This Week's Sponsor
Magic Lasso Adblock: Block ads in iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV appsFlying home robots like Amazon’s Ring drones, how close we’d let AI agents like Claude Duet and Muse get, the body trackers we wear and what we’ve learned, and our thoughts on the whole Nvidia thing.
By Philip Michaels
Live Rewind makes me want to buy an Apple Watch
I have never owned an Apple Watch. And apart from trying a watch on here and there for demo purposes, I’ve never really worn an Apple Watch, not for an extended period anyhow. And up until the Apple Watch Series 12’s unveiling earlier this year, I expected that to remain the case for years to come.
This is no knock specifically on the Apple Watch, incidentally. I could say the same thing for a Galaxy Watch, a Pixel Watch, even just a regular old wristwatch. I don’t like wearing things on my wrist. Even if you slap one of those ID bands you sometimes wear at concerts or other public venues on me, I’ll spend half my time mindlessly pawing at my arm, trying to shake off whatever’s on my wrist.
How committed am I to the No Wristwatches Ever bit? For much of my life, I carried around a pocket watch, and it was only partially because I was adopting an affectation. Once the iPhone came along, providing a slightly more advanced clock to carry around in my pocket, the pocket watch went back into the dresser drawer for good.
So why is the Apple Watch Series 12 finally the device that’s going to break this anti-watch stance I’ve adopted? Well, I may not like wearing things on my wrist, but I dislike not being able to hear things even more. And the Audio Intelligence features on the latest Apple smartwatches seem like a promising solution for problems caused by my dodgy hearing.
Speak up, sonny
As a gentleman whose odometer passed the half-century mark a few years back, I’m in relatively good shape in most areas. Unfortunately, those areas do not include my hearing, which has been in steady decline since my 20s. Things aren’t so bad that I need a hearing aid to go about my business, but depending on the setting, making heads or tails out of what someone is saying can prove challenging.
When my wife tries to tell me something from an adjoining room, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll have no idea what she’s talking about. If you’re speaking while facing away from me, you might as well be in a cone of silence. And in noisy settings — a crowded restaurant, a busy commuter train or heaven forfend a concert — I’m going to do a lot of nodding politely and smiling to cover for the fact that I haven’t heard a word anybody’s said.
It’s not the worst affliction to have in the world. There’s an out-of-kilter signal-to-noise ratio out there in the world, and not being able to hear a lot of it filters out much of the latter. But yes, there are times I need to hear what’s being said to me and plaintively asking “Would you mind repeating that?” only helps so much. That’s where the Apple Watch Series 12 and its Live Rewind feature come into play.
Live Rewind to the rescue
Announced by Apple at its September product event, Live Rewind is a feature coming via the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 that provides a transcript of anything that someone has said to you in the last 15 seconds. You activate the feature by double-pressing the Digital Crown on your watch; you also have to enable the feature in the Watch app by selecting Siri and tapping Live Rewind followed by turning on the Double Click Digital Crown Setting.
With an Apple Watch 12 on my wrist — the Ultra’s too fancy for the likes of me — I can glance at the display when I didn’t quite make out all the details of what someone just told me. Didn’t quite catch what the nurse at my mom’s care facility just said? Missed the particulars of some instructions my wife gave me as she was heading out the door? Did the bartender rattle off the beers on tap just a bit too quickly? Now the Apple Watch and Live Rewind hold the answers to life’s mysteries.
Live Rewind, which is part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, is just one of the Audio Intelligence features that take advantage of the built-in microphone and S11 chip found on Apple’s latest watches. Siri Recap, also part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, can provide you with AI-generated summaries of conversations you’ve had during the day. Sound Recognition and Music Recognition are already part of watchOS 27 — the former notifies you when it detects alarms, doorbells and sirens while the latter is essentially Shazam on your wrist. All four features are a boon to those of us who don’t hear as well as we used to.
Concerns worth listening to
Naturally, the idea that the latest Apple Watches are always listening and taking notes is going to raise some concerns — legitimate ones, too. The people whose conversations get summarized by Siri Recap or whose words are being repeated back to you via Live Rewind didn’t consent to any of this, so a very strong argument could be made that these features are crowding in on people’s privacy.
