Apple

Safari looks almost the same after installing iOS 27. Open it, and the address bar, tab bar, and reading view sit right where they always have. But WIRED found that Apple tucked several new tools into Safari's menus, changes easy to miss if you're just scrolling through a webpage.

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. One real-world example makes the case: an M1 Mac mini running Time Machine, Content Caching, file sharing, and Plex together idled at about 6 watts, climbed to roughly 7 watts during 4K Plex playback, and peaked near 10 watts, replacing an...

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's macOS 27 Golden Gate skips a Photos redesign, but it delivers one of the app's broadest feature updates in years, and not every part of it applies to every Mac. The update spans generative AI editing, a Shared Albums overhaul, and library organization fixes, according to 9to5Mac yesterday. Understanding macOS 27 Photos app new features matters before you update, because the headline AI tools require Apple Intelligence on a compatible Mac, and two of the three send your photos to Apple's...

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.

iPadOS 27 became available as a free update yesterday, and the headline entry on the iPadOS 27 features list is Siri AI, Apple's rebuilt assistant. Installing the update is one decision; getting Siri AI to actually work is another, according to Apple Newsroom. The assistant only works on select iPad models, only in English at launch, and its status in China remains unclear.

Apple Music subscribers don't have to wait until December to see their year in music laid out. The 2026 Replay playlist has been quietly taking shape since late winter, breaking down top songs and artists as the year goes rather than dropping all at once (9to5Mac). This guide covers how to get your 2026 Apple Music Replay playlist in the Music app, how to pull up the same stats on the web, and what to check if Replay still isn't showing on your account seven months in.

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 last Saturday 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 and imported music.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 reach store shelves this Friday, September 18, but the feature drawing the most scrutiny won't be on anyone's wrist that day. Siri Recap, the new always-on conversation summarizer, ships in beta later this year with no confirmed date attached, The Next Web reported yesterday. Once it arrives, 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 anyone,...

Apple TV boxes don't ship with automatic content recognition, and the Apple TV 4K can't inspect video coming through a television's other inputs, giving it a privacy edge over most other streaming devices and smart TVs, according to Ars Technica's reporting from last year. That's a real advantage, but it doesn't touch app tracking, diagnostics, Siri's data handling, or how the Apple TV app personalizes recommendations. That's where the Apple TV privacy settings below come in.

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.

iOS 27 began rolling out yesterday, September 14, and it arrived with a screen most people will tap through without reading: a prompt titled "Improve Siri & Apple Intelligence" offering two choices, "Share Audio and Text" or "Not Now." That single screen is the answer to how to stop Apple using Siri data to train AI. It's the specific control that decides whether Apple can collect and use your Siri, Dictation, and Translate interactions to help train its Foundation Models (9to5Mac reports).

The Apple CarPlay settings to change after that first pairing aren't hidden exactly, but they do live in two different places: the iPhone's Settings app and CarPlay's own on-screen Settings, reached from the car's display. CarPlay ships with a handful of options that adjust how it looks and behaves, and most are worth checking once the initial setup is done (Engadget, yesterday).

Apple now markets the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max as an intelligent personal hub, pairing AI capability with personal context and calling privacy and security core to the design. That's a confirmed claim from Apple's own announcement. It doesn't tell you which parts of that hub are working today, or whether they apply to the phone you already own.

iOS 27 lands as a free software update on Monday, September 14, Apple confirmed yesterday, and the biggest of the new iOS 27 features by far is Siri AI: a rebuilt assistant Apple says can read what's on your screen, dig through your messages and photos, and pull live answers from the web.

Apple's first foldable iPhone now has a price and a calendar. The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB, opens for preorder on October 16, and ships October 23 (MacRumors). Before that money changes hands, the real question for iPhone owners is whether the redesigned iOS 27 layout Apple built specifically for a folding display makes up for the hardware compromises that come with any first-generation foldable. The iPhone Duo software features shown off this week look more thought-out than the...

NameDrop lets two iPhones, or an iPhone and Apple Watch, swap contact cards by holding the top edges close together and confirming a prompt that appears on both screens. It works by sharing contact information using AirDrop, and it's available now on any compatible iPhone running iOS 17.1 or later (Apple Support). This guide covers how to use NameDrop on iPhone step by step: which devices qualify, how to control exactly what gets shared, and what to check when the screen refuses to show up.

To stop CarPlay from automatically connecting, turn off the per-car toggle if the iPhone shows one for that vehicle. Use the Screen Time restriction when the goal is blocking CarPlay everywhere, across every paired car at once. Reach for Forget This Car only when a full re-pairing is acceptable, since that's the method Apple's own support page walks through for CarPlay.

