Skip to content
View in the app

A better way to browse. Learn more.

hosang I.T.

A full-screen app on your home screen with push notifications, badges and more.

To install this app on iOS and iPadOS
  1. Tap the Share icon in Safari
  2. Scroll the menu and tap Add to Home Screen.
  3. Tap Add in the top-right corner.
To install this app on Android
  1. Tap the 3-dot menu (⋮) in the top-right corner of the browser.
  2. Tap Add to Home screen or Install app.
  3. Confirm by tapping Install.

Tech

Tech Articles from a wide variety of topics and categories
Apple at this year's WWDC emphasized that its approach to iOS 27 development was to add fewer newer features and instead make existing features better. Examples of that approach can be seen across the operating system, but it is arguably most obvious in the changes coming to Messages.


That's not to say there's nothing original coming to Messages in iOS 27. For instance, one new Apple Intelligence feature brings content-aware suggestions directly into conversations. If someone asks for photos, for example, Messages can recognize what's being discussed and suggest searching your photo library, using details like people, places, and keywords to surface relevant images.

The app can also detect when a conversation would benefit from creating a reminder or note and offer a shortcut to do so without leaving the thread. Apple is also bringing drawing tools directly into Messages, allowing users to create and share hand-drawn sketches within conversations.

Otherwise, Apple's focus has been on making the following enhancements and improvements to its broader Messages platform:

Faster message loading: Large conversations, especially those containing years of history and thousands of attachments, should load and scroll more quickly.
Improved syncing across devices: Apple says Messages, read states, reactions, and attachments sync more reliably and quickly between iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.
Find offloaded media in Messages: Search can surface photos and videos that have been offloaded from local storage and stored in iCloud.
Thumbnails for offloaded media: Offloaded photos and videos now get visible preview thumbnails instead of generic placeholders, making older media easier to identify.
Personalized Smart Reply suggestions: Apple Intelligence-generated Smart Reply suggestions can now reflect a user's own writing style, making suggested responses feel more natural and personal.
Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks: Multiple reactions to a message are grouped into a single notification rather than generating separate alerts.
Continuous sending of photos, videos, and text: Messages continue sending in the background and automatically resume when connectivity returns, reducing interrupted sends.
Search conversations by phone number or nickname: Conversation search now works with saved nicknames and phone numbers, not just contact names.
Faster access to recent camera captures: Newly captured photos and videos appear more quickly in the Messages media picker.
Failed messages automatically retry sending: Messages that fail because of temporary network issues will automatically attempt to resend without the user's intervention.
Early adopters of iOS 27 will receive access to the public beta next month, when they can try out the new features and improvements themselves. Apple is expected to make a general release available in the fall.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Messages
This article, "14 Ways Apple Is Improving Messages in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
AI agents given access to corporate email and business applications could become a new phishing target for attackers, according to cybersecurity researchers, after a test agent built on OpenClaw was tricked into sharing cloud credentials and customer data with an external attacker.
Varonis Threat Labs said it built an OpenClaw AI agent called Pinchy to test whether autonomous agents could fall for the same kinds of phishing attacks that have long targeted employees. Varonis tested the agent in a controlled Google Workspace environment, giving it access to a Gmail inbox with mock AWS credentials, CRM exports, internal conversations, and calendar invites.
The test used two configurations: a generic productivity profile and a stricter profile that included email safety instructions telling the agent to be cautious of phishing and verify sender identities before acting on sensitive requests. Varonis said the agent still failed in some scenarios, particularly when requests appeared to come from colleagues and were framed as routine or urgent business tasks.
“In some cases, Pinchy not only failed at spotting the phishing attacks, it also performed risky actions that could potentially compromise a real-world organization,” the cybersecurity firm said in its report.
In one test, Pinchy forwarded AWS IAM keys, database passwords, and SSH access details to an external Gmail account after receiving what appeared to be a routine request from a colleague for staging credentials.
In another test, an attacker asked the agent to send the latest customer export for a quarterly business review presentation. Pinchy retrieved and forwarded a CRM export containing details on 247 enterprise customers, including company names, contact information, contract dates, customer tiers, and roughly $1.28 million in monthly recurring revenue data.
But the results were not entirely negative. According to Varonis, the agent performed better against more technical phishing attempts, including a malicious OAuth consent flow disguised as a timesheet platform. In that case, Pinchy inspected the redirect address, identified the destination as suspicious, and stopped before granting consent.
“That contrast is what makes the earlier failures structurally important,” Varonis said. “The agent had enough technical reasoning to recognize sophisticated phishing infrastructure. The weak point was social trust and identity verification.”
The findings come as companies move AI agents beyond chat interfaces and into workflows where they can retrieve documents, process messages, and act across business software.
An architecture problem
The OpenClaw test points less to a failure of the AI model itself than to the way the agent was configured and deployed, said Devashri Datta, a cybersecurity researcher.
“The security tests actually proved that the AI models did their jobs well on a purely technical level,” Datta said.
The bigger problem was that the agent treated email as both a source of information and a source of instructions, creating what Datta described as a classic IT mistake: mixing the data lane with the control lane.
“It didn’t hand over a password because someone asked nicely; it executed what looked like a legitimate operational task,” Datta said. “In any secure system, you never let the data path give administrative orders.”
Other analysts said the model should not be taken out of the equation entirely. The risk is not confined to one layer of the technology stack, said Keith Prabhu, founder and CEO at Confidis. The test showed problems in the model’s ability to judge trust and in the way agent frameworks and enterprise governance handled autonomous access.
“Historically, security architectures segregate any orchestration pipeline into authorization, execution, auditing, and escalation,” Prabhu said. “However, this is collapsed into one single pipeline in AI agents, which may lead to them becoming victims of such phishing attacks.”
Enterprises need enforceable controls
Enterprises should treat AI agents as high-privilege identities, because they can ingest untrusted content while also taking actions across business systems, according to Sunil Varkey, a cybersecurity adviser and former CISO.
That combination raises the stakes for enterprises, particularly when agents can read emails, documents, web pages, and SaaS comments while also sending messages, exporting data, calling APIs or updating records, he said.
“Frameworks like OpenClaw often lack robust enforcement of identity verification, tool-level permissions, and resistance to prompt injection,” Varkey said. “However, the decisive factor in the Varonis tests was over-privileged access, missing human oversight, and absent runtime guardrails.”
Akshat Tyagi, associate practice leader at HFS Research, said enterprises should focus not only on what an agent can access, but also on what it is allowed to send outside the organization.
“Instructions are not controls,” Tyagi said. “If an agent can email sensitive data outside the company just because someone asked convincingly, the problem is not the model alone.”
AI agents should have their own identities, with access that can be limited and monitored, Tyagi said. Requests involving credentials or customer data sharing should trigger human review rather than be left to the agent’s judgment.
View the full article
Introduction
Entering the world of software development and IT infrastructure can feel overwhelming. Many new students face an avalanche of technical terms like containers, orchestrators, and automated workflows right at the start of their learning journey. It is entirely common to feel confused about how all these pieces fit together.
The primary reason for this struggle is that traditional computer science education often focuses heavily on writing code, while ignoring how that code actually reaches real users. In modern enterprise environments, code writing is only the first step of a long and complex journey.
Modern software delivery demands absolute speed, safety, and reliability. This is exactly where the concept of software deployment automation becomes essential. To bridge the massive gap between writing applications on a local laptop and running them safely on live enterprise servers, companies rely heavily on systematic workflows.
For any new student or career switcher, learning Continuous Delivery for beginners is the single most important milestone in building a sustainable IT foundation. This concept serves as the core operational bridge that connects development teams with operations teams.
When you understand this foundational pillar, you no longer look at software as isolated text files. Instead, you begin to see it as a flowing, continuous stream of value. Aspiring IT professionals can access comprehensive, industry-aligned foundational resources and structured guidance directly at DevOpsSchool, which offers deep insights into real-world pipeline implementation methodologies.
What Is Continuous Delivery in Simple Words?
At its absolute core, Continuous Delivery is a software engineering practice where code changes are automatically prepared, tested, and built for a production release. The foundational rule of Continuous Delivery is simple: your software must always be in a release-ready state.
Think of it as an automated manufacturing assembly line. When a software developer finishes writing a new feature or fixing a minor bug, they do not manually copy files onto a web server. Instead, they commit their work into a version control tracking system.
Once that code is submitted, an automated release pipeline takes over immediately. The system compiles the code, executes comprehensive quality checks, runs security scans, and configures the application for deployment.
If every single validation test passes successfully, the code sits safely in a staging environment, fully prepared for immediate production deployment. The software is ready to go live whenever the business stakeholders decide the market timing is perfect.
Why Continuous Delivery Is Important for DevOps Students
Understanding Continuous Delivery early in your education completely changes how you view software development. It serves as the logical extension and foundation of modern CI/CD patterns, which form the bedrock of all cloud engineering activities.
If you attempt to learn advanced tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or Kubernetes without mastering the core philosophy of automated delivery, you will end up memorizing commands without understanding their actual purpose.
Furthermore, mastering this domain provides unmatched real-world job relevance. If you look at entry-level job descriptions for cloud engineers, release analysts, or system automation practitioners, pipeline design skills are universally required.
Learning these concepts early allows you to build a genuine DevOps mindset. You stop thinking purely like a programmer who only cares if the code runs on their local machine. Instead, you start thinking like an operational architect who cares about system stability, automated testing metrics, and repeatable infrastructure patterns.
How Software Deployment Worked Before Continuous Delivery
To appreciate why modern teams value automated systems so highly, it helps to understand the historical challenges that plagued the IT industry for decades. Before software deployment automation became standard practice, releasing an application update was an incredibly stressful, slow, and error-prone ritual.
The Manual Nightmare
In the traditional software era, developers would write code for several months in complete isolation. Once a major release window approached, they would bundle all their code files together and email them or upload them to a shared network drive. From there, system administrators had to manually read long, text-heavy instruction manuals to figure out how to install the software.
The Problem of Environment Mismatches
Because humans were executing these installation steps manually, mistakes were inevitable. A technician might forget to copy a single database configuration file or neglect to install a specific version of a software library on the server. This led to the classic operational conflict: “It worked perfectly fine on my machine, so it must be an operations issue.”
Delayed Testing and Fragile Systems
Testing occurred at the very end of the long development lifecycle. Quality assurance teams would discover critical architectural bugs weeks after the code was originally written. Fixing these deep issues right before a major launch caused massive delays, long nights of stressful troubleshooting, and frequent system outages for paying customers.
How Continuous Delivery Changed Software Engineering
The advent of automated release pipelines completely transformed the software engineering landscape. By replacing unreliable manual labor with deterministic, predictable software scripts, organizations achieved unprecedented operational efficiency.
Automation Over Manual Labor: Software tasks that previously required teams of engineers working over an extended weekend are now executed completely by automated systems in minutes. Radical Risk Reduction: Because software updates are broken down into small, incremental additions, the overall surface area for potential errors drops dramatically. Repeatable Deployments: An automated pipeline ensures that deploying software to a testing environment uses the exact same mechanics as deploying to a live production environment. Blazing Fast Feedback Loops: Developers receive definitive confirmation within minutes if their code updates have broken existing system functionality, allowing them to fix errors immediately. Continuous Integration vs Continuous Delivery (Beginner Comparison)
Many new students frequently confuse Continuous Integration (CI) with Continuous Delivery (CD). While they are tightly linked and work together as a unified process, they focus on entirely different segments of the software lifecycle.
MetricContinuous Integration (CI)Continuous Delivery (CD)Primary FocusCode consolidation, compilation, and early validation testing.Release readiness, environmental staging, and deployment preparation.Automation BoundaryAutomatically triggered when a developer pushes code to a central repository.Extends through staging validation and stops right before final manual production approval.Core GoalTo detect integration bugs as early as possible in the development loop.To ensure that code is always stable and fully certified for live deployment.Typical OutputsValidated software binaries, compiled code packages, or clean container images.A fully verified environment that is completely prepared to serve live production users. To put this in simple terms, Continuous Integration is about making sure all the individual ingredients blend together perfectly without ruining the recipe. Continuous Delivery is about cooking that meal completely, placing it under a warming lamp, and making sure it is ready to be served to the customer the moment the waiter arrives.
Basic Structure of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
A DevOps pipeline basics journey can be broken down into a series of highly structured, sequential stages. Each stage acts as a quality gateway that the code must successfully pass through before moving forward.
[ Code Commit ] ──> [ Build Process ] ──> [ Automated Testing ] │ [ Production Release ] <── [ Approval Stage ] <── [ Staging Deployment ] 1. Code Commit
The pipeline begins the exact millisecond a developer pushes their updated source code to a central platform like GitHub or GitLab. This action alerts the automation engine that new material is ready for processing.
2. Build Process
The automation tool fetches the newly updated source code, compiles it into functional machine language, and gathers all necessary external software libraries. If there are syntax errors or missing structural dependencies, the pipeline halts immediately.
3. Automated Testing
Once the software build is verified, the pipeline subjects the application to rigorous automated testing suites. This includes unit tests checking individual code functions, security vulnerability scans checking for known structural exploits, and style checks ensuring compliance with industry standards.
4. Staging Deployment
If the testing suite passes perfectly, the pipeline automatically deploys the application into a staging environment. This environment is an exact architectural clone of the live production system where real customers operate.
5. Approval Stage
This is the definitive marker of a Continuous Delivery pipeline. The software sits securely in the verified staging environment, fully operational. It waits for human business logic or management sign-off to authorize the final transition to the public production space.
6. Production Release
Once authorized, the pipeline executes the final transition scripts, deploying the thoroughly tested code to live production servers with absolute precision and zero down-time for active users.
Real-World Analogy to Understand Continuous Delivery
To firmly grasp the mechanics of a release pipeline explained without getting bogged down in complex syntax, let us look at a real-world analogy: an advanced automobile manufacturing plant.
Imagine a modern car factory utilizing a highly sophisticated assembly line system. The car begins as raw, unformed sheets of metal at the very start of the track. As the vehicle moves smoothly along the conveyor belt, automated robotic arms weld specific components, apply protective paint coats, install the engine, and attach safety wheels.
At various intervals along this assembly line, automated tracking sensors inspect the work. One machine checks the alignment of the doors, another verifies the engine compression, and a computer scans the electrical wiring for short circuits. If a single defect is detected at any point, the entire assembly line halts instantly so technicians can correct the flaw before the vehicle moves another inch forward.
Once the car reaches the absolute end of the factory floor, it is fully fueled, thoroughly inspected, polished, and parked safely in the shipping yard. The car is 100% functional and completely ready to be driven out on public roads immediately.
The factory does not need to build a new car from scratch when a buyer places an order; the vehicle is already sitting there in a state of absolute readiness. This is precisely what Continuous Delivery does for digital software.
Common Beginner Confusions About Continuous Delivery
When first studying this field, certain conceptual misunderstandings tend to pop up repeatedly. Clearing these up early will accelerate your progress.
Why Continuous Delivery Is Critical in DevOps Careers
If you want to build a highly resilient, long-term career in the cloud computing ecosystem, mastering deployment automation is non-negotiable. Modern enterprise teams no longer hire individuals who only know how to perform manual server administration.
DevOps Engineer
In this role, your core responsibility is designing, maintaining, and troubleshooting the very automation pipelines that development teams use daily. You will be expected to optimize pipeline speeds and ensure seamless integration across various cloud systems.
Cloud Architect / Cloud Engineer
Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are built entirely around programmatic interfaces. As a cloud engineer, you will write automated delivery tracks that provision computing infrastructure dynamically alongside the core application code.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
SRE professionals focus heavily on system availability, uptime, and performance metrics. Understanding Continuous Delivery helps SREs design automated rollback pipelines that can instantly withdraw a malfunctioning software update before it compromises user experience.
Platform Engineer
Platform teams design internal developer portals that abstract away underlying infrastructure complexities. A deep knowledge of delivery automation allows these engineers to build standardized pipeline templates that hundreds of developers can safely leverage with zero friction.
Tools Used in Continuous Delivery (Beginner Overview)
While concepts must always come first, you will eventually utilize specialized software tools to construct and manage automated release operations. Below is a foundational roadmap of the core tools dominating the modern enterprise space.
ToolCore Technology ClassPurpose in the Delivery PipelineGit / GitHubVersion Control SystemServes as the absolute source of truth for code changes and triggers the initial pipeline run.JenkinsAutomation / Orchestration ServerAn open-source classic used to script custom workflows, execute build scripts, and coordinate tests.GitHub ActionsCloud-Native CI/CD PlatformBuilt directly into GitHub, allowing students to write automation configurations easily using simple YAML files.DockerSoftware Containerization EnginePackages applications alongside their exact operating dependencies to completely eliminate environment mismatches.Argo CDDeclarative GitOps ToolConceptually monitors cloud environments to ensure live production systems always match the code stored in Git. Real-World Scenario: Without Continuous Delivery
To see these concepts in action, let us observe a hypothetical software team operating without an automated continuous delivery framework.
Imagine a retail banking company trying to launch an urgent mobile application update on a Friday night. The development team finishes editing the code at 5:00 PM. They manually package the application into a compressed file and upload it to a shared server directory.
At 8:00 PM, the night-shift operations team logs in to deploy the update. They open a lengthy, outdated word document containing manual step-by-step setup instructions. Halfway through the manual process, an engineer accidentally types an incorrect database command, subtly corrupting the storage connections.
The system crashes immediately. Because there are no automated testing layers built into this workflow, the team has no way of knowing whether the crash was caused by a coding bug or a manual typing error.
The entire team spends the rest of the night frantically digging through thousands of lines of server logs under extreme corporate stress. By Saturday morning, exhausted and defeated, they perform a messy manual rollback, having completely failed to deliver the new features to their waiting customers.
Real-World Scenario: With Continuous Delivery
Now, let us examine the exact same retail banking company operating with a fully realized Continuous Delivery paradigm in place.
The developer finishes writing the urgent mobile application update and pushes the code changes directly to the main GitHub repository. The moment the code lands, the automated delivery pipeline springs to life.
The automation system compiles the application code, runs 500 individual unit tests within two minutes, and executes a thorough security compliance scan. Every single check returns a clean green status indicator.
The pipeline then seamlessly deploys the application update into an isolated staging environment that precisely mirrors the live banking servers. Automated integration scripts simulate 1,000 digital customer transactions to verify system stability under heavy load conditions.
The entire process finishes flawlessly in less than ten minutes. The system automatically sends a notification to the operations manager stating that the update is fully validated and ready for production.
The manager logs into the dashboard, reviews the automated test reports, and confidently clicks a button labeled “Approve Release.” The pipeline pushes the update to live production servers instantly with zero downtime, zero stress, and complete operational transparency.
How Beginners Should Start Learning Continuous Delivery
If you are wondering how to practically approach this vast field without getting lost in the details, follow this structured, step-by-step learning progression designed specifically for newcomers.
Step 1: Master the Basics of Git
Before touching an automation engine, you must understand how version control operates. Learn how to create a code repository, perform basic commits, manage branching pathways, and push code up to platforms like GitHub. Git is the primary engine that drives all modern deployment pipelines.
Step 2: Grasp Continuous Integration First
Focus on the initial phase of the pipeline. Write a incredibly basic code script—such as a simple Python file—and configure a basic tool like GitHub Actions to automatically run that script whenever you make a change. Your only goal here is to get used to automated execution loops.
Step 3: Understand Core Pipeline Environments
Learn the conceptual differences between a local computer, a development testing server, a staging mirror environment, and a live production space. Understand how data configurations shift as an application progresses through these different zones.
Step 4: Practice Basic File Automation
Write a simple pipeline script that automatically moves a text file from one folder to another on your computer after verifying its contents. This simple practice strips away the intimidation factor and helps you see that pipelines are just ordered scripts performing logical actions.
Step 5: Build Tiny, End-to-End Projects
Create a basic web page, containerize it using a simple Dockerfile, and write a straightforward pipeline that builds that container and places it onto a free cloud hosting tier. Focus on the workflow end-to-end rather than building a complex application.
Common Mistakes Beginners Make
Avoid these frequent learning traps to save time and build cleaner habits as you advance through your DevOps training.
Jumping Directly Into Complex Tools: Do not try to master advanced Kubernetes cluster orchestrations or complex enterprise Jenkins configurations during your first week. Focus heavily on fundamental architectural concepts before scaling up. Ignoring the Core Fundamentals: Skipping basic command-line navigation, networking rules, and fundamental file permissions will make troubleshooting an automated pipeline nearly impossible. Failing to Practice Hands-On Pipelines: Simply watching video lectures or reading textbook theory will not build operational muscle memory. You must write the configuration code yourself and intentionally break it to see how error logs operate. Confusing the Boundaries of CI and CD: Ensure you can clearly explain where integration validation ends and where continuous delivery readiness begins during any architectural discussion. Role of DevOpsSchool in Learning Continuous Delivery
Navigating the transition from writing basic code to orchestrating complex enterprise delivery pipelines requires structured guidance. This is where specialized educational frameworks become incredibly valuable for students seeking to accelerate their technical growth.
A structured training approach focuses heavily on breaking down deep architectural concepts into clear, digestible operational milestones. This methodology ensures that students do not just learn how to run individual software tools, but thoroughly comprehend the foundational “why” behind enterprise automation strategies.
By interacting with realistic pipeline scenarios and sandbox testing systems, learners gain hands-on experience dealing with simulated production failures, environment mismatches, and automated testing errors in a completely safe training space.
This experience-driven mentorship bridges the wide gap between theoretical knowledge and practical career ready implementation. It helps aspiring cloud professionals develop the genuine technical confidence needed to manage modern software deployment automation systems across global enterprise environments.
Industries Where Continuous Delivery Is Used
Automated delivery methodologies are no longer restricted to specialized silicon valley technology firms. Today, every modern industry relies heavily on these systems to survive in a highly competitive digital marketplace.
SaaS (Software as a Service) Companies
SaaS platforms like streaming services, digital design tools, and productivity applications use automation pipelines to continuously deploy micro updates, perform real-time A/B feature testing, and patch security issues multiple times a day without interrupting active user sessions.
E-Commerce Platforms
Online retail platforms experience massive, unpredictable traffic spikes during major holiday shopping events. Automated pipelines allow these companies to dynamically scale up their checkout systems and quickly update inventory algorithms with absolute safety.
Banking and Financial Institutions
Modern fintech platforms and legacy banking enterprises utilize strict automated release pipelines to ensure every single code change passes exhaustive security compliance scans, encryption audits, and financial regulation validations before getting anywhere near customer account ledgers.
Healthcare Systems
Medical technology portals and hospital tracking databases require absolute system stability. Continuous Delivery allows health IT systems to roll out critical software fixes and data management updates smoothly, ensuring zero operational disruption to patient care workflows.
Telecom Industry
Telecommunication providers manage massive global communication networks. Automated release pipelines help these companies deploy software configurations to thousands of remote cellular stations and digital routing nodes reliably without causing service dropouts.
Future of Continuous Delivery
The landscape of software delivery continues to evolve at an incredible pace. As systems grow larger and more complex, automation paradigms adapt to handle the immense operational scale.
[ Traditional Automation ] ──> [ GitOps Frameworks ] ──> [ AI-Driven Deployments ] The industry is moving rapidly toward fully automated, self-healing release architectures. A major manifestation of this evolution is the widespread adoption of GitOps frameworks, where your entire infrastructure configuration is managed using version-controlled text files that constantly self-correct to prevent system drift.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence and machine learning models are being integrated directly into advanced delivery systems. Future pipelines will not just run static pre-programmed tests.
Instead, intelligent deployment systems will automatically analyze live system performance, monitor real-time user behavior, and autonomously decide whether to roll back an update or continue scaling a deployment based on live system metrics.
FAQs
What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery is a DevOps engineering methodology where software code updates are automatically built, tested, and systematically prepared for a live production release. It guarantees that your software application remains in a release-ready state at all times.
Is CD difficult for beginners to learn?
Not if you focus on the underlying concepts first. Beginners typically struggle only when they try to memorize complex software tools before understanding the basic principles of automated testing, environment isolation, and step-by-step pipeline structures.
Do I need to be an expert coder for CD?
No, you do not need to be an advanced software developer. However, you should understand basic programming logic, script configuration files using straightforward languages like YAML or JSON, and comfortably navigate a standard command-line interface.
What is the core difference between CI and CD?
Continuous Integration focuses on automatically compiling, merging, and testing developer code variations within a central repository. Continuous Delivery picks up right where integration ends, focusing on preparing and staging that verified code so it is fully optimized for a live launch.
What tools should a beginner learn first for CD?
Beginners should start by learning basic Git version control commands. Once comfortable with Git, move on to configuring simple, lightweight automated workflows using user-friendly cloud-native platforms like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD.
Is Continuous Delivery used by real real-world companies?
Yes, it is the standard operating baseline across the global tech sector. Companies ranging from small innovative tech startups to massive multinational banking institutions utilize these automated systems to deliver software securely and efficiently.
How does a deployment pipeline work?
A deployment pipeline functions as a highly ordered, automated sequence of quality stages. When code changes are submitted, the automation engine compiles the code, executes verification tests, deploys the app to a mock staging environment, and awaits a final release confirmation.
Can beginners learn CD easily without a computer science degree?
Absolutely. Modern cloud automation focuses heavily on systemic operational logic, clear configuration management, and consistency. Anyone with strong logical problem-solving skills and a dedication to hands-on practice can master these concepts.
What is a release pipeline?
A release pipeline is the digital structural pathway that code travels through on its journey to production users. It encompasses the entire automated infrastructure responsible for building, testing, securing, and deploying software updates systematically.
Why is automated testing necessary for CD?
Without automated testing, a pipeline cannot safely verify the health of code updates. Manual testing is far too slow and prone to human oversight. Automated tests serve as the digital security guards that confidently certify whether an update is safe for public use.
What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?
In Continuous Delivery, the final step to push an update live onto production servers requires a manual human confirmation click. In Continuous Deployment, that final step is completely automated; if the code passes all testing stages, it goes live to users immediately without any human intervention.
Do I need to learn Linux before studying Continuous Delivery?
Yes, a foundational understanding of basic Linux command-line operations is highly recommended. The vast majority of modern enterprise deployment pipelines and cloud infrastructure servers run on Linux operating systems.
How does CD help improve overall software quality?
By breaking down massive software releases into small, frequent, automated updates, teams can easily identify bugs early, maintain consistent testing standards, and ensure that flawed code is caught before it ever reaches a real-world customer.
Can a fresh graduate secure a DevOps job by knowing Continuous Delivery?
Yes, displaying a deep conceptual clarity of pipeline automation, along with a few hands-on personal portfolio projects demonstrating functional CI/CD paths, makes a entry-level candidate stand out significantly to modern engineering recruiters.
What exactly is a staging environment in a CD pipeline?
A staging environment is an isolated, highly secure testing sandbox that is built to be an exact architectural clone of the live production website or app. It allows teams to safely run final validation checks without impacting real users.
Final Thoughts
As you continue forward on your DevOps path, always remember that Continuous Delivery is far more than a simple collection of automation tools. It is a fundamental mindset focused on absolute reliability, consistent quality, and operational efficiency.
Do not get discouraged if your first automated pipeline fails, or if a configuration script returns confusing error codes. Encountering and troubleshooting broken pipeline stages is the exact process that transforms a curious beginner into a seasoned DevOps professional.
Focus heavily on mastering the core architectural fundamentals first, build simple automation routines consistently, and prioritize systematic learning over tool hype. Over time, these foundational concepts will become second nature, giving you the clarity and confidence to architect world-class software delivery systems.
View the full article
With the launch of iOS 27 and HomePod Software 27, Apple is adding support for AutoMix, Apple's AI-powered Apple Music feature that blends songs using matching key and tempo.


