reporter

According to the latest rumors, Apple is close to launching its next-generation iPad mini. So what should we expect from the successor to the iPad mini 7 that Apple released over 20 months ago. Read on to find out. Processor and Performance Apple is working on a next-generation version of the iPad mini (codename J510/J511) that features the A19 Pro chip, according to information found in code that Apple mistakenly shared in August. Apple's A19 Pro chip since debuted in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro models. The iPhone 17 Pro models include the higher-end version of Apple's A19 Pro chip with a 6-core CPU and a 6-core GPU, while the iPhone Air uses a mid-tier A19 Pro chip with one fewer GPU core than the A19 Pro chip used in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. If the code leak is accurate for the iPad mini 8, Apple is likely to use the mid-tier A19 Pro chip found in the iPhone Air. This is based on the fact that the A17 Pro chip used in the iPad mini 7 has a 6-core CPU with two high-performance cores and four efficiency cores, along with a 5-core GPU, compared to the 6-core GPU found on the A17 Pro used in the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple built the A19 Pro chip on an upgraded third-generation 3-nanometer N3P process for modest speed and efficiency improvements. The chip includes a 16-core Neural Engine, next-generation dynamic caching, and unified image compression. The GPU in the A19 Pro has an upgraded architecture with a larger cache, more memory, and Neural Accelerators that are built into each core. Apple says that this change provides 3× the peak GPU compute over the prior-generation chip. There's also an upgraded 16-core Neural Engine for AI tasks. There is an outside chance that Apple opts for the A20 Pro chip for the new iPad mini. The claim has been made by a MacRumors tipster who analyzed a macOS kernel debug kit containing internal Apple codenames. However, the iPad mini has not always received Apple's newest A-series chip at the time it was updated, so the A19 Pro cannot be ruled out at this time. iPhone 18 Pro models are also expected to use the A20 Pro chip, which will reportedly be fabricated with TSMC's advanced 2nm process. Display Apple's plan to transition the ‌‌iPad mini‌‌ from an LCD to an OLED display is widely rumored. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the small form-factor tablet is likely to be the next Apple device to adopt OLED. According to a Chinese leaker with sources in Apple's supply chain, Apple has evaluated a Samsung-made OLED display for its next iPad mini model. It remains unclear whether the iPad mini 8 will feature a higher refresh rate than the 60Hz LCD display used in the existing iPad mini 7, but since the new base iPhone 17 now uses a 120Hz ProMotion panel, it would be reasonable to expect the same on the first OLED iPad mini. A separate report has suggested the ‌‌‌iPad mini 8‌‌‌'s screen could increase in size from 8.3 inches to 8.7 inches with the adoption of OLED. OLED panels can individually control each pixel, resulting in more precise color reproduction and deeper blacks compared to other common display technologies. They also provide superior contrast, faster response times, better viewing angles, and greater design flexibility. All of Apple's flagship iPhones use OLED panels, and in May 2024 the company brought the display technology to the iPad Pro for the first time. Unlike Apple's ‌iPad Pro‌ models, which feature two-stack low-temperature polycrystalline oxide (LTPO) OLED panels‌, the ‌iPad mini‌ may have a single-stack low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) panel, which would make it dimmer. Chassis Design Apple is reportedly working to give the iPad mini 8 a more water-resistant design, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated casing would bring protection levels closer to those of the iPhone, making the tablet safer for use in damp environments. To achieve this, Apple is said to have designed a new vibration-based speaker system that eliminates the need for traditional speaker holes. By using sound-emitting surfaces instead of open grilles, the company can reduce potential entry points for water and dust, resulting in a more sealed, durable enclosure. On the iPhone, Apple relies on adhesives and gaskets to shield speakers and other openings from moisture. The iPad mini's approach appears to go further, doing away with the holes altogether. Current iPad mini models lack any official IP rating, but the upcoming version could mark the first in the lineup to feature a certified level of water protection. Apple patents could offer further clues to the new design direction. For example, a 2014 patent outlines a "mechanically actuated panel acoustic system" that vibrates flat surfaces to generate sound, effectively turning parts of a device's chassis into a speaker diaphragm. This could potentially allow Apple to produce audio without visible speaker holes. The patent suggest Apple has been building towards a sealed, vibration-based acoustic system for several years. Release Date According to research firm Omdia, the ‌‌iPad mini‌‌ is expected to adopt an OLED display in 2027. However, Korea's ET News and ZDNET Korea have both suggested that the iPad mini will be updated with an OLED display in 2026. Bloomberg has also said the update could come as soon as this year. The most recent word on the subject comes from Weibo-based leaker Instant Digital, who claims the OLED iPad mini will be launched in the second half of 2026 at the earliest. In May 2024, it was reported that Samsung Display had started developing sample OLED panels for a future ‌iPad mini‌, with plans to initiate mass production at its facility in Cheonan in the second half of 2025. The same report claimed that Apple will bring an OLED panel to the iPad Air alongside the ‌iPad mini‌ in 2026, though Apple only refreshed the iPad Air in March, and more recent reporting suggests an OLED iPad Air will arrive in early 2027. The latter outlook aligns with a December report by analyst firm Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) that said an 8.5-inch OLED iPad mini is planned for a 2026 launch, while 11-inch and 13-inch OLED iPad Air models are expected to follow in 2027. Ultimately, there are no rumors suggesting exactly when the next ‌iPad mini‌ will be released, but a launch later in 2026 has a high probability. Pricing The price of the current iPad mini 7 starts at $499 for the 128GB Wi-Fi-only model, going up to $799 for the 512GB model. However, there's a very good chance that the iPad mini 8 will cost more. The main reason is rising memory and storage costs, brought about by the continuing AI data center buildout. Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs for everyone else, and Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins, according to The Wall Street Journal. Just this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook told WSJ that "price increases are unavoidable." Cook said the company was doing its best to "mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us," and that it was trying to shield customers from them, but the situation has become "unsustainable." Cook didn't say which products will go up in price, but it's hard to imagine its iPad lineup won't be affected. Even before Cook's price warning, there was an expectation that the ‌next iPad mini‌ would be more expensive, with Bloomberg's Gurman suggesting Apple could charge up to $100 more for the device. We could now be looking like a couple of hundred dollars or more. Gurman has previously argued that Apple should consider a lower-end version of the mini, or at least a change to its current $499 starting price, given that it's up against rival products that cost a lot less. However, Apple users who are looking for a more affordable option should probably consider the 10th-generation iPad instead. Starting at $329, the iPad offers many iPad mini features, such as Touch ID and Center Stage, but at a lower price that balances functionality and affordability. Related Roundup: iPad miniTag: OLEDBuyer's Guide: iPad Mini (Don't Buy)Related Forum: iPad This article, "OLED iPad Mini: Release Date, Pricing, and What to Expect" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

The Calendar and Reminders apps look about the same as they did in iOS 26, but there are a couple of useful new Apple Intelligence features that make both apps more intuitive. Natural Language for Calendar ‌Apple Intelligence‌ in Calendar lets you add events by describing them in natural language. It identifies people, dates, and places while you are typing, and you can tap to add that info. It's not as fluid as Fantastical, but it's better than before. You can't just open the Calendar app and type "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14" and have it filed correctly as you do in Fantastical because it doesn't have the same automatic date swapping. Calendar adds an event on the date that's selected, and by default, that's the current date. To use natural language to select another date, you can type in "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14," but you need to tap on the July 14 suggestion at the top of the keyboard. The Calendar app will automatically set the event to the time that you type in with natural language, so you don't need to tap for that. Natural Language for Reminders In Reminders, you can now describe a reminder in natural language and it will autofill the metadata that you mention. It can add date, time, and location automatically. You can write in a reminder like "get the groceries at 6pm tonight" or "send the photos to John tomorrow at 4pm" and it will add the correct times to your reminder. The feature is in beta and it's not entirely consistent, so sometimes you need to tap on the suggestion below to add the correct date and time, and sometimes it does it automatically. With natural language support, Apple removed the menu bar at the bottom of the interface for adding a new reminder. Adding extra features like an image or metadata such as a flag can now be done through the "Details" interface. Calendar Event Editing The event editing interface is a little simpler to use, and it's quicker to get to time adjustments. If you adjust the frequency of an event, Calendar can intelligently apply changes to all events. Siri can also be used for editing calendar events. Holiday-Aware Alarms The Calendar app tracks holidays, and can alert you the day before a holiday to ask if you want to change the time of the wake-up alarm that you have set. Large Widgets The Calendar and Reminders apps both have a new extra-large widget size that takes up an entire app page. Siri AI ‌Siri‌ has full access to your calendar and can add events to it with natural language requests. What you can't do with the natural language entry, you can do with ‌Siri‌. ‌Siri‌ is much more capable than before, and it does a better job correctly adding events to the calendar on the day and time you intend, and with parameters, like repeating events. Just describe the event you want to create and ‌Siri‌ can get it done. ‌Siri‌ can add events to your calendar from other apps, like Mail and Messages. ‌Siri‌ is able to search across the Calendar app and Reminders, so it knows your schedule and what's on your to-do list. Visual Intelligence Visual Intelligence in iOS 27 supports adding multiple events to your calendar at one time from a schedule. If you have a document with a list of dates, like a child's sports practice schedule, you can take a picture and add them to the Calendar app all at once. < h2>Reminders Grocery Lists In ‌iOS 27‌, the Reminders app has improved grocery list sorting. It also supports more languages than before. Shortcuts for Reminders There are new Reminders actions in the Shortcuts app, including Create Group, Create List, Create Section, Delete Groups, Delete Lists, and Delete Sections. There's also a new "Get What's On Screen" option that can be used with Reminders. Apple Intelligence Requirements To use the ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features in ‌iOS 27‌, you need an iPhone 15 Pro or later.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27 This article, "Everything New in Calendar and Reminders in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Apple today teamed up with Chart Data to share the top 20 most-streamed artists of all time. Chart Data says this is the first time that Apple has shared the all-time streaming list. Drake is the number one most-streamed artist, with Taylor Swift coming in second. Future was third, followed by YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Bad Bunny. The full list is below. Top 20 most streamed artists of all-time on Apple Music pic.twitter.com/c4WyaRZCTx — chart data (@chartdata) June 18, 2026 Apple Music launched in June 2015, so the top 20 list includes streaming data for the past 11 years. The streaming service is priced at $10.99 per month for an individual plan in the U.S., with other pricing options available for students, families, and in the Apple One bundle. Tag: Apple Music This article, "Apple Music Reveals Top 20 Most-Streamed Artists of All Time" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