Apple’s response — both in an Audio Intelligence support document and a white paper on privacy that goes into even greater detail — essentially boils down to the fact that nothing’s being recorded or stored. Instead, the audio is routed through a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, where it can’t be accessed by anything else, including Apple.
Live Rewind and Sound Recognition do all their processing on device. Siri Recap is sending detected summaries of transcribed audio off-device, but it’s doing that through Private Cloud Compute to maintain privacy. And what you’re getting back isn’t a word-for-word transcript but more of a summary meant to refresh your memory.
That’s all well and good for you and your privacy, but what about the people around you? Live Rewind plays a chime when it’s activated to cut down on the chance of surreptitious listening. Apple also says the feature is supposed to focus on conversations you’re involved in, not eavesdrop on ones taking place around you. And there’s no speaker identification or attribution, though if names come up in a conversation, they’ll be reflected in the summary.
Most of those explanations work for me, to the point where I’d be comfortable that Live Rewind isn’t infringing on people’s privacy. Still, I recognize that technology designed for benign uses can be exploited by bad actors, so that’s something Apple — and Apple Watch owners — are going to have to remain vigilant about.
Watch and listen
Of course, all this Apple Watch talk ignores that there’s an alternative out there for those of us with hearing issues — a pair of AirPods Pro earbuds can double as a hearing aid, at least if you’ve got the second or third generation on hand. A Live Listen feature turns your iPhone into a microphone to help you better hear conversations, and it works with a wider variety of AirPods, too.
I’m not quite sure that’s the best solution for my particular needs. For starters, I’d have to upgrade to the AirPods Pro 3, and while that $249 outlay is cheaper than an Apple Watch Series 12, it’s not that much cheaper when you factor in the other capabilities a smartwatch offers. Plus, the hearing aid feature would require me to wear AirPods more consistently, something that strikes me as awkward when I’m out on a social call. Say what you will about wearing something on your wrist — and I’ve said plenty — but at least it feels more natural than keeping your AirPods on during a fancy dinner.
So am I ready to run out and get an Apple Watch now that it has a feature I find truly useful? Not quite — but I’m closer to getting a smartwatch than I ever have been, and Live Rewind certainly is helping me get there. And that’s kind of how technology works.
We don’t buy gadgets and gizmos just to own the latest thing — we buy them because they solve a need in our lives. For a lot of people, the Apple Watch became a more attractive option as Apple built out the health and fitness tracking features that made this device more than just a wrist-sized version of the iPhone. Those users wanted a better picture of their health, and Apple managed to produce something that provided exactly that.
Up until now, I could take or leave those health-monitoring capabilities. But a device that helps me understand what people are saying to me in a noisy room, that’s a watch feature whose time has finally come.
[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]
by Jason Snell
iFixit reveals the magic behind the new glowing MacBook Pro logo
When I was in Los Angeles getting briefed on the MacBook Pro with PROLED, I asked Apple representatives directly about how they made the Apple logo on the back glow again, given that OLED displays don’t leak light out the back.
They jokingly told me it was “magic,” said that it was actually hard work to do, and refused to get into details.
Okay, I said—I’ll just wait for iFixit to tear one apart.
On old MacBooks, light from the LCD backlight shone through an apple-shaped window in the lid. But the PROLED’s pixels make their own light. So, yes, Apple waited until the first MacBook Pro without a backlight to bring back the backlit logo.
Of course we had to get inside.
The result is pretty much what you’d expect:
Under a taped patch in the middle we found four LEDs, all in a strip along one edge. The light hits a reflective layer and passes through a diffuser, turning four little points of light into one evenly glowing apple. The logo itself has a mirror-like coating that looks shiny with the lights off.
(There’s also a YouTube video of the teardown.)
