Anurag Chawake

Apple is going to be quite picky about the types of ads it shows in Apple Maps. New advertising rules say plumbers, electricians, locksmiths and roofers can’t buy ads on the navigation app — even though Google happily sells them in its mapping app.

That’s a deliberate distinction from Google’s model, in which home services ads make up one of the biggest categories. And that’s just the start of Apple’s restrictions on ads in Apple Maps and its other services.

As it turns out, Apple wants Maps to feel more like a curated storefront than a search engine.

Apple closed the unlocked iPhone loophole for T-Mobile and Verizon buyers. If you’ve financed an iPhone through any of these carriers, it used to stay unlocked. Not anymore.

Every iPhone financed through T-Mobile or Verizon will now stay locked to that carrier until you fully pay it off. This is exactly how AT&T’s financing has always worked. It means no more SIM swapping, joining an MVNO or popping in a travel eSIM on the go.

Apple is pushing an AppleCare+ price increase, with Mac and iPad owners footing the bill. Sign up for coverage on a new Mac or iPad today, and you’ll pay 50 cents more per month than you would have last week.

The change just went into effect and only affects new AppleCare+ enrollments. If you’re already subscribed, you’ll keep your current rate for now. But Apple hasn’t clarified how long that will last. It’s a small bump, but lands just weeks after Apple hiked hardware prices.

Your iPhone will soon speak up before a booby-trapped text message can do damage. The iOS 26.6 malicious message warning is a new pop-up that tells you when Apple thinks an iMessage is trying to harm your device or steal your data. And it gives you a quick way to send that message straight to Apple for investigation.

The alert hasn’t gone live for anyone yet. It was spotted buried in iOS 26.6 beta 5 code, which means it’s still in the testing phase. But its presence indicates iPhone users will soon get a much more visible security layer that makes it harder to ignore message-based attacks.

Apple just got a proposed class-action lawsuit wiped off its plate — and it’s a big one. A federal judge on Monday dismissed a case that accused the company of failing to stop child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from spreading through iCloud, a lawsuit that sought as much as $32.8 billion in damages.

U.S. District Judge Noël Wise ruled that Apple would be shielded from the claims by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that protects online platforms from being sued over content their users upload. The judge tossed the case with prejudice, so it’s gone for good.

Word on the street is that the iPhone 20’s all-glass revamp recently moved from “maybe” to “the factories are literally getting ready for it.”

Seems like anyone ready for Apple to shake up iPhone design can look forward to 2027.

Apple seems to have gone to unusual lengths to keep one man out of its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI: Jony Ive.

However, the legal battle could end up with Apple’s former design chief taking the stand. And that could rattle Apple’s cordial relationship with Ive, who’s helping OpenAI build AI-powered gadgets that threaten the iPhone’s dominance.

If you see a file called CrashReporter.dmg in your Mac’s Downloads folder, don’t open it. It’s not from Apple — it’s a new strain of malware called CrashStealer. It’s wearing Apple’s own clothing, right down to the icon, name and a fake password box designed to look like standard macOS.

The malware slips past Apple’s security checks and tricks victims into typing their Mac password before draining everything of value on the machine. Anyone who’s opened an unfamiliar app in the past few weeks should pay close attention.

Apple just went shopping for a bug hunter. Cupertino scooped up SigScalr, a small startup behind SigLens, an app designed to detect exactly where the software goes wrong — even if the software is basically hundreds of smaller programs working as a single app.

Apple did not announce the acquisition via a press release. It surfaced through the European Union’s paperwork, the same way a lot of Apple’s smaller acquisitions did in the last few years.

But don’t let the quiet rollout fool you. SigLens tackles a problem that’s only getting worse as apps become more complex. And it looks like Apple clearly wants it fixed before it becomes Xcode’s problem too.

Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t fly to Washington last summer to talk about Intel. He went there to keep Apple from getting hit with a 100% tariff on every chip the company imports. But somewhere in those meetings, the conversation shifted to an unexpected topic — Intel.

Fast forward a year, and Apple and Intel now have a manufacturing arrangement in the works. And according to a new report, the origin story is less about “engineering roadmap” and more about “the White House brought it up while Apple was trying to survive a tariff fight.”

The next time an Apple Store employee rings you up, don’t be surprised if you don’t see the traditional plastic card sled. Apple is silently retiring the hardware its retail staff has strapped onto their iPhones for years. The company seems to be betting on the fact that the iPhone is finally good enough to close the sale.

Apple is now reportedly handing out iPhone 16s to its blue-shirted employees to expand Tap to Pay on iPhone. This software feature turns the device into a contactless payment terminal with nothing bolted on. It’s a small hardware swap, but Apple no longer thinks it needs a middleman to take your money.

Update: Apple released the first iOS 27 public beta on Monday.

The iOS 27 public beta is coming soon — if Apple’s previous release pattern holds up, it could hit your iPhone any day now. Developers have been having all the fun since early June, playing around with Siri AI and the new Liquid Glass slider while the rest of us waited. Now, that wait is almost over.