watchOS 27 is the new version of watchOS that's coming to the Apple Watch this fall. It's a little light on features, but there are some useful new additions, including access to Siri AI. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. ‌watchOS 27‌ will have ‌Siri‌ AI, so you'll be able to use many of the same ‌Siri‌ features that you have on the iPhone on your wrist. Right now, the ‌Siri‌ features aren't in the ‌watchOS 27‌ beta, but the integration will be coming later this year. Apple is planning for a ‌Siri‌ app on the watch so you can access all of your ‌Siri‌ conversations. ‌Siri‌ AI for the watch will rely on a connected iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, so you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later to use it on your watch. ‌Siri‌ will be able to access your personal data, search the web for info to answer questions, and take actions in apps. There's a new dynamic app grid that's available when you press the Digital Crown. It will put the ‌Siri‌ app front and center, while also showing ‌Siri‌ Suggested apps that include your most used and recently used apps. The view shows multiple apps in addition to ‌Siri‌ and a shortcut to get to the full app list. Apple also improved Liquid Glass with better contrast and more uniform refraction, which boosts readability. Workout Buddy is now available even without your iPhone nearby, and there are new metrics to keep you motivated, with the watch tracking progressive increases in the distance, pace, and duration of runs. Cycle Tracking now supports menopause/perimenopause recognition and notifications, and treadmill readings will be more accurate. Apple added a new tap gesture, so you can single-tap your index finger and thumb together to select a widget in the Smart Stack. There are new Smart Stack suggested widgets for finding a parked car, accessing ‌Siri‌, getting to pinned messages, accessing transit cards, seeing noise notifications, getting reminders for birthdays, and more. When you're getting a phone call, your watch can show information relevant to the call, like a flight confirmation number if you're on the phone with an airline. Custom passes made with the Wallet app on iPhone work on the Apple Watch, and there's a new unified Find My app for locating devices, items, and people. The ‌Find My‌ app supports Precision Finding for locating an iPhone, AirPods Pro 3, or an AirTag 2. Under-the-hood improvements bring longer battery life, with Apple disabling little-used features like gestures, Start Workout reminders, and Raise to Speak to preserve battery. ‌watchOS 27‌ works on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later, and the Apple Watch SE 3.Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26, watchOS 27Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch This article, "Hands-On With watchOS 27: Every New Apple Watch Feature" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Signify today announced two new Philips Hue devices to expand its Hue Entertainment lineup, debuting the Philips Hue Play Table Lamp and the Philips Hue Play Floor Lamp Large. There are also new candle bulbs. The two lamps are similar to the existing Signe Hue table and floor lamps, featuring a tall, linear design that casts light on a wall or surface behind the light. The lamps offer color-changing lighting effects that synchronize with games, TV shows, movies, and music when used with the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box or the Hue Sync TV and desktop apps. Signify says that the lamps are designed for flexible placement, and a video featuring the table lamp shows it placed next to a TV set to project on the wall behind it. The table lamp is 23.6 inches, while the floor lamp is 53 inches tall. Both support Chromasync for precise color matching. The new lamps have a more affordable price than the previous gradient floor and table lamps. The Hue Play Table Lamp is priced at $80, and the Hue Play Floor Lamp is priced at $150. The new Hue Candle bulbs have Matter over Thread integration and full-spectrum daylight technology. The temperature range up to 20,000K supports colors that mimic natural daylight throughout the day, and they support millions of Hue colors for use in lighting scenes. The bulbs are also 40 percent more energy efficient than the prior version, and they dim to 0.2 percent. Bulbs are priced at $110 for two. All of the new products are available now from the Philips Hue website.Tag: Philips Hue This article, "Philips Hue Adds Play Table Lamp, Floor Lamp, and New Candle Bulbs" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Apple today announced that every part of Formula 1's 2026 Austrian Grand Prix (June 26 to June 28) will be streamed live on the Apple TV streaming service for free. U.S. viewers can watch all sessions — including practices, qualifying, and the Grand Prix — with no subscription required.Related Roundup: Apple TVBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater This article, "You Can Watch All of F1's 2026 Austrian Grand Prix For Free on Apple TV" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Security research firm Paradigm Shift today published details of a new BootROM vulnerability affecting Apple's A12 and A13 chips, along with a working proof-of-concept exploit named "usbliter8." The BootROM, or SecureROM, is the first code an iPhone runs when it powers on. Because it is baked directly into the chip at manufacture, any vulnerability found there cannot be fixed with a software update, meaning affected devices will remain vulnerable for the rest of their lives. The last publicly known BootROM exploit of this kind was "checkm8," released in 2019 which affected devices from the iPhone 4S through to the iPhone X. usbliter8 now extends that history to the next generation of chips, covering the iPhone XS through to the iPhone 11 series. The exploit works by taking advantage of a bug in the USB controller built into Apple's chips. When an iPhone receives USB data during startup, the controller uses a memory buffer to store incoming packets. Paradigm Shift found that by sending a specific sequence of unusually small packets, they could manipulate an internal hardware pointer in a way that causes it to walk backwards through memory, allowing data to be written to locations it should never reach. The researchers say this appears to be a bug in the USB controller hardware itself, not in Apple's software. The A11 chip, used in the iPhone X, is not affected because its USB driver manually resets the pointer after each packet. A14 and later chips are also safe, as they configure a memory protection feature correctly at the BootROM level. The A12 and A13 sit in a vulnerable middle ground between the two. On A12 devices, gaining code execution is relatively straightforward. On A13 devices, things are considerably harder because Apple introduced a security feature called Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC), which detects and blocks certain types of memory tampering. Paradigm Shift says working around PAC on the A13 required a lengthy multi-step process before the researchers could finally take control of the processor. Once in control, the exploit installs a custom handler that survives a device restart and adds two capabilities: temporarily lowering the device's security settings, and booting unsigned software without any verification checks. It also injects the traditional "PWND" string into the iPhone's USB serial number as a signal that the device has been compromised, a convention that carries over from checkm8 and earlier exploits. Paradigm Shift notes that while usbliter8 does not affect the Secure Enclave directly, a BootROM compromise of this kind opens up wider avenues for attacking it. The firm says it reported its findings to Apple Product Security before publication and worked with Apple on coordinated disclosure. The full proof-of-concept code has been published alongside the write-up at ps.tc.Tag: Apple SecurityRelated Forum: iPhone This article, "Apple's A12 and A13 Chips Facing New Unpatchable Exploit" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Apple today announced that developers in Brazil will be allowed to distribute iPhone apps through alternative app marketplaces on iOS, and accept payments through third-party platforms. In other words, developers in Brazil will be able to circumvent the App Store and Apple's in-app purchase system, but there are still fees. Alternative app marketplaces will have to be authorized by Apple and will need to meet ongoing requirements. For apps that are still distributed through the App Store, developers will be able to include an alternative payment processing method in their app and/or link users to a website to complete a transaction. These changes are available on iOS 26.5 and later, and they are the result of regulatory action from Brazil's competition regulator. Apple has added a new page on its website with additional details for developers in Brazil. Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18. Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries. Fees iOS apps distributed on the App Store in Brazil will be able to take advantage of a lower commission of up to 21% on digital goods and services, down from a maximum of 30%, but many developers qualify for a commission as low as 10% through things such as the Small Business Program, Video Partner Program, and Mini Apps Partner Program. If an app uses the App Store's in-app purchase system, there is an additional 5% fee. Developers with iOS apps on the App Store in Brazil will pay a commission of 15% on transactions for digital goods and services made on a website linked to by the developer's app. In some cases, this commission will be lowered to 10%. iOS apps distributed outside of the App Store in Brazil will be required to pay a 5% commission on the sale of digital goods and services, including paid apps. Apple says this "Core Technology Commission" compensates it for the tools, technologies, and services that enable developers to offer apps to iOS users. By July 6, 2026, all current members of the Apple Developer Program will need to agree to an updated Apple Developer Program License Agreement, which includes new terms that allow for these options in Brazil.Tag: App Store This article, "Apple Announces Major App Store Changes on iOS in Brazil" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