Apple says it has improved AutoMix's underlying algorithms to generate new transition types, making for more seamless blends between tracks, so this should also benefit the newly introduced feature for HomePod.

Running Apple's current HomePod Software 26, the AutoMix feature in Apple Music is not available on HomePod. Users running the existing software only have access to the crossfade feature that improves transitions between songs.

If users AirPlay to HomePod and the device they are using to AirPlay supports AutoMix (and it is turned on), then it will play on the AirPlay stream to HomePod, but that's the only workaround.

OG HomePod Support

In case anyone was wondering, the new HomePod Software 27 beta does support the original HomePod. There was some confusion about this earlier in the week, but MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris was able to independently confirm support for Apple's first smart speaker, which launched in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021.

HomePod Software 27 will come out of beta when iOS 27 becomes generally available in the fall.Related Roundups: HomePod, HomePod mini, iOS 27Buyer's Guide: HomePod (Caution), HomePod Mini (Don't Buy)Related Forum: HomePod, HomeKit, CarPlay, Home & Auto Technology
This article, "iOS 27 Brings New Functionality to HomePod" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple this week revealed what its most advanced on-device AI model does, and the feature list is shorter than the hardware requirements might suggest.


In its Siri AI announcement during WWDC 2026, Apple confirmed that the model powers two things: more expressive Siri voices and a major accuracy gain for systemwide dictation.

Both require 12GB of unified memory. Among current iPhones, that limits the more powerful AI model to the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max, alongside iPad models with the M4 chip or later, Macs with M3 or later, and Apple Vision Pro with M5.

That's right, the standard iPhone 17 misses out. Having only 8GB to its name – the minimum Apple Intelligence has required since launch – the base flagship model falls short of the new threshold. This is the first time Apple has raised that bar, given that Apple Intelligence has required 8GB since its introduction two years ago.

So What Does 12GB Get You That 8GB Doesn't?

On the voice side, users can adjust the expressiveness and pace of Siri's speech so that the assistant sounds the way they want it. However, it's the dictation feature that includes the more substantial change. Apple's most advanced on-device AI model is said to be able to turn speech into polished text on the fly, handling capitalization, punctuation, and formatting automatically, with improved speech understanding that's meant to cut down on errors.


Everything else in the Siri AI rollout – personal context, onscreen awareness, web answers, the dedicated Siri app, Visual Intelligence, and Writing Tools – runs on the broader Apple Intelligence device list. That list still includes iPhone 15 Pro, the iPhone 16 series, and iPhone 17.

The 12GB requirement, in other words, does not refer to Siri AI wholesale; it improves how Siri sounds and how well it transcribes. Base iPhone 17 owners will still get the new chatbot-style assistant with iOS 27, they'll just get the older voices and a less precise dictation engine.

Whether that matters will vary from user to user, but for anyone who dictates messages and notes all day, the better transcription is the kind of thing you will likely notice immediately. For everyone else, the difference may be something they can quite happily live with.

iOS 27 is currently in developer beta, with a public beta launching next month and a general release arriving in the fall. Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPhone 17Tags: Siri, Siri AIBuyer's Guide: iPhone 17 (Neutral)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "iPhone 17's 8GB Limit Costs It These Two Siri AI Features in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
When Ram Shankar Siva Kumar launched Microsoft’s AI red team in 2019, the discipline barely existed.
“The running joke used to be that people who used to work in AI red teaming, you can round them up in a 14-foot catamaran,” he tells CSO.
At the time, Microsoft’s approach looked familiar to anyone in cybersecurity: Attack machine learning systems the same way security teams attacked everything else. Identify weaknesses, emulate adversaries, and uncover vulnerabilities before products reach customers.
Then GPT-4 arrived. “The tool that we had changed; actually, it broke,” Siva Kumar says. The attacks his team had developed against earlier machine learning systems no longer worked against large language models. The tools had to be rebuilt. The methodologies had to be newly devised. Even the definition of the job had to be rebuilt.
“We had to retool completely, and we also had to rethink what it means to red team an AI system,” he says.
That rethinking is still under way. Today, AI red teaming has become one of the fastest-growing specialties in cybersecurity, with dedicated teams at Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. But the field is grappling with a more fundamental question than which tools to use: What exactly is the job?
Not your father’s penetration test
The most basic difference between testing traditional software and testing AI reshapes everything else: AI is not deterministic; it’s probabilistic.
“The same attack might only work one time out of 100 times or 10 times out of 100 times or 90 times out of 100 times,” Dane Sherrets, staff innovation architect at HackerOne, tells CSO. That changes how security teams evaluate risk. Instead of asking whether a vulnerability exists, they must also determine how frequently it appears, under what conditions, and whether it can be reliably reproduced.
Pete Bryan, technical lead of the AI red team at Microsoft, thinks the probabilistic nature of AI systems fundamentally changes the testing process. Systems must be evaluated repeatedly, under varying conditions, to understand how they behave and whether risky outputs emerge consistently.
The challenge is not only that AI behaves differently from traditional software. It is also capable of things traditional software could never do.
Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of the infrastructure and security group at Cisco, points to frontier models discovering vulnerabilities in complex software systems at a pace that would have seemed implausible a few years ago. “They’re able to find weird interdependencies,” he tells CSO. “I change the state of this little piece, which changes the state of that piece, which changes the state of this piece, which leads to a memory overflow.”
Modern models can analyze enormous codebases and identify chains of interaction that eventually lead to exploitable conditions — relationships human researchers miss even after years of scrutiny.
That capability cuts both ways. The same reasoning power that makes AI useful for security testing makes AI systems themselves a new kind of target, one that requires different methods to probe.
‘Teenager with a potty mouth’
Traditional red teams spend most of their time modeling sophisticated adversaries: nation-states, cybercriminal groups, advanced persistent threats. AI red teams still care about those actors — but the roster of relevant threat actors has grown considerably.
“One of the enduring personas that we also focus on is what my team lovingly likes to call a teenager with a potty mouth,” Microsoft’s Siva Kumar says.
The phrase captures one of the defining realities of the generative AI era. Many of the most significant jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks were not discovered by elite offensive operators. They were found by curious users experimenting with prompts — people who had no particular expertise but plenty of creativity and time.
“In 2019, if we had had this interview, I’d have said, ‘Hey, my job is to emulate nation-state adversaries and to emulate advanced persistent threats,’” Siva Kumar says.
Those adversaries still matter. But AI systems can fail in response to ordinary users asking unexpected questions, creatively manipulating prompts, or simply interacting with the technology in ways its developers never anticipated.
Ian Swanson, AI security leader at Palo Alto Networks, sees this reflected in how enterprises think about the problem. “What that really means is we need to behaviorally test AI for security, safety, and maybe even brand reputational type risks,” he tells CSO.
The question is no longer simply whether an attacker can break into a system. It is whether the system itself can behave in ways that create risk — regardless of who is doing the asking.
Safety moves in alongside security
That reframing has expanded AI red teaming well beyond its cybersecurity origins.
When Microsoft’s team launched in 2019, its focus was largely on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of machine learning systems — the traditional CIA triad. Generative AI dramatically enlarged that mandate. Trust and safety concerns now sit alongside conventional security ones. Misinformation, dangerous knowledge domains, manipulation risks, and questions about autonomous AI behavior all fall within the remit of many AI red teams today.
“The composition of my team has commensurately increased to kind of meet the AI moment,” Siva Kumar says. His team now includes a psychologist, a linguist, and a specialist in bioweapons — expertise that would have seemed out of place in a traditional security organization.
Bryan sees the expansion as a natural consequence of AI’s role in society. “AI red teaming has a much broader scope,” he says. “We’re worried about those engineering technical elements, but we also encompass the socio-technical risks of the safety side.”
Those expanded sets of worries mean evaluating harms that traditional cybersecurity teams rarely encountered: misinformation amplification, psychosocial risk, content that can cause harm without any attacker ever being involved.
“We need skillsets that are much broader — people who think deeply about psychosocial harms or misinformation amplification — to cover the full remit of AI safety and security,” Bryan says.
AI red teaming’s growing remit has even attracted Washington’s attention. President Biden’s 2023 executive order formally defined AI red teaming and required safety testing results for the most powerful models to be shared with the government before deployment. President Trump later revoked the order, leaving standards development largely to industry and voluntary frameworks.
Red teaming the whole car
One of the most common mistakes organizations make when they begin testing AI systems is focusing exclusively on the model.
HackerOne’s Sherrets uses a car analogy. The model is the engine. But the AI system is everything connected to it — the databases, the APIs, the customer records, the payment systems, the internal workflows. “What I encourage people to do is red team the entire car,” he says. “We need to understand not only the engine, but also all of the other pieces that connect to that engine and how they operate together, because how they connect and operate together could also have vulnerabilities.”
Weaknesses often emerge not from the model itself but from the interactions between components. Sherrets points to an Air Canada case to make the point.
The airline’s customer service chatbot invented a bereavement refund policy that did not exist. A customer relied on it. The airline ended up in court. Nobody had hacked the system. Nobody had exploited a vulnerability in the conventional sense. The chatbot behaved incorrectly — and the organization was held responsible for what its AI said on its behalf.
As organizations deploy AI assistants across customer service, sales, HR, and internal operations, that kind of failure becomes an increasingly significant risk category. The system does not need to be attacked to cause harm. It needs only to be wrong, at the wrong moment, in front of the wrong person.
The agent problem
For much of the generative AI era, red teamers worried primarily about outputs. Would the model hallucinate? Would it leak sensitive information? Would it generate harmful content?
Agents introduce a different category of risk entirely.
Agentic AI systems do not just generate text. They retrieve information. They invoke APIs. They process refunds. They access databases. They perform tasks on behalf of users with real-world consequences. A vulnerability that causes a chatbot to say something wrong is a communications problem. A vulnerability in an agent that executes business processes is an operational one.
The shift extends beyond testing AI systems themselves. Cisco’s Gillis argues that increasingly capable AI models are accelerating the pace of change across enterprise environments, making static security approaches obsolete. “This idea of hardening your infrastructure and then hoping it never changes for 18 months, that is over, permanently dead, gone in this post-Mythos environment,” he tells CSO.
The implication is that security testing can no longer be a periodic exercise. As AI systems become more autonomous, organizations must continuously evaluate how those systems behave in production environments. “We need to test the behavior to make sure agents are doing the right things,” Swanson says.
Microsoft’s Bryan believes agentic systems are forcing a convergence between traditional cybersecurity red teams and AI red teams that will define the field’s next phase. At Microsoft, the two teams remain separate organizations — but they work increasingly closely together, because the systems they now test combine conventional software risks with AI-specific safety concerns in ways that neither team can address alone.
“Agentic AI is really the intersection of all of the cybersecurity risks that come with traditional software systems along with all of the AI security and safety risks,” he says.
AI is a team sport, too
Bryan points to Microsoft’s decision to open-source AI safety testing tools as a recognition that AI risk is not a problem model providers can solve on behalf of their customers. Enterprises deploying AI need their own testing capabilities. Not every organization will maintain a specialized AI red team — but every organization deploying AI needs to understand its risks.
“Like cybersecurity, which has always kind of been a team sport, AI safety and security is really a community-driven piece,” Bryan says. “Everyone has their role and responsibility.”
Bryan also sees the long-term trajectory of the field bending toward a different kind of convergence. “I think there will just become a point where having the AI for red teaming almost kind of becomes redundant, and that just is the red teaming,” he says. “Everyone is using AI to improve their work regardless of the area.”
What will remain distinct is the challenge of testing AI systems themselves — probabilistic systems that expand in scope with each new capability and that can cause harm without anyone intending them to.
Five years ago, AI red teaming was a niche specialty practiced by a handful of researchers. Today, it encompasses cybersecurity, safety, misinformation, autonomy, and governance. Tomorrow it will look different again — shaped by whatever the next generation of AI systems turns out to be capable of.
View the full article
Apple Music is bringing Hi-Res Lossless Audio to tvOS 27, in addition to standard Lossless Audio.


Apple says subscribers with compatible external speaker outputs will be able to enjoy their favorite songs in the highest audio quality and experience studio-quality sound directly through their Apple TV 4K.

As of tvOS 26, Apple TV 4K supports Apple Music Lossless audio up to 24-bit/48 kHz, but does not support Hi-Res Lossless playback (above 48 kHz, or up to 24-bit/192 kHz).

Lossless audio refers to a form of compression that preserves all of the original data, which can result in an improved listening experience, although to what extent is debated.

The tvOS 27 developer beta is already out, and registered developers can install it through Settings ➝ System ➝ Software Update ➝ Beta Updates on a supported Apple TV. tvOS 27 will go on general release in the fall.Related Roundup: Apple TVTag: Apple MusicBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
This article, "tvOS 27: Apple Music Gains Hi-Res Lossless Audio on Apple TV 4K" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the most capable model it has ever made, generally available. It also did something unusual: it shipped one model as two products, split not by capability but by a layer of safety classifiers. Fable 5 goes to the public. Its twin, Claude Mythos 5, the same underlying model with the cyber safeguards lifted, stays locked to a vetted group of cyberView the full article
ServiceNow has warned about a security incident in which unknown threat actors exploited a flaw to obtain deeper unauthorized access to susceptible instances. "On June 5, 2026, ServiceNow applied a security update to hosted customer instances," the company revealed in an advisory that requires customer access. "The update concerned a security issue that could allow an unauthenticated user, inView the full article
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s speech on Monday insisting that tech companies create device controls to somehow block children from viewing or creating sexually explicit imagery has raised alarms among CISOs, who worry that the same technology could undermine enterprise security. Starmer gave tech firms three months to create and implement such restrictions voluntarily, at which point he said he would push for legislation to make it mandatory.
Behind the technical and logistical hurdles for tech firms to clear, such as how a device would determine that an image was inappropriate, and how it could reliably determine the subject’s age, is the issue of whether this process would interfere with encryption protections for enterprises worldwide. And that comes down to whether the required data analysis happens on the device or in the cloud. 
Starmer did not go into a lot of detail, preferring to let technology companies craft their own plans, but in this case the details matter. Analysts and consultants said that there has been a push for everything to happen on-device, which would avoid any encryption problems; if the inspected data never leaves the device, the encryption protection would stay intact.
But this plan for the process to stay on the device seems highly unlikely for multiple reasons. The first problem is device capabilities and hardware age. Although Apple and Google engineers would be working with the latest devices, much of the UK population is using much older and less capable hardware, analysts said. 
Although a 2-, 3- or 4-year-old phone might still be able to handle the additional load, it would likely suffer a dramatic slowdown sufficient to make users decidedly unhappy. That would mean that even if the execution of the data analysis began on the device, it would likely have to be shifted to the cloud for performance reasons. And once it moved into the cloud, the encrypted data problem begins. 
Trying to do this scanning on-device in the UK would fail, said Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group. “It will make unusable the majority of devices used in the UK today. It just can’t work on-device.”
However, Villanustre observed that on-device analysis for this kind of effort, which would need to scan everything that gets downloaded to the phone in search of prohibited images, might be viable in a few years, once the typical device becomes much more powerful. But not today.
Creates new risks
Leading secure messaging app provider Signal also issued a strong statement opposing Starmer’s proposal.
“The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google and Microsoft’s market dominance and their control over our most personal information,” Signal said.  “Once created, [the program] will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider ‘threats’ or ‘harmful content.’”
Signal has aggressively fought against such programs before. Similar privacy campaigns have also been launched in other parts of Europe. 
The long held fear is that moving encrypted data to the cloud, regardless of whether it remains encrypted or is converted to clear text, creates opportunities for attackers to access the sensitive data.
“The mechanism that flags and reports a match to external authorities creates a new, built-in exfiltration path,” said Jeff Valdes, a director at consulting firm Acceligence.
Could do more harm than good
Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, argued that the UK proposal is likely to do far more damage than good. He pointed to the short three month timeframe as evidence of a lack of good faith.
“Legislation of this complexity cannot be drafted in a quarter. The deadline is a pressure instrument, not a delivery schedule. Child safety is the destination. Device-wide inspection is the wrong vehicle,” Gogia said. “Apple and Google already run on-device nudity detection in bounded contexts, and it works: a child can be warned, an image blurred, a sharing attempt interrupted.”
Gogia pointed to another logistical problem, which is that some devices such as tablets are often shared between family members, which makes reliable age determinations all but impossible. 
“The deeper flaw is that the policy assumes a stable mapping between device, person, and age, and that mapping does not exist in real households,” Gogia said. “A device cannot know its holder has changed. The only architecture that survives this is default-child with recurring adult verification, which is surveillance arriving through the back door of household economics.”
In addition, he noted, “Children disproportionately inherit the old, out-of-support handsets the mandate cannot reach. Forcing churn manufactures electronic waste and punishes the families least able to buy new.”
Carmi Levy, an independent technology analyst, agreed that the computing overhead alone for such an effort could make this a deal-killer. 
“The compute requirements, particularly in light of the need to execute this kind of filtering in real time, would be immense. It is futile to assume this capability can ever be rolled out at scale without running into massive concerns on several fronts,” Levy said. “Simply deciding how to tune the filters is an almost impossible task. Although the overall definition of nudity, namely not wearing clothing, is generally agreed upon, the line where it becomes inappropriate for minors is neither static nor universally established. So it’s wildly optimistic to assume that a single threshold would be workable at the scale proposed by Prime Minister Starmer.”
Nidhi Luthra, a director at Acceligence, added that the logistical and technological roadblocks are also a big problem. 
“Technically, parts of this can work,” she said, but vendors would have to deal with age verifications, drifts in the models and false positives, and there is also the “lack of contextual information that truly would have let this work.” 
Puts CISOs in ‘an impossible bind’
The UK proposal also puts enterprise CISOs and IT directors who need to protect sensitive data in an impossible bind, Gogia said. 
They “can govern device management and conditional access. What they cannot govern is a mandatory inspection capability that updates according to political appetite rather than enterprise risk appetite,” he pointed out. “The proposal does not automatically create a breach inside Signal, WhatsApp, or Teams, but it creates the conditions for a new class of breach around them. The weakness need not live in the messaging protocol. It can live in the mandated inspection layer, the classifier update mechanism, the age-assurance workflow, or the logs that enforcement inevitably generates.”
Regime change could lead to abuse
Another common concern is that governments change hands, so limited capabilities granted today to one government might be used very differently by a future government. 
Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, noted, “the current government may only use it to detect nudes, but what is to stop a future authoritarian government from using it to detect unfavorable political commentary? Creating a back door means there is potential for third parties — hackers — to exploit that back door to gain access to the user’s communications. This is exactly what encryption and on-device security measures are supposed to prevent.”
He added, “Apple’s Communication Safety feature, Google’s Family Link, and a range of parental control tools already use on-device AI to detect and restrict explicit imagery on children’s devices. The government is not filling a gap the market failed to address. It is proposing to transfer control of an existing capability from the device owner to the state. Parents can deploy this protection right now, on their terms. That is where the decision should sit.”
Ryan O’Leary, research director for privacy and legal technology at IDC, said the current proposal only involves the UK, and there’s no way to determine whether other governments will try something similar. He noted that the EU’s GDPR was widely expected to go global when it launched in 2016, but in ten years, it hasn’t.
O’Leary said that if this proposal is enacted in the UK, he would advise IT and cybersecurity executives to be extra cautious when sending team members to the region. 
“It would essentially be ‘China rules’” such as air gapping systems and traveling with disposable data-limited burner phones, O’Leary said. “It’s an exceptionally big deal if it goes through,” but, he added, the chance of it happening is very low. “It seems like the technology companies will call his bluff.”
View the full article
AI-generated code is riddled with security flaws, yet enterprises are shipping more of it than ever before. Why? Perhaps they’re over-confident, lack true visibility into security risks, or are simply choosing to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
It’s a dangerous game to play at the dawn of the agentic AI era, as underscored in a new report from app security company Checkmarx.
The survey of thousands of security leaders exposes an underlying naivete about AI-built code and its vulnerabilities, even as tools like Anthropic’s Mythos are uncovering security flaws orders of magnitude faster than any human security team could ever hope to.
“Mythos-class models collapse the window between a vulnerability existing and a working exploit being available from months to minutes,” the report notes. Enterprises relying on traditional security tools and methods, it says, “cannot survive this reality.”
Security as an afterthought
Checkmarx’s survey of 2,350 CISOs, AppSec managers, and developers across 14 countries focused on how much AI-developed code enterprises are deploying, the vulnerabilities it introduces, how it impacts developer workflows, and overall sentiment about AI code and security posture.
Today, nearly half of production code is AI-generated, and the majority of enterprises also report that at least half their codebase is made up of open-source components, according to the report.
But the more AI-generated code that is pushed out, the more vulnerabilities are exposed. Enterprises who said 81% – 100% of their code is built by AI ship vulnerable code 3.4 times more often than businesses using AI more conservatively, relying on 20% or less AI code.
Additionally, 70% of developers said that AI code generation created vulnerabilities in 2025, and almost all enterprises surveyed (93%) had at least one security breach as a direct result of in-house developed apps.
Still, risk is becoming “normalized,” the report notes, with three-quarters of enterprises knowingly deploying vulnerable code as they face increased pressure for ROI. Startlingly, about 30% of respondents admitted they ship compromised code and hope the vulnerability won’t be found. Similarly, more than a third of organizations leave half of their known vulnerabilities unfixed for 90 days or more.
The report points out that the organizational bottleneck isn’t detection, “it’s the human decision to ship anyway, suppress the finding, or defer to the next sprint.”
Along with this, AppSec teams are often limited to reactive incident response as they deal with tool sprawl. And developers only continuously secure code a small percentage of the time (18%), even though nearly all are equipped with security tooling.
Ultimately, developers are “set up to fail,” the report contends. They face significant pressure to deliver, and are forced to choose quantity and speed over security. Yet, even as they face significant consequences when it comes to post-mortems, performance reviews, escalation, and blocked releases, the tools that contribute to security issues, delivering low-value findings, unclear guidance, or late feedback, continue to go unfixed.
“Developers remain accountable for outcomes, even when systems and workflows are not aligned to support them,” the report notes.
Overconfidence, outdated practices
Alarmingly, many enterprises seem to be deluded when it comes to their security posture. Of those that rate themselves as “highly mature” AI organizations, 42% often ship the most vulnerable code, and have breach rates “barely distinguishable” from other enterprises.
“Confidence isn’t protecting them,” the report notes. “It’s blinding them.”
Underscoring this, only 22% of organizations have formal AI governance, and developers still rely on manual code reviews to ensure their code meets compliance standards.
The result is a mismatch between the speed of software creation and the speed of governance, the report notes. “Compliance frameworks are evolving, but many organizations are still attempting to govern AI-scale development with processes designed for a slower era of software delivery.”
Strategic imperatives for enterprises
Enterprises do seem to have wised up (a bit) after Anthropic’s Mythos proved capable of not only discovering vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers, but exploiting them 100 times faster than previous Claude models. And the subsequent Project Glasswing almost immediately surfaced thousands of previously-unidentified security flaws.
Checkmarx’s survey, which, it should be noted, was conducted a month prior to Mythos’ arrival, found that enterprises are finally taking proactive measures, focusing more heavily on AI security threats overall, and investing more in DevSecOps practices, automation, and developer training.
The report emphasizes the importance of prioritizing risk over code volume; vulnerabilities should not be considered isolated incidents. Also, it’s critical to embed security into developer workflows rather than treating it as a checkpoint. Enterprises must have systems that reduce noise, provide clear guidance, and allow them to take action when an issue arises.
Security “must be integrated directly into how developers write, test, and ship code within the IDE, pipelines, and AI-assisted workflows where development now happens,” the report notes.
Similarly, enterprises would benefit by reducing fragmentation and tool sprawl and defining ownership of the AI tools. By simplifying security stacks, they can align responsibilities and ensure consistent tool use, according to the report.
Further, AI needs strong governance, and teams must move beyond outdated manual triage and “human-gated remediation.” AI can fight AI in a strong system built to prioritize, remediate, and resolve risk “without waiting for a human to approve each step,” the report notes.
Ultimately, it says: “Progress depends on embedding intelligence directly into workflows, enabling risks to be prioritized, remediated, and resolved, all within the systems that they operate in.”
This article originally appeared on CIO.com.
View the full article
Apple updated its App Store Review Guidelines this week, adding stricter language around low-quality apps.


