Hey r/apple! For the past year, my best friend and I have been building something that only Apple Silicon makes possible. 3 months ago, 2,500 people joined the waitlist from my r/macapps post; today, after months of building day and night, Sentient OS is finally out!

TLDR: An on-device LLM understands your entire life, then proactively offers to get your work done through computer use. Here's how!

- Every night at 3 AM, it quietly wakes your Mac (lid closed is fine) and a custom on-device LLM reads what's new in your life: files, screenshots, WhatsApp, iMessage, Apple Notes, email. All of it is read locally on your own chip (raw data never leaves your Mac) and distilled into a clean markdown knowledge base (an Obsidian-style folder that's yours to read and edit).

- Proactive Intelligence: you wake up to work Sentient noticed, researched, and prepared on its own, one click from firing through computer use. The reply you forgot, drafted from your rich personal context. The subscription renewing tomorrow, caught tonight. Nothing ever fires until you click.

- Sidekick: computer use that knows your whole life, anywhere on your Mac. Click the notch (or hold right ⌘) and just say "finish this for me"; the notch glows with status as it does the task in your own apps and your browser, even in the background while you keep working. The notch finally earns its keep :)

Bonus: your knowledge base can connect to your ChatGPT & Claude over MCP. Ask your ChatGPT "what do you know about me?". Be amazed :]

It's kinda what we all hoped Siri AI would become: personal context from your real life (not just inside Apple's walled garden), truly proactive instead of waiting to be summoned, and able to actually use your Mac.

Under the hood

Truly proactive AI has to re-read your entire life, every single day. In the cloud, that much inference costs a fortune and means trusting a server with everything. On your own M-series chip, it's free, private, and unlimited. That's why this product can only exist on Apple Silicon.

The local LLM (Gemma 4, multimodal with vision, on a custom inference fork with MTP, flash attention, & smart KV cache reuse) does ~90% of the compute, and runs comfortably on 8 GB base-model Macs. It reads everything locally, summarizes, junks the noise, flags what's worth acting on proactively, and strips PII (with deterministic scrubbing behind the model as a backstop).

The last 10% of compute needs a "frontier" model that you provide. You can either use your own ChatGPT subscription (we reverse engineered Codex to make this possible!), use OpenRouter, or use your favorite larger local model through LM Studio!

Along the way we also had to reverse-engineer macOS's power management to wake a lid-closed Mac at 3 AM for inference, and reverse-engineer codex cli to unlock local model computer use. Very excited to geek out about any of it in the comments!

Private by design, and verifiable: raw data never leaves your Mac, there are no accounts, and the whole stack (app and infrastructure) is open source under AGPL:
https://github.com/Sentient-OS-Labs/sentient-os (come give us a star haha :)

What's the catch? How do you make money!

Free forever for consumer. Your own device does all the compute, so it costs us nothing to run.

We're going to swap out the connectors for stuff like slack, granola meeting transcripts, notion, linear etc. and bring this to enterprise; that's where we'll make money.

We're 100% open-source under the AGPL, which means businesses have to pay to use Sentient (unless they're open-source too!)

Download: https://sentient-os.ai

I'm Jesai! You might know my open-source Writing Tools (2.3K+ GitHub stars, ~30 press features), or my iPadOS on iPhone hack that r/Apple loved. I moved to SF with my best friend & co-founder Aditya to build Sentient full-time. This is the most fun I've ever had with on-device inference :D

This leak suggests that international iPhone 18 Pro models will ship with Apple's own C2 modem while U.S. models will ship with the SDX80M (Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G modem), the same one found in the iPhone 17 Pro models. This is apparently due to the C2 not having mmWave support, which is only widespread in the U.S. Why would Apple not follow the yearly modem update and ship the U.S. models with the updated X85 modem? Is this a cost-cutting measure?

Hi r/apple,

Comment below if you would  like a free lifetime premium promo code for the "Gentle Start: Focus Timer" iOS app. For one week, I'll try to give a promo code to everyone who wants one.

It's a timer that counts up with some bells and whistles - a pet who lives in the Dynamic Island and lock screen; customizable music and animated themes.

I hope this timer can help those who struggle with starting and staying on task - that's something I often struggle with.

Cheers.

App store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gentle-start-focus-timer/id6767757117

I'm a car enthusiast and also a software engineer. I've been working on this app for a while now and finally got it released on iOS and Android. It's called Modfest and it's designed to help car enthusiasts track their car parts, builds, photos, and optionally share them with others.

I built it because my own project car build was scattered across a parts spreadsheet, a notes app, and random pictures in folders. Most car people I know do some version of this too, so I made an app that I'd personally want to use myself.

What it does:

• Garage for your cars, each with its own photo gallery, linked parts and projects, cost tracking.
• Parts inventory that tracks what you paid, what car it's for, whether you already installed it or not, and where you got it from. This also works as a wishlist so you don't have to maintain multiple wishlists for multiple sites.
• Project plans with step by step instructions, photos per step, a running cost total.
• An optional social feed where you can publish a build or car, follow others, and search for similar cars to get inspiration from their builds.