The upcoming iOS 27 update that Apple unveiled last week includes some new features and enhancements for Apple's Find My app on the iPhone. iOS 27 is currently available as a developer beta, with a public beta to follow in July. The update is expected to be released to all users in September. Below, we have outlined three additions to Apple's Find My app on iOS 27. Hide Location A new "Hide Location" option in Find My allows you to discreetly pause your location sharing with specific people until the end of the day — the other person will not receive any notification or alert about you temporarily hiding your location. Apple says it added this feature for situations such as surprise birthday parties. Custom Durations for Location Sharing Find My now lets you share your location with others for a custom duration between 15 minutes and 30 days. You can set a precise number of days, hours, and minutes, or you can set a set a date and time for your location sharing to expire. On iOS 26, there are only three preset timeframes: indefinitely, until end of day, and one hour. Landscape Mode iOS 27 enables landscape mode in more of Apple's built-in iPhone apps, including Find My. Landscape mode was already available on iOS 26 or earlier in Apple Maps, Calendar, Files, Notes, Mail, and some other Apple apps too, but iOS 27 expands support to many more apps. This change could be laying the groundwork for the "iPhone Ultra," as landscape-friendly apps would be well suited for the rumored foldable device. To use landscape mode in a supported app, simply turn your iPhone sideways. Portrait Orientation Lock must be turned off in Control Center.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27Tag: Find My This article, "iOS 27 Adds These New Features to Find My, Including 'Hide Location'" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple has brought some meaningful updates to iPhone Mirroring besides a new app icon. Here's what's new. macOS 27 is currently in developer beta, with a public beta coming next month and a general release expected in the fall. Window Resizing In macOS Tahoe, iPhone Mirroring is constrained to the iPhone's native aspect ratio, so window resizing is limited to the device's fixed proportions. Smaller, Actual Size, and Larger are the only options. By contrast, macOS 27 introduces support for multiple aspect ratios. Depending on the chosen aspect ratio, iPhone Mirroring displays either a modified iPhone interface or an app's available iPad layout. Adjustments are limited to iOS 27-compatible apps for now, but expect this to change when developers update their own apps. The change has also stoked speculation about a rumored foldable iPhone coming in September. Control Center Access In macOS 27, you can now access your iPhone's Control Center directly from your Mac using the Command-4 keyboard shortcut or via the View menu in the menu bar. Previously, iPhone Mirroring didn't support Control Center access at all. DRM Support macOS 27 also adds support for DRM-protected video playback in iPhone Mirroring. In macOS Tahoe, attempting to watch protected content, such as videos from streaming services or rented movies, results in a black screen on your Mac. With the next major update, however, you can view DRM-enabled content directly through the mirrored iPhone window. This article, "Three Ways macOS 27 Improves iPhone Mirroring" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Samsung's newest monitors are now available to purchase, including the Odyssey G8, ViewFinity S8, and Movingstyle Essential. All of these are available with a $50 launch discount, plus your choice of extras including up to $300 in Samsung credit on a future purchase, a free Music Studio speaker, or free Galaxy Buds4 Pro. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Samsung. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running. Starting with the Samsung Odyssey G8 monitors, you will find $50 discounts across every model of the new 2026 devices. Prices start at $899.99 for the 27-inch Odyssey G8 5K Monitor, and also include Samsung's first 6K monitor with the 32-inch Odyssey G8 6K Monitor for $1,549.99. $50 OFF PLUS EXTRASSamsung 2026 Monitors Samsung also has a new 40-inch ViewFinity S8 Curved Monitor on sale for $1,349.99, as well as the Movingstyle Essential Monitor for $849.99, both $50 discounts. Additionally, the company announced a 27-inch model of the ViewFinity S8, but it's not yet available for purchase. 43-inch Movingstyle Essential - $849.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit 27-inch Odyssey G8 5K Monitor - $899.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit 32-inch Odyssey OLED G7 4K Monitor - $1,049.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit 27-inch Odyssey OLED G8 4K Monitor - $1,049.99 ($50 off), plus $200 Samsung credit 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 4K Monitor - $1,249.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit 40-inch ViewFinity S8 Curved Monitor - $1,349.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit 32-inch Odyssey G8 6K Monitor - $1,549.99 ($50 off), plus $300 Samsung credit If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week. Deals Newsletter Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season! Related Roundup: Apple Deals This article, "Samsung Takes $50 Off 2026 Monitors, Plus Credit Towards Future Purchases" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

In Part 1, we walked through six categories of AI coding agent failures and why they keep happening. The agent runs as you, with your filesystem permissions and your credentials, and nothing sits between the model’s decision and the shell’s execution. In Part 2, we looked at one specific version of that failure in detail, the rm -rf ~/ incident that wiped a developer’s entire Mac in a single command. Part 3 moves the same problem up the stack, into a production AWS environment where the blast radius is no longer one laptop but a regional cloud service. What happens when the agent isn’t running on your laptop, but on a production AWS environment with operator-level credentials? You get a thirteen-hour outage, a public denial that fooled no one, and a series of follow-on incidents that cost Amazon an estimated 6.3 million orders before the company was forced to introduce what it called a “code safety reset.” Today’s Horror Story: The Agent That Deleted Production In mid-December 2025, an AWS engineer asked Kiro for help with a small bug in AWS Cost Explorer, the dashboard customers use to track their cloud spending. Kiro is Amazon’s own agentic coding assistant. It had been granted operator-level access to the environment, the same access the engineer had, because that was how Kiro was being rolled out across the company at the time. Kiro looked at the bug, weighed its options, and decided the cleanest fix was to delete the production environment and rebuild it from scratch. The engineer never got a chance to step in. There was no confirmation prompt, no second pair of eyes, no two-person rule, and by the time anyone could have intervened the deletion was already done. Cost Explorer went down for thirteen hours in one of AWS’s mainland China regions. This was not a security breach. It was an AI coding agent doing exactly what it had been set up to do, running with the engineer’s full credentials, with nothing in the architecture to catch the moment between “delete and recreate” being a reasonable option to consider and a production service being torn down. In this issue, you’ll learn: What happened in the December outage, step by step Why Amazon’s “user error, not AI” response only told part of the story How the December incident set the stage for outages that cost an estimated 6.3 million orders by March 2026 The scoped-identity pattern that prevents this whole category of failure Why This Series Matters Each “Horror Story” examines a real-world incident that turns laboratory findings into production disasters. These aren’t hypothetical attacks. They’re documented cases with named victims, internal memos obtained by reporters, and in several cases, public denials from the vendors. Our goal is to show the human and operational impact behind the security statistics, demonstrate how these failures unfold in practice, and provide concrete guidance on protecting your infrastructure through Docker’s scoped-identity execution model. The story begins with an internal memo dated November 24, 2025. Three weeks before Kiro deleted the Cost Explorer environment, two of Amazon’s senior VPs, Peter DeSantis (AWS Utility Computing) and Dave Treadwell (eCommerce Foundation) signed and distributed an internal memo telling the company that Kiro was now the standardized AI coding assistant for the entire organization. The memo set a target of 80% weekly usage by every Amazon engineer by year-end 2025, and directed teams to stop using third-party AI tools unless a VP signed off on the exception. Engineers came to call this the “Kiro Mandate.” Adoption was tracked as a corporate OKR, and engineers who weren’t using the tool showed up on management dashboards. The mandate was framed as a performance question, not a safety question, which mattered because the safety side of the rollout had not kept up. Things like peer review for destructive changes, approval gates for production access, and per-agent permission scoping had not been formally extended to AI-assisted work when the 80% target was set Around 1,500 Amazon engineers signed an internal forum post pushing back, arguing that tools like Claude Code outperformed Kiro on real engineering tasks like multi-language refactoring. Management proceeded with the mandate anyway. By January 2026, 70% of Amazon engineers had used Kiro during sprint windows. Adoption was on track. The risk profile of what those engineers could do with the tool was a different story. Then on February 20, 2026, the Financial Times broke the story based on accounts from four people familiar with the incident. The FT reporting also surfaced a second AI-related outage, this one involving Amazon Q Developer, on a separate system. Amazon’s response went up the same day under the title “Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI.” It called the cause “user error, specifically misconfigured access controls, not AI as the story claims,” and dismissed the FT’s second-incident claim as “entirely false.” The misconfigured access controls part is worth a closer look. A typo would have been “user error.” What actually happened was a structural decision to give an autonomous agent the same permissions as a human operator, in a system where the human’s safety net had always been a colleague asking “are you sure?” Kiro had no colleagues. The Scale of the Problem The December outage was the visible piece of a bigger pattern. Inside Amazon, briefing notes described a series of incidents with “high blast radius” tied to AI-assisted changes, with safety rules that had not yet been written for the way the agents were now being used. None of that language was ever shared publicly. On March 2, Amazon.com showed shoppers the wrong delivery dates after they added things to their carts. About 120,000 orders were lost and 1.6 million people hit error pages. Amazon’s internal review pointed at one of its own AI tools, Amazon Q, as a main cause. Three days later, on March 5, the storefront went down for six hours and lost an estimated 6.3 million orders, with U.S. order volume dropping 99% while it was down. Both incidents traced back to AI-written code that had been pushed live without proper review. On March 10, Dave Treadwell, the same SVP who had co-signed the Kiro Mandate four months earlier, announced a 90-day code safety reset across roughly 335 of Amazon’s most important systems. The new rules: two people had to sign off on every change going live, senior engineers had to approve AI-written code from juniors, and the automated checks were tightened. Treadwell called the new approach “controlled friction.” It’s a quiet way of saying the friction had not been there before, and that what arrived in March was what should have been in place in November. How the Failure Works To understand why these incidents happen, you have to look at the architecture underneath. Kiro was doing exactly what an agentic coding assistant is designed to do. The failure was in the system that surrounded it. When Kiro runs on behalf of an engineer, it inherits the engineer’s full set of permissions. There’s no separate identity for “Kiro acting on behalf of someone,” no role with a narrower scope than the human who launched it. Whatever the engineer can touch, the agent can touch. This is the same property we walked through in Part 1 for filesystem access, applied here to cloud credentials instead. The agent gets a copy of the keys, every time. Then there’s the loop. In most AI coding assistants the reasoning step and the execution step happen inside the same cycle. The agent thinks about what to do, generates the action, and runs it before the engineer has a chance to read what it decided. There’s no proposal stage, no preview screen, no “do you want me to do this?” gate that a human approves first. The deciding and the doing are one thing. The speed makes this worse. Most safeguards in software engineering assume a human is the one making the change. A confirm? (y/n) prompt only protects against typos because a person sees it, pauses, and reads it. An agentic loop reads the same prompt and replies “y” in milliseconds. By the time anyone notices the agent has made a decision, the decision has already been executed. Post-hoc intervention isn’t really a thing in this environment. And the reasoning that gets the agent there isn’t wrong. It’s just not bounded by the things that would have stopped a human. A senior AWS engineer with the same permissions would not have looked at a small bug in Cost Explorer and decided the right move was to tear down the production environment. They would have walked over to a colleague, posted in a Slack channel, paused to think about whether anyone had pinged them lately about that service. Kiro had the same permissions and skipped all of that, because none of it is part of how an AI agent makes a decision. Kiro didn’t go rogue. It didn’t malfunction. It was optimizing for the objective it was given, which was to fix the bug, and “delete and recreate” is a legitimate solution in many engineering contexts. What was missing wasn’t smarter reasoning. It was the layer of friction that would have caught the moment between “this is a defensible option” and “this is happening to a live customer service.” Technical Breakdown: How a Cost Explorer Fix Became a 13-Hour Outage Caption: Diagram illustrating how operator-level permissions flow directly from engineer to agent to production control plane, with no scoped-identity boundary in between. Here’s how the December incident unfolded, step by step: 1. The Request An AWS engineer is looking at a small bug in Cost Explorer for the cn-northwest region. They hand it to Kiro the way they’d hand it to a colleague: check the cost explorer issue in cn-northwest and propose a fix That’s the whole prompt. No special framing, no permissions caveat. It’s just routine maintenance. 