The 4.3 Spam rule already barred overly simple apps in saturated categories, but Apple now includes language saying low-effort apps could be pulled from the App Store. Apps in oversaturated categories that are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers may be removed, according to Apple.

App Guideline 4.3(b) New Language:

App Guideline 4.3(b) Old Language:

Apple says it won't approve dating, flashlight, sound effect, wallpaper, simple timer, and fortune telling apps unless they are meaningfully different from existing apps. Apple says fart, burp, Kama Sutra, and drinking game apps are "mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort" and add no value to the ‌App Store‌. Repeated app submissions of this type could lead to removal from the Developer Program.

Wording on spam apps is clearer than before, and it sounds like Apple will approve fewer apps in saturated categories and may even clean up some clutter apps that get no interest.

Apple also added new detail to its 1.2 rule on apps with user-generated content, which is a guideline that has seen Apple threaten to remove apps like Grok from the ‌App Store‌. Apple now makes it clear that app developers are responsible for removing content that violates ‌App Store‌ guidelines, such as pornographic content.

Apps that do not have a compliance plan for addressing content violations could be removed from the ‌App Store‌.

Apple's final guideline change (4.5.3) bars app developers from using Live Activities to spam, phish, or send unsolicited messages to customers.

The full ‌App Store‌ Review Guidelines are available on Apple's website.Tags: App Store, App Store Review Guidelines
This article, "Apple Updates App Store Guidelines With Stricter Rules for Low-Quality Apps" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Anthropic today announced the launch of Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model that it says is safe for general use.


According to Anthropic, Fable 5's capabilities exceed those of any model it has made generally available, and Fable has demonstrated "exceptional performance" for software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and more. It outperforms Opus models on longer, more complex tasks. Fable 5 can work autonomously for longer than any prior Claude model.

Fable 5 is being released with conservative safeguards to prevent it from being misused in areas like cybersecurity. Questions about some topics will instead be answered by Opus 4.8, with safeguards expected to trigger in less than five percent of sessions on average. Most queries related to cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology will get responses from Opus 4.8 instead of Fable 5.

Anthropic is also releasing Claude Mythos 5 for a small group of cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers. It uses the same underlying model as Fable 5, but with some of the safeguards lifted. Mythos 5 is being deployed through Project Glasswing as an upgrade to the Claude Mythos Preview. Anthropic says Mythos 5 has the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model in the world, with access set to expand through a broader trusted access program.

Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are available at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, which is less than half the price of the Claude Mythos Preview. Mythos 5 is available to those who have access to the Mythos Preview, and that includes Apple. Apple is one of Anthropic's Project Glasswing partners.

Claude Fable 5 is included in Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans from today until June 22. On June 23, the model will be removed from those plans and using it will require usage credits. When Fable 5 capacity is sufficient, Anthropic plans to re-add it to subscription plans.Tag: Anthropic
This article, "Anthropic Launches Claude Fable 5, Its First Public Mythos-Class Model" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.
The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this month’s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.
“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said. “Pandora’s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday.”
June’s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAI’s Codex.
Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed “GreenPlasma,” leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.
Nightmare Eclipse also last month released “YellowKey,” an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.
Microsoft received heavily blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that “Microsoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”
Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Vesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.
Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a “bone shattering” drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next month’s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.
While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barnett.
“So far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,” Barnett wrote. “As usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.”
Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.
Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the company’s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.
Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).
As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this month’s patches.
Further reading:
Microsoft’s Security Update Guide
Action1’s Patch Tuesday breakdown
SANS Internet Storm Center notes on Patch Tuesday
View the full article
Messaging app Telegram now has a native Apple Watch app. The app supports viewing and responding to Telegram messages from the wrist.


Features like stickers, voice messages, and location information can be shared from the Apple Watch app.

Telegram had an Apple Watch app back in 2015, but it was discontinued and removed from the App Store a few years back. There have been third-party Telegram apps for the Apple Watch, but now Telegram users can once again use a first-party solution.Related Roundup: Apple Watch 11Tag: TelegramBuyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
This article, "Telegram Gets Native Apple Watch App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Anthropic unveiled two new powerful AI models built on its previously restricted Mythos architecture: Claude Fable 5, which is being made broadly available, and Claude Mythos 5, which remains limited to a small group of cybersecurity and infrastructure partners.
Anthropic describes Fable 5 as the most capable model it has ever released to the public, outperforming previous Claude models across software engineering, scientific research, vision, and complex knowledge-work tasks. Anthropic says the model’s advantage grows as tasks become longer and more complicated, enabling users to assign larger projects to the system with less oversight and fewer detailed instructions.
According to Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management, research, and labs, the goal was to make Mythos-level intelligence broadly available without exposing users to the risks that previously kept the technology restricted. “We wanted to be able to provide this level of intelligence for general users in a safe manner,” Penn told The Wall Street Journal.
Safeguards may be broader than Anthropic suggests
When Anthropic released Mythos in April, it argued that the model’s capabilities in areas such as vulnerability discovery and offensive cybersecurity created risks that justified restricting access to around 50 recipients. Just a week ago, Anthropic announced it was expanding Mythos access to 150 organizations.
Now Anthropic says it has developed safeguards robust enough to support a broader release. Those safeguards work by routing certain categories of requests — including cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model-distillation-related queries — to the less capable Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic says these fallbacks occur in fewer than 5% of sessions, meaning most users will effectively interact with the full Mythos-class model during ordinary use.
Early testing by security researchers suggests the cyber safeguards may be broader than Anthropic’s description implies. Rob T. Lee, chief AI officer and chief of research at SANS Institute, tells CSO that his routine cybersecurity tasks involving incident response, detection, and basic forensic workflows were automatically routed from Fable 5 to Opus 4.8 during his initial testing. If those observations hold up under broader testing, it could indicate that Anthropic’s classifiers are broadly identifying cybersecurity-related requests rather than attempting to distinguish between benign and malicious cyber activity.
The company describes the safeguards as intentionally conservative. Users may occasionally encounter false positives in which benign requests are routed to Opus 4.8, but Anthropic says it chose to prioritize safety over convenience while it continues refining the system.
A significant portion of Anthropic’s latest announcement is devoted to explaining why it believes the safeguards are necessary. The company argues that Mythos-class systems have crossed a threshold where they could provide meaningful assistance to malicious actors. Unlike earlier AI systems that primarily offered information, Anthropic says advanced models are increasingly capable of carrying out portions of complex workflows, including activities associated with offensive cybersecurity operations.
To address those risks, Anthropic has developed a series of AI-powered classifiers designed to identify potentially dangerous requests. If the system detects a request involving offensive cyber operations, advanced biological research, chemistry-related risks, or attempts to extract the model’s capabilities for use in competing systems, the request is redirected to Opus 4.8. Anthropic says extensive internal and external testing failed to uncover broadly effective jailbreaks that would consistently bypass the safeguards.
Anthropic touts gain in coding, analysis, and autonomous work
The Fable 5 announcement also focuses on software engineering, where Anthropic believes the model’s gains are particularly significant. During testing, Stripe, for example, reportedly used Fable 5 to complete a codebase-wide migration in a 50-million-line Ruby repository in a single day, a task the company estimated would have required more than two months of engineering effort if performed manually.
Anthropic also says the model achieved state-of-the-art results on coding evaluations that measure not only whether software works but whether it meets the standards expected in production environments.
The company further highlighted gains in financial analysis, document reasoning, chart interpretation, and vision tasks. Anthropic says Fable 5 can accurately extract information from complex scientific figures and perform sophisticated visual reasoning tasks, including reconstructing web application source code from screenshots.
Expanded access for cyber defenders
For a select group of users, Anthropic is also introducing Claude Mythos 5. The model is identical to Fable 5 but with certain safeguards removed. Through Project Glasswing, cybersecurity organizations and critical infrastructure providers will gain access to a version of the system with cyber-related restrictions lifted — Anthropic plans to gradually expand access through a broader trusted-access program developed in consultation with the US government.
The company says Mythos 5 possesses what it describes as the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model currently available. Anthropic has previously highlighted the ability of Mythos-class systems to discover software vulnerabilities, assist with exploit development, and perform complex, multi-stage cybersecurity tasks. Those capabilities are precisely what prompted the company to restrict access to earlier versions of the technology.
The move reflects a broader trend across the AI industry as vendors seek ways to commercialize increasingly powerful systems without making their most dangerous capabilities widely available. AI developers have spent the past year wrestling with the question of how to deploy models whose capabilities may provide substantial benefits to defenders, researchers, and enterprises while also creating opportunities for misuse.
AI doesn’t replace the basics
For security leaders, the announcement raises important questions about how quickly organizations can adapt to increasingly capable AI systems. The challenge is no longer simply obtaining access to advanced models but integrating them into security operations in ways that produce measurable benefits.
The question of how well the safeguards are calibrated matters beyond individual workflows — it goes to the heart of whether organizations can actually operationalize these models effectively. Anthony Grieco, Cisco’s senior vice president and chief security and trust officer, said organizations should focus not only on gaining access to increasingly powerful models but also on deploying them effectively while maintaining strong security fundamentals.
“The pace of frontier AI development is changing the security landscape in real-time, and defenders cannot afford to wait for the dust to settle,” Grieco said in a statement sent to CSO. “Whether the model is Claude Mythos 5, Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.5-Cyber, or the next breakthrough, the challenge is no longer just access to advanced AI, but how organizations operationalize it with the right harness, infrastructure, and agentic logic to turn speed into clarity and action.”
At the same time, Grieco cautioned against viewing AI as a substitute for foundational security practices.
“AI will raise the ceiling for what defenders can do, but security resilience remains the foundation that determines whether those gains translate into real protection,” he said. Even as AI models accelerate software engineering, analysis and security operations, organizations still need to execute on fundamentals such as patching, multifactor authentication, network segmentation, and zero trust architectures.
View the full article
When Liquid Glass launched in macOS Tahoe, Apple faced criticism over how the design looked on the Mac. Some people felt that Liquid Glass in ‌macOS Tahoe‌ was an afterthought with little impact from the design update, while others had issues with contrast, readability, rounded corners, and design consistency. There were long complaint threads on the MacRumors forums and on Reddit, and some people refused to update.


Apple is making several changes to Liquid Glass and the overall macOS Golden Gate design, and while subtle, some of the changes could make Liquid Glass on Mac easier to digest.

Transparency and Diffusion

Apple added a full Liquid Glass slider under System Settings > Appearance. It changes the translucency of Liquid Glass elements, and users can choose a clear version of Liquid Glass that allows some of the background to show through, select a more opaque, tinted version that improves the legibility of text, or choose something in between.


Unfortunately, there is no ultra-clear version of Liquid Glass available with the slider. Even the setting that's as clear as possible does not match the original version of Liquid Glass that Apple showed off at WWDC 2025.

Apple changed the overall Liquid Glass opacity, and it now diffuses complex content more effectively. Apple says a darkened edge and brighter specular highlights establish more depth and separation for the UI.

Toolbars and Window Shapes

Apps have uniform toolbars to make text headings and groups of controls more legible. Windows also all have the same corner radius for more consistency between apps.

‌macOS Tahoe‌
Corners of apps are not as dramatically rounded in ‌macOS Golden Gate‌, and the difference is noticeable.

‌macOS Golden Gate‌
It's easier to tell when a window is active because of the sidebar design, the opacity update, and changes to window shadows.

Sidebars

Sidebars are no longer floating and are instead edge-to-edge. It's a design that's less distracting and more uniform because there's no unnecessary sidebar shadowing that just takes up space.


Sidebar icons have color again, which is something Apple removed in ‌macOS Tahoe‌.

Icons

Apple didn't budge on requiring squircle Mac icons, but it did change icon design. Icons have more layers of Liquid Glass to improve detail and sharpness in light, dark, tinted, and clear icon modes.


Apple is also using icons for some menu bar items to make it easier to find commonly used actions.

HDR

Apple is using HDR for depth and dimension in the ‌macOS Golden Gate‌ interface.

Launch Date

‌macOS Golden Gate‌ also includes all of the new Siri AI features coming in iOS 27, along with performance improvements that make the Mac feel faster.

The update is limited to developers right now, but Apple plans to release a public beta in July. ‌macOS Golden Gate‌ will launch this fall.
Related Roundup: macOS Golden Gate
This article, "All the Liquid Glass Changes in macOS Golden Gate" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today released new beta firmware for the AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods Pro 3. The firmware is limited to developers at the current time, and it has a build number of 9A5292e.


In iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, Apple is adding a new AirPods interface and support for custom EQ. AirPods are also compatible with the new Siri AI.

With iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe, Apple added a beta firmware update installation option that's available from the AirPods settings interface when the AirPods are connected to an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, which facilitates beta testing.

Developers can use the beta option to turn on beta downloads.Related Roundups: AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 3, iOS 27Buyer's Guide: AirPods (Caution), AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
This article, "Apple Releases New AirPods Beta Firmware With iOS 27 Features" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Meta on Tuesday announced that it will use information shared by other businesses to personalize users' feed and responses from its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, expanding its scope beyond targeted ads. "Businesses often share information about people's activity on their sites with us to make ads more relevant," Meta said in a statement. "We already use this data - like games you playView the full article
iOS 27's key new feature is a more intelligent and personal version of Siri, but the changes go well beyond that. In a press release today, Apple outlined additional enhancements coming across Apple Maps, Find My, Apple Wallet, Apple Music, and more.


Apple Maps has gained an enhanced Flyover experience powered by AI, enabling you to view aerial imagery in "stunning detail" for select cities.

In the U.S., Apple Maps has also received a new Local Lists feature, which surfaces things such as trending restaurants and kid-friendly places to visit.

In the Find My app, you will have the ability to share your location with others for a custom duration, such as four days and six hours. Or, you can set a set an exact date and time for your location sharing to expire. In addition, you can now pause your location sharing with specific people until the end of the day.


On iOS 26 and earlier, there are only three preset timeframes available: indefinitely, until end of day, and one hour.

In the U.S., iOS 27 allows you to split bills with a new feature powered by Apple Cash and Apple Intelligence. This capability is available in the Messages and Apple Wallet apps, or by using the new Siri mode in the Camera app.

"When users point their iPhone at a receipt using Siri mode, it can surface the relevant action to split a bill with Apple Cash and identify the items on the receipt," said Apple. "As users select their items, their total payment is calculated, including their share of tax and tip, so they can pay back exactly what they owe with Apple Cash."


You can now create custom passes in Apple Wallet from physical cards, like loyalty or membership cards. With the Siri mode in the Camera app, you can simply point your iPhone at any physical card with a barcode and save it to Apple Wallet. Once added, passes are ready to present as a barcode or QR code right from the iPhone.

iOS 27 provides an enhanced Apple Wallet key experience for participating hotels and resorts. You can view more details about your trips, receive updates about booked activities, access services available during your stay, and more.

Apple Pay's checkout flow on the web and in apps is getting an updated design that allows you to swipe to switch payment cards. And if you have an eligible card in Apple Wallet, it will be accompanied by more information, including rewards balances, debit account balances, pay later options, and more.

As part of the Tap to Pay on iPhone feature, new Tap to Share functionality allows you to connect to a participating small business owner's iPhone and securely share shipping information, email addresses, loyalty rewards, and more.

In the Apple Podcasts app, there is a new "search within show" feature.

In the Photos app, iCloud Shared Albums now support full-resolution sharing, more file types, emoji reactions, and more. Even people without an Apple device can now join and contribute photos to these shared albums on the web.

In the Apple Music app, Apple said the AutoMix feature has "even better transitions" that feel "more immersive and engaging for listeners." Introduced in iOS 26, AutoMix adds seamless, DJ-like transitions between songs.

Apple Music's Lyrics Translation feature is expanding to seven additional language pairings: English to French, English to German, English to Italian, English to Korean, English to Spanish, French to English, and Japanese to English.

Apple's press release provides more details about these features and a few others.

iOS 27 is currently available in developer beta, with a public beta to follow in July. The update is expected to be released in September.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tags: Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Wallet, Find My
This article, "Apple Says iOS 27 Adds These 12 New Features to Your iPhone" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Veeam has released security patches to address a critical flaw in its Backup & Replication software that could result in remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2026-44963, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10.0. "A vulnerability allowing remote code execution (RCE) on the Backup Server by an authenticated domain user," Veeam said in a Tuesday advisory. ItView the full article
Microsoft on Monday confirmed that it temporarily removed some GitHub repositories in response to a recent security incident that led to 73 of its open-source projects being compromised to inject an information stealer into the code. "Our priority is to protect customers and the broader ecosystem," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News via email. "We temporarily removed someView the full article
Apple has added direct touch input to Sidecar with macOS 27 Golden Gate and iPadOS 27, allowing users to tap and interact with macOS interface elements using a finger on their iPad for the first time.


Previously, ‌Sidecar‌ was deliberately limited as a touch interface. While multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, and three-finger editing gestures for copy, cut, paste, and undo have been supported for years, directly tapping to click links, open apps, or interact with macOS UI elements was not possible with a finger. Those interactions required either the Mac's connected mouse or trackpad, or an Apple Pencil.

The new Direct Touch capability closes that gap. In ‌macOS 27‌, users can can now tap, swipe, and interact with macOS apps on their ‌iPad‌ screen using a finger, bringing ‌Sidecar‌ closer to how third-party tools like Luna Display have worked for some time. ‌Apple Pencil‌ support continues alongside the new touch capabilities.



The expanded ‌Sidecar‌ functionality requires an Apple Silicon Mac running ‌macOS 27‌ Golden Gate and a compatible ‌iPad‌ running iPadOS 27. As with previous versions of the feature, both devices must be signed into the same Apple ID, connected to the same Wi-Fi network, and have Bluetooth enabled, with the two devices within 10 meters of each other.

The feature is likely another indication of impending touch support on the Mac, along with other features like pull-to-refresh. Apple is said to be planning to launch a "MacBook Ultra" as a new top-tier laptop with a touchscreen OLED display, an M6-series chip, the Dynamic Island, and a thinner design. Reports suggest that the device is scheduled to launch in early 2027.Related Roundup: macOS 27Tag: Sidecar
This article, "macOS 27 Finally Brings Direct Touch Control to Sidecar" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Nomad today introduced two new products in its Stellar Orange colorway, expanding the number of accessories it offers in the unique shade. Stellar Orange matches the Cosmic Orange color that Apple used for the iPhone 17 Pro and ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max.


The Stellar Orange Stand One is a 2-in–1 charging stand that's priced at $135. It was previously available in silver and carbide, but it now comes in bright orange. It is a Qi2 charger that charges a MagSafe iPhone at up to 25W.

The upright charger supports charging an iPhone in portrait or landscape orientation for Stand By, and it has a quality glass and metal build. A second Qi charger at the bottom of the stand allows AirPods to be charged at 5W.

The stand charges over USB-C, and you'll need to supply a 40W or better power adapter, but it does come with a braided nylon USB-C cable. An anti-slip base keeps it in place, as does the weight of the charger.

Nomad's Stellar Orange Tracking Card Pro is $39, and it is made to slip into a wallet to add Find My tracking capabilities. It connects to the ‌Find My‌ network so it is locatable in the ‌Find My‌ app's Items tab, and it can use nearby Apple devices to report its location if lost or stolen.


The Tracking Card Pro can charge using any Qi or ‌MagSafe‌ charger, and the battery lasts for up to 16 months. It is 2.5mm thin, which makes it three times thinner than an AirTag and better suited for use in a wallet. It does not support Precision Finding because Apple doesn't make the iPhone's Ultra Wideband chip available to third-party trackers.

Nomad's $135 Stellar Orange Stand One and $39 Stellar Orange Tracking Card Pro are available from the Nomad website as of today.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner Nomad. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.Related Roundup: iPhone 17 ProTags: Find My, NomadBuyer's Guide: iPhone 17 Pro (Caution)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "Nomad's New Stellar Orange Charger and Find My Card Match the iPhone 17 Pro" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Last year, singer Justin Bieber turned to social media to complain about the placement of the dictation button in the Messages app's text field on the iPhone. Specifically, he said he kept accidentally pressing the dictation button after sending a text, given it shows up in the same spot as the send button.

Apple has seemingly listened to this feedback, as iOS 27 lets you turn off the dictation button in the Settings app under Apps → Messages → Show in Text Field.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Fixes Justin Bieber's Problem in Messages App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote may have seemed relatively quiet on the Vision Pro front, but the visionOS 27 beta contains a decent amount of new features and quality of life improvements that are likely to be welcomed by the headset's user base.


As you'd expect, visionOS 27 is getting the new Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features that Apple has brought to iOS 27 and macOS 27, but this time they feel more seamlessly integrated into the platform compared to previous efforts. For example, Vision Pro users can ask ‌Siri‌ about anything in their surroundings, and using Visual Intelligence, the assistant will see and interpret it in real time, identifying the content, answering questions about it, and providing contextual information to boot.

Interacting with Apple's ‌Siri‌ is achieved via a new 3D orb that users can place anywhere in their virtual space, and just looking at the widget is enough to start a conversation – no "Hey ‌Siri‌" needed. A new ‌Siri‌ app also makes it easier to revisit previous interactions and continue conversations.

Curved windows in visionOS 27
Below is a summary of what else is new in visionOS 27:

Panoramas as environments: Panorama photos can now be turned into immersive spatial environments. Rather than viewing panoramas as flat images, users can step into them and experience added depth and realism, making photos and landscapes feel more lifelike.
Curved app windows: Apps such as Safari, Freeform, and Apple TV now take advantage of new curved window layouts that wrap content around a user's field of view. The feature is designed to create a more immersive workspace and make better use of Vision Pro's virtual display area.
Faster Wi-Fi: Apple says visionOS 27 significantly improves wireless performance, with supported networks delivering speeds up to three times faster than before.
Safari 3D environments: A new Web Environments feature means developers can now use a new immersive API to launch users into a full 360-degree environment from within Safari. Apple says these environments can completely surround a user's physical space, making browsing feel more like a native Vision Pro experience.
Redesigned Control Center: Control Center has been reorganized with dedicated sections for notifications and media playback, system controls, and immersive environments. The redesign aims to make common controls easier to find and reduce the number of steps required to access frequently used settings.
Smaller widgets: A new extra-small widget size allows users to place more widgets throughout their physical space without overwhelming their environment. The additional size option gives users greater flexibility when placing clocks, weather widgets, photos, and other persistent spatial content.
Glance-to-expand notifications: Notifications will now automatically expand when a user looks at them, thereby reducing the need for hand gestures or manual interaction. The feature means quicker access to information, while remaining in line with visionOS's eyes-first interaction model.
Spatially preview your Mac: Mac owners can now preview and edit 3D models from their laptop directly in visionOS, while Quick Look enhancements allow for annotations to be added directly to 3D models.
New Environment: Apple has added a new immersive environment based on Thórsmörk, a nature reserve in Iceland known for its dramatic mountains, valleys, and glaciers. Users can select the environment as a virtual backdrop for work and entertainment, just like the existing environments.
Developer enhancements: Apple is introducing new frameworks, APIs, and tools to help developers build more advanced spatial experiences. The updates include RealityKit improvements, Environment Occlusion for more realistic blending of virtual and physical objects, enhanced asset rendering technologies, updates to Reality Composer Pro 3, and improvements for popular game engines.
The new Control Center design for visionOS 27

The visionOS 27 developer beta is available now, ahead of the software's full release this fall. Apple says ‌Siri‌ AI will begin rolling out later this year as a beta feature and will initially support English only. However, unlike on iPhone and iPad, where ‌Siri‌ AI will not be available at launch in the European Union, Vision Pro users in the EU will have access to the feature from day one.Related Roundup: Apple Vision ProTag: SiriBuyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro
This article, "visionOS 27: Siri AI, Eye-Aware Notifications, Curved Windows, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
macOS 27 Golden Gate adds pull-to-refresh support to the Mac, adopting one of iPhone and iPad's most familiar gestures for the first time.


The feature, which Apple calls "Swipe down to refresh," lets users swipe down within apps to fetch the latest content, rather than relying on a keyboard shortcut or menu item. Apple confirmed that Safari, Mail, News, Podcasts, and Calendar are among the apps that support the gesture at launch.

Pull-to-refresh has been a staple of iOS and iPadOS for many years, offering an intuitive, gesture-driven way to update app content. Its arrival on macOS suggests Apple is continuing to blur the interaction patterns between its platforms.

Apple is reportedly planning to launch a "MacBook Ultra", a new top-tier laptop expected to feature a touchscreen OLED display with an M6-series chip, the Dynamic Island, and a thinner design. Reports suggest early 2027 is the most likely launch window, following delays attributed to the global memory chip shortage. Touch-friendly interface updates to macOS are almost certainly related to that future product.Related Roundup: macOS 27
This article, "macOS 27 Golden Gate Adopts iPhone-Like Pull-to-Refresh Support" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple has published a five-minute recap video summarizing the key announcements from its WWDC26 Platforms State of the Union, covering rebuilt intelligence frameworks, platform design changes, and major developer tools updates.