My favorite aspect of this new easter egg of a feature is that with the light off, you can’t tell that it’s the new MacBook Pro. It doesn’t look like the white logo cut-out of years past; it looks exactly like the mirrored metallic logos of the last decade. Except… then it lights up. Magic indeed.
by Jason Snell
Ding dong, the Apple Support Community is dead
In a long-overdue move, Apple has brought down the hammer on its “Apple Support Community” forum. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors reports:
Apple’s full notice added to the site: “The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.”
It is the end of an era. Apple offered an online discussion forum for user-to-user technical support since 1998, when it launched the Apple Tech Exchange. The forums were renamed to Apple Discussions in 2000, and then to the Apple Support Communities in 2011, before taking on their current Apple Support Community name in 2022.
Apple informed MacRumors that it decided to sunset the Apple Support Community after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.
These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.
But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.
Good riddance.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Apple rushes the iPod to the finish line and then introduces it to an uneasy and uncertain world.
By Philip Michaels
HomeView doesn’t need to be another app dispenser
This may sound like an odd request coming from a guy whose to-do list includes filing a weekly App Report highlighting interesting macOS and iOS offerings, but I really hope Apple keeps a tight lid on the apps that can appear on its HomeView smart display. I’d even take that wish one step further to implore app makers not to flood the zone with HomeView-based offerings if there ever comes a day that Apple does open up development for its latest device.
This is not me hoping for less work in the future due to laziness, though Lord knows, I am that. Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that, as showcased by Apple, the HomeView seems to serve a very specific purpose and turning it into a device that can run every app under the sun like the iPhone and iPad before it might lessen its effectiveness.
The HomeView needs to act as a hub when you need it to be and stay out of the way the rest of the time. And loading it up with too many apps might make it more difficult for the HomeView to recede into the background.
From what I’ve seen of HomeView during its October debut, Apple designed this $299 hub as a way to control your smarthome devices while also taking care of a few other tasks, whether that’s listening to music, checking out recipes, staying up to date on your messages or what have you. That’s true whether we’re talking about the table-top model with its adjustable Liquid Retina display or the version of HomeView that you mount on the wall. In either case, the guiding principle of HomeView appears to be simplicity.
What HomeView doesn’t appear to be is a device that demands to be at the center of your life, even if “hub” is part of the description. You’re already carrying around a device that keeps you constantly connected in the form of an iPhone, and when you need a big screen for more intensive work, you can turn to a Mac or even an iPad. In contrast, the HomeView seems like it’s designed for very specific purposes and not much else.
The app situation on the initial model arriving in stores on November 13 reflects that. Apple lists 15 included apps on board the HomeView, and apart from Intercom — a HomeView-specific app that lets you make audio announcements throughout the home to connected speakers — they’re going to be familiar offerings to anyone who’s used an Apple device.
There’s the Home app, of course, for controlling smart devices from a central location, and Apple includes a few other familiar faces for managing your daily life. Apps like Calendar, Reminders and Weather give you an overview of your day. Safari lets you browse the web from your HomeView, with a special mode for displaying recipes if you’ve got the device set up in a kitchen. Music and Podcasts let you stream entertainment while you’re going about your business, and you can connect to TV, Audiobooks and a handful of other options on your iPhone for additional entertainment resources. And there’s FaceTime for video chats — ideal for the HomeView since you don’t have to hold the device and talk like you would on an iPhone or iPad.
Save for a workaround for audio and video apps that support CarPlay, you can’t install apps on your HomeView. There’s also no App Store, suggesting that Apple thinks of this device as a closed shop, at least out of the gate.
Of course, the iPhone took the same approach initially. It’s hard to remember after two decades of “There’s an app for that” marketing, but the phone Steve Jobs showed off back in 2007 had 15 apps, and that was that. It took a year for Apple to open up the iPhone for third-party apps, and developers were quick to make up for lost time.
Could a similar scenario play out with the HomeView? Certainly, it’s possible. If you’re already using your home hub to look up recipes, why not add a calorie-counting or meal-planning app? You can access your daily schedule and your to-dos, so why not add your health data as well, with maybe some exercise apps thrown in for good measure? Oh, and the HomeView supports entertainment apps, you say? Well, nothing’s more entertaining than games, all the games, oh so many games.
