Apple

iOS 27 began rolling out on September 14, and it arrived with a screen most people may be tempted to tap through without reading: a prompt titled "Improve Siri & Apple Intelligence" offering two choices, "Share Audio and Text" or "Not Now."

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 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,...

GM confirmed last week that Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will remain in the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500, but with a redesigned infotainment interface arriving later this year on the company's highest-volume vehicles.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

Searches for iOS 27 MagSafe Wallet designs are turning up nothing about the physical card accessory. That's because the materials describing this release, Apple's own developer session and MacRumors' reporting, cover changes to the Wallet app, the iPhone software for storing digital cards and passes, not the magnetic accessory Apple sells separately. Apple announced last year that iOS 27 would arrive on September 14 for compatible iPhones, a date that lines up with today (MacRumors, last year).

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.

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.

Some App Store apps now let you pay for an annual subscription in monthly installments instead of one upfront charge. Apple calls it "monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment," and it's easy to mistake for a flexible, cancel-anytime monthly plan.

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.

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.

Apple's Mail app in iOS 27 gets a rebuilt search engine, and this time it ranks results by relevance and intent rather than keywords and recency, according to MacRumors. It's the most direct fix yet for a complaint that, per Cult of Mac, has "been broken for years, and everyone knows it." The iOS 27 Mail app new features go beyond search, too, adding Siri tools that summarize and draft emails, plus one-tap links that push inbox information into Calendar, Maps, and Wallet.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most CarPlay customization doesn't happen on the car's screen at all. The app layout can be rearranged from an iPhone before the driver even starts the engine, as long as that iPhone has connected to the car's CarPlay system before, according to a 9to5Mac walkthrough from about six months ago.

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

For years, Apple Notes was a one-way street. Text went in and mostly stayed there, with no built-in way to hand a note back out in a format other writing tools could actually read. iOS 26 changes that by building native, two-way Markdown support into Notes, and this guide walks through how to import and export Markdown in Apple Notes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

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 Maps ads are now live in the US and Canada. Ad delivery began on August 21, and Apple confirmed a few days later that the rollout would keep expanding over the coming weeks, according to 9to5Mac and PPC Land.

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 shipped September 14, 2026, as build 24A437, and Apple's support documentation lists the new Apple Intelligence capabilities by platform. Counting Siri AI separately and counting Apple's three Intelligent Accessibility subfeatures individually produces 20 entries for the purposes of this article. Updating doesn't hand every iPhone owner all 20 iOS 27 Apple Intelligence features at once, though. Hardware, storage, language, age, and region each gate access on their own, and some entries...

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.

Apple shipped watchOS 27 on September 14, and the update quietly retires one of the Apple Watch's longest-running shortcuts. Double-clicking the Digital Crown no longer switches between the app you're using and whatever you had open before, a gesture that's worked as an instant toggle since watchOS 26 and earlier versions of the platform, according to MacRumors and 9to5Mac. The same double-click used to jump between the watch face and the last app you'd viewed. That's gone too.

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).

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

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).

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.