Apple said its Foundation Models have been rebuilt from the ground up in collaboration with Google, leveraging technology from the Gemini family of models. The Foundation Models framework now supports image input and cloud model integration, allowing developers to connect to any cloud model provider for more complex tasks.

New dynamic profiles are also included to simplify building AI agents and skills by swapping tools in and out and updating instructions on the fly. Core AI, an entirely new framework for running on-device models, is built into the OS and designed to take full advantage of Apple Silicon.

App Intents have been updated to connect apps to Apple Intelligence, making content discoverable and actions available through Siri via natural language, with a new View Annotations API allowing users to act on what's on screen just by asking.

The refined Liquid Glass design system features prominently in the recap. Apple said the design is more consistent and personalizable, with better readability. On macOS, every window now shares a tighter corner radius. App icons receive sharper rendering automatically, with new refraction effects available through Icon Composer.

iOS apps are now resizable, allowing users to take advantage of larger displays when running them on iPads or Macs via iPhone mirroring, with a new resizable iOS Simulator to make testing across sizes easier.

SwiftUI received a range of updates, including drag-to-reorder and swipe actions in any container, nested layouts that resize up to twice as fast, and automatic async image caching. Toolbars now offer finer control over visibility as space shrinks, and a new Spatial Preview Framework for the Apple Vision Pro lets developers stream 3D models from a Mac into physical space.

In Xcode 27, projects load faster and the app is 30% smaller as it moves to Apple Silicon-only. Settings now sync via iCloud, the toolbar is fully customizable, and themes including Emerald, Neon Noir, and Coral Reef bring color throughout the app.

Xcode Cloud is easier to set up with builds up to twice as fast. A new Device Hub replaces Simulator, bringing virtual and physical devices together in one place with live resizing and full hardware control from the Mac.

Apple said it is working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to bring their agents into Xcode. Agent conversations now behave like files and can be opened, split, and stacked in the Navigator. Agents can run tests, use Playgrounds, customize previews across light and dark mode and other configurations, and drive a running app end-to-end. Developers can extend Xcode further through plugins that bring skills, MCP tools, and agents via the agent-client protocol, with Figma and GitHub shipping their own plugins at launch.

The full Platforms State of the Union video is available on the Apple Developer app, website, and YouTube.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tag: WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Apple Shares 5-Minute WWDC Platforms State of the Union Recap Video" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple yesterday announced several improvements to Apple Podcasts, including video podcast playback on macOS and a fully redesigned tvOS app.


Mac users will gain a new, enhanced video podcast experience in ‌Apple Podcasts‌, including Picture in Picture support for watching episodes while multitasking. The update brings the full mobile ‌Apple Podcasts‌ experience to the Mac, with audio and video content alongside transcripts, timed links, and chapters.

The ‌Apple Podcasts‌ app on tvOS is receiving a complete redesign with video podcast playback, a new sidebar navigation for easier browsing, and support for podcast creators' episode and show artwork. The update is aimed at making it simpler to discover and enjoy video content on the big screen.

Across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro, as well as on the web at podcasts.apple.com, Apple is also adding a new search within show feature. The tool allows users to search directly within a show from its See All Episodes view, making it easier to locate a specific episode without scrolling through an entire back catalog.

The updates will arrive this fall as part of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, visionOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, and tvOS 27.Related Roundup: Apple TVTag: Apple PodcastsBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
This article, "Apple Podcasts Gets Video on Mac and Apple TV, Plus New Search Feature" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption figures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads were running those software versions on the day before the start of WWDC 2026 and the release of the first iOS 27 developer beta.


These adoption numbers are based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on Sunday, June 7, according to Apple.

The statistics are as follows:86% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were running iOS 26.
79% of all iPhones were running iOS 26.
79% of all iPads introduced in the last four years were running iPadOS 26.
68% of all iPads were running iPadOS 26.Here is how that compares to the iOS 18 adoption figures that Apple shared based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on Thursday, June 5, 2025:88% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were running iOS 18.
82% of all iPhones were running iOS 18.
81% of all iPads introduced in the last four years were running iPadOS 18.
71% of all iPads were running iPadOS 18.iOS 27 beta testing is now underway, so this will be Apple's final update on iOS 26 adoption.Related Roundups: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, WWDC 2026Tag: iOS AdoptionRelated Forums: iOS 26, Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Apple Reveals How Many iPhones Were Running iOS 26 Before WWDC" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The European Commission has responded to Apple's announcement that Siri AI will not launch in the EU, saying the decision is entirely Apple's and that the company sought an exemption from its legal obligations rather than a compliant solution.


Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels (via Reuters) that Apple had failed to develop interoperability solutions meeting EU privacy and security standards, and instead asked to be let off the hook entirely.



The statement appears to contradict Apple's characterization of events somewhat. Apple announced yesterday that Siri AI would not be available in the EU on iOS or iPadOS, blaming regulators for refusing to engage constructively on proposed solutions.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, said the company was "deeply disappointed" and cited what it described as regulators' refusal to accept any of Apple's proposals, including a system called Trusted System Agent that would have allowed third-party virtual assistants to safely access the same device capabilities as ‌Siri‌ AI.

The Commission's account tells a different story. Rather than negotiating over Apple's proposed solutions, regulators say Apple simply requested a blanket exemption from its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act, something the Commission says is not an available option. Apple's statement framed the DMA's requirements as demanding that any AI system be given "nearly unlimited access" to a user's device.

When iOS 27 and Apple's other major new software updates are released later this year, users in the EU will not have access to ‌Siri‌ AI or any of its new features, including the app for revisiting and starting new conversations. Apple said it hopes to eventually bring ‌Siri‌ AI to the EU and will continue to engage with regulators, but offered no timeline.Tags: European Commission, European Union, Siri, Siri AI
This article, "EU Says Decision Not to Launch Siri AI in Europe Is Apple's Alone" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple executives have detailed the architecture of the company's new Apple Foundation Models (AFM) and clarified exactly how Google's technology factored into their development.


Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, held a post-keynote tech talk (via 9to5Mac) with press on Monday alongside AI VP Amar Subramanya, Siri lead Mike Rockwell, and software VP Sebastien Marineau-Mes to walk through how the third-generation AFM family was built and how it powers Apple Intelligence.

"The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none," Federighi said, explaining that Apple uses none of the Gemini models deployed to Google's customers, none of Google's client-side code, and no Google Search infrastructure as the knowledge backbone.



Subramanya outlined the new AFM family, which spans two on-device models and three server-side models. The on-device tier consists of AFM Core, a next-generation dense architecture model, and AFM Core Advanced, which uses a sparse architecture and is natively multimodal.

Subramanya said AFM Core Advanced is "unlike any on-device model we've run before," enabling new features including invitation and expressive voices without any cloud requests. On the server side, AFM Cloud handles latency-optimized Private Cloud Compute requests, while AFM Cloud Image powers image generation and editing features including spatial reframing.

The key detail on the Google collaboration came in Subramanya's description of how these four models were trained. "All of these are custom built for Apple Silicon, trained using proprietary data with reinforcement learning and refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models," he said, making clear that Google's contribution was distillation-based, not a wholesale adoption of Gemini.

The fifth and most capable model, AFM Cloud Pro, is designed for agentic tool use and complex reasoning tasks, with quality that Subramanya said is "similar to Gemini frontier models." This model marks a departure from Apple's standard Private Cloud Compute setup.

To run it, Apple worked with both Google and Nvidia to extend its private cloud infrastructure to Nvidia GPUs hosted in Google's cloud. Marineau-Mes said Apple wanted to use Nvidia's latest chips but required them to be configured so they couldn't read the contents of Apple's servers. A recent Nvidia technology called "ambiguous confidential compute" provided the solution.



Federighi described the broader system architecture as being organized around a System Orchestrator, a piece of software he called "key to the privacy architecture of our entire system." The orchestrator routes any given query to the appropriate model, on-device or cloud, based on the complexity of the request and the personal context required.

It draws on an App Toolbox for in-app actions, a Spotlight Semantic Index for personal content, and on-screen context for real-time awareness. For queries involving current events, responses are found through Apple's own World Knowledge Service, which Federighi said the company has been building for several years.

Apple also maintains that all Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, including the extended Nvidia GPU capacity in Google's cloud, can be independently verified by third-party researchers to confirm that user data is never stored or accessed.Tags: Apple Intelligence, Craig Federighi, Google
This article, "Apple's New AI Models Contain 'None' of Google's Gemini Assistant" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Certain Apple Intelligence features in iOS 27 will carry daily usage limits, with iCloud+ subscribers receiving higher allowances than free users.


The company reiterated the details in its press release accompanying yesterday's ‌Apple Intelligence‌ announcements. Apple said the limits apply to features that rely on "powerful server models," with image generation cited as the primary example. According to Apple, increased access will be available with most ‌iCloud‌+ subscription plans.



The phrase "most ‌iCloud‌+ plans" suggests the cheapest tier, priced at $0.99 per month, may not qualify for the higher limits. Subscribers on any higher ‌iCloud‌+ tier, or those with an Apple One bundle, appear to be in line for expanded access to advanced AI image generation and potentially other server-reliant features.

‌iCloud‌+ subscribers will also gain additional benefits in the Home app, including upgraded support for HomeKit Secure Video on compatible smart cameras.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tags: Apple Intelligence, HomeKit Secure Video, iCloudRelated Forum: Apple Music, Apple Pay/Card, iCloud, Fitness+
This article, "iCloud+ Subscribers Get Higher Apple Intelligence Usage Limits in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple yesterday detailed several updates coming to Apple Music in iOS 27, including redesigned artist and album pages, an upgraded AutoMix feature, and a suite of performance improvements.


The most immediately visible change is a refreshed artist page, which now features a prominent shuffle play button, a new artist name display, and various other layout adjustments. Apple also says album pages have been updated, though no visible changes are apparent in the first ‌iOS 27‌ developer beta.

AutoMix, Apple's AI-powered feature that blends songs using matching key and tempo, has also been upgraded. Apple says it has improved the underlying algorithms to generate new transition types, making for more seamless blends between tracks. The standard Crossfade option remains available for users who prefer it.

Apple says ‌iOS 27‌ improves the "reliability of ‌Apple Music‌ streaming." Apple has additionally improved the speed at which the Now Playing view loads, as well as the time it takes for streaming playback to begin from a fresh launch, both of which should make the app feel more responsive overall. Users can also now swipe away the Now Playing widget on the Lock Screen to dismiss it.

‌Apple Music‌ gains deeper integration with the all-new Siri AI in ‌iOS 27‌. Users can ask ‌Siri‌ about an artist and then follow up with natural commands such as "play one of her new singles" mid-conversation to kick off a playback session without breaking the flow.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Apple Music
This article, "Apple Music Gains AutoMix Upgrades and More in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
When AirPods owners connect to their iPhone running iOS 27, they'll see a completely revamped settings menu for their earbuds that does a better job at organizing all of the feature options that Apple has added over the last few years.


In the first iOS 27 developer beta, released on Monday, the new settings menu can be accessed in the same way as the old one – i.e. by appearing only when your AirPods are paired with your iPhone – but the menu itself is now a lot more easy to navigate.

Apple has added a volume slider under the Listening Mode toggles, while the Hearing Health, Call Controls/Camera Control, Live Translation and Adaptive Audio sections have been condensed into separate menus identified by new icons: Accessibility, Audio & Routing, Hearing Health, and Controls & Gestures. There are also new menus for Battery, Privacy, and Find My options.

The new design makes the AirPods settings menu a lot more compact, and it no longer feels like you have to endlessly scroll to try and find the option you're after. Apple has also implemented the redesign in System Settings for macOS 27 Golden Gate.


Apple plans to release a public beta version of iOS 27 and macOS 27 next month, with a general release of the updates expected in the fall.Related Roundups: AirPods 4, iOS 27Buyer's Guide: AirPods (Caution)Related Forum: AirPods
This article, "iOS 27 Introduces Overhauled AirPods Settings Menu" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
BenQ is expanding its display lineup with the MA320UG, a 32-inch 4K 120Hz display designed for Mac users. BenQ's new $830 display connects to a Mac using Thunderbolt 4, and provides up to 96W charging.


The MA320UG has an appealing design with a silver aluminum stand and a round height-adjustment arm that has up to 150mm of travel. It can be used in landscape or portrait mode by rotating, and the bottom of the base has a rubber pad where a Mac can sit. It has tilt and swivel functionality for getting an ideal viewing angle. There are slim bezels at the sides and top of the display, and a thicker bezel at the bottom.


There's an upstream Thunderbolt port, a downstream Thunderbolt port to daisy chain a second display, two USB-C ports (one with 35W charging), two USB-A ports, and two HDMI ports at the back of the display. An always-on charging mode lets devices charge when the display is turned off, and there are two speakers included. Speakers in displays are generally not great, and that's the case here. The sound is fine, but if you want good sound, use your Mac's speakers or get external speakers. The 96W charging was enough to keep my MacBook Pro topped up, even though the ‌MacBook Pro‌ can draw up to 140W.

I tested the MA320UG with a 16-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌, and it's always tricky evaluating a 4K display next to a ‌MacBook Pro‌ display, because it's never going to look as crisp. A 4K 32-inch display is about 138 pixels per inch (PPI), while my ‌MacBook Pro‌ display is 254 PPI.


With BenQ's display software, the MA320UG can be set to 2560x1440, which is the default, 3840x2160, or a lower resolution. The lower the resolution, the larger the on-screen elements. I find 3840x2160 to be too small, and 2560x1440 to be too big, so there's no real sweet spot. The software doesn't allow for it, but I used my Mac's settings for a 3008x1692 resolution for a more consistent UI size with my ‌MacBook Pro‌.

Text on the MA320UG is slightly fuzzier than on the ‌MacBook Pro‌'s display at the three higher resolutions I tested, but it's still entirely readable with HiDPI for Retina scaling. I don't notice the difference when I'm absorbed in work, but if I sit and stare at both displays, I can see the softness of the text on BenQ's display. I know some people are bothered by the disparity, but it's not something I think about unless I concentrate on it.


HDR video in BenQ's HDR mode is where I can see the biggest difference between the MA320UG and the ‌MacBook Pro‌. The ‌MacBook Pro‌'s display is much brighter and the contrast ratio is higher, so it wins out when it comes to color variation and detail. Everything has more depth on the ‌MacBook Pro‌ display.


If I'm not sitting at my desk and looking at the same HDR video on both displays at the same time, the MA320UG is totally fine, and I don't know what I'm missing. If I look at the MA320UG alone, it looks great. The MA320UG has a 120Hz refresh rate, which does match the ProMotion of the ‌MacBook Pro‌ for smooth scrolling, so there's no jarring transition. While the refresh rate is up to 120Hz, it tops out at 60Hz when using HiDPI and HDR at the same time due to bandwidth limitations.

You can have 120Hz HiDPI, 120Hz HDR, or HiDPI HDR enabled, but not all three, and if that sounds confusing, it is. The limitation is because of the bandwidth needed for 4K, HDR, 120Hz, and Retina scaling all at once, and it's true for other 4K HDR 120Hz displays too.

Mac settings and BenQ's software aren't intuitive when it comes to using the different modes. The app doesn't allow refresh rates to be manually adjusted, and it's not clear why HDR can't be activated when in HiDPI mode and at 120Hz. In the native display settings, HDR doesn't even show up as an option. I have to use the Mac settings to drop to 60Hz when using HiDPI, then the HDR option appears.


I don't know that anyone is going to want to use 120Hz HDR without HiDPI in a scaled mode because it looks bad, so HDR mode effectively means running at 60Hz unless you're at the native 4K resolution. At 4K, you're not using HiDPI, so 120Hz HDR works fine. You can set up modes on the BenQ display to switch these parameters quickly when you want to watch HDR content.

The MA320UG uses an IPS panel with what BenQ calls a "Nano Gloss" coating. It has 450 nits brightness, a 2000:1 contrast ratio, and DisplayHDR 400. It does not have the brightness level or the contrast ratio for the bright colors and deep blacks that make HDR content look incredible on a Retina display, but it's not terrible. Content that's bright makes the entire display brighter, drowning out dark colors and cutting some detail. This wouldn't be my first choice for HDR content, but it is an option.


"Nano Gloss" is indeed glossy, and it looks fairly similar to the coating on my ‌MacBook Pro‌ and Studio Display. It's glossier than other 4K displays I've used, which are typically more matte. It has reflectivity that's similar to a ‌MacBook Pro‌'s display, so it's maybe not the best monitor if you have a bunch of bright lights behind you, or light from a bright window.


BenQ says the MA320UG covers 98 percent of the P3 wide color gamut, with a color syncing feature that matches the color of the display to the Mac's display. I thought the colors were close to identical on the default setting when comparing the same image on the MacBook's screen and the BenQ display. I don't have a colorimeter, but to the naked eye it was close. There are options for tweaking red, blue, and green to get a better match if needed. The Mac color matching feature does not seem to work when the display is in HDR mode because HDR settings override it.

The display supports setting different color profiles like P3, sRGB, Cinema, Game, or ePaper. Cinema cranks up contrast while lowering brightness, while Game increases brightness and sharpness. ePaper is a black and white mode, which is interesting if you want a quick access grayscale mode for reading. You can also set a custom user mode and adjust gamma, color temperature, contrast, sharpness, hue, and saturation.

Display Pilot 2 is BenQ's display software that adds multiple "Mac" features to the MA320UG. I have mixed feelings about the software. It's useful and feature-rich, but wanted me to sign in with an Apple or Google account when I first installed it. My Apple Account passkey would not work, but I was able to use the software in guest mode. Signing in enables auto backup of personal settings to a Cloud server and allows display settings to sync across devices, but I'm not sure most people need that. It also opted me in to sharing analytics, diagnostics, and usage information with BenQ automatically (an opt out toggle is available in settings).

You need the software to get the full feature set from the MA320UG, like the ‌MacBook Pro‌ color syncing. It also enables brightness control from your Mac's keyboard, which is done through macOS Accessibility permissions. Other display control apps like BetterDisplay do the same thing. In addition to color matching, True Tone, Night Shift, and automatic brightness sync are available too, so the BenQ display's white balance always mirrors your Mac's white balance. The display has a sensor that can be used to detect ambient light and keep brightness levels matched between the display and the connected Mac, but it made both displays inappropriately bright in my office. The ‌MacBook Pro‌'s ambient light sensor did a better job, and that's also an option for maintaining the same brightness levels.

It is convenient to have a third-party display that behaves in the same way the ‌Studio Display‌ does, because you don't need to dig into menus for things like adjusting brightness. I think the app could use a better interface and improved instructions that outline what each feature does, but I appreciated the unseen features that made Mac settings work.


The app has a long list of settings for customization and to meet different workload needs. It syncs color and Focus modes between the MA320UG and the Mac display. You can set display settings to go with a particular Focus mode. If you activate Do Not Disturb, for example, you can set a Low Blue Light mode on the MA320UG, change the color temperature, or choose a particular color mode. Focus options can be used for quickly changing display color modes by activating a Focus on the Mac. Using Focus modes requires enabling Full Disk Access, and that's not a setting that I enable for any app.

There's a visual optimizer, blue light reduction feature, partition option for changing how tiled windows are displayed, quick access tools for swapping color modes and changing resolution, toggles for HiDPI and HDR, KVM settings, and a DualView mode where you can use one color profile on half the screen, and a different color profile on the other half. I don't know why, but there's also a Google bar that lets you enter a search term in the app that then opens a Google search on the web.

With a 5ms response time, the MA320UG isn't ideal for competitive gaming, but it does support FreeSync for general gaming. There is a built-in KVM switch for using the same peripherals with two Macs or a Mac and a PC, and it can be used for cross-device copy paste and file transfers. Display Pilot 2 needs to be installed on both machines, with PBP mode activated and KVM set to auto switch.

Display Pilot 2 understandably only works with BenQ displays, but that's frustrating if you want to use it with other third-party displays. I have a 4K OLED display for my PC that I sometimes use with my Mac, and if I want to adjust brightness or manage it, I have to use BetterDisplay. I can use BetterDisplay with the BenQ display too, but then I lose some of the features like color matching.

Bottom Line

BenQ's MA320UG is a good 4K display if you're looking for a Mac-friendly 32-inch display at a price that comes in under Apple's own display options. The Mac color matching and the software that allows it to work like a native display are useful, and a 120Hz refresh rate is appreciated when used alongside a ‌MacBook Pro‌.

Many third-party displays are much less Mac-friendly and aren't able to function like a native display, but the MA320UG matches the Mac's color and white balance, which gives it an edge over competing 4K displays.

For a 4K LCD display, the MA320UG has a good screen that pairs well with a Mac. It wouldn't be my first choice for HDR or gaming, but for everyday work, it's a solid option. A lot of displays are designed for Windows machines and don't have features that translate to a Mac, so I do appreciate that BenQ created the MA320UG with Mac functionality in mind.

BenQ's software is decent, as long as you don't have another third-party display that you want to use along with the MA320UG. Multi-display management is a hassle when you have to use two different display software options.

I wouldn't choose this over a ‌Studio Display‌ if I had the budget for Apple's monitor, but it is larger and hundreds of dollars less expensive.

How to Buy

The MA320UG is available from the BenQ website or from Amazon.com for $829.99.

Note: BenQ provided MacRumors with an MA320UG for the purpose of this review. No other compensation was received.
This article, "BenQ MA320UG Review: A 32-Inch 4K 120Hz Display Made for Macs" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Check Point has issued emergency hotfixes for a pair of vulnerabilities affecting VPN deployments that still use the deprecated Internet Key Exchange version 1 (IKEv1) protocol, warning that one of the flaws is already being exploited in the wild.
The more serious issue allows attackers to establish VPN sessions without a valid password, potentially giving them a foothold inside corporate networks. According to the company, attackers have been exploiting the vulnerability since at least early May, with activity accelerating in recent weeks.
“To date, the observed exploitation has been limited to a few dozen targeted organizations globally,” Lotem Finkelstein, vice president of research at Check Point, said in a security blog post. “One case involved confirmed post-compromise activity associated with a Qilin ransomware affiliate.”
The vulnerabilities affect customers using Remote Access VPN, Mobile Access VPN, and certain Spark Firewall products configured for IKEv1.
While the said protocol has been considered legacy technology for years, it remains enabled in some environments for compatibility reasons. Check Point is urging affected customers to apply the newly released hotfixes immediately and, where possible, migrate from IKEv1 to the newer IKEv2 protocol.
The deprecated protocol became an active risk
The exploited bug, tracked as CVE-2026-50571, affects deployments that continue to accept IKEv1-based remote access connections.
According to Check Point, attackers can exploit a logic oversight in how Remote Access and Mobile Access components validate certificates during the authentication process. Exploitation allows an unauthenticated attacker to establish a VPN connection without supplying a valid user password.
While additional steps may be required to access internal resources or escalate privileges, security researchers note that bypassing the VPN login barrier provides attackers with a significant foothold inside targeted environments.
The vulnerability was put under the “Improper Authentication” CWE tagged at CWE-287, with a CVSS score of 9.3 assigned to it. Affected Check Point Quantum software platform versions, which run on the Gaia operating system powering all Check Point products, include R80.20.X (EOS), R80.40 (EOS), R81 (EOS), R81.10 (EOS), R81.10.X, R81.20, R82, R82.00.X, R82.10.
The second vulnerability, CVE-2026-50752, emerged during a broader security review conducted as part of Check Point’s investigation into the improper authentication flaw. Researchers reportedly used the company’s BLAST agentic application security platform to analyze the affected VPN components, leading to the discovery of additional weaknesses in certificate validation logic.
Unlike CVE-2026-50571, the newly identified issue does not allow direct authentication bypass. Instead, it could enable a man-in-the-middle attacker to interfere with site-to-site VPN communications if specific conditions are met.
This flaw received a CVSS score of 7.4, with no exploitation attempts observed in the wild yet.
Mitigations and patches issued
Affected organizations have received a set of resolutions to help with the problem, starting with an attack detection technique.
“Search your Check Point SmartConsole logs for possible VPN certificate authentication attempts associated with the observed attacker infrastructure and certificate subject names,” Check Point said in an advisory that shared SmartConsole queries for scans around the time range, attacker IP address, and VPN/IKE activities.
Additionally, the company listed three mitigation tips for protection outside and beyond patches. These include removing support for legacy Remote Access client connections, configuring Global properties for Remote Access VPN authentication to IKEv2 only, and setting the machine certificate authentication as mandatory. Lastly, and most effectively, the company issued a string of downloadable hotfixes corresponding to each affected version, which customers can download and apply for complete and immediate protection.
View the full article
Apple adds native ultrawide display support in macOS 27 Golden Gate, bringing higher resolutions and persistent display arrangements to users of widescreen monitors.


The update allows ultrawide displays to run at resolutions up to 5K at 120Hz. Apple also says that display arrangements are now preserved across connections, so the layout automatically restores exactly as the user left it each time they plug in.

The feature addresses a longstanding pain point for Mac users with ultrawide setups, who previously had to work around limited native resolution options or manually reconfigure their display arrangements after each connection.

‌macOS 27‌ Golden Gate is expected to ship to the public this fall. It is available to developers in beta now. Related Roundup: macOS 27
This article, "macOS 27 Golden Gate Gains Native Ultrawide Display Support" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple has taken a new approach to its stock wallpapers with iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate, using variations of the same artwork across all platforms for the first time.


In previous years, most platforms shipped with their own distinct wallpaper. This year, they all share a design called "Celosia," featuring sweeping, overlapping curves and soft shadows inspired by layered flower petals or folded paper. In Light mode, warm sandy gold blends into soft purple; Dark mode shifts to moody deep indigos with silvery-blue edges. The curved shapes also form a stylized "27," tying the design directly to the software version.