That’s the sort of mission creep I think Apple must avoid with the HomeView. Some apps for managing your life make sense, so long as they’re consistent with the idea of a central hub that you’re checking when it’s convenient. But if you keep expanding that functionality to an ever-increasing array of apps, the HomeView becomes just another screen you wind up staring at, no different from an iPhone or iPad or what have you. And perhaps paradoxically, the need for a device like a HomeView dissipates as its functionality expands.
So my plea for the HomeView — to Apple, to app makers, to anyone who will listen really — is to think long and hard about expanding the home hub’s ability to add apps. Take it from someone who ekes out a living reviewing these sorts of things: Sometimes less is more.
[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]
by Jason Snell
The Mac-based Virginia Tech supercomputers
Stephen Hackett has a great, in-depth history of that time Virginia Tech built one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers out of Macs—twice:
Tech tore down the Power Mac version of System X in January 2004 and rebuilt it with Xserve G5s that summer. ECC memory was a big part of the reason. As the school put it: “We needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming.”
The new array was made up of 1,100 dual 2.3 GHz Xserve G5 servers and six Xserve RAIDs. Those 2.3 GHz machines were custom-built by Apple for Virginia Tech; the public wouldn’t be able to buy one until January 2005. Each one had 4 GB of that sweet, sweet ECC RAM and an 80 GB Serial ATA drive.
I love the extra mile Stephen went with the research on this one. Featuring some never-before-seen photos!
We do some dad talk before getting to the father of the year, Jensen Huang.
by Jason Snell
Apple starts to charge for heavy AI usage
Ryan Christoffel of 9to5 Mac has spotted a new feature in Apple’s Creator Suite:
Apple has officially launched its first take on charging for AI features via the new Logic Pro update—with more coming soon.
With Logic Pro’s latest update, if you select Logic Pro from the menu bar, then ‘Intelligence Features’ and ‘Show Usage,’ there’s an option to ‘Buy More Usage.’
It seems like for general AI usage by consumers, Apple is planning on wrapping access into iCloud+ plans. But this apparently is the approach it will use in its professional-level products. 
Jason reviews the MacBook Pro with PROLED Display, we break down what’s coming with the arrival of 27.3 betas (including the perplexing Siri Recaps feature), and is John Ternus getting impatient with Apple’s software pace?
By Glenn Fleishman
No, Apple isn’t using Live Listen to listen to you
Live Listen is a valuable accessibility feature for people who need assistance hearing things around them. It can stream the sound from the microphone on an iPhone or iPad to Apple-compatible hearing aids, AirPods, or supported models of Beats headphones.1
This can be extremely useful for someone with hearing loss, or even to understand other people in a busy room, because the benefits of the iPhone’s multiple mics canceling out noise can make a muddled or incomprehensible conversation clear to hear.
Because we live in an age of conspiracy, some bozos have decided that an innocuous, well-documented feature that’s existed since 2020 (with iOS 14.3/iPadOS 14.3) somehow translates to “all the iPhones and iPads with this update, both personal and operational, are by default listening in on all conversations around them, transcribing them, and sending those transcriptions up to Apple for advertising purposes” to quote from misinformation across two posts on Bluesky.2
The impetus appears to be a setting in iOS and iPadOS at Settings: Accessibility: Audio & Video: Live Listen, called Remote Control. It would have first appeared in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, and the current panic alleges it was turned on by default in the 27 updates.
But the Remote Control feature has nothing to do with Apple grabbing your audio. It’s part of a privacy-forward, locked-down feature that extends the utilities of your devices logged into the same Apple Account.
This conspiracy appears to have started on X, the every-bad-theory app, but has spread. Sensible people I know are asking whether this is a risk. Let me break this down.
Live Listen and Remote Control
If you have trouble hearing people in crowded situations, places with echoes, or just in general, your iPhone or iPad can act like an isolating microphone—that’s Live Listen. You can only enable it if you have a supported device nearby and active. Then, you can:
- Go to Settings: Accessibility: Audio & Video: Live Listen and tap Start Live Listen.