For years, every iMessage conversation looked the same: the standard plain Messages backdrop, no matter who you were talking to. That changed when Apple shipped iOS 26, which lets you swap that plain canvas for a photo, a solid color, an animated preset, or an AI-generated image. Learning how to change the background on iPhone Messages takes about thirty seconds once you know where to look, but the feature works differently than most people expect. It isn't a personal theme sitting quietly on...

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's iOS 27, currently moving through beta testing ahead of a fall release, brings a broad set of improvements to Messages.

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...

Parallels recently announced Parallels Desktop 27, adding a Metal-based graphics driver that brings hardware-accelerated OpenGL 4.3 to Windows virtual machines on Apple silicon Macs. The company describes the capability as unique among Mac virtualization tools, though that comparison comes from Parallels itself rather than independent testing.

The Apple Maps Lake America update has started rolling out. As of September 1, Apple Maps began showing "Lake America" to U.S. users for the body of water traditionally known as Lake Ontario, after President Trump signed an executive order renaming it for U.S. federal use and, according to his interior secretary, personally asked Apple to make the switch.

Apple has given Siri a dedicated Mac app for the first time, with its own icon in the Dock.

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.

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...

The most useful iOS 27 HomeKit changes have nothing to do with new hardware. Apple is adding several HomeKit Secure Video features powered by Apple Intelligence: plain-language descriptions of what your cameras recorded, natural-language search across that footage, and a single notification that merges scattered door and motion alerts instead of firing them off one by one (MacRumors; 9to5Mac).

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

Apple quietly previewed a way to switch one phone number between two iPhones at WWDC 2026, but it left the mechanics largely unexplained. What sounded at first like a small continuity feature now looks more substantial: one iPhone can serve as the main device, a second can act as its companion, and the same phone number can move between them without repeatedly transferring the primary eSIM.

Apple's long-rumored Home Hub display is shaping up to be less a single shared screen and more a device that can serve personal content depending on who's using it.

Apple Watch GPS vs GPS + Cellular comes down to one question: can the watch stay connected without your iPhone anywhere nearby? For the same model and case configuration, the GPS and GPS + Cellular versions share the same exterior design, size, screen, and core health and fitness features (iPhoneLife, 2023; Engadget). The GPS + Cellular version adds one extra capability: connecting to a mobile network on its own, so it can make calls, send texts, stream music, and receive notifications with no...

iOS 27's Wallet app now includes a bill-splitting tool that scans a restaurant receipt, sorts out who ordered what, and lets each person pay back their share through Apple Cash. The iOS 27 Apple Cash bill splitting feature relies on Apple Intelligence to read the receipt, so there's no manual math involved in figuring out tax and tip. 9to5Mac reported a favorable hands-on experience with the tool three days ago, calling it a real reason to start using Apple Cash.

Updating to iOS 27 doesn't automatically give you Apple's new Siri. Siri AI began rolling out in beta on Sept. 14, but hardware, language, region, age, and waitlist requirements mean some iPhone owners still won't see it after installing the update.

iOS 27 shipped this week with a redesigned Siri, but a feature tucked inside the Shortcuts app handles daily use just as directly. Type a single sentence into Shortcuts and it now builds a working "Daily Digest" automation, pulling weather, your calendar, reminders, and a summary of recent messages and emails without you touching the action-by-action builder (PCWorld, yesterday).

This guide walks through how to use Visual Intelligence on macOS Golden Gate: what your Mac needs before turning it on, both keyboard shortcuts that trigger it, the in-app option built into apps like Safari, and which questions are actually worth asking it. Visual Intelligence has lived on the iPhone since the iPhone 16, and Golden Gate brings the same idea to the Mac, letting you select something on screen and ask Siri about it instead of typing out a search (MacPaw).

Apple released iOS 27.2 beta 1 today, giving developers the first hands-on look at the redesigned Health app the company detailed last week. Developers running the beta can open two new tabs, Insights and Longevity, but the personalized health information and recommendations Apple has demonstrated, including advice about readiness, fitness, and heart health, aren't functional yet, according to 9to5Mac and MacRumors.

macOS 27 "Golden Gate" started rolling out on September 14, 2026, bringing what Apple calls "an entirely new version of Siri" to the Mac, according to Apple Newsroom. The macOS 27 Siri AI features include a dedicated conversational app, personal-context search across messages and email, and systemwide actions that reach into files, folders, and other apps.

watchOS 27 removes the Apple Watch double-click Digital Crown shortcut that used to jump straight back to whatever app you'd just been using. 9to5Mac reports the change on Series 11, Ultra 3, and SE 3, while MacStories documents the same beta behavior: a double-click now triggers the exact same result as a single click, opening the new Dynamic App Grid instead of the old App Switcher. This is watchOS 27 beta behavior, not something confirmed for whatever Apple ships in the eventual public...

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).