The ‌iOS 27‌ and iPadOS 27 Celosia collection comes in three variants: a standard ‌iOS 27‌ version, Dynamic, and Color, each with separate Light and Dark versions optimized for the Home Screen and Lock Screen. ‌macOS 27‌ Golden Gate ships with dynamic wallpapers accessible only through the OS itself. Even CarPlay contains 14 Celosia wallpaper options in the first developer beta, spanning Light and Dark modes across Grey, Purple, Red, Teal, Blue, Brown, Dark Blue, and Green variants, plus a Hero option in both Light and Dark.Related Roundups: CarPlay, iOS 27, macOS 27Related Forum: HomePod, HomeKit, CarPlay, Home & Auto Technology
This article, "Apple Unifies iOS 27, macOS, and Even CarPlay Wallpapers for First Time" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
macOS 27 Golden Gate brings a major improvement to iPhone Mirroring, allowing users to resize the window beyond the iPhone's fixed aspect ratio for the first time.



Until now, iPhone Mirroring has been limited to the iPhone's native aspect ratio in a small window. Users could adjust the window's overall size somewhat, but its proportions remained locked. With ‌macOS 27‌, users can now change the aspect ratio of the iPhone Mirroring window itself, offering dramatically more flexibility for workflows that rely on the feature.

The update was revealed in Apple's Platforms State of the Union address. Several fixed aspect ratios appear to be available rather than free-form resizing, meaning the system snaps to the nearest supported shape. Depending on the chosen aspect ratio, iPhone Mirroring renders either an adjusted version of the app's iPhone layout or its iPad layout, when one is available. Aspect ratio adjustments are currently limited to iOS 27-compatible apps, which at present means only native iOS apps.



‌macOS 27‌ also adds Control Center to iPhone Mirroring, joining the Home Screen, App Switcher, and Spotlight as iPhone areas accessible directly from the Mac.

The improvements arrive alongside a broader push Apple made at this year's Platforms State of the Union, where developers were encouraged to move away from designing apps for fixed orientations and specific devices, and instead target what Apple described as "a dynamic range of sizes and aspect ratios." Apple introduced resizable iOS apps in iPhone Mirroring and on ‌iPad‌, with developers who rebuild against the latest SDK automatically opted in. A new resizable iOS simulator in Xcode lets developers test layouts across a wide range of screen sizes and aspect ratios.

That guidance appears to have ramifications well beyond iPhone Mirroring, with wide speculation that the feature is essentially a veiled preparation for the upcoming foldable iPhone. Moreover, iOS 27 contains frameworks that point more explicitly toward foldable hardware: "foldState" and "angleDegrees." A third find, a new key that returns the total count of built-in displays on a device, suggests Apple is also preparing the software stack for a device with more than one integrated screen. Taken together, the strings and the resizability push appear to be laying the groundwork for the foldable iPhone, widely expected to be called the "iPhone Ultra" and anticipated to launch alongside the iPhone 18 Pro in September 2026.Related Roundup: macOS 27Tag: iPhone Mirroring
This article, "macOS 27 Lets You Resize iPhone Mirroring in New Aspect Ratios" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple's first iOS 27 developer beta, released on Monday, includes a new feature in the Find My app that lets you temporarily hide your location from select people.


A new "Hide Location" option appears in the user's Find My card in the People section, under "My Location." Tapping it hides your location temporarily for 12 hours before reverting to your previous shared location state. When enabled, the option switches to "Unhide Location."

As it currently works, enabling the feature doesn't appear to notify the person that you are hiding your location from them – your Find My card simply registers "No Location Found" on their device.


Apple intends to make a public beta of iOS 27 available next month, with a general release expected in September.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Find My
This article, "iOS 27: Find My App Lets You Hide Location From Others Temporarily" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple yesterday held its WWDC 2026 Platforms State of the Union, detailing a wide range of updates to its developer tools and platforms, headlined by a major expansion of the Foundation Models framework.


The main announcement was free access to Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute for developers with fewer than two million first-time App Store downloads, removing infrastructure costs as a barrier to building AI-powered features. The framework is also gaining image input support, server-side model integration allowing developers to call third-party models like Claude and Gemini through the same Swift API, and a new Dynamic Profiles system for building multi-agent workflows.

Apple also confirmed the Foundation Models framework will go open source later this summer. Key announcements from the session include:


Foundation Models framework: Free Private Cloud Compute access for smaller developers, image input support, server-side model support (Claude, Gemini, and others), Dynamic Profiles for multi-agent workflows, and open source release later this summer.
Core AI: A brand new framework for running custom on-device models, with ahead-of-time compilation, dedicated instruments, and Python tools for converting PyTorch models to Apple silicon. Powers Siri under the hood.
App Intents and Siri: New entity and intent schemas let apps contribute content to Spotlight's semantic index, making it discoverable and actionable through natural language. A new View Annotations API lets ‌Siri‌ act on on-screen content conversationally.
Xcode 27: 30% smaller and Apple silicon-only, with iCloud settings sync, customizable toolbar, per-project themes, and a new Device Hub replacing Simulator. Agentic coding is expanded significantly: agents can now interact with the simulator, localize apps, run tests, and fix crashes pulled from Organizer. Xcode Cloud builds are up to twice as fast.
Liquid Glass forced migration: Support for opting out of the Liquid Glass design language is being removed. Apps recompiled with Xcode 27 will automatically adopt the new design. Liquid Glass itself has been refined with better content diffusion, a new darkened edge for depth, and a user-facing transparency slider.
Intel Mac deprecation complete: macOS Tahoe was the final Intel release. Developers can now ship Apple silicon-only binaries on the Mac App Store.
iOS app resizability: iPhone apps on iPad and in iPhone Mirroring now support resizing, with apps automatically opting in when rebuilt with the latest SDK. Speculated to be related to the upcoming foldable iPhone.
SwiftUI updates: Reorderable containers and swipe actions for any container, layouts that resize up to twice as fast, lazy state initialization, and a new document infrastructure with first-class URL access.
Swift 6.4: Includes an anyAppleOS availability shorthand, suppressible compiler warnings, async support in defer blocks, and improved type-checker diagnostics. Parts of the OS kernel are now being written in Swift.
Notion migrating to SwiftUI: Apple cited Notion as a major app moving its UI from cross-platform web technologies to native SwiftUI for performance and consistency.
Game Porting Toolkit: Major update adding AI skills for coding agents and new Metal command line tools to speed up bringing games to Apple platforms.
MLX: Apple's open source ML research framework now supports Metal 4 and can scale model training across multiple Macs via RDMA over Thunderbolt.
Spatial Preview framework: Mac apps can now extend 3D models into space around Apple Vision Pro wearers in real time.


Apple also mentioned that its fifth Apple Developer Center will open this fall in Berlin, joining Cupertino, Shanghai, Singapore, and Bengaluru.

See Apple's full address video for more information. All sessions from ‌WWDC 2026‌ are available via the Apple Developer app, the Apple Developer website, and YouTube.Tag: WWDC 2026
This article, "Apple Outlines Major AI and Developer Tool Updates at 2026 Platforms State of the Union" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Cybercriminals are increasingly reshaping familiar social-engineering campaigns around the way employees use AI, with separate advisories from Microsoft and Google documenting how attackers are adapting scams to AI-powered tools, trusted digital services, and changing workplace behavior.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence, in its advisory, said threat actors are “leveraging the wider global interest around AI itself as a social engineering lure,” impersonating platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, and Anthropic’s Claude to distribute malware, steal credentials, and commit financial fraud.
Google, in its latest Fraud & Scams Advisory, separately highlighted the evolution of traditional phishing into Adversary-in-the-Middle (AITM) and QR-code phishing attacks while documenting growing abuse of trusted cloud services, AI-driven investment scams, and impersonation campaigns.
While Microsoft’s advisory focuses on AI-branded lures and Google’s examines broader fraud trends, both point to attackers evolving established social-engineering techniques to match the growing role AI plays in everyday enterprise workflows rather than relying solely on technical exploits.
AI lures move into the mainstream
“Threat actors are quick to capitalize on highly anticipated launches or emerging trends, leveraging trusted branding and exploiting user curiosity to improve the success rates of their campaigns,” Microsoft said in the advisory. The company added that despite the AI branding, the campaigns continue to rely on “longstanding tactics” such as urgency-driven messaging, abuse of trusted services, and multi-stage redirection chains.
Microsoft argued that AI-themed campaigns are becoming more than opportunistic attacks. “AI-themed lures reflect a shift in social engineering that is likely to persist as a long-term tactic used by threat actors, from cybercriminal groups to nation states,” the advisory said, citing campaigns that used ChatGPT-themed subscription renewal emails and fake DeepSeek V4 repositories employing stolen branding and search optimization to distribute Vidar Stealer malware.
Google’s advisory reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle.
“Scams continue to be a persistent global challenge, fueled by sophisticated transnational crime groups who seek to exploit people online for financial gain,” the company said, citing estimates that global fraud losses could approach $580 billion in 2025. The advisory describes Calendar Phishing campaigns that abuse trusted cloud productivity suites, AITM attacks that mirror legitimate login experiences, and cryptocurrency scams that persuade victims to execute malicious code under the guise of AI-powered investment guidance.
Rather than introducing entirely new attack techniques, both advisories document cybercriminals adapting familiar phishing, impersonation, and malware campaigns to environments where AI tools and cloud services have become part of everyday work.
Security shifts to the human layer
Security researchers say the findings reflect a broader enterprise challenge as AI becomes embedded across business applications and employee workflows.
“AI-enhanced phishing and impersonation, including deepfakes, voice cloning, and social engineering, ranks as the single most-cited AI-driven threat concerning enterprises today, with 58% of respondents flagging it,” said Sakshi Grover, senior research manager for Cybersecurity Services Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
“The attack surface has migrated from software stacks to the cognitive and behavioral layer — what employees believe, click on, and act upon when an AI-branded experience tells them to,” Grover said.
Prabhjyot Kaur, senior analyst at Everest Group, said organizations should see the trend as more than another wave of shadow IT.
“Shadow IT was a visibility problem. Shadow AI is a trust exploitation problem,” Kaur said, arguing that AI capabilities increasingly arrive through embedded SaaS features, browser extensions, copilots and productivity platforms that employees adopt as part of routine work.
Building resilience beyond phishing
For enterprise leaders, the challenge increasingly lies in adapting security programs to changing user behavior rather than responding to isolated phishing campaigns, analysts added.
Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said adversaries are “capitalizing on the credibility of leading AI brands” to make social-engineering campaigns “hyper realistic and convincingly personalized” through deepfakes, impersonation, and disinformation.
“Attackers are adapting to how employees interact with AI, targeting the human layer by manipulating trust and routine behaviors rather than seeking technical exploits,” Kaushik said.
She said organizations should focus on long-term resilience instead of episodic response. “The strategic battle has shifted from blocking individual episodic attacks to managing the environment itself,” Kaushik said, arguing that stopping one deepfake or impersonation attempt offers only a tactical victory if the broader attack ecosystem continues to evolve.
View the full article
Apple in iOS 27 has made a small but significant change to how the Now Playing widget works on your iPhone's Lock Screen – you can now swipe it away to get rid of it.


Previously, there was no way to dismiss the Now Playing interface on the Lock Screen. But in the first iOS 27 developer build released yesterday, a leftward swipe on the playback controls slides in a Clear button from the right.

Clearing the controls from the screen also removes the smaller Now Playing widget from the Dynamic Island.

It's not quite clear yet how to bring the widgets back immediately – as 9to5Mac notes, the only workaround appears to be pausing whatever's playing, waiting a few minutes, and then resuming it. It also seems to depend on which app you're using for playback. For example, switching from a podcast to video playback re-invokes the Lock Screen widget.


Being able to make the Now Playing widget go away is admittedly a small tweak, but it will be welcomed by anyone who likes to dismiss whatever is taking up space on their Lock Screen, playback controls included. Apple will make iOS 27 available in public beta next month, with a general release expected in the fall.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Lets You Dismiss the 'Now Playing' Lock Screen Widget" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple yesterday announced a redesigned Find My app in watchOS 27 that brings all tracking functionality into a single, map-centric interface.


Previously split across separate Find Devices, Find People, and Find Items apps, the new app now consolidates everything into one unified view. Apple says the update makes it easier to locate the people, devices, and items you care about, with a map-centric layout as the central navigation paradigm.

The redesign also introduces more flexible sharing options within ‌Find My‌, giving users greater control over how they share their location and item tracking with others.Related Roundup: watchOS 26Tag: Find MyRelated Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "watchOS 27 Gains a Consolidated and Redesigned Find My App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Instagram is now rolling out a long-awaited feature that lets users rearrange posts in any order on their profile grid.


The update, which began reaching users on June 8, is available via the Instagram app for iPhone and Android. To reorder posts, users can go to their profile, long-press any post on the grid, select "reorder grid" from the pop-up menu, then drag content to the desired position. Changes save immediately and are visible to all visitors.

Until now, Instagram profiles have displayed posts in strict reverse-chronological order, with the only exception being the ability to pin up to three posts at the top. The new feature lifts that restriction entirely, allowing posts of any age to be freely repositioned. Pinned posts continue to appear at the top regardless of any reordering.


The feature had been available to some users in test groups prior to the wider release. It arrives nearly a year after it was first revealed. Instagram first announced the change in January 2025, partly as an apology to users whose carefully assembled profile pages had been disrupted when the app switched from square to taller, vertically oriented thumbnails.Tag: Instagram
This article, "Instagram Now Lets Users Reorder Posts on Their Profile Grid" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple made the visionOS 27 beta available to Vision Pro developers after Monday's WWDC 2026 keynote, and in this version there is a new Environment that allows you to immerse yourself in the Icelandic highlands.


"Thórsmörk" is a mountain ridge in Iceland that was named after the Norse god Thor. It offers a nighttime and daytime experience of the icy landscape surrounding a lake, complete with wintry sound effects and running water. It also includes a view of the Northern Lights.

Environments let you transform your physical surroundings into a different place, like Yosemite, Mount Hood, or the Moon. Environments can be used while you're using apps or they can provide a backdrop when you're watching movies. In Thórsmörk, for example, if you're watching a video, the scene's colors are reflected in the snow and the water for extra immersion.

Last year, visionOS 26 introduced an interactive Jupiter Environment that uses imagery from NASA for maximum authenticity.

There were only a handful of passing references to visionOS 27 during Apple's keynote, but the Vision Pro software is set to benefit from the same Siri AI features that are coming to iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate. visionOS 27 is expected to be released in the fall.Related Roundup: Apple Vision ProTag: WWDC 2026Buyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro
This article, "visionOS 27 Gains New Icelandic Environment Called 'Thórsmörk'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple expands GymKit support to the iPhone and AirPods Pro 3 with iOS 27, extending the gym equipment connectivity feature beyond Apple Watch for the first time.


GymKit originally launched in 2017 and has, until now, been exclusive to the Apple Watch feature, requiring users to wear the watch and tap it against compatible equipment to pair. The expansion means that iPhone and ‌AirPods Pro 3‌ users can now also connect to supported cardio machines, including treadmills, ellipticals, bikes, and stair-steppers, for more accurate real-time workout metrics, without needing an Apple Watch on their wrist.

The feature works via two-way data exchange, syncing metrics such as speed, pace, distance, calories, and heart rate between the device and the machine in real time, with the goal of aligning what the user sees on their device with what the equipment displays.Related Roundup: AirPods Pro 3Tags: AirPods Pro 3, GymKitBuyer's Guide: AirPods Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: AirPods
This article, "Apple Expands GymKit to iPhone and AirPods Pro 3" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple has expanded the number of major U.S. cities where its Apple Pay for transit feature is supported, providing a simple way for those who use public transportation to pay for rides.


‌Apple Pay‌ for transit now works in Atlanta, the Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Some of these cities have supported ‌Apple Pay‌ for transit purposes for several years, and in others like Dallas and Houston, support is new as of June 2026.

In cities that support Apple Pay for transit, iPhone users can enable Express Mode to pay fares without unlocking their device or using Face ID or Touch ID. To choose a card, open Settings, go to Wallet & Apple Pay, and tap Express Transit Card.

When a credit or debit card is set for Express Mode, it can be used automatically at transit terminals. On iPhone XS and later, Express Transit may also work for up to five hours after the battery runs out, thanks to power reserve.

Some cities allow standard credit or debit cards for transit, while others require a dedicated transit card in the Wallet app. For example, in Houston, users add a virtual RideMETRO card, whereas in Dallas users can pay their DART transit fare with any contactless credit card or debit card.

The iPhone 6s, 2016 iPhone SE, and later support Express Mode for Apple Pay transit. It also works on Apple Watch Series 1 and later with watchOS 5.2.1 or newer.

