Apple

Apple expanded support for its Apple Account Card in Wallet last week, adding Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Malta to the list of countries where the feature works (MacRumors). It's a small update to a feature that's been rolling out gradually since 2022 (MacRumors), but it's a good excuse to answer a question a lot of iPhone owners have been quietly Googling: what is an Apple Account Card, and is it something you need?

A newer iPhone can text emergency services from a trailhead with zero bars, but that capability isn't something you switch on in advance. It becomes available when you're off-grid and a normal call or text to emergency services can't connect, as long as you're outdoors with a clear view of the sky and using an iPhone 14 or later.

T-Mobile charges $5 per month for iPhone Handoff, the eSIM feature in iOS 27 that lets one phone number move between two iPhones, according to T-Mobile.

Apple's rumored smart home display, unofficially called the Apple Home Hub, is reportedly being tested inside employees' homes right now, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says an unveiling could come as soon as next month, according to MacRumors.

If your Apple Watch is a Series 6, 7, or 8, an Ultra 1, or an SE 2, there's a compatibility issue to check before anything else about watchOS 27 features. Apple's official compatibility list shows those models won't run it. MacStories, testing the public beta two months ago, found watchOS 27 limited to Series 9 and later, Ultra 2 and later, and the newly added SE 3. That leaves Series 6, 7, 8, Ultra 1, and SE 2 without the update, even though all of those models currently run watchOS 26.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 reached store shelves on Friday, September 18, but the feature drawing the most scrutiny didn't arrive with them. Siri Recap, the new opt-in conversation summarizer, arrives in beta later this year with no confirmed date attached, The Next Web reported. Once enabled, it's designed to listen to conversations throughout the day and quietly summarize them, and Apple says the raw audio behind those summaries is inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user,...

Code buried in the iOS 27 Release Candidate points to a new way to handle iOS 27 Apple Gift Card redemption: tapping a physical card against the back of a compatible iPhone instead of typing in a gift card code. MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris found the strings while digging through the RC build and reported that the phone would scan a chip in the card to check whether it's authentic and unspent before adding the balance to an Apple Account (MacRumors, last week).

iOS 27's Shared Albums update fixes a problem baked into the feature for years: shared photos and videos will no longer get compressed the moment they leave a personal library. The tradeoff is that new Shared Albums now count against the owner's iCloud storage, according to MacRumors and Trusted Reviews, reversing a setup that let people share thousands of images without touching their plan. The change is rolling out now, with iOS 27 in public beta ahead of a full release expected alongside new...

A single number is easier to understand than a night full of sleep charts. That was the appeal when Apple introduced Sleep Score with watchOS 26 in September 2025, giving Apple Watch users a nightly rating from 0 to 100 instead of leaving them to interpret sleep duration, wakefulness, and consistency on their own.

watchOS 27's new Siri app can save and continue chats for the first time, but Apple Watch doesn't hand you an obvious way to pick a thread back up. There's no button, no swipe prompt, nothing that mirrors how the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions handle it, according to 9to5Mac. A workaround exists and it works, but whether any of it applies to your Watch and iPhone pairing depends on a stack of eligibility rules Apple has only partly documented.

A Shortcuts setup can get close to sending photos in iMessage with one tap.

The Apple smart home display release date has already slipped past two internal targets, and the latest word from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman only widens the window rather than narrowing it. Apple's first screen-equipped home device remains on track for a launch before the end of 2026, Gurman reported last week, per MacRumors. That's a looser timeframe than the September target cited in earlier coverage, and it lands in a different window than the October-to-early-2027 range Cult of Mac reported...

Apple shipped iOS 27 public beta 5 on August 24, alongside iPadOS 27 public beta 5, tvOS 27 public beta 5, and macOS Golden Gate public beta 5, making the latest builds available to anyone enrolled with a compatible device, according to MacRumors. Of the four, iOS 27 carries the bigger story: a rebuilt Siri that remains limited by hardware, language, region, and Apple's access waitlist.

New code buried in a macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate is fueling fresh camera-equipped AirPods rumors, showing in granular detail how Apple's prototype earbuds actually capture and process images, according to MacRumors. The details point to a device built for Visual Intelligence, Apple's visual AI feature, rather than conventional photography.

Apple is drawing a hardware line in tvOS 27 for the first time in four years, cutting two older Apple TV models out of the update entirely (TechRadar, 2 months ago). But knowing whether your box makes the cut is only half the story. The more useful question, especially if you own one of the tvOS 27 compatible Apple TV models, is whether upgrading right now would actually get you anything.

Notability's calendar meeting recording feature launched on August 25, letting Mac and Windows users start a recording by tapping directly on a calendar event. Tap the event, and Notability opens a note ready for input while recording begins, according to 9to5Mac.

AppleCare One Family launches in the US on Sept. 14 for $49.99 a month, giving households a new way to protect all eligible Apple devices across a Family Sharing group of up to six people. Unlike AppleCare One Individual, which starts at $19.99 for three devices and adds $5.99 for each additional product, Family keeps the same monthly price as more eligible devices are added, according to Apple's current AppleCare details.

Apple's newest Watches can listen for a doorbell, identify music playing nearby, recover the last few seconds of a conversation, and eventually summarize conversations from throughout the day. That raises an unavoidable privacy question: What happens to all the audio needed to make those features work?

An iPhone that keeps losing charge during CarPlay usually gets blamed on the car first: a bad port, a cheap cable, a head unit that can't keep up. Before touching any of that, plug the iPhone into a wall charger with a known-good, compatible cable and see if it charges normally on its own. That single test won't rule out every car-specific variable, but it's the fastest way to tell whether the problem starts with the phone before spending an evening swapping cables in the driver's seat.