2. The Reasoning Kiro looks at the environment, finds the misconfiguration, and weighs its options. It could patch the misconfiguration in place, or redeploy specific components, or tear the environment down and rebuild it cleanly from the deployment templates. From a pure correctness standpoint, the last option is the most thorough, since it guarantees no residual state from the broken configuration. That’s the path Kiro picks. 3. The Inheritance Kiro is running as the engineer. The engineer has operator-level access to the Cost Explorer production environment, including the ability to tear it down, because that’s the kind of operation a human operator might legitimately need during an incident. The control plane has no concept of “Kiro acting on behalf of the engineer.” It only has “an authenticated principal with sufficient permissions making a request.” From its point of view, the engineer is making the call. 4. The Execution Kiro initiates the deletion, and the request runs in the seconds it takes to send the API call. There is no confirmation prompt the engineer could intercept in that window, no two-person rule waiting on a second approver, and no policy gate watching for the specific shape of “this command would tear down a production service.” The control plane sees a valid API call from an authenticated principal with sufficient permissions, and it processes the call the way it would process any other operator request. 5. The Outage Cost Explorer in the affected region goes down, and customers across that region lose the ability to view, analyze, or manage their cloud spending. The outage ends up running for thirteen hours, with almost all of that time spent on recovery rather than detection, because the deletion itself completed in the seconds it took to send the API call. Rebuilding the environment from the deployment templates, validating the configuration against the expected state, restoring connectivity to the services Cost Explorer depends on, replaying the state the old environment had built up, and bringing the service back up in front of real traffic is the work that takes the rest of the day. Internally, the incident enters Amazon’s Correction of Error process, while externally the story stays quiet for two months until the Financial Times breaks it on February 20, 2026. Amazon’s response, issued the same day, frames the cause as “user error, specifically misconfigured access controls,” and announces mandatory peer review for production access in the same breath. That second part is the architectural admission that something more than user error needed to be fixed. The Impact Within thirteen hours, AWS had: Lost a production service for a regulated region (mainland China) where service continuity matters acutely Triggered an internal investigation that produced a post-incident briefing characterizing the failure as part of a “trend of incidents” with “high blast radius” Set the conditions for the follow-on incidents in March that cost an estimated 6.3 million orders The technical fix was simple. Mandatory peer review for production access. The reason it wasn’t in place from the start is the part that matters: nobody had updated the operational model to account for the fact that the entity making the change might be moving at a thousand times the speed of the entity reviewing it. This is what one autonomous “delete and recreate” decision produces when the agent has the same credentials as the engineer who launched it. How Docker Sandboxes Eliminates This Attack Vector Issues 1 and 2 covered the commands you’d type to run an agent in a sandbox. This one is about what sits underneath those commands, because the Kiro incident isn’t really a CLI problem. It’s an architecture problem, and no command-line flag fixes the kind of gap the December outage exposed. What fixes it is the layer the flag sits on top of. That layer is the microVM. Each sandbox runs inside its own dedicated microVM, with its own kernel, its own filesystem, its own network namespace, and its own Docker daemon. It’s hardware-boundary isolation, the same kind you get from a full VM, but optimized for the way agents actually work: spin up in seconds, throw away when done, no path back to the host. As Docker’s microVM architecture post explains, the bounding box has to come from infrastructure, not from a system prompt. An LLM deciding its own security boundaries is not a security model. This is the part that matters for the Kiro case. Inside a microVM, the agent isn’t an extension of the engineer’s identity. It’s a distinct process with a distinct view of the world, running on a different kernel, talking to a different Docker daemon, reaching the network through a proxy that the agent cannot see or bypass. The credentials that would let a human operator delete a production environment are not in the agent’s process memory, not in its environment variables, not in any file it can read. They live outside the microVM boundary entirely. Three architectural decisions that close the Kiro gap The Docker Sandboxes architecture documentation describes how each layer of the design protects against a specific class of failure. Three of those layers are directly relevant to the December incident. 1. The workspace is mounted at the same path it has on the host, and nothing else is. The sandbox sees the agent’s workspace through a filesystem passthrough at the same absolute path. That’s the only thing it sees. The engineer’s home directory, their cloud configs, their credential files, their SSH keys, all of that lives outside the boundary. If the agent reasoned its way to a “delete and recreate” plan, the deletion would target the workspace, which is reproducible from source anyway. The host stays whole. 2. The Docker daemon lives inside the VM, with no path back. This is the design decision that separates Docker Sandboxes from approaches that look similar on the surface. Mounting the Docker socket from the host gives the agent escape paths. WASM and V8 isolates can’t run a full development environment. A general-purpose VM is too heavy to spin up for a single session. A microVM with its own Docker daemon is the only model that gives the agent a real working environment without any of those compromises. For the Kiro case specifically, it means the agent can investigate the Cost Explorer bug, build container images, run tests against them, and propose a fix, all without ever holding the credentials it would need to execute that fix against the live service. 3. A proxy on the host enforces credentials and network policy. All outbound traffic from the sandbox routes through an HTTP/HTTPS proxy running on the host, outside the VM boundary. This is the layer that directly addresses what went wrong with Kiro. Secrets are stored on the host, scoped to specific services, and injected into outbound requests by the proxy. The agent never sees the values themselves. It also can’t get around the proxy, because the proxy is the only way traffic leaves the microVM at all. If the agent decides to call a destructive control-plane endpoint, the proxy is what stops it, regardless of what the model has reasoned its way to. Why this matters for the Kiro incident specifically Let’s replay the December scenario against this architecture. The engineer launches the agent inside a sandbox. The microVM boots in seconds, the workspace gets mounted, and the agent starts up without any AWS operator credentials in its environment. Those credentials are still on the host, where they belong. From here, the agent investigates the Cost Explorer bug exactly the way Kiro did, reasoning through the same options and quite possibly landing on the same “delete and recreate” plan. Nothing on the inside of the box has changed. What changes is what happens when the agent tries to act. The deletion call leaves the sandbox through the only path available to it, which is the proxy on the host. The proxy checks the network policy and either authenticates the call with a scoped, read-only credential the engineer set up for investigation work, or it refuses the call because the destination wasn’t on the allowlist. Either way, the December outcome, the thirteen-hour production outage, simply doesn’t happen. The agent’s plan ends up in front of the engineer as a proposal. The engineer reads “delete and recreate,” recognizes that it’s too much for a small bug, and asks the agent to patch in place instead. This pattern generalizes. The same architecture that would have contained the LovesWorkin filesystem incident in Issue 2 would have contained the Kiro control-plane incident in this one, because both failures share the same root cause: an agent acting with the launching user’s full identity, at machine speed, against systems that have no way of knowing they’re talking to an agent. The microVM makes the agent a distinct actor with its own boundary. The isolated Docker daemon gives that actor a real working environment to operate in. The proxy gives the engineer a place to decide, ahead of time, what that actor can reach. The blast radius of anything the agent reasons its way into is bounded by what the sandbox allows, not by what the engineer who launched it happens to have access to. The sbx CLI is what exposes all of this to the developer. Here’s what the Cost Explorer investigation would have looked like inside a sandbox, configured the way the December incident needed. # 1. Store the AWS credential for the sandbox, outside the agent's view. # The actual scoping (read-only, Cost Explorer only) is handled # at the AWS IAM layer when the credential is created. From sbx's # side, the credential is opaque, the agent never sees the value, # and the proxy is what injects it into outbound calls. echo "$AWS_COST_EXPLORER_READONLY_KEY" | sbx secret set -g aws # 2. Define what the sandbox is allowed to reach on the network. # Cost Explorer read endpoints are on the list. Control-plane # endpoints that would let an agent tear down a production # environment are not. sbx policy allow network "ce.amazonaws.com,api.anthropic.com" # 3. Launch the agent inside the sandbox. sbx run claude # 4. After the session, review what the proxy allowed and denied. # Any attempt the agent made to reach an endpoint outside the # allowlist will show up here. sbx policy log Step 1 stores the AWS credential outside the agent’s view, with the read-only and Cost-Explorer-only scoping enforced by AWS IAM rather than by sbx. Step 2 defines the network perimeter the proxy will enforce, independent of how broad the credential’s IAM permissions actually are. Step 3 starts the agent inside the microVM with no path back to the host. Step 4 is what makes the whole setup auditable: every call the proxy allowed or denied during the session, including any attempt the agent made to reach destinations off the allowlist, shows up in sbx policy log. What this gives the engineer, end to end, is a working agent with a known and bounded reach. The