Apple Pay transit is available in several cities around the world, including London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Toronto, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Transit support varies by city, so check local requirements before traveling. In supported areas, Apple Pay can make public transit easier by letting you pay at the gate without buying tickets in advance. Apple lists supported transit systems on its website.Related Roundup: Apple PayTags: Apple Pay, Express TransitRelated Forum: Apple Music, Apple Pay/Card, iCloud, Fitness+
This article, "Apple Pay for Transit Now Works in These 14 U.S. Cities" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Researchers from the University of Toronto developed a computer worm prototype powered by an AI agent that successfully self-replicated to different systems within a simulated computer network. The worm used a free large language model (LLM) running on local hardware and exploited a combination of older and new vulnerabilities, as well as misconfigurations that remain all too common in enterprise environments.
At a time when CISOs and the security industry are concerned about the ability of frontier models such as Anthropic’s Mythos to find zero-day vulnerabilities in critical software, this experiment is a reminder that attackers don’t need cutting-edge AI to wreak havoc across typical corporate networks. In fact, using paid models accessible only via APIs would be a point of failure for an autonomous malicious system like a computer worm, because prompts constructed to bypass safety guardrails would quickly be detected and blocked by the AI labs.
“We discovered that it is possible to create an AI-driven computer worm, using only small, free AI models, that can autonomously identify each machine’s unique weak points (including vulnerabilities just reported by industry and misconfigurations such as reused passwords) and exploit them, hijacking computing power to take over regular devices such as laptops, cameras, and everything else online, and then copying itself onto servers and networks to either steal data or launch new attacks,” the research team from the University of Toronto’s CleverHans Lab said in their report. “We did this without using the newest, most powerful AI models. There is no single defence against this new threat.”
Building an agentic harness for offensive cyberattacks
While frontier models such as Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 offer million-token context windows and can reason for tens of minutes and even hours at a time to solve a single task, this approach does not work for locally hosted LLMs running on a single GPU. Their context windows are much smaller and generally exhibit weaker instruction-following abilities for agentic tasks.
Vibe-coding software developers who encountered these problems long ago have solved them by building custom harnesses and agentic frameworks that split complex software engineering projects into phases and steps, executed by multiple sub-agents in parallel that share results via some form of memory system, ranging from a markdown file to a database.
The CleverHans Lab researchers adopted those lessons to build their own harness for offensive security purposes to compensate for local LLM limitations, complete with phases and task-specific nodes that make LLM calls with specialized prompts.
“This core is supported by complementary systems: a hierarchical memory that preserves discoveries across independent LLM calls, tools and their handlers that encapsulate common action sequences and interpret execution results, a skill system that injects context-aware pentesting guidance on demand, and multi-agent coordination that shares intelligence across instances,” they explained in their paper.
Agentic harnesses built for security research and penetration testing are not a new concept and have existed for a while. Open-source examples include RAPTOR, a framework of skills and agents for Claude Code designed for vulnerability discovery and exploit writing, and SecOpsAgentKit.
“Previous models can perform close to, at, or beyond Mythos levels depending on capability by using harnesses,” Gadi Evron, CEO of AI security firm Knostic and one of the creators of RAPTOR, told CSO. “When new models come out, they can achieve in a prompt what previously took a harness, at which point new harnesses are built, and so on and so forth.”
Simulating a vulnerable enterprise network
The CleverHans Lab researchers created a network made up of virtual machines running different operating systems including Ubuntu (16.04-24.04), Debian (9-12), Alpine Linux, Rocky Linux 9, CentOS Stream 9, and Windows Server (2008 R2, 2019, 2022). These VMs simulated servers running a variety of web services, as well as IoT devices and industrial control systems that can be found on typical corporate networks.
The researchers left an assortment of old and new — a few days old — vulnerabilities unpatched on the simulated systems, as well as common insecure configurations and generic flaws such as missing access control or SQL injection. The goal was to test the capability of their AI-powered worm to discover the systems, find the open ports, identify the exposed services, locate the vulnerabilities, exploit them, and then copy itself to the compromised system.
The systems had both remotely exploitable flaws that would provide initial access, as well as local flaws and weaknesses that could be used to elevate the privileges to root and completely take over the machine.
“These two classes evaluate complementary capabilities: CVEs test the agent’s ability to fingerprint software versions and dynamically adapt or compile raw exploit code to fit the target environment, whereas CWEs probe its capacity for open-ended, target-specific reasoning where no off-the-shelf exploit applies,” the researchers said. “To ensure the network reflects vulnerabilities encountered in the real-world, all targets are drawn from three authoritative threat taxonomies [the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, the OWASP Top 10: 2025, and the MITRE ATT&CK framework] covering, respectively, vulnerabilities under active exploitation in the wild, prevalent web and software vulnerabilities, and adversarial techniques used after initial access to a network.”
Furthermore, some virtual machines were equipped with GPUs that would allow the worm to replicate itself and then hijack the computing resources to run the model locally instead of relying on the LLM hosted by the researchers on an external system.
Over the course of seven days and five generations of self-replication, the worm managed to spread to 27 of the 33 systems in the simulated environment. The worm correctly identified the vulnerabilities in 82% of the attempts and managed successful exploitation in 44% of those. Despite the exploitation rate being quite low, the parallel and swarm-like implementation where every compromised system became a new instance of the malicious agent, compensated and eventually led to an overall high success rate.
This largely matches what security researchers from Forescout found in a study performed earlier this year that looked at how good models have become at discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities. While the research showed that the new generation of open-weight models had significantly improved their capabilities of both finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, the smaller variants of those models quantized to run locally on single-GPUs still performed poorly at such tasks.
The researchers noted at the time, however, that by using specialized AI agentic frameworks like RAPTOR they were able to find new zero-days in OpenDNS.
“Many of the open-source or generally commercially available models are already good enough that if used with the correct harness they can find vulnerabilities, exploit them, create malicious code and so on,” Daniel dos Santos, VP of research at Forescout, told CSO. “The new work from U of Toronto shows that similar models can also be used to create dynamically adapting worms.”
Cybercriminals are aware of these advances in model capabilities too based on discussions Dos Santos’ team observed on underground forums, with more attackers focusing on open-source and commercial models instead of “underground” ones fine-tuned for cybercrime.
Organizations running out of time
While zero-day attacks receive a lot of attention and AI has put such flaws within the reach of more attackers than ever, the reality is that there is no shortage of systems on the internet and inside networks that are either misconfigured or vulnerable to known flaws for which patches or mitigations exist.
The University of Toronto experiment shows that defenders need to be able to respond with similar speed, especially since their prototype shows that knowledge about new vulnerabilities can be integrated into the worm’s knowledge base within hours of public disclosure. The ability of the worm to hijack GPUs to run nodes further decreases the investment attackers need to make in running such AI-assisted attacks.
“Organizations have endless technology and security debt, and with AI attacks on the rise, we no longer have time,” Evron said. “Change however is all about time, especially in the enterprise. The key is to start preparing right now. Soon, we won’t measure time to exploitation, but will need to construct new measurements, such as for the ability to handle regularly occurring, concurrent data breaches while minimizing impact on daily operations.”
University of Toronto researchers call for enterprises to adopt AI-assisted penetration testing and fuzzing to discover exploitable weaknesses in their own infrastructure, but also to build the capability to deploy patches or mitigations faster, which is now a significant gap.
They do, however, acknowledge some limitations of their prototype, such as the fact that it was noisy, leaving many behavioral signatures behind that could be detected by endpoint and network monitoring systems. Also their simulated network lacked basic network segmentation, which could be further improved with zero-trust architecture to prevent lateral movement and by minimizing the software dependencies and attack surface on every host system.
“While vulnerabilities, exploits, and attack orchestration are now autonomous, the deeper meaning for defense is that many of our assumptions about building security programs are now challenged,” Evron said. “Until we get to mature defensive AI, we must empower our people with coding agents to bring them up to machine speed, and then defend these agents in turn.”
View the full article
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity flaw impacting BerriAI LiteLLM to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42271 (CVSS score: 8.7), is a command injection vulnerability that could allow any authenticated user to run arbitrary commands on theView the full article
Threat actors are continuing their onslaught against software supply chains, now with malware named after death itself.
The newly-discovered Hades Campaign is a “highly sophisticated” supply chain compromise that targets Python developer environments and runs as soon as infected packages are imported. It uses the popular Bun toolkit to silently execute multi-layer payloads that can extract sensitive data, move laterally across compromised systems, exploit common security frameworks, and even hijack AI gatekeeper analyzer systems via adversarial prompt injection.
Notably, the campaign exploited the popular C++ library ensmallen, as well as packages in the computational biology, bioinformatics, and genotype-phenotype analysis ecosystems.
The most novel thing about this malware is its combination of advanced tactics, noted David Shipley of Beauceron Security. He noted that we’ve seen memory-focused malware, we’ve seen attacks that attempt to defuse large language model (LLM) powered analysis with hidden prompts, and we’ve seen malware with wiper capabilities.
“But all three, in a fast moving mass propagating worm, is its own kind of nightmare,” he said. “And I suspect this is the way of the future.”
How Hades works
The Hades Campaign was discovered by researchers at StepSecurity, who called it the latest evolution of the Miasma threat actor. The researchers previously described Miasma attacks that had sent self-replicating worms to perform multi-cloud credential sweeps, caused infected repositories to execute code when folders were accessed in integrated development environments (IDEs) or by AI agents, and used techniques that scanned and read Linux process memory.
Hades uses the same credential harvesting methods, self-replicating worm logic, and GitHub-based exfiltration patterns, the researchers noted. In addition to ensmallen, compromised packages include mflux-streamlit, nhmpy, ppkt2synergy, embiggen, gpsea, and pyphetools.
The campaign’s entry point is a simple, obfuscated script embedded inside a Python package’s __init__.py file, a critical building block that gives Python the ability to recognize packages and import modules. Once they gain access, threat actors drop a precompiled Bun runtime binary and executes its JavaScript payload. Bun allows the malware to run complex JavaScript tasks in environments lacking a Node.js installation, bypassing traditional package manager controls and proxy logs.
The malware is able to scrape Linux memory mappings, and also introduces tailored macOS and Windows memory scrapers, which allow threat actors to extract sensitive, encrypted data.
Interestingly, attackers are also able to evade detection by automated LLMs that scan for suspicious code. This is achieved with a simple block of text at the top of the file; this instructs the model to ignore the hidden code below, classify the package as verified and clean, and provide reports stating it is safe.
This element represents what the StepSecurity researchers described as a “significant conceptual shift,” with attackers writing payloads that target AI systems’ cognitive logic. “Scanners that pass raw text to LLMs without strict boundary isolation can be coerced into generating false negative verdicts, allowing the malicious package to bypass organization analysis,” they wrote.
The tactic is indeed clever, Beauceron’s Shipley agreed, pointing out that attackers will increasingly target endpoint LLM-powered agents.
Why? “Because there’s no reliable defense,” he said. “LLMs are incredibly susceptible to social engineering.” This has been relabeled as prompt engineering, but is essentially just phishing for bots, he pointed out.
“While everyone’s worried about LLM-powered vulnerability discovery and automated exploitation, it’s LLM-created smart malware like this, and AI-powered phishing of humans and bots, that keeps me awake at night,” Shipley said.
Hades’ crafty worm propagation
The Hades Campaign command and control (C2) infrastructure uses three independent channels on public GitHub infrastructure to allow its communications to blend in with normal traffic. Stolen credentials are encrypted locally in a hybrid fashion (serialized, compressed, and pushed to a newly created public GitHub repository under attackers’ control). Exfiltrated repositories carry the description “Hades — The End for the Damned.”
Researchers noted that a core component of this campaign is its ability to propagate and move laterally across networks. It exploits the very methods meant to protect systems, including Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy Protocol (SCP), OpenID Connect (OIDC),and Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA).
For instance, when running inside a GitHub Actions workflow runner, the malware checks for OIDC variables, then bypasses registry signature policies and generates cryptographically signed SLSA provenance bundles via Sigstore. It can then fetch target libraries and inject the obfuscated script and JavaScript payload. From there, it can publish compromised versions to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository and node package manager (npm) using the target’s credentials and the generated Sigstore bundle.
“This ensures that the published package appears to have valid, cryptographically verified build provenance from the organization’s official GitHub Actions build environment,” the researchers explained.
Further, if a harvested GitHub token has write permissions, the malware will target repositories to extract secrets using GitHub Actions runners. This occurs “directly from the runner’s address space without ever writing them to disk or making a suspicious network connection,” the researchers noted.
The malware also targets rule files and configuration directories for 14 different AI agents and systems, planting custom prompt instructions or executing hooks that trigger a bun run bootstrap command when the victim loads or consults the workspace with their AI assistant. Finally, it establishes persistence on the workstation and monitors for the presence of the stolen token; if that token is revoked, it executes a wiper process to erase the user’s files.
This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.
View the full article
OpenAI’s move to implement a Lockdown Mode that tries to limit data exfiltration by shutting down external capabilities is being seen as making the best out of a bad situation. But Lockdown Mode doesn’t block exfiltration as much as it slightly reduces it, and the reality of enterprises using multiple AI vendors for their agentic models further complicates an already dicey governance strategy.
When activated within OpenAI products’ settings, Lockdown Mode limits web browsing to cached content, limits image support, disables Deep Research and Agent Mode, denies users the ability to approve Canvas-generated code to access the network, and prevents ChatGPT from downloading files for data analysis, though it can still operate on manually uploaded files, OpenAI said in a blog post. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
That post included a frequently-asked-questions section in which OpenAI wrote its own questions. and then answered them. One notably asked “Is prompt injection a major risk?” with the response, “Prompt injection is not currently a major risk, but its impact could grow as attackers develop more sophisticated methods.”
Consultants found that sentence baffling.
“OpenAI’s own posture is telling. It calls prompt injection a frontier research problem, hard enough to warrant a containment mode, while saying in the same breath that it is not currently a major risk,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “A vendor does not build a panic room for a house it believes is safe. Lockdown Mode is the admission itself.”
And the risk of AI-enabled data exfiltration was illustrated recently when some Instagram users’ personal data was stolen after Meta had turned over control of password changes for accounts to an AI agent. 
Still allows some exfiltration
Gogia added that the Lockdown Mode is porous, as it will still allow some data exfiltration; he called the OpenAI effort “a model carrying a trusted user’s authority while acting on instructions hidden in untrusted content. Data can leave by a side door rather than be announced in the chat.”
Tom Findling, CEO of Conifers.ai, also questioned whether OpenAI could block all of what it claims it can block. “It is yet to be seen whether [Lockdown Mode] can be breached or not. Is it Nirvana? Probably not, but this is likely the best they could have done, given the infrastructure they have today.”
An executive with a major agentic cybersecurity firm, who asked to be not named, agreed with Findling: Lockdown Mode “is not going to be validated until someone tries breaking it. Almost every sandboxing solution out there, AI has been able to break out of,” he said.
Debate over who has control
Analysts and consultants disagreed over whether enterprises should use the OpenAI capabilities for isolation or use the enterprise’s own restrictions.
“The question I immediately asked myself was whether organizations need OpenAI to do this for them. The answer, in my opinion, is no,” said Erik Avakian, technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group. “Security professionals have been implementing similar concepts for years through control areas like network segmentation, least privilege, applying Zero Trust concepts and principles, application controls, and ‘air-gapping’ some environments.”
Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, also has doubts. “So long as the LLM and associated components are provided as a service by OpenAI, customers can only partially control where those systems can reach out, so this lockdown mode seems to be the answer to that,” he said.
“Yes, customers could use a secure gateway,” he added, “but if the LLM and/or agent sitting at OpenAI premises accesses other third party services, there would not be a way for the IT and/or cybersecurity team from the customer to restrict this. The most secure approach is always the deployment of the AI infrastructure on premises, but that’s just not viable for the majority of organizations.”
Dennis Xu, a research VP with Gartner, flatly stated that enterprises need to rely on AI vendor provided cutoffs. 
“This is not something end user clients can do on their own. As this controls how traffic flows from OpenAI infrastructure, the ChatGPT application, going outbound, only OpenAI has the ability to control that flow. ChatGPT is a web/SaaS based application that cannot be air gapped,” Xu said. “In the shared responsibility model, this falls under provider responsibility. End user clients will need to rely on what is available from providers such as OpenAI. Without that, they have no control over this data flow. So if they like this OpenAI feature, they need to raise this as a feature request with other providers for them to implement into their solution.”
That can get exponentially more complex if all AI vendors deploy such shutoff valves in different ways. 
Gogia noted that vendor-specific controls are useful tactically and weak strategically, because each vendor can only constrain its own product. “OpenAI can limit OpenAI but it cannot govern a local model in a business unit or an assistant embedded elsewhere,” he said. “Its own model shows the limit: in managed workspaces, apps and connectors remain governed by role-based access and Lockdown Mode does not automatically disable every app. The hard work does not vanish. It moves into governance.”
Villanustre added that the result will be that customers may need to deal with “a patchwork of controls” until independent third party governance tools come to the rescue and support this cross-vendor management model.
As well, Avakian said, “rather than relying on a single AI platform, organizations will likely use multiple models from multiple vendors, in which each will serve different business functions. We might soon find ourselves talking about AI trust zones, AI segmentation, AI least privilege, and AI governance frameworks the same way we talk today about network segmentation and Zero Trust architectures.”
However, Carmi Levy, an independent technology analyst, said that the OpenAI move is an improvement, albeit an incremental one.
“It is not a replacement for pre-existing best practices within any organization. Rather, it enables greater in-model protections before organizational limitations can be imposed. With different vendors incorporating different lockdown modes into their models, IT is challenged to update its own protocols to integrate with an increasingly diverse vendor landscape,” he said. “There’s no getting around the fact that this will add ongoing overhead to IT and cybersecurity operations, as different vendors continue to evolve their own protection-focused regimes.”
Humans are the problem
One of the reasons that Lockdown Mode can’t halt all exfiltration, even if it works perfectly, is the human factor, coupled with the tendency of autonomous agents to bypass rules. 
For example, let’s say that an end user works for a large publicly-held American company, and the user asks the agent to gather financial details about an upcoming quarter’s revenue and net income. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules in the US make it illegal to selectively share that unannounced data with the public.
If the agent finds a way to access internal emails and documents from Finance and shares the answer with the end user, and that end user then copies and pastes that information into an email sent to some investors, or possibly even a financial journalist, the user is in contravention of the rule; the model that supplied the data may not have even known that this disclosure was prohibited. 
Expands the attack surface
Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, noted that the most interesting thing about Lockdown Mode is that it acknowledges a reality many organizations are wrestling with: AI’s value often comes from its ability to connect to systems, access data, browse the web, and take action.
“Those same capabilities also expand the attack surface. As AI becomes more integrated into critical business processes, the conversation shifts from maximizing capability to balancing capability with control,” he said. “The broader implication is that we’re likely moving toward a world where AI systems have configurable operating modes based on business context, data sensitivity, user privileges, and risk tolerance. That’s a much more nuanced model than the all-or-nothing approaches we’ve seen so far.”
Greis would like the OpenAI option to offer IT granular functionality choices. “IT needs to have the availability to configure it and not just accept the default settings from OpenAI,” he said. For example, IT might want to customize based on connectors, or GPTs, or models, or zones, or regions.
Another Gartner VP analyst, Nader Henein, said that OpenAI created Lockdown Mode “with a narrow set of clients in mind, specifically for non-classified government use, potentially for specific governments, the reason being that if an enterprise client has this level of concern regarding data sensitivity, they are not likely going to trust any provider, including OpenAI,” he pointed out. “Those clients are likely to seek on premises large language models, or large language models hosted in secure, trusted environments.”
View the full article
Apple held its WWDC 2026 keynote today, introducing iOS 27, macOs 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. It took Apple an hour and a half to walk through the major new features in the updates, but we have a quicker 10 minute recap for those who want the highlights.

Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Apple debuted an all-new smarter Siri, added Apple Intelligence features to multiple apps, and shared details on a long list of performance improvements and bug fixes. We have a recap of all our coverage below.
Siri AI


Apple Announces 'Siri AI' at WWDC 2026
Apple Unveils All-New Siri App Across iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate
Apple Rebuilds Search Infrastructure Across Platforms
Apple Touts Faster Core Software Features Across Devices
Apple Reveals New AI Architecture Built Around Google Gemini Models
New Siri AI Features Won't Be Available in EU Later This Year
Apple Says New Siri is Compatible With These iPhones, iPads, and Macs
Siri AI Gains Customizable Voice Expressiveness and Pace
Apple's Private AI Will Run on Google's Servers

iOS 27 and iPadOS 27


Apple Announces Liquid Glass Improvements and Transparency Slider
Apple Expands Visual Intelligence With Bill Splitting, Nutrition Insights, and visionOS Support
New Safari Can Monitor a Webpage and Notify You of Updates
Apple Brings Natural Language Creation to Shortcuts App
Apple to Bring AI Reframing and Editing Tools to Photos App
Apple Revamps Image Playground With Photorealistic Generation and New Editing Tools
iOS 27 Adds New Parental Controls: Ask to Browse, Time Allowances, and a Redesigned Screen Time
Apple to Add AI Video Descriptions and Smarter Notifications to Home App
Apple Intelligence Introduces Contextual Call and Messages Features
iOS 27 Calendar and Reminders Apps Get New AI Features and Natural Language Support
Apple Passwords Can Now Automatically Fix Weak and Compromised Passwords With Agentic AI
Apple Brings AI Tab Organization and AI-Generated Extensions to Safari
iOS 27 Camera App Gets Siri Mode, Updated UI
Apple Intelligence Gains Smarter Writing Tools in iOS 27
iOS 27 Wallet App Gets 'Create a Pass' Feature
Apple Overhauls Genmoji in iOS 27
iOS 27 Tidbits: Share a Phone Number on Two iPhones, Independent Alarm Volume, Faster AirPlay and More
Apple Announces New CarPlay Features on iOS 27, Including Video Apps
Apple Maps Flyover Gets a Visual Upgrade in iOS 27
iOS 27 Adds Perimenopause and Menopause Tracking to Health App
Apple Photos Finally Gets a Slideshow Maker
iOS 27 Supports iPhone 11 and Newer
iPadOS 27 Drops Support for a Wave of iPads
How to Get iOS 27's New Siri AI: Join the Waitlist First
iOS 27 Announced: How to Install the Beta

macOS 27 Golden Gate


Apple Announces macOS Golden Gate
Rich Siri Conversations in macOS 27 Can Be Started in Spotlight
Here Are the Macs Compatible With macOS Golden Gate

watchOS 27


watchOS 27 Features Dynamic App Grid, New Gesture Control, and More
watchOS 27 Introduces Workout Buddy Upgrades, Better Sleep Tracking, and More
watchOS 27 Drops Support for Apple Watch Series 8, Ultra 1, SE 2, and Older
Apple Watch Series 9 Mistakenly Left Off watchOS 27 Compatibility List

tvOS 27


Apple Announces tvOS 27 With These New Features
tvOS 27 Drops Support for Two Apple TV Models

visionOS 27

AirPods


Apple to Bring Custom EQ to AirPods

Other News


Apple Releases First iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Betas to Developers
Apple Unveils Xcode and Foundation Models Framework Improvements
Apple's Most Powerful On-Device AI Now Requires iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air
Apple Brings Full-Resolution iCloud Shared Albums to Android and Windows
iOS 27 Hints at Foldable iPhone With App Resizability Push and New Framework Strings
Tim Cook Delivers Farewell Remarks at His Last Apple Keynote as CEO

Make sure to stay tuned to MacRumors, because we'll have more in-depth feature guides and videos coming over the next several weeks.Related Roundups: iOS 27, WWDC 2026Related Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2026 in 10 Minutes" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today unveiled watchOS 27, featuring a redesigned dynamic app grid, new gesture controls, and a raft of usability and battery improvements.


The new dynamic app grid surfaces and rearranges five apps based on context and usage. Users can simply tap the bottom center icon to go to the rest of their apps.

A new tap gesture lets users select a widget in the Smart Stack by tapping their index finger and thumb together once, allowing interaction even when the other hand is occupied. Apple is also expanding Smart Stack suggestions to surface more contextually relevant widgets, including birthday reminders for close contacts, a parked car location card, sleep alarm adjustments ahead of select holidays, and transit card balance checks.

Users can now create custom passes for any membership or card that uses a QR code or barcode, such as a library card, using their iPhone and access it directly from the Apple Watch's Wallet app or pin it to the Smart Stack. Transit cards and IDs will also appear in the Smart Stack.

Apple says it has improved Liquid Glass in watchOS 27 to improve readability through more uniform refraction and better contrast. Other improvements include faster Music playback startup, faster app extension launches, improved Wi-Fi connectivity, more efficient water detection, better battery efficiency with suggested optimizations, Guest Key support, and the ability to view card balances in the Wallet app. The settings interface in the Apple Watch app on iPhone also features a new design.

Find My is completely redesigned with a more map-centric layout and consolidates the Find Devices, Find People, and Find Items apps into a single unified view. A new Call Context feature can proactively surface relevant information from other apps during a phone call to a business, such as displaying a confirmation code from Mail when a user calls an airline. watchOS 27 also includes a large number of fitness, workout, and sleep tracking improvements.Related Roundup: watchOS 26Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "watchOS 27 Features Dynamic App Grid, New Gesture Control, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced new slideshow features coming to the Photos app, allowing users to play any set of photos and videos as a slideshow.


There are options to set the slide duration, transition style, and music. iOS 27 also lets users save any slideshow directly as a video to their ‌Photos‌ library for easy playback later.

Additional new features include the ability to save individual video frames as photos, more flexible album organization tools, emoji reactions in Shared Albums, a view of recent Shared Album activity, and access to full-resolution photos and videos in Shared Albums. Apple also introduces new collections in ‌Photos‌, including Captured by Me and Identity Documents, alongside improved search results for people and pets.Tag: Photos
This article, "Apple Photos Finally Gets a Slideshow Maker" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
watchOS 27 contains a series of enhancements to fitness and sleep tracking, including new Workout Buddy insights, improved indoor run tracking, and more.


Workout Buddy is gaining new data-driven motivation features, delivering progress updates for pace, distance, and workout duration based on a user's fitness history. Apple is also enabling Workout Buddy to function without an iPhone nearby, allowing users to stay motivated during workouts without needing a phone in their pocket or hand. Workout Buddy is additionally expanding to Spanish, letting Spanish-speaking users receive personalized fitness motivation in their preferred language.

Indoor run and walk distance tracking is also getting more accurate in watchOS 27. Apple says improved motion tracking algorithms will more precisely measure treadmill distance directly from the wrist, without requiring a connected iPhone. Route maps in the Fitness app are also receiving an accuracy improvement, giving users a more precise view of their workout paths after the fact.

Sleep tracking is becoming more accurate as well, though Apple has not yet detailed the specific changes underlying the improvement. The update also brings a step count sync fix where steps counted in the Health app will now sync with the Fitness app directly.Related Roundup: watchOS 26Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "watchOS 27 Introduces Workout Buddy Upgrades, Better Sleep Tracking, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced that iOS 27 will expand the Health app's Cycle Tracking feature with dedicated perimenopause and menopause support, including notifications, symptom logging, and educational resources.


The update will enable Cycle Tracking to detect when a user's logged cycle patterns are suggestive of perimenopause and surface a notification accordingly. Users will also be able to log related symptoms directly within the Health app and access educational resources designed to provide guidance and support through the transition. There are also new Fitness+ workouts for perimenopause and menopause.

The new perimenopause and menopause support in ‌iOS 27‌ uses long-term cycle data to detect a hormonal transition that can begin a decade or more before menopause itself. The additions are part of broader Health app improvements in ‌iOS 27‌ that Apple says include more advanced cycle tracking overall, faster data updates across the app, and refreshed design elements.

Apple introduced Cycle Tracking across the iPhone and Apple Watch simultaneously with iOS 13 and watchOS 6, and has deepened the feature set steadily since, most notably with the addition of wrist temperature sensing in the Apple Watch Series 8, which enabled basal body temperature tracking and retrospective ovulation estimates.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Apple Health
This article, "iOS 27 Adds Perimenopause and Menopause Tracking to Health App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple Maps is getting a visual update in iOS 27, with Apple planning to introduce new aerial imagery that's combined with Visual Intelligence models.


Apple said everything will have sharper detail, from the "shapes of individual trees to the way light reflects off the glass of skyscrapers."

Flyover is an ‌Apple Maps‌ view that lets users see more than 350 cities in 3D with detailed landmarks, roads, trees, parks, buildings, and more. It uses aerial imagery captured by planes, and it is a signature ‌Apple Maps‌ feature.

The more detailed Flyover visuals Apple described at the WWDC 2026 keynote do not appear to be implemented in the ‌iOS 27‌ beta as of yet.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Apple Maps
This article, "Apple Maps Flyover Gets a Visual Upgrade in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Back at WWDC 2025, Apple revealed that it was planning to allow CarPlay users to watch video via AirPlay in their vehicles while they are not driving, but we did not hear many specific details about this functionality until now.


In a WWDC 2026 video aimed at developers, Apple said the CarPlay video feature is available in new vehicles that support it. When playing a video in an iPhone app that supports AirPlay video streaming, users can select the car's display from the AirPlay menu on iOS and watch the video on a compatible vehicle's screen.

New in iOS 27, Apple is allowing developers to create CarPlay apps with video browsing capabilities, so you can find videos to watch right on CarPlay.

This feature can keep you entertained while you are not driving. For example, Apple said you may use it while waiting in your car at the airport, or charging your electric vehicle. For safety reasons, video playback is only enabled when the vehicle is parked.

In addition, the more personal and intelligent version of Siri — aka "Siri AI" — will be available on CarPlay when it is used with an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Apple offered the following example for using Siri AI via CarPlay: "On the road, ask Siri which trailhead your friend suggested and get the answer instantly."


In a slide shown very briefly during the WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple revealed four additional enhancements coming to CarPlay:Audio scrubbing within CarPlay's Now Playing interface
Improved GPS accuracy and navigation heading
A mini-player for audio within apps
Improved wireless CarPlay reliabilityAll of the new CarPlay features require an iPhone running iOS 27, which is available in developer beta starting today. A public beta will follow in July, and the software update should be released to all users with a compatible iPhone in September.Related Roundups: CarPlay, iOS 27, WWDC 2026Tag: AirPlayRelated Forums: HomePod, HomeKit, CarPlay, Home & Auto Technology, Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Apple Announces New CarPlay Features on iOS 27, Including Video Apps" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today confirmed that the Apple Watch Series 9 is compatible with watchOS 27, after the device was mistakenly omitted from the software's official compatibility page.


Apple updated its website immediately following its WWDC 2026 keynote, and the watchOS 27 page listed a shorter compatibility list than many users expected: the Apple Watch SE 3, Series 10, Series 11, Ultra 2, and Ultra 3. That would have meant watchOS 27 dropped support for the Apple Watch Series 9, despite both the Series 9 and Ultra 2 containing the same S9 chip.

Shortly after Apple released watchOS 27 developer beta 1, Apple Watch Series 9 owners began reporting that they were able to download, install, and run the beta on their devices. Apple confirmed to MacRumors that the Series 9 omission was an error, and that the device is indeed supported. Apple's website has since been corrected.

watchOS 27 still drops support for the Apple Watch Series 6, Series 7, and Series 8, along with the original Ultra and SE 2, a significant cut that makes it the largest single-year drop in Apple Watch software support to date. The update introduces a new Siri AI app, new workout data insights, Spanish support for Workout Buddy, and more.Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26Tag: WWDC 2026Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "Apple Watch Series 9 Mistakenly Left Off watchOS 27 Compatibility List" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today said it is expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC) beyond its data centers, partnering with Google and NVIDIA to run Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud.


Private Cloud Compute is Apple's cloud intelligence system for private AI processing, used to keep ‌Apple Intelligence‌ requests secure while handling processing in the cloud. PCC has been limited to Apple silicon servers in Apple data centers, but Apple is now relying on Google servers to handle some ‌Apple Intelligence‌ processing.

Apple partnered with Google to use the technologies behind Google's Gemini AI models for its own Apple Foundation Models. While some processing is done on-device, agentic tool use and complex reasoning require cloud processing. Apple says it worked with Google and NVIDIA to extend its PCC infrastructure to Google Cloud systems that run NVIDIA GPUs without compromising privacy and security protections.

All server components and software are part of a trusted computing base subject to verifiable transparency and no-privileged-access guarantees, plus Apple has a cryptographically verifiable ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks. PCC on Google Cloud also uses many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon.

Apple says the efforts it has made to bring PCC to Google Cloud will mean user data continues to be protected by PCC's security and privacy properties even outside of Apple hardware and data centers. Apple maintains control over PCC software and Apple devices will only trust PCC software cryptographically approved by Apple.

PCC on Google Cloud is not fully implemented, and Apple plans to gradually add the full set of protections throughout the beta testing process.

PCC on Google Cloud binaries will be available for public inspection. Apple plans to provide public research tooling and access to live PCC nodes in research mode through its Apple Security Bounty Program.Tag: Google
This article, "Apple's Private AI Will Run on Google's Servers" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced an update to iCloud Shared Albums to allow friends and family on Android and Windows to join and contribute photos more conveniently, with support for full-resolution images.


The improvement for Android and Windows users removes a notable friction point for mixed-device groups, enabling users outside the Apple ecosystem to participate in shared albums via iCloud.com more easily, as well as add photos at full-resolution with no compression for the first time.

Apple has also introduced new ways to filter and react to photos in shared albums, along with updated tools for inviting others to contribute.Tags: Android, iCloud Photos, Windows
This article, "Apple Brings Full-Resolution iCloud Shared Albums to Android and Windows" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
At the WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple detailed iOS 27 changes like a new version of Siri with a dedicated ‌Siri‌ app and Apple Intelligence features across multiple apps, but there are dozens of smaller but still important changes that Apple didn't have time to go through.


Apple shared an image summarizing some of the bug fixes and optimizations it made in ‌iOS 27‌, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, and there are some interesting changes.


Dual Phone Numbers

Apple says you'll be able to switch between two iPhone devices with the same phone number, which presumably means you can set up two iPhones with one number and then swap between them as needed. It could work similar to how an iPhone and Apple Watch can share the same phone number. It should be a useful change for anyone who wants to get a foldable iPhone and a standard iPhone 18 Pro this year.

Sharing numbers between two iPhones may require carrier support, so it's not clear if it's implemented in the beta.

Two FaceTime Cameras

Dual camera in FaceTime is a listed feature, and that likely means you'll be able to use the front and back cameras at the same time during ‌FaceTime‌ calls.

