Apple

Apple's smart home event 2026 didn't happen on a stage. It arrived as three separate press releases on October 13, introducing three home-hub devices and a nine-product Apple Home Collection built with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric (Apple Newsroom).

Apple is holding a private 'Welcome home' experience in New York today, with announcements expected for a new Apple TV 4K, a refreshed HomePod mini, and a new smart home hub called HomeView, according to MacRumors. The most notable report heading into the event involves a new Apple TV built-in microphone: Apple has tested an Apple TV 4K with a built-in mic for hands-free Siri requests, a feature MacRumors describes as tested, not confirmed for the shipping device.

Apple's smart home plans could include someone to help install the equipment. A rumored arrangement with ADT raises that possibility ahead of Apple's Oct. 13 "Welcome home" event, but neither company has announced a deal.

Apple Maps lets you request that your house be obscured in Look Around, its street-level photo feature. The available sources describe this as an imagery request, not an address-listing request: they document what happens to the Look Around photo but don't establish whether approval changes search results, map pins, place cards, or driving directions tied to your home. That distinction is worth settling before walking through how to blur your home on Apple Maps.

TextExpander launched a free-forever plan this week that needs no credit card and syncs the same snippet library across Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, and Chrome, according to 9to5Mac and TextExpander's own site. The TextExpander free plan gives individuals a genuine no-cost entry into cross-device text expansion, not a stripped-down trial that pushes a sale.

This guide walks through how to import passwords into Apple Passwords, built around the Mac-based CSV import that third-party guides have documented in detail, plus a separate iPhone-only method that hasn't been shown to produce the same result. If switching password managers has been sitting on the to-do list, this covers what to check before starting, how the transfer actually works, and why it's worth verifying everything before deleting the old vault.

Plug a spare numpad into your Mac and remap one of its keys in Karabiner-Elements, and nothing in a basic rule guarantees that remap only fires from that spare keyboard. The same key code reaches macOS whether it came from your main keyboard or the spare one sitting next to it, unless the rule is scoped to one specific device. That's the core obstacle anyone trying to use a spare keyboard as a macropad on macOS runs into first.

Open Settings on an iPhone running iOS 27, and you'll find a new iOS 27 Impersonation Risk Detection toggle sitting inside Privacy & Security. It's designed to flag when your behavior during a wire transfer, a high-value payment, or a change to a critical security setting looks like someone is coaching you through a scam in real time.

macOS 27 "Golden Gate" started rolling out Sept. 14, bringing what Apple calls "an entirely new version of Siri" to the Mac, according to Apple Newsroom.

Continuity isn't one setting tucked into a menu. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS bundle nearly a dozen distinct tools under that name, everything from AirDrop and Handoff to lesser-known features like Continuity Sketch and Instant Hotspot (Apple Support, earlier this year). Knowing how to use Apple Continuity well means matching the right feature to the right task, not switching everything on and hoping it sorts itself out.

An Apple-commissioned Omdia study, based on 1,500 conversations with enterprise tech leaders and practitioners, found that 57% of enterprise AI models run under 10 billion parameters, small enough for a MacBook Air or entry-level MacBook Pro to handle. That number describes model size, not proof that most enterprise workloads are ready to leave the cloud. Concurrency, uptime, and integration requirements never entered the measurement. Still, it's the kind of stat fueling a real question for...

Apple told developers to "start getting ready ... today" for the iPhone Duo, eight days ago. Eight days later, the iPhone Duo app developer update timeline still has a gap right in the middle of it: no Xcode 27.1 beta, the actual tool developers need to act on that instruction.

Apple released watchOS 27.0.1 for Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 on Sept. 23, with release notes describing bug fixes "including an issue that could cause the Apple Watch to restart unexpectedly," according to MacRumors.

iOS 27 splits Apple's Clean Up tool into three processing modes: Auto, Fast, and High Quality, and picking the right one is the difference between an edit that holds up and one that looks obviously doctored. This guide covers how to use Clean Up in iOS 27 Photos to remove unwanted objects from iPhone photos, including which mode to trust and when to override it. Hands-on tests from Macworld and TechRadar show High Quality producing noticeably more convincing results than Fast in complex...

