Opinion pieces & commentary

Last month, we heard some news from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo about Apple entering a new segment of the laptop market. The company is reportedly working on a new MacBook at a lower starting price point than the MacBook Air, and it’ll apparently pack the A18 Pro chip found in iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.

While a cheaper MacBook is certainly a welcome add, the question truly stands: will Apple do it properly, or will it serve as another decoy model?

We were already expecting higher iPhone prices this year, but it now seems that one of the four models will get a bump in storage in return.

That’s always welcome, of course, but a move Apple made two years ago already made it irrelevant to me …

Since Apple’s latest earnings call, talk of a potential Perplexity acquisition has quieted down (the fact that Perplexity was once again allegedly caught red-handed sidestepping content restrictions didn’t help).

Meanwhile, with the ever-increasing number of engineers from its Foundation Models team jumping ship, Apple’s need for fresh talent is getting more urgent by the day. But if Perplexity is a no-go, who else could Apple buy?

One of the bullet points in Apple’s announcement of its increased US manufacturing spend made a big, but very non-specific, claim. Apple said that it was working with Samsung on an “innovative new technology which has never been used before anywhere in the world.”

Although the company was being mysterious, we likely know what that means – and it’s great news not just for the iPhone 18, but also for future iPhones beyond it …

We yesterday highlighted what is quite possibly the smallest user-facing change in the latest iOS 26 beta: the ability to revert the camera app slider to its previous direction.

While this is in itself a very tiny change, I do think it ought to be a guiding principle for Apple’s approach to user interfaces …

Perplexity has long been accused of deliberately bypassing anti-scraping measures to retrieve web content. While the company has historically dismissed these accusations as disingenuous or misunderstandings, a new report shows that not only is the practice still happening, but it may actually be getting worse.

A Bloomberg report over the weekend suggested that Apple has created a new Answers, Knowledge and Information team as part of its Apple Intelligence efforts.

While that might not sound like a huge deal, effectively just catching up with what others are doing, I actually think it’s about the smartest thing the company could be doing right now in terms of addressing Siri’s reputation …

Yesterday saw the emergence of three rumors about the iPhone 17 Pro camera system. The source for them has no track-record, so it’s entirely possible that all three are nonsense, but it’s at least plausible that they would have access to the claimed information.

Two of the rumored features would be welcome, even if one sounds rather unlikely. But the third is something I’m very much hoping is dead wrong …

A report yesterday suggested that the two iPhone 17 Pro models could get an anti-reflective display, after Apple’s suppliers managed to overcome production difficulties.

I do love anti-reflective displays, and still have very fond memories of my all-time favorite Apple one from way back in 2004, but an iPhone one would have only moderate appeal to me …

Amazon, Google, and Samsung are all working on an exciting way to bring AI to smart homes – and Apple risks being left behind.

Samsung is first to launch the new feature: the ability to use natural language to simply tell your smart home app what it is you want it to do …

Analyst Ming–Chi Kuo has suggested that Apple plans to launch an all–new MacBook next year, powered by an iPhone processor. Specifically, he expects it to have the A18 Pro chip which currently powers the iPhone 16 Pro line–up.

While there’s no word on pricing, the only way the report makes sense is if Apple is targeting an even lower price than the $999 starting–point of the current MacBook Air. Indeed, if you factor in discounted pricing on that, then it would have to be significantly cheaper. But there may be a more cynical possibility …

When Jony Ive and Sam Altman teased their upcoming AI hardware device, we noted how mysterious they were being about its form factor.

While some were suggesting that it was a wearable, I said I felt pretty sure it wasn’t, and that’s now been confirmed by a court filing. A 9to5Mac reader last month made a plausible suggestion, and the latest development seems to me to add weight to the idea …

Apple has definitely built up quite a compelling ecosystem around the Apple Watch. Between all of its fitness challenges, activity rings, and competitions – Apple has certainly found a way to make exercise fun for a lot of people. The problem? Some people simply don’t like the form factor of a smartwatch.

WWDC 2025 ends today, and we’ve seen all the new features on offer from Apple’s shiny glassy new iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26.

The first developer betas are available now, and anyone can sign up to try them – but you probably shouldn’t. If you’re not a developer with sacrificial test devices, exactly how long should you wait in the beta cycle before risking them on your daily drivers … ?

This week, Apple unveiled visionOS 26, and one of its standout features is spatial widgets: customizable, three-dimensional elements that users can pin to their surroundings and glance at while wearing an Apple Vision Pro.

And while they’re technically impressive and undeniably cool-looking (especially that wall-embedded ones), they might also be Apple’s first hint at what we could expect from a long-rumored smart home product.

With the announcement of iPadOS 26, Apple has finally done something it had seemed to be resisting for well over a decade: turning the iPad into a computer.

Apple has long sent mixed messages about the device, sometimes arguing that it is a computer, and other times arguing that iPads and Macs are two very different devices with two very different roles …

There’s a new Apple research paper making the rounds, and if you’ve seen the reactions, you’d think it just toppled the entire LLM industry. That is far from true, although it might be the best attempt to bring to the mainstream a discussion that the ML community has been having for ages. Here is why this paper matters.

In 2020, Apple surprised a lot of people by re-entering a neglected segment of the smartphone market: small phones. With iPhone 12 mini, Apple did something fairly special, by squeezing all of the same technologies of the iPhone 12 into a 5.4-inch form factor. Unfortunately, it didn’t live for too long, but there may be a new opportunity to bring it back.

If you had asked anyone six months ago what Apple’s biggest 2025 play would be, the obvious answer would’ve been “AI.” Maybe “home.” But gaming? You’d have been hard pressed to find anyone willing to bet on that. And yet, that’s exactly what it’s starting to look like.

Back from 2005 to 2009, Apple used to have a neat little software feature called ‘Front Row’. It essentially allowed you to utilize an Apple TV remote with your Mac, and take advantage of a unique software interface for watching content. It didn’t last very long, but I think now could be a pretty unique time to reintroduce it.

One of the bigger leaks from Bloomberg is that what we’ve all been anticipating as iOS 19 will instead be branded as iOS 26 (aka 2026).

In other words, Apple is switching from sequential naming to year-based naming. I think that’s a great idea – but not the silly car-maker business of using next year, for a very practical reason …