The Latest on Apple

Security research firm Paradigm Shift published a working exploit this week that breaks into Apple devices at the hardware boot level through a BootROM flaw that Apple could not patch in existing silicon, according to the researchers. Named usbliter8, it is the first public unpatchable iPhone exploit targeting A12 and A13 chips since checkm8 exposed earlier hardware in 2019.

The new VSCO Studio Pro app launched on iOS this week, targeting high-volume photographers — weddings, portraits, events, sports, and school photography — with a macOS version confirmed for later this year. The broader strategic move may be the subscription bundle around it: VSCO One, priced on par with Adobe Creative Cloud Pro at $499.99 per year, packages Studio Pro alongside Galleries, Sites, AI Lab, Workspace, Canvas, Capture, and The Freelance Photographer business mentorship program.

Apple is adding a "Hide Location" option to Find My in iOS 27 that lets users pause location sharing with a specific person until the end of the day. Based on hands-on beta testing by MacRumors, the person whose access is paused receives no notification or alert that anything has changed. The no-notification behavior, if it holds through to the final release, would make the pause effectively invisible to the other person.

Apple Notes is gaining clipboard-level Markdown support in iOS 27, a change that removes a persistent friction point for anyone who moves text between Notes and external writing tools. Pasted Markdown converts automatically to rich text, and note content can be exported as raw Markdown syntax through a new edit menu option, 9to5Mac reported. That combination, along with native divider lines and several UI refinements, lands at iOS 27's general release. The AI-related additions operate on a...

Apple announced today that iPhone users in Brazil can install apps from third-party stores and pay for digital goods through alternative payment systems, making Brazil the first major market outside Europe to receive these changes. The new options arrive under a formal settlement with Brazil's competition regulator CADE and take effect immediately as part of iOS 26.5, Apple announced. Whether they produce meaningfully lower prices or genuine choice for Brazilian iPhone users is a different...

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on June 18, 2026, that Apple had agreed to work with Intel to design and build chips in the United States. Apple and Intel have not publicly confirmed the deal or its scope. That gap is the story.

Apple is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for a spring 2027 release, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who cited multiple sources inside the company. Prototypes of the device, internally coded V62, are already in advanced testing, Thurrott reported yesterday. The reported iPhone Air 2 release date puts it alongside the standard iPhone 18 in a staggered launch cycle that breaks from Apple's long-established fall-only pattern.

At WWDC 2026 last week, Apple announced two Siri AI upgrades and confirmed its mainstream flagship can't run either of them. The base iPhone 17 has 8GB of RAM; both new iPhone 18 Siri AI features require 12GB. Only the iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max, and iPhone Air clear that bar, according to MacRumors and 9to5Mac, both reporting this week.

A note on sourcing: benchmark data in this article comes primarily from Apple's own WebKit engineering blog. DMA compliance analysis draws on Open Web Advocacy, an advocacy group with an explicit position on this issue. The DMA text itself is primary law. Where claims come from parties with financial or policy stakes, that is noted.

Security researchers published findings today claiming Apple's App Store logs every individual tap a user makes and transmits that data to Apple as behavioral analytics. The gap between that characterization and Apple's own personalization disclosure is now the center of a privacy dispute that raises a direct question: when Apple says users can opt out, what exactly are they opting out of?

Apple is reportedly planning two 20th anniversary iPhone models for 2027, not a single commemorative flagship. Bloomberg reporting covered by MacRumors this week says both sizes would share identical specs, including the same next-generation 2nm A21 chip and the same four-edge curved display. Buyers wouldn't have to choose between owning the anniversary device and owning their preferred screen size. That's a meaningful structural shift from how Apple handled the iPhone's tenth birthday.

iOS 26.4 Always Play on iPhone Alarm Feature Explained for Apple Watch Users

20th Anniversary iPhone Rumor Explained: Design Vision vs. Reality

Apple announced three concrete upgrades to iPhone Mirroring at WWDC, and the macOS 27 iPhone Mirroring upgrades cover the full range: Control Center access, protected video playback, and a resizable window that can shift aspect ratios beyond the iPhone's fixed proportions.

Apple's supply chain is reportedly preparing parts and module production for an iPhone camera the company has never built before. Sunny Optical has started producing actuators for a variable aperture mechanism destined for the iPhone 18 Pro, while LG Innotek is preparing full module assembly at its Gumi facility in South Korea for June or July, ahead of its normal schedule, specifically because the new mechanism raises defect risk, MacRumors reported. That points to supply-chain preparation,...

A new leak suggests the iPhone 18 Pro aluminum casing will carry forward the same alloy Apple introduced with the iPhone 17 Pro, and if accurate, that means inheriting both the thermal performance gains and the cosmetic wear susceptibility that came with it. Leaks from Fixed Focus Digital described the 18 Pro as "still aluminum alloy, with really good heat dissipation" and the same color scratch risk as its predecessor.

Tesla CarPlay support has long looked like a business decision dressed up as a product omission. For more than a decade, Tesla resisted CarPlay while competitors leaned on Apple and Google to compensate for weaker native platforms a dynamic that ABI Research noted last December when it confirmed Tesla was reportedly testing native CarPlay integration for the first time. But reporting over the past year points to something more specific than corporate reluctance: Tesla's driver-assistance...

The debate over Apple AI privacy risks in Europe is being framed as a Brussels problem. Apple used part of its WWDC 2026 keynote to announce a product it isn't shipping: Siri AI, the most capable version of its assistant, demonstrated at WWDC pulling a FIFA World Cup schedule from the internet, searching a user's Messages history for a recipe, drafting a party invitation, and preparing to send it to a group chat, all without the user opening a single app. That assistant will not reach iPhones...