- Tap the Live Listen button, which looks like a microphone, in Control Center; or the Hearing Devices button, which looks like an ear, and choose the hearing device, like AirPods.3
- Use other pathways described in Apple’s support note.
Starting in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, enabling Live Listen lets you also turn Live Captions on. So you’re not only hearing a clearer or louder version of audio, you’re also seeing a running transcript of what it’s picking up. You can move through the entire Live Listen session in both audio and captions.
The remote control option for Live Listen, added in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, allows use of an Apple Watch paired with your iPhone or an iPhone or iPad signed in to the same Apple Account to control Live Listen on the iPhone or iPad that’s in use. That linked device can also view Live Captions in real time.
The words remote control and transcript seem to have provided a sliver of an opening in the oyster of Apple privacy for people specializing in outrage and ragebaiting to crack open the bivalve.
The seeming Patient Zero on X wrote:
Go to your iPhone settings – accessibility – audio & visual – LIVE LISTEN.
Turn off LIVE LISTEN.
It even says it keeps TRANSCRIPTS.
This is NUTS.
While he’s going through psychosomatic anaphylactic shock, let’s look at the real story—and the real risk!
Apple risks entire company on secret recording
You might remember Apple had a run-in with secret recording a while back. The company failed to disclose that some small amount of audio captured by Siri was not just sent to the cloud for processing, but listened to by human beings. Apple agreed to settle a class-action suit in 2025 for $95 million covering 2014 to 2024; the final details are still being approved.
You might also recall that two months ago, I wrote about the new watchOS 27 features Live Rewind and Siri Recap that Apple announced were coming later this year to newer Apple Watch models. At the time, I wrote, “Should your Apple Watch always be listening?” In the classic Betteridge’s Law style,4 my answer was: “No.”5 I argued that Apple should not release either feature in its current privacy-negative forms—both protect the Apple Watch owner’s privacy, but not the privacy of those they record without proper consent and notification.
So I am hardly a “rah rah Apple is never recording us, sis boom bah” cheerleader. I try to cast a gimlet eye across any such claim.
Thus do the claims fall apart.
First, Apple’s market capitalization is nearly $5 trillion as I write this. The idea that the company would risk its reputation, particularly after the earlier Siri misstep, and expose itself to massive lawsuits worldwide, plummeting sales, and the loss of trillions from its stock value for improving ad targeting is laughable.
Its ad business is estimated at under $10 billion a year; the company doesn’t break it out from service revenue, which was $123 billion in fiscal 2026 out of nearly $500 billion overall.
Second, this all feels predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of Live Listen and its Remote Control option, with some degree of “death paneling” something innocuous to win…points? views? X bucks? Whuffie? I don’t know what the goal is.
The Remote Control function is poorly explained in the Settings app, and doesn’t even use that name in Apple’s documentation. More confusing, if you haven’t set up Live Listen, you see just a Remote Control option enabled by default, but there’s no Start Live Listen button.6 Which makes it feel more insidious.
Please speak directly into the flowerpot
With very little effort, it’s possible to determine that neither Live Listen nor Remote Control is a threat. Also, logic is available. But emotion overrides logic, and that’s why this column exists.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Live Listen works with AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, Beats Fit Pro, and Powerbeats Fit, with iOS 14.3/iPadOS 14.3 or later. ↩
- I don’t know what “operational” means. Maybe a bad translation of “for business operations” from Russian. ↩
- Add a control if it’s not there. ↩
-
Of course I know Ian Betteridge.
#glenning↩ - I just installed iOS 27.3 beta and watchOS 27.3 beta, and turned on Siri Recap to test it. I forgot I had done so, and it captured a few conversations with my wife and summarized them (eerily well). I apologized to her, deleted the recaps, and disabled the feature for now. ↩
- Apple doesn’t provide an accounting of which settings are on by default. Remote Control was enabled on my iPhone, and many people who have never touched it also saw this setting enabled. ↩
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]
By Jason Snell
iPhone Duo: The apps are coming
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been using the iPhone Duo as my iPhone and iPad for two weeks now, but here we are. I’m slowly working on a review when I’m not writing a zillion other things related to Apple’s very busy product season.
