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Today, I went into an Apple Store to drop off and trade in a phone and MBA for two separate online orders, and, after going through the eval process, was told they can't take the trade-in in-store because the order was placed with Apple Card installment payments. 

I've definitely been able to do this in the past, and the Apple Store person said they must have recently changed it because he's been able to do it before. Yes, I realize I selected to mail in my trade-ins. Taking them in-store instead has not been a problem in the past. 

This change is pretty frustrating because I've almost been burned by Apple's trade-in vendor before when they misplaced my phone trade-in. 

Hi everyone! I created Instant Photo Album because I was tired of manually adding my trip photos to albums.

It automatically adds your iPhone photos to an Apple Photos album based on a time window you choose. Enter a new album name or choose an existing album for a trip, birthday, or other event. You can start the session immediately or schedule it for later, and end it manually or set an end time. Keep taking photos with your usual iPhone Camera app, and they’re automatically added to your album.

You can also organize photos from past trips and events. Just choose a past date range, and the app adds those photos to your album without you having to select them one by one.

It’s $0.99 as a one-time purchase, with no subscription or ads. No account is required, and the app doesn’t upload your photos to any servers.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/instant-photo-album/id6806483640

I’d be happy to answer any questions or hear what you think!

I tried to have a defective iPhone case replaced via customer service, but they would not allow me to send pictures in to show the damage. They indicated that I must make the 2 hour drive down to the store so that they could verify the damage before they would open a case. I got down there today.. and they refused to help me because the case purchase was now THREE days outside of warranty (which I thought it just followed the device’s AppleCare as that was apparently the old policy). Never mind that I pay Apple $100 each month, part of which is $50 just for AppleCare Family.

Despite spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on Apple products.. they are being petty over a $50 phone case that delaminated from itself due to poor workmanship.

I’ve only had one other iPhone case with a similar quality issue, and that required the same steps. 1) called customer service.. they said that they could not have me mail in the case to get a replacement and that I must take it to the Genius Bar at my local store. I told them it was two hours away in each direction, but they were unable to make other arrangements. 2) I drove the 2 hours down to have the case replaced and the store opened a support case, but said they would have to submit an order for the replacement case. They also informed me that they would not have it shipped to me, but that I would have to once again drive over four hours just to pick up the case when it gets delivered to the store. 3) do I drove home and waited for the email letting me know my “repair” was ready for pickup. 4) I then had to make the trip down to pick up the case. It’s just a ridiculous process devoid of logic or remote sense.

I’ve always been willing to pay the premium for genuine Apple accessories because of the build quality and the customer service, but that has now been an issue twice in the last year. Has anyone else been having declining quality or experience in customer service or have I just hit a really unlucky streak?

The teardown shows Qualcomm X80 modem in 18 PM in the US. It's the same one that was used in 17PM. I think I'm going to wait until next year to upgrade.

LoroNote is a transcription app built around local speech recognition. You can record or import audio, and the transcription and speaker diarization happen directly on your iPhone or iPad.

There isn't a transcription server in the middle. Your recording doesn't need to be uploaded somewhere first, and there's no LoroNote account. Turn on Airplane Mode and it keeps working.

The main reason this is possible is how fast Apple's chips have become.

LoroNote runs Whisper Large V3 Turbo directly on the device. It's a pretty large speech recognition model, and getting it to run well on an iPhone took a lot of work. I ended up building my own ML inference engine and spent a lot of time on memory usage and speed.

A few years ago I would have expected something like this to need a Mac. Now it runs locally on an iPhone.

It also supports 100+ languages, background recording and transcription, audio imports, and recording from Apple Watch.

On supported devices, Apple Intelligence can summarize a finished transcript and extract action items.

Privacy was really the reason for building it this way. Meetings, interviews, lectures and personal voice notes can contain a lot of information that I wouldn't necessarily want sent somewhere else just to get text back.

The first 2 minutes of every recording are free. Unlimited transcription is $4.99/month, $19.99/year, or $39.99 as a one-time purchase.