A Tom's Guide reporter spent about four hours trying to book a family trip to Disneyland Paris, phone parked in an online queue the whole time. The reporter said the checks on that booking page came about every 20 minutes in that case, part of a range the same person observed elsewhere running anywhere from 10 minutes to a full hour (Tom's Guide, last week). That inconsistency is the whole problem with an otherwise clever tool.

Apple's iOS 27 parental controls started arriving on devices on September 14, 2026, as part of a broader software rollout that also touched iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. The features getting the most attention, child accounts, Ask to Browse, and a redesigned Screen Time, aren't spread evenly across that whole list. Apple says they require installing the Screen Time update specifically on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

Apple's macOS 27 "Golden Gate" puts Siri AI into Spotlight, the right-click menu, and screen-aware queries, but the first hands-on account of it found Siri itself only "occasionally useful." Gizmodo's Kyle Barr spent time with the macOS 27 beta two months ago and came away more impressed with a different feature: AI-assisted Shortcuts, which he called "the real gold" of the release.

Crack an iPhone 17 screen without coverage and Apple bills $329; do the same to a Pro Max and the number climbs to $379. File that same repair through AppleCare+ instead, and the fee drops to $29 (iDrop News, about a year ago; Engadget, two weeks ago). That gap explains why AppleCare+ can be valuable, and also why so many people buy it without checking whether they actually need it.

Apple's macOS 27 Golden Gate update lets Mac owners route a question, and related follow-ups, to ChatGPT instead of the new Siri AI, but there's no switch that makes the swap permanent. Here's how to use ChatGPT with Siri on Mac: turn on the ChatGPT extension once in System Settings, then ask for ChatGPT by name every time you want it instead of Siri AI, since every new query defaults back to Siri AI otherwise.

iOS 27 arrived earlier this month, and among its Apple Intelligence features is a new way to build automations: describe what you want in plain language, and the Shortcuts app builds it for you (MacRumors; EFF). Tap New Shortcut and the app can open to a "Describe a Shortcut" screen instead of dropping straight into the manual action editor, based on MacRumors' testing during the beta this summer (MacRumors). The update also brings new automation triggers and several new actions across...

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans to unveil a new smart home hub alongside a refreshed HomePod mini and an updated Apple TV 4K on Tuesday, October 13, an event already being tagged online as the Apple HomeHub October 13 launch.

Apple released Final Cut Camera 2.4 recently, giving the app direct control over the iPhone 18 Pro's variable-aperture lens for the first time. This Final Cut Camera iPhone 18 Pro variable aperture support lets users dial in specific aperture settings or switch to shutter-priority and aperture-priority modes while recording video, instead of leaving exposure to the camera's automatic choice.

Apple confirmed this week that it's tightening macOS Full Disk Access controls, requiring a "very explicit user action" before any Mac app can receive the permission. The company says autonomous AI agents have pushed the risk of that access high enough to justify the change.

Ever tapped Cancel on iCloud+, and nothing happens right away, and the paid plan keeps working through the end of the current billing cycle? That's what happens when you cancel iCloud storage: Apple doesn't cut off access the moment the change gets confirmed. What happens after that date depends on two separate things: how much data the account holds compared to the free 5 GB tier it's about to land on, and a set of iCloud+ features that disappear regardless of how much storage is actually in...

Apple's macOS Full Disk Access changes are arriving because AI agents are gaining enough autonomy to turn a convenience permission into a serious privacy risk, and the company says it needs to act before that risk grows further. A notice posted on Apple's developer site states that going forward, anyone who wants to grant Full Disk Access (FDA), the macOS permission that lets an app slip past most of the system's privacy protections, will have to take "very explicit user action," as reported by...

AppleInsider deleted Apple Intelligence's model folder on a test Mac last week and watched the Storage pane's AI figure drop from 27.59GB to 3.07GB, a 24.52GB swing. Available disk space only grew by about 14GB (AppleInsider). That gap matters before anyone touches anything: a Storage-pane number, a folder's measured size, and actual free space are three different things, and no method in this guide can promise an exact number back.

Two enterprise AI reports published earlier this year could be misread as evidence against buying Macs for a managed fleet. The logic looks tidy on paper: pair a documented AI governance gap with a survey of Apple-first organizations, and it reads like a case against the hardware itself. That reading doesn't hold up once you look at what either report actually measured, and that's the gap this article checks, not whether Apple Intelligence enterprise Mac security is settled, but whether these...

