Founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple is best known for making some of the world’s most ubiquitous consumer devices, software, and services: the iPhone, iPad, iMac and MacBook computers, Apple TV, Apple Watch, iOS, iCloud, iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and many more. Led by CEO Tim Cook since 2011, Apple is one of the largest technology companies in the world alongside Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
The little character inspired by the Finder logo has been briefly featured as part of Apple’s marketing for the MacBook Neo, but on Monday, the company uploaded three new videos to its TikTok account starring the mascot. I love it.
An excerpt from Patrick McGee’s Apple in China.
Apple would never have survived a decade without Steve Wozniak’s marvelous machine.
iMacs. iBooks. iPods. For 10 years after Steve Jobs came back, Apple couldn’t miss.
The native app is currently in beta for iOS users, according to WABetaInfo. It lets users access their recent chat list, view contact details, manage calls, and send messages from their car’s infotainment display. Meta’s devs are on a roll having recently brought WhatsApp to both Apple and Garmin watches.
We knew Apple would let people hook Siri into the chatbot of their choice. But the latest installment of Mark Gurman’s Power On hints at something bigger. The company is “opening Siri and Apple Intelligence to third-party services.” Extensions will have a dedicated App Store section, making it hard to believe Apple will stop at just a couple of chatbots.
A cornerstone of this strategy is the upcoming iOS 27 Extensions feature, which will let users install third-party AI chatbots beyond ChatGPT and run them inside Siri. This feature will have its own dedicated App Store section, effectively creating an AI App Store. It will be a marketplace of sorts for third-party AI integrations.
Apple’s iPhone empire spans the globe — and so does legal pushback.
YouTube’s ETA Prime found that a strip of copper, some Noctua thermal paste, and an Arctic Thermal Pad do a surprisingly effective job at dissipating heat from the Neo’s CPU and reducing thermal throttling, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. The liquid-cooler they add is even more effective, but feels like overkill for most Neo users.
But it is expanding its modest American Manufacturing Program. TDK will make camera stabilization sensors, while Bosch will build chips for crash detection and activity tracking. Cirrus Logic and Qnity Electronics are also on board. The $400 million planned for these new partnerships won’t make a major dent in Apple’s reliance on China, though.
The Cupertino company sued former Vision Pro engineer Di Liu last year for allegedly stealing trade secrets before starting a new role at Snap. The case was dismissed this week after Liu agreed to return Apple’s confidential information and pay the company an undisclosed sum for monetary damages.
As part of a deal announced in January, Apple reportedly has ‘complete access’ to Gemini in its data centers, according to The Information. That includes the option to use Gemini to train “student” AI models via distillation that could be specially-tuned for Apple’s devices and require less computing power.
[The Information]
The show returns for season 5 on Friday, and Apple just announced that it would be coming back for one last season after that. Now we have the first teaser trailer for Star City, a spinoff that shows the other side of the alternate reality sci-fi story. It starts streaming in May.
A newer version of the DarkSword exploit that targets devices running iOS 18.4 to 18.6.2 has appeared on GitHub. About 34 percent of iPhone and 43 percent of iPad users are still running iOS 18 or earlier, according to Apple, which issued an emergency patch on March 11th. Update your devices, folks!
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Verge Score
And we re-tested the M1 Pro and M1 Max models to see how far the M5 Max has come.
Currently, up to six family members or friends can share access to Apple services, apps, and subscriptions, but all purchases go through the family organizer’s payment method. When iOS 26.4 is released, Apple will let adult members of a Family Sharing group make purchases using their own payment methods, as spotted by MacRumors.
Once we knew how easy it was to disassemble and repair Apple’s cheapest laptop, it seemed obvious that modding it would be a thing. Thankfully, it’s a lot less likely to wreck your Neo than this storage upgrade. Though it’s not clear how it will affect the CPU’s longevity.
The iOS launch for the AI-powered browser follows an Android release in November.
[Perplexity]
According to 9to5Mac:
iOS 26.4 specifically focuses on fixing a bug where characters on the keyboard appeared as if they were tapped, but were not actually inserted. Those missing characters then affected how Apple’s Auto-Correction feature was able to predict what you actually meant to type.
Apple has released a release candidate of the update, indicating it should launch publicly soon.