Apple Watch Series 12 doesn't wait for "Hey Siri" before it starts paying attention. Sound Recognition listens continuously for sirens, alarms, doorbells, and crying babies, flagging them with on-device intelligence even when the wearer's iPhone isn't nearby. Live Rewind goes further: a double press of the Digital Crown surfaces the previous 15 seconds of nearby conversation as a text snippet, without anyone having to ask for it in the moment.

Most Mac users assume the system language is all-or-nothing: change it, and everything from Finder to your third-party apps follows along. That's not quite right. macOS has a dedicated setting for how to change language for individual apps on Mac, letting you override one app's display language while leaving the rest of the system exactly as it was.

Open the Health app on your iPhone and there's a feature tucked inside that can hand a paramedic someone's blood type, list their allergies, and name who to call when they can't answer for themselves. It only works, though, if someone filled it in before the emergency happened. This guide walks through how to set up Medical ID and emergency contacts on iPhone: building the medical profile, adding contacts, deciding what to expose on the Lock Screen, configuring Emergency SOS without triggering...

Apple seeded tvOS 27 RC, build 24J360, to developers and public beta testers yesterday, and the update is now available through Software Update on enrolled compatible Apple TVs (MacRumors, yesterday; iClarified, yesterday). If you're trying to figure out how to install tvOS 27 RC, the requirement comes first: it runs on Apple TV 4K (2nd generation, 2021) or newer, and it does not run on the Apple TV HD (2015) or the original Apple TV 4K (2017) (iThinkDiff, 2 weeks ago; iClarified, yesterday).

Apple's new foldable, iPhone Duo, ships without any Face ID hardware. In its place, Apple built Touch ID into a side button and says a paired Apple Watch can unlock iPhone Duo as well, according to Apple's announcement ten days ago.

This guide walks through how to use Visual Intelligence on macOS Golden Gate: what your Mac needs before turning it on, the keyboard shortcuts that trigger it, the in-app option built into Siri's systemwide context menus, and which questions are actually worth asking it.

Apple began offering new and qualifying returning subscribers three free months of Apple One with the purchase of an eligible device on September 17, 2026. If you're trying to figure out how to get the Apple One 3-month free trial after buying a new device, the first question isn't which iPhone you bought. It's whether your Apple Account qualifies at all.

Apple is reportedly building a new smart home hub: a HomePod-style speaker paired with a roughly 7-inch display, running a new operating system built on tvOS, alongside refreshed Apple TV and HomePod hardware.

If you mostly use Apple Podcasts to press play and nothing else, there's a handful of useful controls sitting untouched: a library that actually surfaces what you want to hear, playback settings you won't have to hunt for every session, chapter and timestamp navigation for long episodes, and syncing that's supposed to carry your spot across every Apple device you own.

Searches for iOS 27 MagSafe Wallet designs are mixing together two different kinds of Wallet news.

A red badge has planted itself on the Settings app for some iPhone owners, tied to a prompt that reads "Activate iCloud Storage," and it won't clear no matter how many times it gets tapped. The odd part: the alert is showing up on devices where iCloud+ or Apple One storage is already active.

An old Mac mini doesn't have to end up in a drawer once a newer model takes over your desk. Turning an old Mac mini into a home server is one of the more practical uses for hardware that's small, quiet, and easy to tuck away where noise and space matter.

Plug into CarPlay for a quick errand run, and you might unplug later to find your phone has shed more charge than the trip seemed to justify. Apple forums and Reddit threads are full of the same complaint: CarPlay eats through battery faster than people expect. That's not a fringe annoyance, either, since CarPlay now works with more than 800 vehicle models.

Rivian's chief software officer has a blunt answer for anyone still shopping for Apple CarPlay in an electric truck: the debate itself, he argues, no longer matters. That's a striking claim from a company whose own buyers once ranked CarPlay as their single most-requested feature, according to The Verge, two months ago.

Apple released macOS 27 Golden Gate on Sept. 14, 2026, as a free update for eligible Macs, calling it a stability, performance, and compatibility release recommended for all macOS 27 users. The headline macOS 27 Golden Gate features center on Siri: Siri AI now lives inside Spotlight for conversational search, while a separate Siri AI app handles saved conversations synced through iCloud.

Apple is reportedly building an entirely new operating system, possibly called homeOS, to run a long-rumored smart home hub. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman describes it as blending tvOS, watchOS, and iOS elements, and it would join iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS as a distinct Apple smart home operating system if it ships (MacRumors, today).

AT&T iPhone Handoff support remains unconfirmed.

Farwave, an iPhone and iPad app, lets people find world radio stations by spinning a 3D globe to a region and tapping on a station, according to a 9to5Mac report published September 12 as part of the outlet's weekly Indie App Spotlight series. The Farwave app is free to download, with a subscription tier that adds podcasts, imported music, and other features.

Scroll through a playlist and find half the tracks dimmed and unplayable, and the timing feels random: was it something you did, a subscription hiccup, or the label pulling the song outright? If you're searching for Apple Music songs grayed out how to fix, the troubleshooting path is more structured than the scattered advice online suggests. Apple's own Cloud Status labels, "Waiting," an exclamation mark, or "No Longer Available," point to different likely causes, and only some of them respond...

Open System Settings after installing macOS 27, and Apple Intelligence might be claiming far more space than Apple's own numbers suggest it should. That's the pattern surfacing on Mac forums this week: multiple owners running Apple's newest macOS release are seeing Apple Intelligence storage usage on Mac systems run well past what Apple's support documentation lists as the requirement. MacRumors measured 20.67GB on its own M4 Pro Mac mini, already above Apple's published 14GB ceiling for that...

iOS 27's Wallet app now includes a bill-splitting tool that can scan a restaurant receipt, identify individual items, calculate each person's share of tax and tip, and let people settle up through Apple Cash.