Faster AirPlay and AirDrop

AirPlaying content to the HomePod and Apple TV is faster than before thanks to multiple system improvements. AirDrop transfers from the iPhone to other devices are also faster, and it's quicker for an iPhone to find nearby AirDrop recipients.

Messages Drawing App

There's a drawing app in Messages where you can handwrite a message or draw a picture. It uses the same drawing tools that are available in the Notes app or when annotating images.

Extra Large Widgets

There's a new extra large widget size you can select on the iPhone's Home Screen. The extra large size takes up an entire app page and displays more information from an app.

Shared Album Expirations

You can now set a shared photo album to expire after a set time, so it doesn't exist indefinitely.

Independent Alarm Volume

Alarm volume can be controlled separately from system volume, as can alerts and system sounds. In Settings > Sounds & Haptics, there are toggles to match Alarms, Timers, Alerts, and System Sounds to Ringtone Volume or to decouple them. Toggling off the match option lets you select a preferred volume level for alarms and system sounds.

Markdown in Notes

You can now copy and paste Markdown in the Notes app.

Save a Video Frame

There's a new option to save a video frame as a photo in the Photos app.

Weather

The Weather app has a "Highlights" view with at-a-glance information, plus it includes updated hourly and 10-day views for precipitation and wind speed.

Other iOS 27 Optimizations and Changes


Faster message loading in Mail
Enhanced Safari power efficiency
Improved battery insights
Smoother scrolling in App Library
Smoother unlocking on iPhone
New AutoMix transitions in Apple Music
Faster HomeKit accessory pairing
Faster start page loading in Safari
More accurate Visited Places in Maps
Improved Messages syncing across devices
More power efficient personal hotspot on devices with N1 chip
Failed messages will automatically try resending
Improved Bluetooth power management
Support for time zone changes in Sleep
Improved unread badge accuracy in Mail

These are just some of the improvements and changes that Apple has introduced in ‌iOS 27‌. We'll be sharing more new features in ‌iOS 27‌ as they're discovered by the community. The ‌iOS 27‌ beta is available for developers right now, with Apple planning to introduce a public beta in July. ‌iOS 27‌ will launch this fall.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Tidbits: Share a Phone Number on Two iPhones, Independent Alarm Volume, Faster AirPlay and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Cisco warns customers of an actively exploited high-severity vulnerability in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, an enterprise network management system that has been targeted by hackers multiple times in the past. Located in the command-line interface, the flaw allows authenticated attackers to escalate privileges to root and take over the entire system.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245, is rated 7.8 (high) on the CVSS scale instead of critical because it requires local access and netadmin privileges to exploit. These privileges can be obtained via stolen credentials or by exploiting authentication bypass flaws, such as CVE-2026-20245 or CVE-2026-20127, which were fixed in May and February, respectively.
The older authentication bypass flaws were exploited by a cyberespionage threat actor Cisco Talos tracks as UAT-8616. It’s not clear whether the new vulnerability was exploited by the same group as part of its campaigns against enterprise SD-WAN deployments, but it was reported to Cisco by Google’s Mandiant division, which specializes in incident response.
“This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input,” Cisco said in its advisory. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by uploading a crafted file to the affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform command injection attacks on an affected system and elevate their privileges as the root user.”
Mitigation
While a patch is not yet available, Cisco recommends upgrading to the latest available version to ensure the previous authentication bypass exploits don’t work. Customers should also check the configuration of their edge devices because the company has observed cases where exploitation of this flaw resulted in configuration changes.
Before upgrading SD-WAN deployments, users are advised to save all relevant log files and issue the request admin-tech command to collect the admin-tech file from each of the control components.
Cisco has published indicators of compromise that should be visible in the scripts.log file from /var/log/. However, it’s hard to distinguish malicious and legitimate command calls in the logs, so if the indicators of compromise are present in the logs, customers should contact the Technical Assistance Center.
“If the logs show indicators of compromise and the system is confirmed to be compromised, applying the software update alone will not resolve the vulnerability,” the company said. “In such cases, follow the specific remediation steps that will be provided by the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to help secure the system.”
View the full article
Tim Cook closed out what is expected to be his last keynote as Apple's chief executive officer today with some emotive final remarks.


Wrapping up a pre-recorded video message, Cook reflected on his tenure at the company. "Some of the highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this, sharing powerful new tools with all of you," he said, adding that what developers create with Apple's platforms has been "a constant reminder that imagination has no limits."



Cook said it had been "an honor" to lead the company, describing Apple's north star as always creating products that serve people's needs. "I truly believe the best is still ahead," he said, before thanking the audience.

Cook has served as CEO since 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs. John Ternus, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering, will takeover from Cook in September, just in time for the announcement of new iPhone models.Tags: Tim Cook, WWDC 2026
This article, "Tim Cook Delivers Farewell Remarks at His Last Apple Keynote as CEO" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
iOS 27 includes an entirely revamped Genmoji creation experience. There's an updated interface that supports describing an emoji that you want to create, with options to start from existing emoji, choose an image from Photos, or select a person.


After uploading an image or using a text phrase to create a ‌Genmoji‌, there's now a "Describe a change" interface for making updates to what you've already created. You can iterate on designs and change specific elements of a ‌Genmoji‌, tweaking colors and objects.

Apple's AI is smarter than before and it is able to successfully make iterative updates for better ‌Genmoji‌ customization. Each change uses the old base rather than regenerating a new ‌Genmoji‌ with every request. With a series of requests, it is possible to make a complicated, multi-element ‌Genmoji‌. Along with describing changes, you can also add in additional emoji, and the interface makes suggestions on what to do next.

‌Genmoji‌ output is also more consistent, and ‌Genmoji‌ look more like real emoji with a 3D, cartoonish style by default. There is now an option to change style, so if you don't want the cartoonish look, you can ask for something else like a drawing or a sketch.

Generating a ‌Genmoji‌ does not take as long, and it appears to be less system intensive with less battery drain.

Apple also overhauled Image Playground in ‌iOS 27‌, and both Image Playground and ‌Genmoji‌ use updated Apple Foundation Models. ‌Image Playground‌ now supports generating photorealistic images and adding AI elements to just parts of photos.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Genmoji
This article, "Apple Overhauls Genmoji in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple appears to be laying the groundwork for a foldable iPhone in iOS 27, with new references discovered in the operating system's frameworks and a notable emphasis on flexible app layouts at this year's Platforms State of the Union.


During the Platforms State of the Union session, Apple told developers to move away from designing apps for specific devices and fixed orientations, and to instead target what it described as "a dynamic range of sizes and aspect ratios." The framing appears to go beyond the stated context of iPhone Mirroring and the iPad.

Apple used the session to introduce support for resizable iOS apps in iPhone Mirroring and on the ‌iPad‌. Developers who rebuild against the latest SDK will have their apps automatically opted in to resizability, Apple said, with SwiftUI apps that already use scene lifecycle and standard framework support for basic resizability considered "well on your way to supporting full resizability."

A new resizable iOS simulator and Previews in Xcode were also announced, allowing developers to test layouts across a range of screen sizes and aspect ratios. Apple said it is also providing a skill for coding agents to help identify and fix common resizability issues.

The guidance effectively asks developers to treat every iOS app as something that may need to reflow across a wide variety of form factors, which is a requirement that makes considerably more sense if a future iPhone is capable of folding open to a substantially larger inner display.

As if that wasn't enough evidence for the upcoming foldable iPhone, X user @samhenrigold spotted two strings within ‌iOS 27‌'s frameworks that point directly toward foldable hardware: "foldState" and "angleDegrees." A third discovery, a new key that returns the total count of built-in displays on a device, is a further indication that Apple is preparing the software stack for a device capable of presenting more than one integrated screen.

The foldable iPhone, widely expected to be called the "iPhone Ultra," is anticipated to be announced in September 2026 alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, with a book-style design featuring a roughly 7.8-inch inner display and a 5.5-inch cover display. Other rumored key features include Touch ID instead of Face ID, a titanium frame and Liquid Metal hinge, dual rear cameras, the A20 chip, and the C2 modem. The device is expected to start at over $2,000, making it the most expensive iPhone ever. Related Roundups: iOS 27, iPhone FoldTag: Foldable iPhone
This article, "iOS 27 Hints at Foldable iPhone With App Resizability Push and New Framework Strings" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The upcoming tvOS 27 update that was previewed today drops support for two Apple TV models.


The two Apple TV models that are compatible with tvOS 26 but not tvOS 27 are the Apple TV HD from 2015 and the Apple TV 4K (1st generation) from 2017.

tvOS 27 is compatible with the Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) and newer, according to Apple's documentation.

tvOS 27 features a redesigned Podcasts app, smoother app launches and animations, support for larger text across the interface, and more. Apple did not give tvOS 27 much attention during its WWDC 2026 keynote, so we are still in the process of learning what other new features and enhancements are included in the update.

tvOS 26 Compatibility

Apple TV HD (2015)
Apple TV 4K (1st generation, 2017)
Apple TV 4K (2nd generation, 2021)
Apple TV 4K (3rd generation, 2022)
tvOS 27 Compatibility

Apple TV 4K (2nd generation, 2021)
Apple TV 4K (3rd generation, 2022)
The first tvOS 27 developer beta is available today, and a public beta will follow in July. The update will be released later this year — likely in September.

A new Apple TV 4K (4th generation) is expected to launch later this year.Related Roundup: Apple TVBuyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forum: Apple TV and Home Theater
This article, "tvOS 27 Drops Support for Two Apple TV Models" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple's most advanced on-device AI model in iOS 27 requires a minimum of 12GB of unified memory, meaning the standard iPhone 17 is excluded.


The next generation of Apple Intelligence introduces a new on-device model more powerful than anything Apple has shipped before. While most ‌iOS 27‌ AI features run on the same hardware supported today, including iPhone 15 Pro, the most capable model carries stricter requirements. To run Apple's most powerful on-device model, users will need one of the following devices:


iPhone: iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, or ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max
iPad: iPad with M4 or later with at least 12GB of unified memory
Mac: Mac with M3 or later with at least 12GB of unified memory
Vision Pro: Apple Vision Pro with M5


The base ‌iPhone 17‌ is excluded because it ships with 8GB of memory, falling short of the 12GB threshold. The standard memory requirement for ‌Apple Intelligence‌ has been 8GB since its introduction, so this marks the first time Apple has raised the bar for its most capable on-device features.

According to Apple's press release, the new model specifically enables features including expressive voices and more advanced dictation.Related Roundups: iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone AirTag: Apple IntelligenceBuyer's Guide: iPhone 17 Pro (Caution), iPhone Air (Neutral)Related Forum: iPhone
This article, "Apple's Most Powerful On-Device AI Now Requires iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple barely touched on tvOS 27 during its WWDC 2026 keynote today, but the update exists, and it adds some new features to the Apple TV.


In a slide that was shown very briefly during the keynote, Apple revealed some of tvOS 27's new features and enhancements:
A redesigned Podcasts app
Smoother app launches and animations
Faster AirPlay connectivity with other Apple devices
Smart downloads
A new Larger Text accessibility option in the Settings app, which increases the size of text across the tvOS interface
AppleCare coverage details in the Settings appApple's website does not offer a tvOS 27 preview page like it does for iOS 27 and the other new software updates, and the "what's new in tvOS" page on Apple's developer website has yet to be updated, so no further details about these features are available right now. Stay tuned for more tvOS 27 information over the coming days.

The first tvOS 27 developer beta is available today, and a public beta will follow in July. The update will be released later this year — likely in September.Related Roundups: Apple TV, WWDC 2026Buyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy)Related Forums: Apple TV and Home Theater, Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Apple Announces tvOS 27 With These New Features" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced that Siri AI will offer a "brand new voice experience," giving users the ability to customize how the voice assistant sounds.


On devices that support Apple's most advanced on-device model, ‌Siri‌ AI will deliver more expressive voices alongside a significant improvement to systemwide dictation accuracy. Users will be able to adjust both the expressiveness and pace of ‌Siri‌'s voice to their preference via a new UI with sliders. As of developer beta 1, American is the sole voice option.

The updated dictation engine will capture speech as polished text, automatically handling capitalization, punctuation, and formatting in real time. Apple says improved speech understanding means users can speak naturally and trust that their words will appear accurately and as intended.Tags: Siri, Siri AI
This article, "Siri AI Gains Customizable Voice Expressiveness and Pace" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The Wallet app in iOS 27 has a new "Create a Pass" option that's designed to let you add passes for tickets, memberships, and more using Visual Intelligence. If you have a ticket for an event and there's not a digital version available in the Wallet app already, you can create one using the physical pass.


By default, the Wallet app uses ‌Visual Intelligence‌ to scan a pass and add it, but there's also a "Create Pass Manually" option. Pass templates include Standard, Membership, and Event.

Each type includes relevant information like name, location, or admission type, along with a scannable code drawn from an included barcode or QR code that you take a photo of. There are 12 background colors to choose from, or seven custom backgrounds for categories like theater, music, sports, and movies.

Fields can be added or removed as needed when creating a custom pass, with options like label, date, membership, contact, coupon code, VIN, insurance, and more, so most physical cards should be able to be stored digitally. Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Wallet App Gets 'Create a Pass' Feature" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced a series of Apple Intelligence improvements coming to Mail, Messages, Files, and system-wide text input as part of iOS 27 and its other major platform updates.


The updates include automatic proofreading, which surfaces spelling and grammar suggestions as users type across the system. Apple is also introducing intelligent file and folder naming suggestions based on content.

Two enhancements come specifically to Mail and Messages. Apple's composition assistant will now adapt to how a user typically communicates with different contacts, tailoring its suggestions to match individual conversational styles. Smart Reply, which proposes quick responses to incoming messages, has also been updated to draw on a user's personalized writing style rather than offering generic reply options.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Apple Intelligence
This article, "Apple Intelligence Gains Smarter Writing Tools in iOS 27" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The iOS 27 Camera app has a new "Siri" mode that is available in addition to the video, photo, and other camera modes. You can get to ‌Siri‌ mode by swiping over to it at the bottom of the Camera app in the ‌iOS 27‌ developer beta.


‌Siri‌ mode integrates Visual Intelligence, so you can take a photo of something and ask ‌Siri‌ about it. ‌Siri‌ can answer questions about whatever you're taking a photo of, identifying plants, animals, landmarks, and more.

Visual Intelligence is expanding to new categories in ‌iOS 27‌, and it can help you determine the calories in a plate of food or split a bill with friends by calculating what each person owes.

In ‌Siri‌ mode, the main Camera button captures an image and ‌Siri‌ will give information about what's in the shot. A button on the right lets you search Google Images, and a button on the left lets you ask a specific question.

In other Camera modes, there are minor interface updates. Quick access tools for turning on Night Mode, turning off Live Photo, and activating Flash are at the top center of the interface, and the full set of tools can be accessed from the bottom right instead of the top right.

While there were rumors of a Camera app widget section for customizing the available camera controls, that's not a feature that's available yet.

Using ‌Siri‌ mode in the Camera app requires access to the ‌Siri‌ waitlist. The ‌iOS 27‌ beta is only available to developers right now, but Apple plans to make a public beta available in July. ‌iOS 27‌ will launch this fall.Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "iOS 27 Camera App Gets Siri Mode, Updated UI" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today unveiled a raft of Safari upgrades powered by Apple Intelligence, including automatic tab organization, AI-generated custom extensions, and new privacy-first browsing tools.


The centerpiece feature is automatic tab organization, which uses ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to group a user's open tabs into relevant topics without any manual intervention. If someone is planning a weekend trip, for example, Safari can pull all of their travel-related tabs into a single topic. As browsing continues, Safari will slot new tabs into existing topics or create fresh ones as needed.

Apple is also introducing a way for users to create custom Safari extensions using natural language. The company described the feature as "describe an extension," letting users specify what they want in plain English and having Safari generate an extension that adapts web pages accordingly. Apple's example was adding a toolbar button that saves and rates recipes from cooking sites.


A new "Notify Me" feature lets users ask Safari to watch a specific web page for changes and alert them when something relevant happens, such as a product restocking or a price drop. Users tell Safari in natural language what they are looking for, and Safari sends a notification when it detects a matching change on that page.

Apple is bringing a background agentic password-updating tool to the browser. Working alongside the Passwords app, ‌Apple Intelligence‌ can automatically navigate to eligible websites, sign in, and update weak or compromised passwords to strong ones with a single tap.

Apple says all of these capabilities are built with privacy in mind, and that no personal browsing data is exposed to Apple or anyone else in the process.Tags: Apple Intelligence, Safari
This article, "Apple Brings AI Tab Organization and AI-Generated Extensions to Safari" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced that the Passwords app can now automatically update weak and compromised passwords using Apple Intelligence and Safari to take action on a user's behalf.


The feature builds on Passwords' existing ability to flag weak or compromised credentials. While the app has long been able to alert users to security issues, acting on those alerts required manually visiting each site and changing passwords individually. The new capability removes that friction by automating the process end-to-end in the background.

Apple describes the system as agentic, with ‌Apple Intelligence‌ and Safari securely navigating through websites, signing in, and upgrading accounts to strong passwords without the user needing to intervene beyond an initial tap. The feature displays as a Live Activity when active.Tag: Apple Intelligence
This article, "Apple Passwords Can Now Automatically Fix Weak and Compromised Passwords With Agentic AI" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The Calendar and Reminders apps in iOS 27 let you create events and reminders using natural language commands, making it easier to manage your schedule and task list.


You can tap the "+" button in the Calendar app and then type in something like "Movies with Sarah at 8pm on Thursday" to schedule an event. You don't need to go to the specific day to create an event, and you can instead just tap when the date and time suggestions appear as you type. You can also use timing like "every week" to set up a recurring event.

Reminders work in a similar way, and you can type in something like "Remind me to go grocery shopping at 2pm on Thursday" to set up a reminder for that date and time.

Apple says editing an event in Calendar is also simpler. If you have a meeting that's every week and update it to every other week, the Calendar app will intelligently adjust frequency for all future events.

Visual Intelligence integrates with Calendar and Reminders, so if you're looking at an event online and take a screenshot, or if you snap a photo of a flyer with your phone, you can have relevant information added to the Calendar app automatically. Siri is also able to intelligently add events to the Calendar app with natural language requests.

‌iOS 27‌ is limited to developers right now, but Apple plans to make a public beta available in July.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Calendar and Reminders Apps Get New AI Features and Natural Language Support" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Understanding software supply chain security is one thing. Putting it into practice across a real pipeline, with real deadlines and real constraints, is another. Most organizations recognize that their software supply chain is a growing attack surface, but translating that awareness into concrete, repeatable practices is where the work gets difficult.
But why should your team tackle this now? According to Sonatype, over 99% of open source malware identified in 2025 occurred on npm. And the first self-replicating npm worm emerged, spreading autonomously across developer environments and compromising hundreds of packages within days. Meanwhile, Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that the share of breaches involving third parties doubled year-over-year to 30%.
This guide focuses on those practices that matter most for teams building and shipping container-based workloads. It’s organized around five categories that follow the natural flow of software delivery: trusted content, build security, pre-deployment verification, access and policy controls, and continuous monitoring. This way, your team can be better equipped to protect your software supply chain in the wake of increasingly automated and sophisticated attacks.
1. Start with trusted content
Choose verified, minimal base images
Every container image inherits the security posture of its base image. If that foundation contains unpatched vulnerabilities, outdated libraries, or components you do not need, those risks propagate into every image built on top of it. The first and highest-leverage supply chain practice is selecting base images that are minimal, continuously maintained, and verifiably built. 
Look for base images that ship with complete SBOMs, provenance attestations at SLSA Build Level 3, and cryptographic signatures you can verify before deployment. Minimal images reduce attack surface by removing shells, package managers, and utilities that production workloads rarely need but attackers frequently exploit.This is where hardened, provenance-verified base images become a foundational practice. Rather than maintaining custom hardening scripts for each base image, teams can start from images that are rebuilt from source with full transparency into how they were produced.
Pin dependencies and verify integrity
Dependency pinning is a deceptively simple practice that prevents a category of supply chain attacks. When a Dockerfile references a tag like python:3.12, that tag can point to a different image digest tomorrow than it does today. A compromised or accidental change upstream flows silently into your builds.
Pin container images by SHA256 digest, not by tag. Pin language-level dependencies (npm, pip, Maven) to exact versions with lock files, and verify the integrity of those lock files in CI. If your build system pulls a dependency and the hash does not match what was committed, the build should fail.
Scenario spotlight: Consider a team that builds nightly from a :latest-tagged base image. One morning, a routine build deploys to staging and integration tests start failing. The root cause: an upstream package update in the base image introduced a breaking change. With digest pinning and explicit upgrade workflows, this class of problem disappears entirely, and so does the more dangerous variant where a malicious change slips in unnoticed. 2. Secure the build pipeline
Enforce build provenance and attestation
Build provenance answers a question that SBOMs alone cannot: where was this artifact built, by what system, and from what source? Without provenance, you can verify what’s in an image but not whether the build environment itself was trustworthy.
The SLSA framework defines progressive levels of build integrity, from basic provenance documentation at Level 1 through hardened, tamper-resistant build platforms producing non-falsifiable provenance at Level 3. At minimum, builds should generate signed provenance attestations that link every artifact back to its source commit, build configuration, and builder identity.
In practice, this means configuring your CI/CD system to produce SLSA provenance attestations (typically expressed using the in-toto attestation format) alongside every image build. These attestations become the cryptographic evidence that your deployment policies can verify before allowing an image into production.
Harden CI/CD infrastructure
The build pipeline itself is a high-value target. If an attacker compromises your CI/CD system, they can inject malicious code into every artifact you produce, and your existing checks may not catch it because the malicious modification happens after the source code review.
Key hardening practices include:
Isolate build environments so each job runs in a fresh, ephemeral context with no residual state from previous builds. Limit the secrets available to build jobs to the minimum required. Pin GitHub Actions and other CI plugins to full commit SHAs rather than mutable tags. Enforce branch protection rules that require code review and passing status checks before any merge to a release branch. CISA emphasizes build system integrity as a foundational element of supply chain assurance. If you cannot trust the system that produced an artifact, no amount of post-build scanning will compensate.
3. Verify before you deploy
Generate and consume SBOMs continuously
A software bill of materials is only useful if it’s accurate, current, and integrated into your decision-making. Generating an SBOM once at release time and filing it away satisfies a compliance requirement but provides minimal security value.
The more effective practice is generating SBOMs at every build, attaching them to the image as attestations, and consuming them downstream in admission controllers, vulnerability scanners, and license compliance checks. When a new CVE drops, teams with current SBOMs can determine in minutes which running workloads are affected. Teams without them start a multi-day forensic exercise.
Pairing SBOMs with exploitability data (VEX) adds another layer of actionability. VEX documents indicate whether a vulnerability in your SBOM is actually exploitable in the context of your specific image, reducing the noise that causes alert fatigue and helps teams focus remediation on the vulnerabilities that actually matter.
Integrate vulnerability analysis into developer workflows
Vulnerability scanning is most effective when it surfaces results where developers are already working, not in a security dashboard that gets checked once a sprint. Shifting analysis into the inner development loop means flagging issues at build time, in pull requests, and during local development, well before an image reaches a registry.
This is where continuous vulnerability analysis integrated into the developer workflow becomes essential. Rather than batching scan results into weekly reports, effective programs surface findings alongside the code change that introduced them, with actionable remediation guidance.
The NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) reinforces this pattern. Practice PW.7 recommends that organizations review and analyze human-readable code to identify vulnerabilities and verify compliance with security requirements. Automated analysis integrated into CI/CD is the scalable implementation of that guidance.
4. Control access and enforce policy
Manage registry access and image policies
Your container registry is the distribution point for every image your organization runs. If developers can pull any image from any public registry without restriction, the supply chain extends to every maintainer of every image they choose to use.
Implement registry access controls that restrict which images are approved for use, enforce that all images come from verified publishers or internal builds, and require signature verification before any image enters production. Image access management policies ensure that teams can experiment freely in development while production environments consume only vetted, policy-compliant images.
Scenario spotlight: Medplum, a healthcare developer platform helping customers meet HIPAA and HITRUST requirements, migrated their container foundation to Docker Hardened Images with just 54 lines added and 52 removed across their codebase. The result was a dramatically reduced CVE count, non-root execution by default, and no shell access in production. They also got a cleaner story to tell their auditors. Instead of explaining custom hardening scripts and per-CVE exception documentation, the team can point to documented hardening methodology and SLSA Build Level 3 provenance. Apply least privilege across the pipeline
Supply chain attacks frequently exploit over-permissioned service accounts, CI tokens with broad scope, or shared credentials that provide more access than any single job requires. Applying least privilege to your delivery pipeline means scoping every credential, token, and API key to the minimum permissions needed for its specific task.
CISA specifically recommends phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication on all developer and CI/CD accounts. Beyond authentication, ensure that build service accounts cannot push to production registries, that deployment tokens cannot modify build configurations, and that no single credential grants access to both source code and production infrastructure.
5. Monitor, respond, and improve
Implement runtime monitoring
Static analysis and build-time scanning catch the threats you anticipate. Runtime monitoring catches the ones you did not. When a supply chain compromise makes it past your pre-deployment controls, runtime anomaly detection is the layer that identifies unexpected behavior: new network connections from a container that should not make outbound calls, file system modifications in an immutable image, or process execution patterns that diverge from the image’s normal profile.
Effective runtime monitoring for supply chain security goes beyond traditional application performance monitoring. It requires baseline behavioral profiles for your container workloads and alerting that triggers on deviation, not just on known-bad signatures. This is particularly important for detecting compromised dependencies that behave normally during testing but activate malicious behavior under specific runtime conditions.
Build incident response into your supply chain program
When a supply chain incident occurs, response speed depends on preparation. Teams that have practiced their response to a compromised dependency, a malicious base image update, or a build system breach respond in hours. Teams that have not practiced these scenarios scramble for days.
Your incident response plan should include procedures for:
Identifying which artifacts were produced from compromised components (this is where provenance and SBOMs pay for themselves) Revoking and rotating credentials that may have been exposed Rebuilding affected images from verified sources Communicating with downstream consumers of your software Best practices at a glance
Software supply chain practice
What it looks like in production
Trusted base images
All production images built from minimal, signed, provenance-verified base images with near-zero CVEs
Dependency pinning
Container images pinned by digest; language dependencies locked to exact versions with hash verification
Build provenance
Every artifact ships with signed SLSA attestations linking it to its source, builder, and build configuration
CI/CD hardening
Ephemeral build environments, pinned CI plugins, scoped secrets, branch protection enforced
Continuous SBOMs
SBOMs generated at every build, attached as attestations, consumed by admission and scanning tools
Developer-integrated scanning
Vulnerability analysis in PRs, local builds, and CI with actionable remediation guidance
Registry access management
Image pull policies restrict production to approved, signature-verified images from vetted sources
Least privilege
Pipeline credentials scoped per job; phishing-resistant MFA on all developer and CI/CD accounts
Runtime monitoring
Behavioral baselines for containers with alerts on anomalous network, filesystem, and process activity
Incident response
Documented, practiced playbooks for supply chain scenarios with provenance-backed blast radius analysis
Getting started
Building a software supply chain security program is iterative work. The practices in this guide represent the larger picture, but the path there is incremental. Start with the foundation: trusted base images and dependency integrity. Layer in build provenance and SBOMs. Then expand into policy enforcement, developer-integrated scanning, and runtime monitoring as your program matures.
Docker Hardened Images provide a ready-made foundation for teams implementing these practices. Thousands of minimal, continuously rebuilt images ship with SLSA Build Level 3 provenance, signed SBOMs, and OpenVEX exploitability data, giving you a trusted starting point without the overhead of maintaining custom hardening pipelines. An independent assessment by SRLabs validated DHI’s provenance chain, signing model, and vulnerability management workflow, and continuous hardening practices. 
Pair that with Docker Scout for continuous vulnerability analysis integrated directly into your development workflow, and you have the core tooling to support a supply chain security program that scales with your engineering organization.
Explore our full catalog of hardened images and start replacing your base images today.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the most important software supply chain security best practice?
Starting from trusted, minimal base images has the highest leverage because it reduces the attack surface for everything built on top. A single vulnerable component in a base image can propagate across hundreds of downstream images and workloads.
How do SBOMs and build provenance work together?
An SBOM tells you what’s inside an artifact. Build provenance tells you where and how it was built. Together, they provide the transparency needed to assess whether an artifact is trustworthy and to quickly identify affected workloads when a vulnerability or compromise is discovered.
How does the SLSA framework relate to supply chain best practices?
SLSA (Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts) provides a progressive maturity model for build integrity. It gives teams a clear path from basic provenance documentation toward hardened, isolated build platforms with non-falsifiable provenance. Future iterations of the spec are expected to extend coverage into areas like hermeticity, reproducibility, and source integrity.
What is the difference between vulnerability scanning and runtime monitoring
Vulnerability scanning identifies known weaknesses in code and dependencies before deployment. Runtime monitoring detects unexpected behavior in running workloads, catching compromises that scanning missed or that activate only under specific conditions.
Where should teams start if they have no supply chain security program today?
Start with base image selection and dependency pinning. These two practices are relatively low-effort to implement and immediately reduce your exposure to the most common supply chain attack vectors. From there, add SBOM generation and build provenance to build the visibility needed for everything else.

