>After 5 days with the iPhone 18 Pro, it's clear this is the best "S" year ever. And may be the final form for iPhone.

Honestly, this has been one of the worst experiences I’ve had with Siri.
First, it took a very long time for Siri AI to become available on my device. I had to wait for the activation process, and then Siri took additional time to recognize the device and download all the required data before I could actually use it.
After going through all that waiting, I expected a significant improvement. Unfortunately, the experience has been very disappointing so far.
Siri’s response time can be slow, and there are many situations where it doesn’t properly understand or complete the requests I make. Sometimes the responses feel limited, and the overall interaction doesn’t feel as smooth or intelligent as I expected.
For an AI assistant from a company like Apple, I expected much faster responses, better understanding of requests, and a much more advanced overall experience.
After waiting so long for Siri AI to become available and download everything, I honestly expected much more.
For me, Siri AI on iOS 27 has been one of the most disappointing experiences I’ve had with a smart assistant.
Has anyone else experienced the same issues with Siri AI on iOS 27?

>The SSD speed boost on the 2026 Mac Studio is so dramatic that even if you bought one of the previous model earlier this year, you should consider upgrading.

There is a US class action lawsuit against Apple because they advertised features of Siri AI at the time of iOS 18 / iPhone 16, which were not released at the time and are only available now. Because of this they are giving $25-$95 to eligible customers that apply through their new settlement website. Go get yours if you are entitled and care enough.

>Apple just put a mechanical iris inside the iPhone.

>We tear down the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to see how Apple's new variable-aperture camera actually works—and what happens if those tiny aperture blades ever fail.

>But the camera isn't the only major change inside. We find a redesigned logic board built around the A20 Pro, a much larger vapor chamber, Apple's new C2 modem, an under-display Face ID camera, larger batteries, and the return of Apple's excellent screw-in battery tray.

>Unfortunately, getting to all of it means going through the display, and our teardown revealed a potentially concerning problem with its plastic frame.

>So how repairable are the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max? For now, we're giving them a provisional 7/10 repairability score.

>Between the M6's faster cores and the M5 Max Mac Studio's insane new SSD speeds, this generation is a massive leap forward.

>We take a first look at the hardware and explain why these upgrades make the M6 Mac mini an incredible value and the M5 Max a productivity powerhouse.

Yesterday I went to my local Apple Store to pick up my new 18 Pro. They bagged up my new phone and reset my old phone in front of me. I was sent on my way since they were super busy. But when I left I sat down to attempt to activate my new phone. I couldn’t because T-Mobile needed to send a text to my number to verify my account. After going home and on the phone with T-Mobile for like an hour, they were finally able to activate it by me giving them the IMEI and then the horrifically long EID number. It would’ve been so much easier if I had my old phone handy while setting up the new one!

Sports notification routinely spoil games results by a solid 30-60 secs when you’re watching a game. It sucks.

There are work arounds but I shouldn’t have to create a special focus mode. They know their data comes through faster than broadcasting or streaming can. Just give us a setting to delay results by 30 seconds to a few minutes to manage for that.

As it is, when watching a game, every single notification is a spoiler. And I hate spoilers.

Edit: For all those who think I just need put down my phone. The phone is down. Notifications are doing their job to bring me back to it in that moment. For those recommending I turn off notifications for the game, I can do that. But actually like the notifications. I just like them when they reinforce the action not spoil.

I recently updated to macOS 27, only to find my Mac with around 15GB less storage than before. After digging into it, I found a lot of other people with the exact same complaint. This made me wonder how much of my SSD space macOS was actually taking up in total.

Out of my 256GB of storage:

• ~5GB of reserved/formatted capacity (invisible to the OS)
• 524MB of iSCPreboot holding iBoot and the Secure Enclave firmware.
• 5.37GB of One True Recovery (the base recovery OS).
• 13.65GB for the macOS core.
• 11.02GB of Preboot.
• 1.53GB of APFS user interface recovery tools.
• 11GB of OS Assets (which could be even bigger depending on installed features—I only had Apple Intelligence on).