agent can investigate, reason, and propose. It cannot execute its way into a region-wide outage. What This Looks Like in Practice Stepping back from the Kiro story for a moment, the picture is straightforward. Docker Sandboxes gives an agent a real working environment, scoped credentials, a network boundary, and a path that throws everything away cleanly when the session ends. Compared with the way most engineers run AI coding agents today, the trade-offs look like this: Security Aspect Traditional Agentic Setup Docker Sandboxes Identity Engineer’s full credentials Scoped identity per task Secret Handling Loaded into agent context Proxy-injected, never exposed Production Access Inherited from operator role Explicit allowlist or nothing Destructive Operations Execute at machine speed Reviewable before execution Audit Trail Per-engineer, post-hoc Per-sandbox, real-time sbx policy log Blast Radius Whatever the engineer can do Whatever the sandbox is configured for The row that matters most for the Kiro story is the second-to-last one. Without a sandbox, a destructive operation runs as fast as the API call leaving the agent’s process. With a sandbox, that same operation has to clear the proxy first, which means it lands in the engineer’s review queue instead of in production. Best Practices for Secure Agentic Production Work Never give an agent your full production credentials. Create a scoped identity with the minimum permissions the specific task needs. If the agent is investigating a read-only issue, give it read-only access. The Kiro incident is what happens when this rule is skipped. Inject secrets through a proxy, not through environment variables. A secret the agent never sees is a secret the agent cannot accidentally send to the wrong endpoint, leak in a log, or include in a code commit. Proxy injection turns the credential from data the agent holds into a capability the proxy provides. Tag AI-assisted changes as a distinct change category. Track them, require senior review, and apply the two-person rule by default. This is not a slowdown for AI workflows. It is the same review discipline a senior engineer’s pull request would get, applied to an actor that ships at machine speed. Read the policy log. sbx policy log records every connection attempt the proxy allowed or denied during a session. A blocked attempt to reach a destructive endpoint is exactly the signal you would want to see, and it stays buried unless someone looks. Pair adoption metrics with blast-radius metrics. Amazon’s 80% Kiro target was a corporate OKR. The safeguards that should have moved alongside it were tracked nowhere. Pushing usage forward without also pushing safety boundaries forward is what set up the December outage. Take Action The path to safe agentic work in production-adjacent environments starts with one shift: stop giving agents the credentials you give your humans. Install Docker Sandboxes. The Docker Sandboxes documentation walks through installing sbx and running your first scoped-identity agent. Read the security model. The Docker Sandboxes security documentation covers credential handling, isolation layers, network policies, and workspace trust in detail. Try the proxy-injected secrets pattern. Running sbx secret set followed by sbx run is the quickest way to see how the threat model shifts when secrets sit outside the agent’s context rather than inside it. If you’re new to this series, Issue 1 walks through the six categories of AI coding agent failures, and Issue 2 goes deep on the rm -rf ~/ incident on the filesystem layer. Conclusion The December Cost Explorer outage and the March outages on Amazon.com are points on the same line. They are what happens when an agent inherits an operator’s credentials, when the safeguards designed for human pace meet a decision-making loop that moves a thousand times faster, and when adoption gets pushed forward without anything pushing the safety boundary forward with it. Amazon’s response is the part of the story worth holding onto. “User error, specifically misconfigured access controls” is true in the same way that “operator error, not the missing guardrail” was true for every famous industrial accident before guardrails were invented. The misconfigured access controls weren’t a typo. They were the structural decision to scale agentic adoption without scaling the identity model around it. Everything Amazon added afterward, the peer review, the senior sign-off on AI-assisted changes, the 90-day code safety reset, the “controlled friction” Treadwell described, points at the same gap. The agent needed to operate in a smaller box than the engineer it was running on behalf of. Docker Sandboxes doesn’t try to make the agent more cautious; it changes what the agent can reach. The credentials sit outside the boundary. The destructive endpoints sit off the allowlist. The agent gets a real working environment, but not the production control plane. Coming up in our series: Issue 4 will explore the GitGuardian sprawl report and the s1ngularity attack, where AI agents weaponized their own context windows to scan developer machines for credentials, and how proxy-injected secrets eliminate the exposure surface Learn More Run agents safely with Docker Sandboxes: Visit the Docker Sandboxes documentation to get started. Explore the Docker MCP Catalog: Discover MCP servers that connect your agents to external services through Docker’s security-first architecture. Download Docker Desktop: The fastest path to a governed AI agent environment, with Docker Sandboxes, MCP Gateway, and Model Runner in a single install. Read the MCP Horror Stories series: Start with issue 1 to understand the protocol-layer security risks that complement the agent-layer risks covered here. View the full article

Apple has agreed to work with Intel to manufacture some of its chips in the United States, U.S. president Trump said on Thursday. Intel's stock rose 9 percent in premarket trading following Trump's comments, which appeared in a social media post. Apple was up 0.6 percent in premarket trading. Neither Apple nor Intel have officially commented on their reported partnership, but The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple and Intel had established a preliminary agreement that would see Intel manufacturing processors for Apple devices. Intel would make chips based on Apple chip designs in the same way that TSMC currently does. Prior rumors on Intel's Apple talks have suggested Intel could make some of the lower-end processors used in Apple devices, including the lowest-end M-series chip used in select iPad and Mac models. Before Apple adopted Apple silicon, it used Intel-designed chips for its Macs, but there were continual chip delays. Today, Apple designs its own Arm-based chips and has TSMC manufacture them, giving it the freedom to roll out updates on a more predictable schedule. Apple hasn't looked to Intel as a supplier before, both because the chipmaker has trailed rivals like TSMC and Samsung and because of the rocky history between the two companies. That picture may be shifting under Lip-Bu Tan, who took over as Intel CEO last year after the company ousted Pat Gelsinger, and has since pushed to turn around its struggling chip manufacturing arm. Tan's efforts appear to be having the desired impact – the company's stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion. The U.S. government also took a 10 percent stake in Intel last year, converting $8.9 billion in unpaid Chips Act grants into equity. Apple has been trying to broaden its supply chain, since TSMC – based in Taiwan – is its only Apple silicon manufacturer at the moment. On Apple's most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said iPhone 17 supply had been constrained during the quarter because the company couldn't secure enough A19 and A19 Pro chips from TSMC. With the AI boom driving massive demand for AI servers, TSMC has less capacity to spare for consumer-device chips. That's left Apple with a weaker hand when it comes to securing production slots.Tag: Intel This article, "Apple to Make Chips in US With Intel, Trump Says" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

We're only three months out from the launch of Apple's premium next-generation smartphone lineup, and while we're not expecting a sea change in terms of functionality, there are still several enhancements rumored to be coming to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. One thing worth noting is that Apple is reportedly planning a major change to its iPhone release cycle this year, adopting a two-phase rollout starting with the iPhone 18 series. That means the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone ("iPhone Ultra") will be released in September 2026, followed by the iPhone 18, iPhone Air 2, and iPhone 18e in spring 2027. Overall Design iPhone 17 Pro Style Rumors suggest the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will largely retain the same design as the iPhone 17 Pro models. Most rumors suggest the rear camera system will look identical to the current generation, featuring a raised "plateau" with three lenses arranged in a triangle – although recent dummies indicate a possible thickening of the plateau and the protrusion of individual lenses. Display sizes are also expected to remain unchanged, with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max continuing to use 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch panels, respectively (the same dimensions introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro series). iPhone 18 Pro models could drop the current two-tone look of the rear casing found on the iPhone 17 Pro in favor of a more seamless aesthetic, while Apple has apparently updated the back-glass "replacement process" to minimize the color difference between the Ceramic Shield 2 glass and the aluminum frame, resulting in a more unified appearance. Next-Level Battery Life Thicker Chassis The iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a bigger battery for continued best-in-class battery life, claims a Chinese leaker. The Weibo user known as "Digital Chat Station" said that the ‌iPhone 18‌ Pro Max will have a battery capacity of 5,100 to 5,200 mAh. (The iPhone 17 Pro Max has the biggest ‌iPhone‌ battery to date at 5,088 mAh. Apple says it has a battery life of up to 39 hours.) According to another rumor, the body of the iPhone 18 Pro Max will be slightly thicker than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, raising the device's weight to around 243 grams. That would make the iPhone 18 Pro Max approximately 3 grams more than the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is currently the heaviest model Apple has produced. A larger battery is the most likely cause. Smaller Dynamic Island Under-Screen Face ID? Rumors continue to circulate about whether the iPhone 18 Pro models will introduce under-display Face ID, but reports remain divided on when the technology will actually arrive. The feature would move the TrueDepth camera system beneath the display, eliminating the need for the current Dynamic Island cutout. According to Wayne Ma of The Information, Apple is targeting a design without a Dynamic Island, replacing it with a single pinhole camera in the upper-left corner of the screen. However, other sources dispute that claim. Display analyst Ross Young believes under-display Face ID is possible for the iPhone 18 Pro, but says a smaller Dynamic Island will still be present. