Apple: Page 3

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.

WhatsApp is rolling out a new settings panel that lets a subset of Mac beta testers set their own WhatsApp beta for Mac update schedule, picking between two release channels instead of taking whatever build the company pushes automatically, according to WABetaInfo and Hardware Upgrade this week.

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...

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 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.

iOS 27 lets an iPhone tap into GymKit-equipped gym machines for the first time, with AirPods Pro 3 supplying the heart-rate data an Apple Watch would normally provide (Engadget, yesterday). That's the shift behind iOS 27 GymKit iPhone and AirPods compatibility: the phone becomes a second way to connect to equipment that could already talk to a Watch. It doesn't add GymKit to treadmills that never had it, and as of this testing, iOS 27 remains in beta; Apple hasn't said when GymKit on iPhone...

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.

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.

iOS 27 shipped Sept. 14 with a redesigned Siri, but one of its most useful AI features lives inside the Shortcuts app. Describe a Shortcut lets you type what you want in plain language and have Apple Intelligence assemble the actions for you instead of building a workflow one step at a time.

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.

The Apple Health app redesign does something the app has never really done before: it tells you what to do with your numbers instead of just displaying them. A daily 0-10 readiness score arrives with a plain-language verdict like "Recover" or "Go For It," and a new "Health Age" metric compares your body's tracked stats against your actual age. Apple unveiled both as part of a broader health and fitness push tied to Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

iOS 27 gives Find My something it has never had: a way to pause your location for one specific person without sending them any alert. That closes the long-standing gap between sharing everything and stopping sharing and hoping nobody notices.

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

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.

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...

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.

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 released macOS Tahoe 26.6.1 on August 6, 2026, with a security advisory covering one Screen Sharing vulnerability. Apple identifies the flaw as CVE-2026-65400 and says an attacker on the network may be able to authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials. The company addressed the authentication issue with improved state management.

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...

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...

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,...

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.

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.

Cultured Code released the Things 3.24 update today, adding Siri AI task creation, full Spotlight search integration, a new XL Portrait widget, and expanded notification snoozing across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. The update is already live on the App Store (9to5Mac; MacRumors).

New Apple TV and HomePod mini hardware is reportedly "nearly ready to launch," with September or October the likely window for both devices, according to MacRumors citing Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. That report puts a firmer shape on the HomePod mini 2 release date and features that have been circulating for months, but the hardware itself isn't really the story here.

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.

An OpenCVE entry lists macOS Sequoia 15.8.1 and macOS Tahoe 26.7.1 as the fixed versions for CVE-2026-86950, an out-of-bounds write bug that could let a maliciously crafted file trigger arbitrary code execution. Apple released macOS Golden Gate 27.0.1 on September 28, but its security-releases page says the update has no published CVE entries. OpenCVE's record for CVE-2026-86950 does not list a macOS 27 version, so the public records checked here do not tie CVE-2026-86950 to Golden Gate 27.0.1.

Apple calls Finder the home base of the Mac: the tool for organizing and reaching almost everything on the system, from documents to a connected iPhone. Most people use about a tenth of it. This collection of Finder tips and tricks for Mac users covers the rest: the browsing, previewing, editing, and search tools sitting in the same window you already open dozens of times a day.

Code buried inside a macOS Tahoe 26.7 update shows how Apple's rumored Home Hub might figure out who's standing in front of it. The strings describe ambient sensing, built-in cameras, and possibly voice cues working together to verify a person's identity and then switch to that person's own profile. MacRumors reported the find, and AppleInsider spotted matching code in the same build, which it describes as a 26.7 release candidate.

Beta code inside tvOS 27 and Bloomberg reporting suggest Apple is preparing Siri AI for the Apple TV ecosystem, but neither source confirms which existing models will support it. Whether the second- and third-generation Apple TV 4K will run the redesigned assistant, or whether it's reserved for hardware Apple hasn't announced yet, remains an open question.

Installing iOS 27 next month may not hand you Siri AI on the spot. Beta evidence points to a four-step sequence: update, enable Apple Intelligence, join the iOS 27 Siri AI waitlist, then wait for a notification, according to 9to5Mac on August 25 and MacRumors on August 24.

Backing out of an app, opening Settings, and scrolling through the full app list just to flip one permission toggle is a small tax most iPhone owners pay eventually. This guide walks through how to add an Open App Settings shortcut to Control Center, a one-step Shortcuts action that, according to reporting, jumps you from whatever app you're using straight to that app's own settings page, skipping the manual hunt through the list (Digital Today reported earlier this year).

The word "reset" gets stretched to cover three unrelated jobs when an Apple TV remote acts up, and that stretching is where most of the confusion starts. Learning how to reset an Apple TV remote really means figuring out which of three things applies: restarting a frozen remote, re-pairing one that's lost its Bluetooth connection, or wiping the entire Apple TV back to factory settings. Only the last of those erases the Apple TV's data.

Apple is testing a new iOS 27 feature called iPhone Handoff that would let one phone number switch between two iPhones through a "companion eSIM" setup, rather than forcing users to manually transfer an eSIM every time they change devices. Apple briefly previewed the capability at WWDC 2026 with the description "Switch between two iPhone devices with the same phone number," but didn't explain how it would work.

Code buried in audioOS 27 beta 8 points to a four-HomePod surround sound system and a new listening mode Apple calls "Party Mode."