One thing that’s really changed over the last two weeks is the support for the iPhone Duo among my most-used apps. When I first set it up, the good apps were few and far between. But today, I’m actually surprised when I hit an app that hasn’t been updated to support the Duo. Apple’s data bears this out, as this statement (supplied to Six Colors by Apple) from Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations Susan Prescott points out:
It’s been wonderful to see how quickly developers have embraced iPhone Duo, and we’re grateful for their creativity and innovation. Today there are well over 100,000 apps built for iPhone Duo already live on the App Store, and thousands of optimized apps are being added to the store each day. In the last month alone, thousands of developers have joined us for workshops in 19 cities around the world to experience iPhone Duo firsthand and bring updated apps to their users. The enthusiasm has been incredible, and we’re excited to see the pace of updates continue to accelerate as more and more apps optimize for iPhone Duo.
Here are a few of my favorites thus far: Marco Arment’s Apple Pencil-savvy sketch app Fineliner, Aniline’s social-media client Indigo, Balazs Varkonyi’s RSS client ReadKit, Yoav Zoldan’s TV tracking app Skipper, Cross Forward’s revived weather app Check the Weather, and the YouTube TV app for some election-night multitasking.
By John Moltz
This Week in Apple: Add information
More reviews and reactions come in, Apple reports earnings and AI takes a dive.
Chicken dinner
Reaction to Apple’s recently released products continues to flow in and this week saw the first reviews of [takes deep breath] the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display.
For Workgroups.
I will probably be making fun of that name for a long time so… buckle up.
The Verge declares:
“The touchscreen MacBook Pro is a winner”
Reviews of the new OLED iPad mini were also favorable to the extent that I really wish people would stop publishing them because I don’t need one but I really want one so I’m begging you to stop. Please.
Meanwhile, more iPhone Duo reactions have come in. Turns out, it’s not for Marques Brownlee.
“MKBHD Switches Back to iPhone 18 Pro After Testing iPhone Duo”
Brownlee’s reasons for the move were the better camera on the 18 Pro and Face ID, but he said he’d miss the suspense of wondering whether or not the screen would crack.…
This is a post limited to Six Colors members.
By Philip Michaels
App Report: Command centers
We like simple tools here at the App Report, but we also admire apps that could settle for handling just one task but find ways to expand that mission that actually make sense. To that end, two of the entries in this week’s round-up start off with the seemingly simple jobs of expanding text and transcribing meetings, respectively, and turn them into productivity hubs that handle much, much more.
But don’t worry, fans of simplicity — we have some other apps on display that take a much more restrained approach to things like widgets, RSS feeds and reminders.
Whether you’ve got a simple app or a more complex one, we want to hear from you. Send a description to apps@sixcolors.com, and we’ll take a look. We can’t respond to every email, but you might just wind up seeing your submission in a future report.
By Jason Snell
MacBook Pro with PROLED review: You could even say it glows
The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is, like its name, a bit overloaded with meaning. Its banner feature is its impressive tandem OLED display, a first on the Mac--but most people will instead remember that display because it's also a touchscreen. Advances in Apple silicon are usually a major part of the story of a new MacBook Pro, but not this time around--these new laptops are powered by the same M5 Pro and Max chips introduced on the MacBook Pro earlier this year.
So, yes, the real story here is the screen--but what a big story that screen is! In fact, it's two big stories.
OLED and everything after
Let's start with that OLED display, because it's clear that this new laptop redesign (the first since the M1 era in 2021) was inspired entirely by the desire to move the MacBook Pro off of mini-LED backlit LCD panels and onto OLED at last.
Let's be clear: The "old" MacBook Pro display is spectacularly good. But there's only so much even Apple could do with that technology. OLED is just superior, in so many ways: it's thinner and lighter, uses less power, and every single pixel emits light on its own, so you can have spectacularly bright areas with pitch-black pixels right next door. (The contrast ratio on the PROLED XDR display is ten million to one.)