Here's how to use Visual Intelligence on macOS Golden Gate, what the keyboard shortcut actually does, and where the beta still falls short. This guide walks through both entry points, explains what each popout action does in the current developer beta, and tells you when the feature is worth reaching for and when to skip it.

Apple has reportedly been exploring an autocorrect upgrade for iOS 27 that would go beyond fixing misspellings to suggest alternative words as you type. The approach is comparable to how tools like Grammarly surface vocabulary rewrites, 9to5Mac reported in late March. No final decision on shipping the feature has been made.

Tamil Nadu's pollution regulator has given one of Apple's most important Indian suppliers a formal ultimatum: explain alleged groundwater contamination near its Hosur iPhone parts plant, or face a power cutoff and forced closure. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board served Tata Electronics a show-cause notice last month under India's Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, demanding a response within 15 days, per The New Indian Express this week. Tata says its own accredited...

An An unreleased Apple Watch anniversary band has surfaced outside Apple, and only four units are known to have surfaced publicly. The Sport Band is engraved with "2014–2024: Ten Years of Apple Watch," two units sold on eBay still sealed in Apple's internal sample packaging, and a public release now looks highly unlikely.

iOS 27 AI Photo Editing Tools: 4 Features, 2 Not Ready Yet

Apple Ultra Rumors: Why Apple Is Building a Tier for Risky Hardware

Apple unveiled macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC26 this week, and the release has a clear internal logic: fix the readability problems Tahoe introduced with Liquid Glass, deliver a rebuilt Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, and give families parental controls that are actually worth using. Every Apple Silicon Mac from M1 forward can run it. The catch worth knowing upfront: the headline AI feature isn't fully here yet. Siri AI arrives as a separate beta later this year, starting in English only....

Siri has been a punchline for so long that skepticism feels like the responsible position. So here's the direct answer to the question everyone's asking after WWDC26 this week: is Siri actually good now? Not yet. But for the first time, there's a credible structural argument that it could be and that argument is worth taking seriously, with clear eyes about where it breaks down.

Two Apple Photos executives gave their clearest public account yet of what the iOS 27 Photos AI features are built to do. The word they kept returning to was "refine." The flagship tool, Spatial Reframing, can shift the apparent camera angle of a photo after the fact and change where a subject appears to be looking. That's a harder sell for "refinement" than Apple's framing acknowledges.

Apple Music, Fitness, and Health have all gained landscape orientation support in iOS 27, ending years of portrait-only layouts for three of the company's most-used first-party apps, Macworld reported this week. For everyday users, that's a straightforward fix. The more significant story is what sits behind it: the same beta that quietly rotated those apps also contains framework strings referencing fold states and display angles, neither of which maps to any device Apple currently sells.

The most revealing thing Apple did at WWDC this week wasn't on stage. Buried inside the first iOS 27 developer beta are three framework references, foldState, angleDegrees, and a new key that returns a device's total number of built-in displays, that correspond to no existing Apple product. Developer Sam Henri Gold first spotted the strings on June 8 and shared them publicly; 9to5Mac verified their existence shortly after, and Macworld independently confirmed the findings, noting that no...

iOS 27 gives the Apple TV Remote a dedicated Home Screen icon for the first time since the app was pulled from the App Store in 2020. Users can add the Apple TV Remote to their iPhone Home Screen with a simple drag from Spotlight or the App Library, no Settings configuration required. The change ships in the current developer beta, as MacRumors reported this week.

The "which came first?" Wikipedia quiz is real. It's just not listed for iPhone. Wikimedia's own experiments page shows the daily historical facts game as Android only, with no iPhone version in any published materials, per the Wikimedia Foundation. A separate Wikimedia game is playable on mobile devices in a browser, but it's a navigation challenge, not a history quiz. If you're searching for one and land on the other, you'll know immediately they aren't the same thing.

Apple is moving Visual Intelligence out of a hidden gesture and into a named mode inside the Camera app with iOS 27, making a capability that has existed since iPhone 16 actually discoverable. The iOS 27 Camera Control improvement gives the feature a dedicated Siri mode in the mode selector alongside Photo, Video, and Portrait, according to MacRumors' hands-on developer beta coverage three days ago.

Starting November 30, 2026, WhatsApp will require iOS 15.5 or later to run on iPhones and iPads. Devices on iOS or iPadOS 15.4 and below will no longer be able to use the app after that date. The cutoff reportedly covers both WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business, which share the same underlying codebase, according to BusinessToday.

Apple's June figures put 79% of all compatible iPhones on iOS 26, below the 82% iOS 18 had reached at the same point last year, and the second-lowest June adoption rate Apple has recorded since 2015, ahead of only iOS 17, according to App Store data. The upgrade cycle is functioning. It's just running softer than Apple's own recent standard.

Apple gave EU iPhone and iPad users a concrete reason to notice the Digital Markets Act earlier this month: Siri AI will not be available on iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 in any of the 27 EU member states when those releases ship later this year, with no timeline for when that changes, according to Apple's newsroom. Apple's marketing chief Greg Joswiak escalated that framing this week, calling the Siri AI EU launch delay the "most serious negative outcome yet" of the Digital Markets Act, Euractiv...

Two years ago, Apple announced an AI-powered Siri that never fully materialized. This week, at WWDC 2026, the company tried again and this time, the evidence suggests it actually delivered. Whether that's enough to win the AI assistant wars is a different question, with a less flattering answer.