View the full article
The more intelligent and personalized version of Siri that Apple introduced today — "Siri AI" — is limited to devices with Apple Intelligence support.


"Siri AI" is available on the devices listed below.

iPhone

iPhone 15 Pro
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 16e
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Plus
iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 17e
iPhone 17
iPhone Air
iPhone 17 Pro
iPhone 17 Pro Max

iPad

iPad mini (A17 Pro)
iPad Air (M1 chip and newer)
iPad Pro (M1 chip and newer)

Mac

"Siri AI" is compatible with any Mac with the M1 chip and newer.

Apple Watch

"Siri AI" is compatible with the following Apple Watch models when they are paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone model that is nearby:


Apple Watch Series 10
Apple Watch Series 11
Apple Watch Ultra 2
Apple Watch Ultra 3
Apple Watch SE (3rd generation)

Vision Pro
Vision Pro (M2 chip)
Vision Pro (M5 chip)
Some of the "Siri AI" features are also available on CarPlay when an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone model is connected to the vehicle.

"Siri AI" is available to test in English in the iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27 developer betas starting today, but there is a wait, and it will be coming to the Apple Watch in a future watchOS 27 beta. "Siri AI" will also be included in the public betas of each update, which will be available in July.

The revamped Siri is launching later this year. Even then, it will still have a "beta" label.

Note that "Siri AI" will not be available in the EU on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 at launch, with Apple citing regulatory issues related to the Digital Markets Act.Related Roundup: WWDC 2026Tags: Siri, Siri AIRelated Forum: Apple, Inc and Tech Industry
This article, "Apple Says New Siri is Compatible With These iPhones, iPads, and Macs" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced a set of new communication-focused Apple Intelligence features, including contextual suggestions in Messages and a Call Context tool that surfaces relevant information from Mail when a user phones a business.


The new Messages features offer one-tap suggestions based on the content of a conversation. If a contact asks for photos, Messages can surface a suggestion to search the library, recognizing keywords, locations, and people to find the best matches. Messages can also prompt users to create a reminder or a note directly from the conversation thread. Smart Reply in both Messages and Mail can now draw on a user's personalized writing style, and suggestions in Mail gain the ability to take action with third-party apps.


The other headline feature is Call Context, which proactively surfaces relevant information when a user places a call to a business. If someone calls an airline to change a flight, for example, the Phone app can automatically find the relevant confirmation code or reservation number from Mail and display it during the call. Apple says Call Context looks only at who the user is calling and not at the call audio itself. The feature runs entirely on device, meaning no data is shared with Apple or any third party.Tags: Apple Intelligence, Messages
This article, "Apple Intelligence Introduces Contextual Call and Messages Features" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced new Apple Intelligence features for the Home app, including AI-generated descriptions of HomeKit Secure Video camera clips and smarter grouping of accessory notifications.


The Home app will use ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to analyze recorded clips from compatible cameras and generate text descriptions summarizing what happened in them. Users can search through footage to find specific events, such as a package delivery, without needing to watch each clip individually.

The app will also surface noteworthy clips at the top of the Search page, so users can quickly identify important moments. When playing a clip, the Home app can pull together footage from multiple cameras to provide a more complete picture of an event.


‌Apple Intelligence‌ will also make accessory notifications smarter. Rather than receiving a separate alert for every triggered accessory, the Home app will understand related notifications as a single ongoing activity and deliver one notification that continues to update as the activity unfolds.Tags: Apple Home, Apple Intelligence
This article, "Apple to Add AI Video Descriptions and Smarter Notifications to Home App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
This fall, Apple will bring new child safety features to iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate. Apple says parents will have access to a simpler setup experience with recommended apps, a new Ask to Browse feature for Safari, and an overhauled Screen Time interface with Time Allowances.


Parents will be able to select the apps a child can access, opting for a few essential apps, a curated set, or the apps that are appropriate for the individual child. Apps can be added over time, and kids can get parental approval for app downloads with Ask to Buy. If the new Ask to Browse option is enabled, parents can also approve each new website that a child visits.

There are tools for managing who children can connect to on Messages, FaceTime, and Phone, and parents can enable a setting that will require children to get permission before connecting with a new contact.

Communication Safety is being updated to blur gore and violence in Messages and ‌FaceTime‌ calls by default for users under 18. As with nudity, it will automatically blur content when gore or violence is detected in images and videos.

With Time Allowances, parents can manage the time that children spend in apps in the Entertainment, Games, and Social Media categories. Parents can set a limit based on the child's age, with suggestions from the latest expert guidance.

Daily Schedules let parents limit which apps children can access and when based on time of day and day of the week.

Screen Time gives parents an at-a-glance view of their kids' device usage and most used apps, with options to make adjustments to access in the moment. Apple says parents will be able to quickly limit access during meals, outdoor play, and other times that "deserve full attention."

Apple now has a dedicated Child Safety website where parents can learn more about the tools coming in ‌iOS 27‌, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iOS 27 Adds New Parental Controls: Ask to Browse, Time Allowances, and a Redesigned Screen Time" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple has announced a major overhaul of Image Playground, introducing a new generative model capable of photorealistic image creation alongside expanded editing and sharing capabilities.



The updated app is powered by a new generative model that runs on Private Cloud Compute, enabling it to produce high-quality images in virtually any style, including photorealistic output for the first time. All generated images will automatically carry a hidden SynthID watermark to identify them as AI-generated.

‌Image Playground‌ now supports photo-based editing in addition to creation. Users can describe changes they want to make to an existing image, or use touch gestures such as tapping, circling, or brushing to highlight specific objects and move or resize them. Photos can also be transformed into different styles using a text description, and people from a user's photo library can be included in generated images.


The experience extends further into iOS with new output destinations. In addition to Messages, generated images can now be used as Lock Screen wallpapers and Contact Posters. Users can also choose an aspect ratio when creating images, such as landscape for a website header or portrait for a flyer.

Developers will have access to the new capabilities through the ‌Image Playground‌ API, allowing third-party apps to integrate photorealistic generation and editing features directly.Tag: Image Playground
This article, "Apple Revamps Image Playground With Photorealistic Generation and New Editing Tools" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced a new Foundation Models framework for developers alongside a set of Xcode enhancements aimed at agentic coding workflows.


The Foundation Models framework gains image input support, allowing developers to pass images alongside text into on-device models. Apple also introduced custom skills and server-side model execution as part of the framework, giving developers more flexibility in how they integrate AI capabilities into their apps. Apple also announced a new Core AI framework alongside the Foundation Models changes.

Xcode's coding assistant has been expanded to handle app localization and can now interact with simulated devices, with the ability to extend its capabilities further via custom skills. Apple also said developers will be able to more easily resize and interact with app previews, with additional details to follow in upcoming sessions and the State of the Union presentation. Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said Xcode is now the "best place" to build apps using agentic coding.

Apple also highlighted expanded App Intents support, with Apple citing third-party apps such as Line as examples of how developers can allow users to ask Siri to perform actions within their apps on their behalf.Tag: Xcode
This article, "Apple Unveils Xcode and Foundation Models Framework Improvements" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple released the first betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 today, introducing a more capable version of Siri called ‌Siri‌ AI. Developers are able to download the betas and try ‌Siri‌ out, but there is a waitlist.


After updating to ‌iOS 27‌, developers will need to open the Settings app, go to the Apple Intelligence section, and opt in to the waitlist to get access to ‌Siri‌.

There is no word yet on how long the wait will be, but Apple used a similar waitlist when rolling out ‌Apple Intelligence‌ in iOS 18. It could be a matter of hours for some of the first developers to update to ‌iOS 27‌.

The new ‌Siri‌ and ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features that Apple introduced today are available on all devices that support ‌Apple Intelligence‌, but some on-device capabilities will be limited to newer iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

‌Siri‌ AI is free, but Apple does have daily limits on some capabilities like image generation. Opting into an iCloud+ subscription plan increases AI limits. ‌Siri‌ AI is limited to English, and it is not available in the European Union on the iPhone or the iPad, but EU users can try it on Mac. ‌Siri‌ AI is not available in China. Related Roundup: iOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "How to Get iOS 27's New Siri AI: Join the Waitlist First" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
iPadOS 27 cuts support for more iPad models than last year's iPadOS 26 did, with older iPad Pro, iPad Air, ‌iPad‌, and iPad mini models all losing compatibility.


‌iPadOS 26‌ supported ‌iPad Air‌ models from the 3rd generation onward. iPadOS 27 raises the floor to A14, M1, or later, cutting the 3rd generation ‌iPad Air‌ model from the compatibility list entirely.

The ‌iPad Pro‌ also sees cuts. ‌iPadOS 26‌ retained support for ‌iPad Pro‌ 12.9-inch from the 3rd generation onward and ‌iPad Pro‌ 11-inch from the 1st generation onward. iPadOS 27 raises those floors to the 4th generation 12.9-inch and the 2nd generation 11-inch, dropping two older Pro models that were still supported just a year ago.

For the standard ‌iPad‌ lineup, ‌iPadOS 26‌ drew the line at the 8th generation, having already dropped the 7th generation last year. iPadOS 27 cuts the 8th generation as well, leaving only the 9th generation, 10th generation, and the current A16 model as compatible.

The ‌iPad mini‌ sees its oldest supported model bumped from the 5th generation to the 6th generation, with the A17 Pro-equipped mini 7 also included. The 5th generation mini, which ran ‌iPadOS 26‌, will not receive the update.

By contrast, ‌iPadOS 26‌ was a relatively conservative cull; it dropped only the 7th generation ‌iPad‌ from the iPadOS 18 compatibility list. iPadOS 27 represents a considerably more aggressive pruning across the entire ‌iPad‌ lineup.Related Roundup: iOS 27
This article, "iPadOS 27 Drops Support for a Wave of iPads" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Following the WWDC 2026 keynote event, Apple has seeded the first betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 to developers for testing purposes.


Registered developers can opt in to betas and download the software through the Settings app on each device.

The software includes many of the new features that were shown off earlier today, though some of what Apple demoed won't be available right away. Highlights include an updated version of Siri with a ‌Siri‌ app and new AI features for apps like Photos, Camera, and Wallet.

There are dozens of new features to go through, including hundreds of smaller tweaks and changes that we'll be writing about over the next several weeks. Make sure to stay tuned to MacRumors for hands-on coverage, guides, how-tos, and an in-depth look at everything you'll want to know about the new software.

Today's betas are limited to developers who will incorporate the new features into their apps. Apple will release a public beta so anyone can test out the software in July. ‌iOS 27‌, iPadOS 27, ‌macOS 27‌, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 will all launch to the public in the fall.Related Roundups: Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, iOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 26Buyer's Guide: Apple TV (Don't Buy), Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forums: Apple TV and Home Theater, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch
This article, "Apple Releases First iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Betas to Developers" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced that iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 will be available in developer beta starting today, with public betas to follow in July. The software updates will all be released in the "fall" as usual — likely September — but Apple did not provide any specific date at this time.


The revamped version of Siri that is officially named "Siri AI" will be available to test in the iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27 developer betas starting today, and it is coming to the Apple Watch in a future watchOS 27 beta. "Siri AI" will also be included in the public betas of each platform that are launching in July.

"Siri AI" requires a device that is compatible with Apple Intelligence.

The revamped version of Siri will roll out to all customers with a compatible device later this year, but even the launch version will be considered a "beta."

"Siri AI" is the more personalized version of Siri that Apple first previewed all the way back at WWDC 2024. Two years later, it is finally arriving, with the core upgrades being understanding of personal context and on-screen awareness.

"Siri AI is an entirely new version of Siri deeply integrated into iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro," said Apple. "It can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos, and more, and get things done across apps with even more systemwide app actions."

With broad world knowledge, the new Siri is able to answer many more questions.

An all-new Siri app across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 provides users with a dedicated spot to fully interact with the revamped assistant.Related Roundups: iOS 27, macOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "Apple Announces When iOS 27 and Revamped 'Siri AI' Will Be Released" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today confirmed that watchOS 27 will not support the Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra (first generation), or Apple Watch SE (second generation), effectively drawing a line at devices equipped with the S9 or S10 chip.


The only Apple Watch models compatible with watchOS 27 are the Apple Watch Series 10, Series 11, Ultra 2, Ultra 3, and SE 3. Despite the fact that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 contains the S9 chip, the Series 9 which contains the same chip will no longer be supported.

The cuts are the biggest loss of latest generation software support for the Apple Watch to date. watchOS 26 supported exactly the same devices as watchOS 11 before it: the Apple Watch Series 6 and later, Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and later, and all Apple Watch Ultra models. With watchOS 27, Apple is effectively dropping four years' worth of device support in a single software update.
Related Roundups: Apple Watch 11, watchOS 26Buyer's Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)Related Forum: Apple Watch
This article, "watchOS 27 Drops Support for Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 1, SE 2, and Older" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today unveiled macOS Golden Gate, the next major version of its Mac operating system, during its WWDC 2026 keynote.


As expected, the update confirms the end of Intel Mac support. Apple said last year that macOS Tahoe would be the final release to run on pre-Apple silicon machines, and macOS 27 makes that official – you'll need an Apple silicon Mac to install it.

Here are the Macs compatible with macOS Golden Gate:

MacBook Neo (2026)
MacBook Air with Apple silicon (2020 and later)
MacBook Pro with Apple silicon (2020 and later)
iMac with Apple silicon (2021 and later)
Mac mini with Apple silicon (2020 and later)
Mac Studio with Apple silicon (2022 and later)
Mac Pro with Apple silicon (2023 and later)
Four models that ran macOS Tahoe didn't make the cut this year. They include the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019), the MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports), the iMac (2020), and the Mac Pro (2019).

Owners of those machines aren't entirely out of luck, however. Apple usually keeps issuing security fixes for the previous macOS version well after it's superseded, so anyone sticking with Tahoe will continue to get the necessary patches. But for the latest features, though, the only path forward is a newer Mac.Tag: WWDC 2026
This article, "Here Are the Macs Compatible With macOS Golden Gate" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
The new enhanced Siri AI features that Apple announced today at WWDC 2026 will not be available in the European Union or in China when they are released in beta later this year.


Apple said that while Siri AI will be available for free with the new upcoming OS releases, it will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS until it can find a path forward for regulatory approval.

Apple said EU regulators did not accept any of the company's proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.
When iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 launch later this year, Apple will not offer Siri AI or its new features on those platforms in the EU. That includes the new app for revisiting conversations, expanded Visual Intelligence capabilities, integrated writing tools, Siri mode in the Camera app on iPhone, and other Siri AI features introduced at WWDC26. Apple explained further in a newsroom announcement:
The restrictions will apply to both consumers and developers. EU-based developers will be unable to test or integrate the new Siri AI features into their iPhone and iPad apps. Apple will, however, make Siri AI available in the EU on macOS 27, visionOS 27, and watchOS 27.

Apple also said that Siri AI will not be available in China while the company works through regulatory requirements.

Tags: China, European Union, Siri
This article, "New Siri AI Features Won't Be Available in EU Later This Year" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced new AI-powered photo editing tools coming to the Photos app as part of Apple Intelligence, including an upgraded Cleanup tool, a new Extend tool, and a new Spatial Reframing feature.


Spatial Reframing allows users to reposition the virtual camera angle of a photo after it has already been taken. By touching and dragging, users can adjust the framing and perspective of a shot, with ‌Apple Intelligence‌ generating new content only to fill in the gaps created by the shift in angle. It only generates new content to fill in the gaps where the perspective has shifted, ensuring the reframed photo stays consistent with the original scene.

The Cleanup tool is also receiving what Apple calls a "big upgrade," with improved ability to remove distractions from images and more realistic infill "even when the scene is complex." A new Extend tool rounds out the trio, letting users add more background space to a photo or adjust its aspect ratio.

Apple said the new tools help photographers "enhance their images in ways that respect the original moment." All three features are processed using Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, meaning the edits are handled in the cloud while Apple says user data remains protected. The new tools will work on older photos as well as images taken with non-Apple cameras.Tags: Apple Intelligence, Photos
This article, "Apple to Bring AI Reframing and Editing Tools to Photos App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced that users can now describe a shortcut in natural language, with Apple Intelligence automatically building the automation in the background.


Previously, creating a Shortcuts automation required users to manually build workflows step by step, making the feature largely the preserve of more technically minded users. With the upcoming update, users can simply describe what they want a shortcut to do in plain English text, and ‌Apple Intelligence‌ then handles the construction.

Apple demonstrated the feature with a practical example: A user asking the Shortcuts app to automatically send their estimated time of arrival to a designated recipient whenever they leave home. ‌Apple Intelligence‌ calculates the ETA based on the user's location and sends the correct time without any manual configuration.Tags: Apple Intelligence, Shortcuts
This article, "Apple Brings Natural Language Creation to Shortcuts App" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple's new version of Safari browser can be tasked to monitor a webpage and notify you of any changes, thanks to a new built-in feature.


With "Notify Me," Safari can keep checking a website on your behalf – such as a product you've been watching for when it comes back in stock – and alert you when a change occurs.

In other upcoming feature additions, using the power of AI, Safari tabs that you have open can automatically be organized into topics.

Moreover, Apple says that you can describe what you want in natural language, and Safari can create a custom extension that adapts web pages just for you.

Stay tuned for all the details.Tag: WWDC 2026
This article, "Safari Will Soon Be Able to Monitor a Webpage and Notify You of Updates" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today introduced a Siri app across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, providing users with a dedicated spot to interact with the revamped assistant.


In the Siri app, you can have back-and-forth conversations with Siri in text or voice modes, and your conversation history is synced across your devices via iCloud.


Apple is finally launching its more personalized version of Siri, complete with understanding of your personal context and on-screen awareness. It is called Siri AI, and it will initially be available in English only, according to Apple.Related Roundups: iOS 27, macOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "Apple Unveils All-New Siri App Across iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today unveiled significant upgrades to Visual Intelligence, including a new Siri mode in the Camera app that can analyze real-world objects and take actions directly from what the iPhone sees.


Apple's vice president of software engineering Sebastien Marineau-Mes detailed the enhancements during today's WWDC keynote, explaining that the new ‌Siri‌ mode in Camera uses image understanding powered by Apple's foundational models to interpret what the camera is pointed at and surface contextually relevant actions.

One of the headline use cases is bill splitting. Users can aim their iPhone camera at a restaurant check and immediately divide the total between friends, with Apple Cash integration allowing payments to be sent on the spot. Apple also demoed pointing the camera at a plate of food to receive nutritional insights.

‌Visual Intelligence‌ is also coming to visionOS, bringing the same capability to Apple's spatial computing platform. ‌Siri‌ can recognize real-world objects in a user's environment and surface relevant information about them on demand.Related Roundup: Apple Vision ProTags: Apple Intelligence, Visual IntelligenceBuyer's Guide: Vision Pro (Neutral)Related Forum: Apple Vision Pro
This article, "Apple Expands Visual Intelligence With Bill Splitting, Nutrition Insights, and visionOS Support" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
In macOS 27, Siri's new chatbot capabilities can be accessed straight from Spotlight, Apple announced today.


During its WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple revealed that Siri's rich conversational experience can be started right inside the Spotlight prompt, accessed via Command + Space, bringing in context and chat history on the fly.

Conversation history is synced via iCloud, so you can go from device to device. It can use world knowledge, personal content, and allows you to perform tasks like writing Messages or emails.

There's also a new Siri mode in Camera. Apple is introducing broader Apple Intelligence upgrades that can bring smarter capabilities to apps across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Stay tuned for all the details.Related Roundup: macOS 27Tag: Siri
This article, "Rich Siri Conversations in macOS 27 Can Be Started in Spotlight" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article
Apple today announced a significantly revamped Siri at WWDC 2026, rebranding it as "‌Siri‌ AI" and unveiling out a wave of new capabilities spanning conversational depth, system-wide integration, and a redesigned interface across platforms.


Apple framed the update with the acknowledgment that "there are times when you expect more from ‌Siri‌." The company is describing the redesigned assistant as "a profoundly more capable assistant" that can now hold multi-turn conversations, draw on real-time world knowledge, and interact with personal data across apps.

‌Siri‌ is now embedded directly in the Dynamic Island, accessible by swiping down from it, pressing the side button, or saying "Hey ‌Siri‌." A revamped voice engine makes the assistant sound more expressive, with micro-adjustable voice settings available during initial setup.

During Apple's keynote demo, presenters showed ‌Siri‌ handling chained, multi-step requests with apparent ease. In one sequence, a presenter asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, was told tickets require a lottery entry, and asked ‌Siri‌ to set a reminder when the lottery opens, which it did. In another, the assistant identified a photo's landmark, pulled up navigation to that location, and surfaced photos from a recent family trip, adding a specific image to a shared family album on request.


Another demo showcased ‌Siri‌'s ability to synthesize information across apps. A presenter asked about a dessert he had heard about at an event, and ‌Siri‌ located the relevant details from his Messages history. It then compiled the information into a watch-party menu, drafted a message to his contacts with the menu included, and presented send and edit options. In a further demo, a presenter asked about something his son had shared in a message and followed it up by asking ‌Siri‌ to compose an email on the subject.

A new dedicated ‌Siri‌ app lets users scroll back through prior conversations and kick off new ones, with conversation history synced via iCloud so sessions carry seamlessly between devices. The app is also coming to watchOS. On the Mac, ‌Siri‌ is now also integrated into Spotlight and available via right-click context menus on any file or window. On visionOS, ‌Siri‌ AI gains a 3D visualization that users can place anywhere in their space.

Tags: Siri, WWDC 2026
This article, "Apple Announces 'Siri AI' at WWDC 2026" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

View the full article

Account

Navigation

Search

Search

Configure browser push notifications

Chrome (Android)
  1. Tap the lock icon next to the address bar.
  2. Tap Permissions → Notifications.
  3. Adjust your preference.
Chrome (Desktop)
  1. Click the padlock icon in the address bar.
  2. Select Site settings.
  3. Find Notifications and adjust your preference.