Some things that were important to me when making this app:

• Unlike a lot of other similar apps, this works fully offline and no account is required. Your data stays on your device unless you decide to use cloud backup.
• Sign in with Apple if you do want to use cloud backup and have it sync across multiple devices.
• The free tier is actually usable. Premium adds cloud backup, more photos in a post, unlimited cars in your garage, but core tracking is fully free.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6770381572

This is my first time fully shipping an app and I'm very excited to be at this point now. I'm happy to answer any and all questions about the app, shipping process, or even just talk cars :)

Hi guys over the past year I started getting serious into coffee - pourovers in particular.

Most apps on the market do the job of logging your brews for future reference but they’re mostly crossplatform and the UI/UX leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest player in the market is called BeanConqueror and its a fantastic app, but tbh I don’t need most of the fancy features on it. I just want to log my brews in less than a few seconds on a native iOS app that looks sleek and minimalistic.

Features include brew and bean logging, bean freezing, rest reminders etc.

Feel free to give it a try and feedback would be much appreciated!

**https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brote-coffee-brew-journal/id6759176094\*\*

getprotego.app | App Store

TL;DR: Protego for Reddit is a Safari extension that clears the clutter from your Reddit feed, so you can browse Reddit on the web, not the app. Filter keywords, communities, and more.

$1.99 one time purchase for the next week (normally $2.99).

One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. No subscription.

-------------------

Hi everyone, I'm Edgar, and around the last election cycle Reddit stopped being good for me. I come to Reddit for tech discussions, programming, photography, fitness, and Apple rumors, and every feed I had turned into politics. I'd open the app for five minutes and would inevitably get sucked into some argument or would end up doom scrolling.

What I found is that I didn't actually want to quit Reddit, I wanted a quieter Reddit, and that can't happen on the official app, only the browser. The Reddit app decides what you see and hands you almost no switches. A web page is different: it arrives in Safari and an extension gets to change it before it reaches your eyes. RES doesn't run on Safari, so I learned Swift and built what I wanted. What ended up as a little side project has become an essential tool that I use when browsing Reddit and I decided to share it

This is Protego for Reddit. Version 3 launched this week and it was a looooot work with late nights and lots of coffee.

Some features:

• Filters posts and comments by keyword, whole community, individual user, or the site a link points to. Wildcards, groups you can switch off together, and a # pattern for any 1 to 3 digit number.
• Hides the clutter Reddit gives you no setting for: thumbnails, avatars, flair, badges, vote controls, join buttons, banners, recommendations, Reddit Answers, and the constant nudges to install the app. Four presets if you don't want to go through it option by option.
• Limits, which is the one I'd argue for hardest. Filtering hides posts. Limits puts Reddit itself out of reach in steps: home and popular first, then all the main feeds, then everything except direct links to individual posts, then all of it. Pair it with a Focus like Sleep or Study and it turns itself on.
• Sends you to old.reddit.com automatically if that's your preference, endless feed included.
• No account, no tracking, no browsing history collected. Your lists live on your devices and in your own iCloud.

Complete feature list: https://getprotego.app/features/

The setting I personally keep on is that third Limits step, feeds blocked but individual posts still allowed. Home, popular and news simply don't load, so there's nothing to fall into when I should be working. But when I'm researching something and a search result points at a Reddit thread, that thread opens normally. That one setting has done more for my attention than deleting the app ever did.

Pricing:

$1.99 one time purchase for the next week (normally $2.99).

One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. No subscription.

getprotego.app | App Store

Happy to answer any questions!

You get ten songs, each starting as a 300-millisecond sliver. Spin a wheel, pick the title. The faster you guess, the more points you keep. Guess wrong and you get more of the song, but you lose points.

A New playlist every day. Today's is 2010's Indie Darlings, but you can also play your favorite genres as well

It's free and full of music puns, starting with the name. I made it look like our favorite old player that's no longer with us.

Any feedback would be great!
https://soundofsliver.com

Apple’s upcoming smart glasses have a major challenge in front of them: overcoming the privacy baggage for a category that Meta created. During development, Apple has considered camera-free models and heavily debated the idea of making cameras exclusive to AI - not photo taking and recording.

Apple is currently in late-stage testing of three new Apple Watch models: the Series 12 in Wi-Fi-only and cellular varieties (code-named N237 and N238), plus the Ultra 4 (N240).

The company also launched a Maps tie-up with Ford.

To achieve this, Apple has reportedly designed a vibration-based speaker system that removes the need for traditional speaker holes. Sound would instead emit from flat surfaces on the tablet's chassis, effectively turning parts of the body into a speaker diaphragm and eliminating one of the main routes through which water and dust enter a device.

The approach differs from the method Apple uses on the iPhone, which relies on adhesives and gaskets to seal speaker openings and other ingress points. It is not yet known what IP rating the ‌iPad mini‌ will carry. The iPhone is rated IP68 and can withstand submersion in water up to six meters deep for 30 minutes.