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has echoed this view, reporting that the new models will feature a slimmed-down Dynamic Island rather than removing it entirely. Apple is also said to be testing new camera miniaturization technology to reduce the size of the front-facing camera currently located within the Dynamic Island. The Weibo leaker "Ice Universe" has claimed the Dynamic Island cutout on the iPhone 18 Pro models will be approximately 35% narrower than it is on the iPhone 17 Pro models. Specifically, they said it will have a width of around 13.5mm, down from around 20.7mm. Meanwhile, Chinese leaker Instant Digital has offered yet another version of events, saying the Dynamic Island will shrink in size, but that under-display Face ID and camera technology won't debut this year. The latest word on the subject is that Apple is weighing two options for the iPhone 18 Pro's Dynamic Island, and a final decision has yet to be made. One option apparently retains the existing screen mold from the iPhone 17 Pro, while the other introduces a significantly smaller "Mini ‌Dynamic Island‌" enabled by moving the Face ID receiver and transmitter components beneath the display. Upgraded Display LTPO+ The iPhone 18 Pro models will reportedly use LTPO+ display technology, which should be more power efficient than the current LTPO technology in the iPhone 17 series. Such an upgrade could also contribute to longer battery life (see above), since LPTO+ enables finer control of OLED light emission, potentially allowing the display to optimize its operation based on environmental conditions. In other words, it will know better when to up screen brightness or reduce it, depending on surrounding light sources. The panels are reportedly being supplied by Samsung Display and LG Display. A20 Pro Chip 2nm Process The iPhone 18 Pro models will use Apple's A20 chip, based on TSMC's 2nm process for power and efficiency improvements. A move to 2nm fabrication increases transistor density, which will enable higher performance. The A20 series is expected to deliver roughly a 15 percent speed gain and about 30 percent better efficiency compared with the A19 series used in Apple's iPhone 17 models. Apple's A20 chip will be packaged with TSMC's Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) technology, suggesting at least some A20 chips will have RAM integrated directly onto the same wafer as the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, rather than sitting adjacent to the chip and connected via a silicon interposer. This could contribute to faster performance for both overall tasks and Apple Intelligence, and longer battery life from improved power efficiency. C2 Modem Replacing Qualcomm Apple plans to include its next-generation C2 modem in the iPhone 18 Pro models, according to supply chain analyst Jeff Pu. The chip will succeed the C1 modem, which debuted in the lower-cost iPhone 16e as Apple's first in-house cellular modem, and the C1X modem chip in the iPhone Air, which Apple says is up to 2× faster than the C1. The C2 is expected to bring faster speeds, improved power efficiency, and support for mmWave 5G in the United States – a feature missing from the C1 and C1X. Apple's modem roadmap is part of a long-term strategy to reduce reliance on Qualcomm, which currently supplies 5G modems for the rest of the iPhone lineup. The company has been working on developing its own cellular chips for years, aiming for deeper integration and greater control over power management and performance. New Camera Sensor Samsung-Made Samsung is working on a new three-layer stacked image sensor, reportedly intended for the iPhone 18. The sensor, referred to as PD-TR-Logic, integrates three layers of circuitry, which would improve camera responsiveness, reduce noise, and increase dynamic range. The leak comes from a source known as "Jukanlosreve," who claims the sensor is being developed specifically for Apple's 2026 iPhone lineup. Sony has long been Apple's sole image sensor supplier, so Samsung's entry would be a big shift in the iPhone's camera supply chain. Variable Aperture DSLR-Style Apple intends to equip this year's iPhone 18 Pro models with a variable aperture lens, according to reports. Weibo-based leaker Digital Chat Station claims the main rear camera – what Apple calls the 48-megapixel Fusion camera – on both iPhone 18 Pro models will offer variable aperture, which would be a first for the iPhone. A variable-aperture system physically adjusts the lens opening, letting more light in for low-light shots or narrowing the opening for brighter scenes and deeper depth of field. The main cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro, and 17 Pro all use a fixed ƒ/1.78 aperture, where the lens is permanently set to its widest setting. With a variable lens, the iPhone 18 Pro would allow users to manually shift the aperture, similar to on a DSLR camera. This would mean more control over depth of field, enabling sharper focus on subjects or smoother background blur. Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in November 2024 that Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models will get the feature. 5G Satellite Internet Non-Terrestrial Data According to a report by The Information, Apple plans to add support for 5G networks that operate via satellites rather than Earth-based towers as early as next year. This advancement would allow future iPhones to gain full internet connectivity through satellite, not just limited emergency features. If Apple meets the 2026 target, the first devices to feature 5G satellite internet would likely be the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone. Apple partners with Globalstar for its iPhone satellite features, but there is currently no service that delivers full 5G satellite internet directly to a smartphone. That said, Amazon and Globalstar announced in April a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire the satellite operator. Amazon's Leo satellite network will power existing iPhone features – with scope for additional feature support as part of a forthcoming infrastructure upgrade. Simplified Camera Control New Design Apple is reportedly working to simplify the Camera Control button's design on iPhone 18 models in order to reduce costs. The current Camera Control button on iPhone 17 models uses both capacitive and pressure sensors beneath a sapphire crystal surface. The capacitive layer detects touch gestures, while the force sensor recognizes different pressure levels for taps, presses, and swipes. However, according to the Weibo-based account Instant Digital, Apple will remove the capacitive sensing layer and retain only pressure sensing recognition in the second iteration to achieve all Camera Control functions on the iPhone 18. The simplified version is not about reducing functionality in the button, but about saving money. The current solution is said to be very expensive for Apple and is generating costly after-sales repairs. We don't expect Camera Control to go away anytime soon – Apple apparently sees it as a key feature, so much so that it has reportedly made deliberate engineering compromises to ensure that the first foldable iPhone features the button. New Colors Three in Testing In February 2026, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple is testing a deep red finish for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Rumors of purple and brown finishes have also circulated, but Gurman believes those are just variants of the same red idea. Since then, we've seen aligned rumors that the devices will come in light blue, dark cherry, dark gray, and silver. The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max were previously available in Deep Purple, and Apple has never released an iPhone in a genuinely brown color. According to a Chinese leaker, Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models won't come in black this year. If the rumor is true, it will be the second consecutive year Apple has ditched what was arguably its most classic color option for the Pro lineup. iOS 27 Smarter Siri The iPhone 18 Pro will ship with iOS 27, which brings the biggest Siri shake-up in the assistant's history. Apple introduced Siri AI at WWDC in June – a rebuilt, more conversational version of Siri with onscreen awareness, personal context understanding, and broad world knowledge that lets it pull up-to-date answers from the web. It also gains its own standalone app for revisiting past conversations, an expanded Visual Intelligence mode, and writing tools that work across email, messages, and documents. Like the iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro is expected to carry 12GB of RAM, so it should run the full range of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features. Related Roundup: iPhone 18 Pro This article, "12 Reasons to Wait for the iPhone 18 Pro" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Police in Leicestershire UK are investigating reports of a couple taking the lyrics of ‘Rocket Queen’ a touch too literally while riding the Ferris wheel at Download Fest on Saturday, prior to the commencement of Guns N’ Roses‘ headline set and in full view of thousands of punters. According to multiple reports and witness accounts circulating online and reported by The Sun, festivalgoers initially assumed the pair were simply enjoying the view from one of the ride’s transparent pods… This was the talk of the entire festival, but now there are videos and news articles online LMAO https://t.co/9Sf7ElryUK — Tim B (@Reality_Tim) June 15, 2026 That theory reportedly did not survive the second rotation. Witnesses claimed the alleged encounter unfolded while crowds were gathering below ahead of GNR taking the stage, with one attendee telling UK press the moment spread through the crowd surprisingly quickly. “They were literally in a glass pod above everyone’s heads at the busiest point of the night,” one regular Download attendee told The Daily Star. “It sort of brought everyone together in a weird way. Before they were spotted, the atmosphere was nervous apprehension because [Guns N’ Roses are] always late on. As soon as the cameras came out and word started getting around about what happened, the atmosphere completely changed – they made the night.” Elsewhere, another witness reportedly suggested the couple may have assumed the cabin windows were tinted. Unfortunately for them… eyewitnesses claim visibility conditions were, uh… excellent. Leicestershire Police confirmed they are aware of footage circulating online and said enquiries are ongoing. “Officers are aware of a video on social media concerning two people acting inappropriately while on a Ferris wheel at Download this weekend,” a spokesperson told The Sun. “The incident is currently being investigated and officers are in contact with the organisers of the festival.” Not everyone found the alleged stunt amusing, however, with some attendees expressing concern that families and younger festivalgoers were present at the time. The whole thing unfolded during one of the biggest nights of Download 2026, which featured Guns N’ Roses as one of this year’s headliners alongside Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Download has seen walls of death, circle pits and people crowd surfing in inflatable pools… but this might be the first time someone allegedly interpreted Use Your Illusion as an instruction manual. Further Reading Most Music Fans Prefer Live Concerts Over Sex, Study Finds Punters Are Having More Sex At Splendour In The Grass Than Any Other Aussie Music Festival, Study Finds This Dude’s 15-Min Rant About Download Festival’s Debut Aussie Lineup Is A Wild Ride The post Police Hunt Couple Allegedly Spotted Bonking On Ferris Wheel During Guns N’ Roses Set At Download UK appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Australia, we have some ~EPIC~ news… Mere hours after Faith No More sent fans into collective meltdown with a cryptic social media post teasing “2027”, bassist Bill Gould has now confirmed the unthinkable: Faith No More are officially planning to tour again. BILL GOULD of Faith No More about FNM playing live after decade Yep. After years of uncertainty, cancelled comeback plans, public comments suggesting the band may never return, and enough mixed messages to make fans emotionally retire from speculation altogether, it sounds like Faith No More are finally ready to step back onto a stage. Speaking on the newly launched Rock Talk podcast with host Jadranka Jankovic Nesic, Gould confirmed the reunion plans in surprisingly direct terms. “Yeah, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna play. Yeah, we’re gonna do it.” That alone would’ve been enough to send the internet into cardiac arrest, but Gould also opened up about why the band feels the timing matters. “Our music is very physical, and a big concern is, like, pretty soon we’re not gonna be able to do this the way we wrote it,” he explained. “We wrote it as 20-year-olds and it’s always been very physical… We all kind of decided, like, we think we can do it. I think that we can do it for a few more years, and we can do it the right way, so we’re gonna give it a go.” Honestly? There’s something pretty beautiful about that. This doesn’t sound like a nostalgia cash-in or a “let’s do another lap because everyone else is” situation. If Gould’s comments are anything to go by, this feels more like a band recognising they’ve still got enough in the tank