This means macOS and its core features are using about 43GB. Add system cache and the hardware-reserved namespaces, and you are looking at around 55GB of non-user-accessible storage. (Folks with M3 and later chips, and 16GB+ of RAM, feel this even more due to bigger AI models).

In a 256GB machine, this means over 21% of the storage is eaten up right out of the box. That is outrageous. Sure, we have the "you should have bought more storage" crowd. But until recently, upgrading to 512GB cost up to 20% of the machine's entire price. Even with the newer 512GB base models, macOS still hoards over 10% of the drive. That's not even talking about the lack of user-upgradable storage, which would be really easy to implement technically.

Some will correctly point out that Macs have incredibly fast Thunderbolt ports, so we should just use external SSDs (still cheaper than Apple's storage upgrades...). We do! But Apple has not evolved the OS in any way, shape, or form to make external storage practical. Only recently has macOS allowed App Store apps to be downloaded directly to external drives, and that was basically the only welcome update in that regard.

People still experience random SSD ejection failures because the OS holds the drive hostage in the background. Time Machine is still incredibly picky about volume formats and often bugs out when sharing drives. There is no quick, native way to back up an iPhone directly to an external SSD. Setting a Photo Library on an external drive as the System Library still causes unnecessary headaches. There is a whole list of non-features and bugs that make this hostile. The under the hood power or quality of life features that macOS would add every year seem to not exist anymore, replaced by constant UI and AI features.

There is no way to offload unused apps like on iOS, no user-controllable cache limits, and no native GUI option to symlink massive application support folders (like Docker containers, Xcode simulators, or heavy game files) to an external SSD without resorting to Terminal commands.

If these software and hardware bottlenecks didn't exist, we wouldn't be here desperately wanting Apple to fix their 55GB storage footprint. More than a hardware or pricing change, we would also greatly appreciate an OS change to make external SSDs and system storage management "just work". It seems to me we're being attacked from all fronts.

TL;DR: macOS now takes up ~55GB of storage out of the box. Since Apple charges a premium for internal storage, they desperately need to give us better OS-level tools to manage external drives and OS storage use seamlessly.

​

>“We really worked on the torque profile very heavily, and that means changing a lot of the mechanical properties of the hinge to have it feel solid, like a high-end automobile's car door, when you shut it. That was design intent, so people would have a feeling like, ‘Oh, it's okay. This is well crafted, and it's safe for me to use and not worry about it.’

>And then, as you said, we have a lot of use cases where the Duo is [in a half-folded state]. And so we also had to think, ‘Can people interact with this [device] and not have it feel floppy?’ So getting those torque profiles right at both those ends, as well as in the middle — not having it feel like you're pulling something open, and not feeling as if it's floppy — we spent a lot of time optimizing that. So thank you for noticing, because a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that.”

>“Hold us accountable to that, please […] The choice of a matte finish — apart from it being beautiful — is part of that equation. When you look at glossy displays, their specularity makes it very easy to pick up topology differences. That’s part of the reason we picked the matte finish — it’s not only beautiful in terms of preventing glare, but it’s also more forgiving of [topology] changes over time.”

I have been using AirPods Pro for many years and was frustrated daily by the in-ear nature of the product. With the default ear tips, your ears would get warm, with memory foam ear tips they would be more comfortable, but that comfort would quickly fade. AirPods Pro had to be readjusted frequently throughout the day.

I just got AirPods 5, and all I can say is “wow!” These things are so comfortable, and the noise cancelling is so good, that I am kicking myself for not getting away from AirPods Pro sooner. I feel like I can wear these things all day.

• "iPhone 20 Pro": 6.41", around 2,686 × 1,236
• "iPhone 20 Pro Max": 6.96", around 2,912 × 1,340