Once the public beta drops, which should be more stable than the initial developer betas, anyone can install iOS 27 for free. But your iPhone does need some prep first, and there are a few reasons you should think twice before hitting the Install button.

The latest leak about the first folding iPhone says Apple might not deliver the extreme battery capacity that most early rumors indicated.

If you were banking on a foldable with all-day battery life, this is worth pausing on.

Beta remorse is real. Maybe an app won’t open, maybe things just feel off, or maybe you just want to go back to a stable daily driver while Apple sorts all the issues. Whatever the reason, you can downgrade from iOS 27 beta to iOS 26, and it’s not even that hard.

Here’s what to do.

Apple’s on-device ambitions just got more interesting. The company has reportedly been talking to a startup called PrismML that claims to run a massive, server-grade language model on the iPhone 17 Pro — no cloud required.

If the discussions turn into a deal between Apple and PrismML, it could be a significant upgrade for Apple Intelligence. Here’s why.

The iPhone is about to get a lot more fluent. iOS 27 will bring support for nine new languages and accents to Apple Translate, pushing the app’s total support from 21 up to 30 — the biggest single expansion update Translate has ever received.

Soon, you’ll be ready for, “Dette er den største enkeltstående udvidelsesopdatering, som Apple Translate nogensinde har modtaget.”

The PC industry just posted its worst quarter in two years, but the Mac is having a moment. New shipment data shows Mac sales grew by double digits at a time when every other big computer maker was tanking. Unsurprisingly, the reason comes down to the global chip shortage that’s wrecking the whole industry.

This matters because the same memory crunch dragging down Dell, HP and Lenovo is pushing the price up for your next Mac. Apple seems to be weathering the storm better than anyone else, but it isn’t immune, and the discount window for your next Apple hardware could be closing fast.

Got an old encrypted hard drive in a drawer? Apple just put a deadline on it. With the upcoming macOS 28 update, your Mac will flat-out refuse to mount encrypted drives using the old Mac OS Extended file system — so if you’re still holding on to one, now’s the time to deal with it.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere. Apple has been flagging incompatible hard drives by showing warning pop-ups since macOS 26 and has now confirmed a hard cutoff.

So take note: if you still have an old backup or an archive of camera footage stored on an encrypted Mac OS Extended volume in a drawer or cabinet, macOS 28 will lock you out unless you fix it.

Your Apple Watch’s Siri timer problem just got fixed. With watchOS 27 beta 3, you can finally tell Siri to add two minutes to an already running timer — instead of getting stonewalled with “What do you want to set the timer to?”

If you’ve ever pulled a tray out of the oven a little early just because doing timer math in your head felt easier than fighting Siri, you know exactly why this matters. It’s a teeny tiny fix, but it does away with the everyday friction that made your watch feel less useful.

In the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Siri AI can pull live information from third-party apps on your iPhone. It’s the kind of feature Siri should’ve had years ago — and now, it’s finally here.

Right now, it only appears to work with a couple of electric vehicle apps, letting you ask Siri things like your car’s battery level. But it’s a signal of where Siri AI is headed — an assistant that finally acts as a bridge across your entire phone, not just Apple’s walled garden.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is reportedly getting a huge battery upgrade — while the standard Pro model might get almost no bump at all.

That could make this the year the Pro Max truly earns its name with a battery gap wider than anything we’ve seen before.

Your iPhone is about to get a lot more transparent about where your data goes. Apple is rolling out a Google Cloud pop-up warning that protects your privacy by letting you know before certain Apple Intelligence features send your prompts off-device, and it’s already live for some users right now.

The heads-up appears when you use certain image- and shape-generation tools. It won’t block you from using these features, though. It simply makes sure you know your data is leaving Apple’s own servers before you hit send.

Apple’s smart glasses may be waiting, but AirPods Ultra may just be confirmed. Buried in iOS 27’s beta code is a mystery wearable that reads images from two cameras, located on each side of your head. And Apple’s own sample data has it identifying the Eiffel Tower and a coffee mug.

If you’ve ever wanted Siri to actually see what you’re looking at instead of just hearing you describe it, this could be it. Apple is reportedly working on just that, and the newly spotted code hints at how close it might be, and which product, AirPods or glasses, is likely to land first.

The “free” clipboard manager you just downloaded could be doing more than just copying and pasting text. Researchers recently found a new malware called PamStealer disguised as Maccy, a popular clipboard tool, that does something most Mac malware doesn’t bother with — checking your Mac password before sending it off.

The malware hides itself in a lookalike download for Maccy. It doesn’t just grab your password and run — but it checks the password against the same system Apple uses to log you in.

Scammers are tricky, but your iPhone will soon get a lot less gullible, thanks to a new iOS 27 feature called Trust Insights. It watches for the tell-tale signs you’re being coached through a scam — and steps in before you actually lose money.

The system runs quietly in the background regardless of what you are doing on your iPhone. If it thinks your behavior looks suspicious, your iPhone will flag it, slow you down, or make you verify twice before you go through with it.

While Trust Insights didn’t get a flashy keynote moment during WWDC26 in June, it will be one of the most useful things Apple ships this fall.