to do it properly – and wanting to take that opportunity before time makes the decision for them. The timing is especially surprising given how bleak things looked not that long ago. Last year, drummer Mike Bordin said vocalist Mike Patton had been unwilling to play shows, while keyboardist Roddy Bottum admitted he couldn’t really see the band getting back together. Earlier this year, Patton himself appeared to make peace with the idea, saying of the band’s apparent ending: “I don’t see it as a sad thing.” Which makes this turnaround feel… pretty huge. Fuel has also been added to the fire by news that Brazilian live entertainment company 30e has signed a long-term agreement with the band. In a collective statement, Faith No More said: “30e feels like a company that wants to dent the status quo, and as artists we understand the value of that. “Their approach doesn’t feel like the usual machinery; it feels like it’s coming from a different place, with a different kind of energy, and we are willing to get behind that.” Faith No More haven’t played a live show since August 2016. Now, almost a decade after their last performance and seven years after their comeback plans stalled, it sounds like one of alternative metal’s most influential bands is finally preparing to open the vault again. No dates yet. But for the first time in a very long time… this one actually sounds real. And for Aussie fans, the possibility of Faith No More returning to the stage carries an extra layer of significance. The band haven’t toured Australia since their appearance on Soundwave 2010, while their last proper Australian headline run dates all the way back to 1997 – meaning if Australia ends up featuring in these newly revived plans, it could mark Faith No More’s first local headline tour in 30 years. That comeback almost happened once already. The band had announced Australian and New Zealand dates in 2020, with the tour later rescheduled twice due to the pandemic before ultimately being cancelled in 2021 as Mike Patton stepped back to focus on his mental health. At the time, the band told fans: “Unfortunately, due to our current challenges, we aren’t going to be ready to perform for the upcoming Australian, New Zealand and European tours. “To play at anything less than 100% after so long is not an option for us.” Patton later explained that pandemic-related pressures had intensified existing mental health struggles, while the rest of the band publicly backed the decision. “We believe that forging ahead with these dates would have had a profoundly destructive effect on Mike,” the band said at the time. Now, with Gould confirming Faith No More are preparing to play again while they still feel capable of doing it “the right way”, Aussie fans suddenly have something they haven’t had in a very long time: a reason to hope. Watch this space. Further Reading Faith No More Just Teased Something For 2027 And Metalheads Are Losing It 11 Unforgettable Soundwave Festival Moments Former Faith No More Singer Chuck Mosley Dead At Age 57 The post Faith No More Confirm 2027 Live Return, Giving Aussie Fans Good Reason To Hope appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Some bands mark a milestone anniversary with a documentary. Some release a box set. Hoodoo Gurus? They’re doing what they do best: hitting the road and packing the setlist with wall-to-wall Aussie pub rock bangers. The Aussie institution have announced the Hoodoo Gurus Rewind Tour – All Killer, No Filler, celebrating 45 years since the band first formed with a massive national run this November and December. And in true Gurus fashion, they’re fully leaning into one of the longest-running labels attached to their legacy. Hoodoo Gurus – What’s My Scene Namely: being a singles band. Rather than digging into deep cuts and album tracks, this tour is all about the hits… and the songs that somehow became fan favourites despite never becoming hits at all. “We’ve often been described as a ‘singles band’ so for this Rewind tour we’re gonna embrace that notion by only playing songs that were released as singles,” frontman Dave Faulkner explained. “No b-sides, no album tracks, we’ll just be concentrating on the hits – and quite a few misses as well!” And yep, they’re aiming big. “With all our bona fide hits, we’re hoping to play every one of our 42 singles at least once somewhere during this tour.” That means classics like What’s My Scene, Like Wow – Wipeout!, Come Anytime and Bittersweet are all fair game, alongside some cult favourites that radio didn’t exactly know what to do with at the time. Case in point? Axegrinder. “‘Axegrinder’ horrified radio programmers back in the day – ‘We can’t play that!’ seemed to be their collective response – but within 12 months it had become a fan favourite, which it remains to this day.” As if the nostalgia factor wasn’t already maxed out, the Gurus are bringing one hell of a support package with them. Sydney legends Ratcat join all dates while celebrating 40 years as a band, fresh off three decades of proving they were never just a one-hit wonder and still carrying the same scrappy charm that helped Tingles and Blind Love become unlikely chart juggernauts in the early ‘90s. Opening the run are Perth garage-rock royalty The Stems, whose relationship with Hoodoo Gurus stretches back more than four decades. “THE STEMS are both honoured and super excited to be a part of the upcoming Hoodoo Gurus Rewind Tour,” frontman Dom Mariani said. “I’ve always admired the Gurus, not only for their great music but for their dedication and longevity to stay on top of the Australian music scene to become one of our country’s greatest ever rock and roll bands.” Forty-five years in, Hoodoo Gurus remain one of the few Australian bands whose catalogue genuinely spans generations – from college radio obsessives and pub-rock lifers through to younger fans discovering just how many songs they already know. And this time around? No filler (their words). Suss all the dates and details down below! HOODOO GURUS 2026 REWIND TOUR – ALL KILLER, NO FILLER Supported by Ratcat and The Stems Saturday 28 November – Hindley Street Music Hall | Adelaide, SA, 18+ – moshtix.com.au Tuesday 1 December – Ice Cream Factory | Perth, WA, 18+ – ​eventbrite.com.au Saturday 5 December – Tumbalong Park | Sydney, NSW*, Lic. All Ages – moshtix.com.au Sunday 6 December – Live at the Gardens, Royal Botanic Gardens | Melbourne, VIC*, Lic. All Ages ​- ticketmaster.com.au Friday 11 December – The Fortitude Music Hall | Brisbane, QLD, 18+ – ticketmaster.com.au Frontier Member Presale – Monday 22 June (12pm local) General On Sale – Tuesday 23 June (1pm local) Further Reading Australian Crawl To Reunite Original Members For The First Time In Over 40 Years On Massive Red Hot Summer Tour Hoodoo Gurus Blast One Nation Over Use Of Their Music At January 26 Rally triple j’s Hottest 200 Of Australian Songs: The Complete List The post Hoodoo Gurus Are Celebrating 45 Years By Playing Nothing But Singles On Their ‘All Killer, No Filler’ Australian Tour appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," said Cook. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable." Cook did not say which products will get price increases or how much pricing will go up. The iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max coming in September could be more expensive than the iPhone 17 Pro and ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max. Prices on iPads and Macs could go up in the near future. Apple already raised the price of the Mac mini from $599 to $799 by eliminating its lowest-tier model. Apple has also eliminated several higher-tier ‌Mac mini‌ and Mac Studio options. Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs. The ‌Wall Street Journal‌ suggests Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins given the cost of memory chips and SSDs. Research firm TechInsights claims Apple will need to make the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ around $270 more expensive to keep its existing profit margin. Apple is struggling more with memory chips, but storage chips are also an issue. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told The ‌Wall Street Journal‌. Cook said Apple will use its cash to increase memory supply, but he did not give details on what that means. Apple does not plan to create its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," Cook said. "We know what we're good at." While memory chip makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are increasing production capacity, much of that added capacity will prioritize server chips. Demand for consumer-device chips is expected to continue to outpace supply. At the same time, Apple needs to increase the DRAM in its devices to support new AI features. Cook likened the memory shortages to a hundred-year flood. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years," he said. Apple is one of the largest purchasers of memory and storage worldwide, but it is likely reluctant to make the same deals AI companies do. Those deals involve signing multi-year agreements with a large cash prepayment. Multiple companies have already raised their prices, including Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Dell. Tag: Tim Cook This article, "Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to Memory Costs" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Like iOS 27, iPadOS 27 gains a smarter, more capable version of Siri, the ‌Siri‌ app, and new Apple Intelligence features in apps, but there are a few iPad-only standouts. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. ‌Siri‌ AI on iPad has all of the same features as ‌Siri‌ AI on the iPhone, so it can access your personal data, search the web for answers, complete tasks in apps, and answer questions about what's on your screen. For people who write with Apple Pencil on ‌iPad‌, it can index your handwritten notes so you can search through them. You can use ‌Siri‌ to take action on your notes, whether typed or handwritten. ‌Siri‌ can summarize, rewrite, give you writing advice, check grammar, generate new text for you, and more. There's a systemwide Write with ‌Siri‌ feature for getting help no matter which app you're using. There's a new Image Playground app that can generate images in any style, including photorealistic, and that powers the Image Wand in the Notes app. You can draw a quick sketch of something in Notes and then use ‌Image Wand‌ to turn it into a photorealistic visual aid. Visual Intelligence used to be an iPhone-only feature, but in ‌iPadOS 27‌, it's expanding to the ‌iPad‌. You can take a screenshot and then circle what you want to know more about with a finger or the ‌Apple Pencil‌. The ‌iPad‌ supports the same ‌Visual Intelligence‌ features, like telling you the nutritional value of food and identifying plants and animals. The Shortcuts app can use AI to automatically generate shortcuts for you, which can be especially useful on the ‌iPad‌. If you want a quick way to change how the ‌iPad‌'s windowing works when you attach a keyboard vs. when you use it without a keyboard, you can describe that in a sentence or two and get a functional shortcut just a minute later. Safari supports automatically grouping tabs, plus there's an AI feature for generating your own extensions. Like ‌iOS 27‌, ‌iPadOS 27‌ is also more responsive thanks to performance improvements. Browsing and transferring files are quicker, AirDrop is faster, apps launch more quickly, and multitasking on ‌iPad‌ is faster. There's a Liquid Glass slider for adjusting opacity to your taste, and Apple also made other Liquid Glass improvements to boost readability. You can also resize iPhone apps that are running on the ‌iPad‌. ‌Siri‌ AI and ‌Apple Intelligence‌ in ‌iPadOS 27‌ require an ‌iPad‌ with an M-series chip or the A17 Pro iPad mini. EU users won't get ‌Siri‌ AI on ‌iPad‌ when ‌iPadOS 27‌ launches, and it's also not available in China. Older iPads won't get ‌Siri‌ AI or ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features, but they will get the performance improvements Apple added. Older iPads will feel faster on ‌iPadOS 27‌ than they do in iPadOS 26.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27 This article, "iPadOS 27 Hands-On: Everything New for iPad" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Apple is working on a new iPhone Air that's expected to launch in spring 2027, reports Bloomberg. The updated ‌iPhone Air‌ could get an Ultra Wide lens in addition to the Wide lens to make it a better value for the money. An ‌iPhone Air‌ with two camera lenses has reached the advanced testing phase. The device has the same design as the current model with the exception of the extra lens. Apple also wants to improve battery life, either through an increased battery size or improvements to efficiency. Given that the design of the new model is similar to the current design, there may not be room for a larger battery. The device will use an A20 chip built on Apple's new 2nm process, so it could feature better efficiency. Multiple prior rumors have suggested Apple is adding a second camera to the ‌iPhone Air‌ to address the main customer complaint about the device. The current model has a single rear lens with a Wide lens, which makes it inferior to the more affordable iPhone 17 in terms of camera quality. The ‌iPhone 17‌ has a two-camera setup, while the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have three cameras. The next ‌iPhone Air‌ will come out alongside the iPhone 18 in 2027, with the iPhone 18 Pro, ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, and foldable iPhone set to debut in September.Related Roundup: iPhone AirBuyer's Guide: iPhone Air (Neutral) This article, "iPhone Air With Dual Lens Camera Coming in Spring 2027" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