The display really is impressive. Obviously, its primary target audience will be creative professionals who can take advantage of the wide color gamut (P3+Adobe RGB) and high dynamic range to create work without any fear that they're not seeing exactly what they expect to see. For me, a person who mostly works in typed words and audio, well, it sure was something to pull up 4K HDR movies on the PROLED XDR display.
I was also impressed by just how bright the screen can get. Obviously, bright HDR content will be incredibly bright, up to a peak of 2000 nits. But I was also impressed with its brightness in standard dynamic range. In bright environments (think: direct sunlight), the display is actually capable of cranking up SDR brightness to 2000 nits, because even in direct sunlight, you do need to see your computer's display to get anything done.
Since this is an OLED display, there could potentially be lifespan-limiting issues like burn-in. Apple says the laptop is continuously monitoring each pixel on the display and applying compensation to reduce long-term burn-in and retain as much consistency and precision as possible.
Just as those M1 MacBook Pro models introduced us to the "notch," a camera and sensor cut-out smack in the middle of the menu bar, the PROLED MacBook Pros introduce the Dynamic Island to the Mac for the first time. In other words, the "notch" is now a small circular cut-out from the display. Rather than leaving it as blank space, Apple has taken a page from iOS and turned it into the Mac's own Dynamic Island. (It's still dead center in the menu bar, though, so menu items will need to leap over the island as they did the notch.)
Spotlight and Siri AI are now animated as emerging from the black blob that is the Dynamic Island. Now Playing appears up there, too, and you can click1 or tap2 on the Dynamic Island to expand it and get playback controls. Shared Live Activities from your paired iPhone should also appear up there, rather than in the menu bar itself, as they do on other Macs.
I'm a big fan of subtle, ambient information presentations that inform you about things happening on your devices. That's why the Dynamic Island was such a fun approach to turning a problem (an unsightly camera cut-out) into a useful feature. The notch never really did anything--it was just a dead zone. The Dynamic Island serves a purpose and the MacBook Pro is better for it.
Continue reading “MacBook Pro with PROLED review: You could even say it glows”…
by Jason Snell
Siri AI keeps on improving
Apple’s 27.3 Developer betas added some major Siri AI features to Safari, but that’s not all. There’s also the Siri AI Developer Preview, which Federico Viticci analyzed in detail, finding it to be a sign that Apple really is executing fast on its AI development game plan:
You don’t roll out this kind of expansion two months after the launch of iOS 27 unless you truly have a flexible orchestration layer and modern harness that can make the assistant more useful simply by virtue of giving it more tools.
It’s been a slow burn for Siri AI over the past two months, especially since it was always a bit unclear what would work and what would break when using it inside apps. I’m curious to test the updated architecture over the next “few months” (per Apple), and I’m now very confident about the fact that Apple is building a Siri Agent for iOS 28.
Apple lost two years by fumbling the Apple Intelligence roll-out. It’s good to see that it still has a serious sense of urgency and isn’t hibernating until WWDC 2027.
Our quirky interface habits that go against the grain, how our beta and app update routines have shifted in the AI era, where and how often we run searches these days, and the first settings we tweak on a brand-new computer.
By Jason Snell
Apple’s fiscal 2026 in charts
On Monday, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, setting an all-time quarterly revenue record and closing its record fiscal year off with a bang. I made some charts to illustrate the thing, as I tend to do.
Now that Apple’s fiscal 2026 has concluded, it’s time for a second set of colorful financial charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.
Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue over the last 15 years:
The post-pandemic/Apple silicon leap in 2021 is still notable, obviously. After three years of middling growth, 2025 kicked it into gear and then 2026 went wild—an increase of more than $62B in revenue, or 15.1%. It’s Apple’s best growth year since that magical 2021.
It’s also worth noting the boom-and-flat cycles Apple tends to go through, which are frequently driven by changes to iPhone buying. There was a big kick in 2015, another in 2018, a huge one in 2021 (amplified, again, by pandemic buying and Apple silicon), and a bit of one in 2026.