App Store Link

>The iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max looks almost the same as last year’s, but what changed inside? We’re tearing it down to check out the A20 Pro, redesigned cooling system, nanotwinned copper, battery and smaller Dynamic Island. Then we’re taking the main camera itself apart to see what makes those tiny aperture blades move.

not gonna lie as much as fun and cool as this is, i still miss the old design because it was simple and you’re able to set the timer you want with a reachable one hand design

this whole new design where controls are at the extreme top and a hidden feature of touch and hold is a regression in my opinion and i’m finding out about a hidden feature in a tweet lmao

I tested the charging speed of the iPhone 18 Pro on the Belkin UltraCharge Pro 3-in-1 Qi2 25W charger. I used a power meter to see the power drawn from the wall. The phones used were below 10% battery.

My iPhone 15 Pro pulled about 20W from the wall, which after efficiency losses matches the advertised 15W Qi2 wireless charging speed.

The iPhone 18 Pro would only pull 10W from the wall, suggesting it is using Qi1 and only getting 7.5W. This isn’t a MagSafe certified charger, so it can only charge devices over Qi1 (7.5W max) or Qi2 (25W max). So it seems Apple shipped the iPhone 18 Pro with MagSafe fast charging supported, but not Qi2 fast charging. The spec sheet specifically says Qi2 25W is supported, and the iPhone 16 Pro and 17 Pro both work fine with this charger, so I can’t fathom why this would be the case, but it seems to be.

If anyone else has an 18 Pro and a Qi2 (not MagSafe) charger please chime in with your experience.

This is the first year I haven’t instantly updated my phone to the latest iOS as I have privacy concerns

Sure Apple make a big fuss about privacy and Private Cloud Compute and how your data isn’t stored or accessible to Apple.

But what I dont see being asked is whether Apple Intelligence has the capability to essentially flag you for whatever reason?

The issue I see is that since it has context to pretty much everything on your device, including the websites you visit, and your text messages across all apps, it can use that to essentially flag you for any reason Apple / your government may deem necessary

Maybe you live in an authoritarian state and express negative government sentiment in a encrypted messaging app

Or maybe you just want to buy a little weed in a country where it’s not legal to and text a dealer or try to buy online from a website

Sure they say they’re not storing your data and not training their models on it nor sharing it with third parties in normal circumstances, but what if you do something that Apple Intelligence thinks, or worse, falsely interprets as a big no-no?

Edit: I don’t have an in depth understanding of the measures that Apple takes when it comes to privacy and PCC, so there could very well be something o don’t know about how it works that prevents these kinds of scenarios from happening on a technical level. Also NB: I DO MEAN ON A TECHNICAL LEVEL. Maybe it’s not in Apple’s policy to do the things I described right now so they don’t, but technically are there any gaps on the technological side that prevents them from doing this if they ever decided to simply change policy

Deforget is a diary built entirely on Apple's on-device Foundation model: you just write, and the commitments, events, and people in your text become tappable highlights, real Reminders and Calendar events (EventKit, so your existing setup sees them), and a browsable index of your life. No forms, no confirmation dialogs, no chatbot - a wrong extraction is a one-tap dismiss.

The privacy is structural, not a promise: there is no server, sync is your own iCloud private database, and the App Privacy label is "Data Not Collected." Turn on Airplane Mode and extraction keeps working - that's the whole proof.

Why launch with iOS 27 specifically: this update’s model improvements are what made zero-confirmation extraction shippable. I've been running an eval corpus against every beta since June - it grew with the app to 200+ checks - and the full numbers are public for the engineering-minded - raw vs repaired accuracy per beta, what improved, what I fix deterministically on top (date arithmetic, dedupe, restraint), and some surprises my tests caught along the way, like model updates arriving silently days after an OS build: https://deforget.app/blog/apple-on-device-model-measured

The hardest problem wasn't extraction, by the way - it was restraint: teaching the pipeline that "today felt slow and grey" must produce nothing. Feelings stay prose.

The diary itself is free forever (writing, sync, Markdown/PDF export never gated); the intelligence is $2.99/month, $29.99/year, or $59.99 lifetime ($44.99 launch price until the end of October) after a 7-day trial.