The Connectivity Standards Alliance that includes Apple today announced the latest version of Matter, Matter 1.6. The update focuses on improved device setup, better coordinated device management, and response to control inputs. Matter 1.6 includes NFC-Based Commissioning for setting up light bulbs in ceiling fixtures, in-wall switches, and other products that need to be configured prior to installation. It allows for setup before the device is fully powered, and it serves as an alternative to Bluetooth LE setup. Users will just need to hold a smartphone near a device to commission it. For multi-ecosystem device sharing, Matter 1.6 supports "Joint Fabric" as a new approach that expands the Enhanced Multi-Admin toolkit. Joint Fabric lets multiple user-authorized controllers co-administer a single shared Matter network. Any device added to the Joint Fabric is accessible to all participating controllers, which makes it simpler for Android and iOS users in a household to access and control Matter-enabled devices. Matter smart home products can be controlled from any interface or ecosystem without requiring a separate setup of every device for each platform. Thermostat Suggestions improve how thermostats account for user inputs and preferences. Controllers won't send direct commands to change temperature or mode, but will instead submit a time-bound suggestion tied to the thermostat's supported presets so the thermostat can react based on preferences and environmental conditions. The CSA says the new feature will be helpful in the following situations: A user enrolled in a utility demand-response program can configure the thermostat to protect those commitments, preventing an automation from a different ecosystem from accidentally overriding a savings event. A user who has chosen to optimize for energy savings, or for humidity control, air quality, or another preference, can have the setting recognized and respected across connected services without needing to configure it in each one. A thermostat that was just manually adjusted, on the device or through one ecosystem, can recognize a suggestion arriving moments later from another source and will identify it is likely not what the user intended, and defer. The update standardizes how devices communicate their capabilities and operational limits, and CO and smoke alarms are now able to indicate when they have been removed from their installed position. Security sensors are also able to interoperably indicate a sensor event history, so ecosystems have access to real-time status and past activity. Matter 1.6 is available for device makers and platforms to integrate into their products. Apple so far has not been quick to implement new Matter specifications. Matter 1.4 was announced back in November 2024, but Apple Home doesn't support all of the Matter 1.4 features. In tvOS 27, Apple implemented support for Thread 1.4, improving Matter-over-Thread connectivity. Thread credential sharing allows smart home devices to join existing Thread networks for a true mesh network instead of separate, parallel networks across Thread Border Routers from different manufacturers.Tags: Matter, Thread This article, "Matter 1.6 Announced With NFC Setup, Cross-Ecosystem Device Sharing, and Smarter Thermostats" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

If you have not been paying close attention, you might still think that you need to be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program for $99 per year to install iOS developer betas, but that has not been the case for a few years now. In fact, anyone can install the iOS 27 developer beta on their iPhone for free, and the process is quite easy. Even if you are not an app developer and have no current plans to release apps on the App Store, you can still install the iOS 27 developer beta on your iPhone. If you feel more comfortable with waiting for the iOS 27 public beta, though, Apple said that the first public beta of iOS 27 will be available at some point in July. Warning: While the first iOS 27 developer beta is considered to be relatively stable, iOS betas can and do have bugs and performance issues. You may not be able to use some apps that you rely on, and issues can extend to CarPlay. Backing up your iPhone before installing beta software is highly recommended, and relying on a secondary iPhone altogether is always a good idea if possible. How to Install the iOS 27 Developer Beta Sign into your Apple Account from this page and accept the Apple Developer Agreement to become a registered Apple developer for free. Open the Settings app and tap on General → Software Update → Beta Updates. Select the iOS 27 Developer Beta option (restart your iPhone if you don't see it) and follow the on-screen steps.How to Install the iOS 27 Public Beta (in July) Sign up at beta.apple.com for free. Open the Settings app and tap on General → Software Update → Beta Updates. Select the iOS 27 Public Beta option (restart your iPhone if you don't see it) and follow the on-screen steps.iOS 27 is compatible with the iPhone 11 and newer, but Apple Intelligence features like Siri AI are limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer. Keep in mind that the revamped version of Siri has a waitlist. To join the waitlist, open the Settings app on iOS 27 and tap on Siri and you will find it there. It can take anywhere from hours to many days to receive access to Siri AI and the Siri app.Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPadOS 27 This article, "You Can Easily Install the iOS 27 Beta For Free Right Now, Here's How" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Microsoft engineers have published benchmark results showing that a Chromium-based browser using its own rendering engine scores 28.6% higher than Safari on Apple's own Speedometer 3.1 performance test on iOS. Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the Microsoft Edge Web Platform, published results on Monday comparing a research prototype of Edge built with Apple's BrowserEngineKit framework against Safari running iOS 26.5.1. The Blink-based prototype scored 49.27 versus Safari's 38.3 on Speedometer 3.1, and also outperformed Safari on the JetStream 3 JavaScript benchmark by 13.1% (306.35 vs. 270.9) and on the MotionMark 1.3.1 graphics rendering benchmark by 2.1% (4,773.52 vs. 4,673.68). Pflug described the work as a research prototype rather than a finished product, and the numbers as preliminary results from his own device rather than lab conditions. Apple requires all browsers on iOS to use WebKit, the engine that powers Safari, meaning browsers like Chrome and Firefox on iPhone are effectively reskinned Safari instances. The EU's Digital Markets Act theoretically changed that in March 2024, requiring Apple to allow alternative browser engines through BrowserEngineKit, yet more than two years later no browser maker has shipped an alternative engine on iOS. Companies cite technical barriers and the requirement to publish any such browser as an entirely separate app from their existing WebKit-based version. Open Web Advocacy told The Register the results illustrate a 17-year cost to consumers. The group called on the European Commission to open a specification proceeding instructing Apple precisely how it must remove barriers to alternative engines, adding that restricting browser engines allows Apple to limit what the mobile web is capable of and keep businesses dependent on native apps and App Store rules.Tag: WebKit This article, "Apple's WebKit Rules Reportedly Cost iOS Users Almost 30% Browser Performance" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Amazon this week is discounting a collection of Beats headphones and speakers ahead of Prime Day, including a low price on the Powerbeats Pro 2. You can get this new 2025 model for $199.95 in all four colors, down from $249.99. This deal on the Powerbeats Pro 2 is being matched at Best Buy, along with a few other Beats deals. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running. This sale also includes discounts on products like the Beats Pill, which has hit $99.95 on Amazon, down from $149.95. This is an all-time low price on the speaker. UP TO 50% OFFBeats Deals on Amazon Additionally, Amazon has the Beats Studio Buds+ for $99.95, down from $169.95. These have up to 9 hours of playback (up to 36 hours with charging case), USB-C, active noise cancellation, transparency mode, and an IPX4 rating for sweat and water resistance. You'll also find a few steep discounts on over-ear headphones, like the Beats Studio Pro at $169.95, down from $349.99, and some markdowns on Beats iPhone 17 cases. Beats Studio Buds+ - $99.95, down from $169.95 Beats Pill - $99.95, down from $149.95 Beats Solo 4 - $129.95, down from $199.95 Beats Studio Pro - $169.95, down from $349.99 Powerbeats Pro 2 - $199.95, down from $249.99 Beats USB-A to USB-C Woven Cable - $5.00, down from $18.99 Beats iPhone 17 Case - $18.99, down from $45.00 Beats iPhone 17 Pro Rugged Case - $30.50, down from $79.00 Beats iPhone 17 Pro Max Case - $28.50, down from $45.00 If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week. Deals Newsletter Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season! Related Roundup: Apple Deals This article, "Powerbeats Pro 2 Available for $199.95 Low Price, Plus More Early Prime Day Deals on Beats" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article

Apple's decision to move Hide My Email to a dedicated "private.icloud.com" domain appears to have the consequence of making it easier for platforms that want to block iCloud aliases to do so. Apple is unifying the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and ‌iCloud‌+ Hide My Email under a single private.icloud.com domain later this summer. Sign in with Apple currently uses privaterelay.appleid.com, while Hide My Email uses icloud.com, the same domain as standard ‌iCloud‌ email addresses. That shared domain has historically made it difficult for services to selectively block disposable ‌iCloud‌ addresses. Blocking icloud.com outright would also block legitimate users with standard Apple email accounts. With the new subdomain, that tradeoff disappears. @vxdb on X was among the first to flag the implication: "platforms who want to ban ‌iCloud‌ aliases can now do so by banning this new subdomain without affecting all ‌iCloud‌ users." Others online noted that email services, signup flows, and anti-abuse systems will now have a clean, unambiguous target if they choose to restrict alias-generated addresses. Apple has said that existing addresses on legacy domains will continue to work and that mail will be forwarded with no interruption, so current Hide My Email users won't lose access to their aliases. New addresses generated after the migration, however, will feature the private.icloud.com domain, and it is those addresses that become blockable in isolation for the first time.Tag: iCloudRelated Forum: Apple Music, Apple Pay/Card, iCloud, Fitness+ This article, "Apple's New Hide My Email Domain Makes It Easier to Block iCloud Aliases" first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums View the full article