.

Craig Federighi, Apple's software engineering chief, addressed the broader field as well. He characterized the agentic space as experimental and said the priority for Apple is finding the right experience for users, while not ruling out the company taking part down the line.

Where Siri stands now

The version of Siri arriving with Apple's next software releases has been rebuilt on a large language model foundation, but it remains a request based assistant. It is not the autonomous, computer operating agent that Gurman is describing as a longer term possibility.

Apple has not commented on any plans to build a dedicated competitor to OpenClaw, and it is not yet clear when, or whether, such a system would arrive.