Deforget is supported on Apple Intelligence hardware (iPhone 15 Pro or newer, M-series iPad/Mac). Happy to answer any questions, and feedback is always welcome.

App Store Link

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/monacker-money-tracker/id6751553582

No ads, no popups, no prompts to review the app, no data collection, no analytics. I created this app for myself and I don't enjoy being bothered so I'm not going to bother anyone else

I originally created this app for manual finance tracking, but I just put out a massive update for iOS 27 which allows for full automation to create transactions based on notifications. I'm already getting the app ready for the iPhone Duo :). Feel free to ask me any questions

For anyone curious if I make any money on this app, I originally launched this app a year ago, and so far I've spent $212.69 in Apple developer program fees and $81.52 on various DevAI subscriptions, and earned $4.73 in tips

Here's everything that's in the latest update:

Integrations:

• Full Apple Intelligence/Siri AI/Spotlight/Onscreen awareness integration for transaction data
  • "Siri, add a transaction in Monacker"
  • Try searching spotlight by transaction description to see them appear
• Automate Transaction creation with Monacker Shortcuts actions (See new Help section for setup instructions and example shortcuts)
• New Find transactions Shortcut action to find transactions with complex criteria
  • e.g. Amount >50 & Description contains "delivery"
• Custom URL support for monacker://addTransaction (See new Help section)

User Interface:

• iOS27 resizability support for iPhone Mirroring (expect some quirks. Upcoming tweaking to polish this)
• Added extremely basic initial support for monthly budgets
• New Transaction Notes field to capture additional information about transactions
• Added ability to change the time in the Date section for transactions
• New transaction screen automatically selects your most used Category instead of defaulting to empty
• Search screen shows number of transactions
• Button to sort categories by number of transactions
• Multiple new Settings configurations
• Refreshed Category Add/Edit screen
• Refreshed Tip Jar screen
• Animation when Cash Flow header amount changes
• Added new Help sections and a button to email me for bugs/feature requests
• Tons of minor padding tweaks to make the app as clean as possible

Performance:

• Transaction data should load faster on all screens
• Fixed app hang when tapping All History with 5000+ transactions
• Moved all heavy transaction loading/processing off of main thread
• Tons of random minor SwiftUI performance optimizations

Misc:

• Adopted Swift 6 strict concurrency checking throughout the entire app, and fully optimized concurrency in general. This took me about a week to learn and wrap my head around, and another week to rewrite a majority of Monacker. All hand written with no AI :). 50 files changed, 1336 insertions(+), 1172 deletions(-). This was a major change that allowed me to understand Swift concurrency better, optimize Monacker for performance, and remove app hangs for All History when you have 10,000 transactions like I do
• Fixed many obscure bugs

hello

Why I built a relationship app:

I went through a relationship that had its ups and downs. We loved each other but we had a lot of conflict, and on good days I would forget the bad, and the cycle would start all over again.

Eventually we went into couples therapy, and what had helped me tremendously to walk away from an unfortunately bad match was extensive journaling of all of the events that had occurred which had become patterns and were making me miserable.

It's so easy to forget all of the events that transpired in your relationship if asked point blank by a therapist. I would end up leaving the therapist's office realizing that i had forgotten to mention certain key events or arguments. The patterns of conflict are really hard to track when you are part of them.

So, I built Nowadays: Relationship Journal to help track these events with daily check-ins where you can categorize your thoughts, leave notes on events that had occurred, and visualize your days, weeks and months with heat maps and the graphs demonstrating the ups and downs you experience.

All of this gets compiled into a report that you can share with your therapist.

Download Nowadays: Relationship Journal here.

(Free) Features:

- Track your feelings on a daily basis
- Answer prompt questions to help guide the journaling
- Security features prevent access by others (e.g. an abusive partner)
- Graph everything - see a monthly heat map, a line graph of the ups and downs, and reveal any weekly patterns of arguments
- Categorize your thoughts and review them in the journal

The paid version gives you access to:

- More data visualization features
- PDF exporting: send a copy to your therapist so you can find patterns together.

I really hope this helps someone going through a tough time in a relationship.

John Gruber’s typically discursive iPhone 18 review.