Apple just released watchOS 27.2 beta 3, the third developer beta, alongside matching beta 3 builds for tvOS 27.2, visionOS 27.2, iPadOS 27.2, and other platforms in the same seed. The update swaps in fresh code for Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Vision Pro testers, but the available report doesn't name a single feature, fix, or interface change tied to any of those three platforms.

Apple rewrote the compatibility lists for the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad around August 25, dropping every Intel-based Mac from the official pages. This week, it reportedly extended the same edits to related tech-specs pages. The pages now read as if the accessories support Apple silicon Macs only, a shift worth knowing about if you're checking Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad Intel Mac compatibility before buying or troubleshooting one.

Apple Wallet can store a state-issued driver’s license or ID, but that doesn’t mean every state qualifies as one of the states that accept a driver’s license in Apple Wallet at TSA checkpoints. According to TSA’s own list of participating states and eligible digital IDs, 16 states plus Puerto Rico currently route a mobile ID through Apple Wallet specifically for checkpoint use. Other states may use a state-built app instead, or may not appear on TSA’s current eligible-ID list at all.

GarageBand is free for all Mac users and comes stocked with 15GB of bundled sounds, 48 effects, and support for up to 255 audio tracks, according to a PCMag UK review updated earlier this year. For this workflow, there's no need to buy additional plug-ins or sound packs. This GarageBand for Mac beginner tutorial walks through how to make music in GarageBand for Mac starting from a blank project, built from Apple Loops, Drummer Loops, and optional recorded audio.

GPTK 4 and CrossOver are making some modern Windows titles genuinely playable on Apple Silicon, which sounds like great news if you're trying to play Windows games on an M5 Max Mac Studio you already own, or one you're thinking about buying. Before installing anything, know this: the most detailed benchmark report behind this guide tested a 40-core GPU, 48GB M5 Max MacBook Pro, not the base M5 Max Mac Studio, which has an 18-core CPU, a 32-core GPU, and 36GB of unified memory. Apple also offers...

iOS 27 restores a real Home Screen icon for the Apple TV Remote app, but the release candidate also contains two more additions most users can't touch yet: an app launcher and a Top Shelf content carousel. Both of these iOS 27 Apple TV Remote app hidden features sit behind disabled feature flags, so installing the update on its own won't switch either one on, according to MacRumors and Cult of Mac.

iOS 27 rolled out today, September 14, and buried inside it is something AirPods owners have asked for through several software cycles: a working iOS 27 AirPods customizable EQ that lets owners push lows, mids, and highs up or down instead of trusting Apple's automatic tuning alone. Apple Intelligence and a beta version of Siri AI ship the same day.

Granola Apple Watch App Explained: Features, Privacy Gaps, and Timing

Apple didn't quietly bolt on a new financing tier this week. It shut down the iPhone Upgrade Program and iPhone Payments in the United States and replaced both with the Apple Upgrade program, a Klarna-backed lease that now spans iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac (Apple Newsroom, this week). Leases start at $17.99 a month for iPhone and run 12 to 36 months depending on device category, sold through Apple's own retail and online channels in partnership with buy-now-pay-later provider Klarna...

Apple's WWDC26 preview of iOS 27 showed off video playback in the car and a much smarter Siri, but installing the update on an iPhone doesn't unlock either feature by itself. Working out iOS 27 CarPlay features compatibility means checking three separate things at once: the iPhone's model, the car parked in the driveway, and whether the apps already installed have caught up to Apple's new tools.

Apple CarPlay not working is rarely about a bad cable or spotty Wi-Fi, not at first anyway. The real diagnostic starting point is simpler: figure out whether the connection is wired or wireless, because the checks that follow are different for each (MacObserver, last year).

TechCrunch's hands-on verdict on the rebuilt Siri AI is blunt: the assistant finally works the way Apple promised, though the review reads more like relief than excitement, closer to a bug fix than a breakthrough (TechCrunch's hands-on review). Scientific American frames the wait differently, noting that Apple has promised, and repeatedly delayed, this more proactive Siri for two years (Scientific American). Whichever framing feels right comes down to something more basic than opinion: can you...

Wallpaper Engine isn't available on macOS. Its developers currently support Windows and Android and say they have no immediate plans for a Mac version.