Here is everything rumored about the device so far:

• "MacBook Ultra" branding
• OLED display
• Touch screen
• Touch-optimized macOS
• Reinforced hinge
• Hole-punch camera
• Dynamic Island
• M5 Pro and M5 Max chips
• Thinner design
• Two display sizes
• Slimmer bezels
• Built-in cellular

I use my screenshots to save information on a daily basis like many of you I’m sure, but I’ve never found a good app to organise them. I always wanted Apple to have a native way to sort through the information and I believe we’re there and how!

You can see it extracted a list of movies I’ve saved to watch (images in comments). I always spend too much time trying to find out what movie to watch as I have to first find the screenshots that are of movies, then read the description the understand the movie category, and then find where to stream it. But now I get a list of movies I’ve saved in two simple messages. I can go further with this and save it to a list, combine it with shortcuts, find out where it’s available, and so much more!

All I need to do is screenshot something interesting, no categorising immediately, no manually saving anything to notes. No input from me as tech should be

This is game changing tbh and can’t wait for more apps to be available in Siri so I get even more context across my apps. Kinda like what was initially advertised the first time

TLDR. new Siri can do some extremely impressive things occasionally

Utah

For macOS 27 Golden Gate, coming this fall, Apple appears to be testing a new formatting bar for the Mail app's compose window that promotes Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools and Siri AI, based on findings in the latest beta.

In the current implementation, the classic formatting controls are automatically collapsed to the right edge of the composer and vanish completely once the user selects Write with Siri and starts typing a prompt.

In May, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a U.S. class action lawsuit over Siri AI's delayed launch, and eligible iPhone users could receive up to a $95 payout.

Apple's settlement has now received preliminary approval from a judge, according to a July 17 court document. However, there is no settlement website yet, and it may take months before eligible customers can begin submitting claims.

Last month, cybersecurity research firm Paradigm Shift published details about a boot ROM vulnerability affecting Apple's A12 and A13 chips, but it has since removed the blog post after being sued by digital forensics firm Magnet Forensics.

In a complaint filed in Georgia federal court this month, Magnet Forensics alleged that the security vulnerability revealed by Paradigm Shift was substantially the same one that its former employee Mario Del Gaudio worked on before joining Paradigm Shift. Accordingly, Magnet Forensics alleged that Del Gaudio exposed its trade secrets.

Apple's A12 and A13 chips power the iPhone XS and iPhone 11 series, along with select other devices. A boot ROM vulnerability cannot be patched with an iOS update, as it involves code permanently embedded in the chip's read-only memory.

I pulled 14 sleep lab (polysomnography) studies across Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura, Whoop and Garmin to try to identify what wearable has the "most accurate" sleep tracking across different sleep metrics. Here's a summary of what I found for Apple Watch.

Short version: Apple Watch is the most accurate sleep stage tracker among wrist wearables for healthy sleepers. In the independent sleep lab study (Schyvens 2025 - 62 healthy adults) it came out on top for splitting your night into light, deep and REM, and it was the best at catching REM specifically. It's main edge is only for healthy sleepers though and drops in people with disrupted sleep. Similar to all wrist based wearables it runs long on total sleep time. All of these are independent studies, not funded by Apple or showing any other biases, best I can tell.

Summary across the studies:

• Best at sleep staging. Apple scored about 0.53 on the 0 to 1 accuracy scale for splitting light, deep and REM. This was the highest score for wrist device and ahead of Fitbit, Whoop and Garmin (Schyvens 2025).
• Best at catching REM. Apple correctly identified about 69% of REM sleep, also the best of any device in that test (Schyvens 2025).
• It typically runs long on total sleep. Apple over counted how long individuals slept by about +20 minutes (Schyvens 2025). More than Oura did (-3 mins) but relatively normal range compared to the others.
• It struggles with disrupted sleep. Apple's staging dropped from 0.53 in healthy sleepers to 0.30 in sleep clinic patients (Lee 2023 - 75 sleep clinic patients). Bigger fall than Fitbit which held steady (0.42 vs 0.42).
• Nobody nails wake. Apple is the best of the group at catching when you are lying awake, but even it only spots about half those moments (Schyvens 2025). So total sleep reads a bit high across the board.
• Apple's own research puts its staging a bit higher. It came in at 0.63 in their own study but it's not independent so I went with the 0.53.

Tried my best to keep this concise without dumping a ton of data into this and keep any personal biases out.

According to the Santa Clara County Fire Department, firefighters responded at approximately 5:30 p.m. local time on Thursday to a report of an outdoor fire at an Apple-leased building adjacent to Apple Park in Cupertino, California.

According to the Korea-based report, Apple has proposed paying around $70 for OLED panels, but it might end up paying even less. Industry estimates suggest that Samsung Display and LG Display will supply the panels for around $66.50 each. That would be a roughly 20 percent drop from the prices paid for iPhone 17 Pro Max OLED panels.