Thursday January 23, 2025 6:41 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 should be released to the public next week, following beta testing since mid-December. While the software update is a relatively minor one, it still includes a handful of new features, changes, and bug fixes for iPhones.
Below, we recap everything new in iOS 18.3.
Notification Summary Changes
Examples of inaccurate Apple Intelligence notification summaries
Apple Intelligence...
Friday January 24, 2025 1:55 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple is set to release iOS 18.3 next week, bringing further refinements to Apple Intelligence features, a couple of neat new capabilities to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 devices, and bug fixes.
While not quite as packed with new features as Apple's preceding iOS 18 point releases, iOS 18.3 still introduces capabilities that aim to make your iPhone smarter and more intuitive. Below, we've...
Friday January 24, 2025 8:16 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 is expected to be widely released next week, and that means the first iOS 18.4 beta for iPhones should be just around the corner.
Apple has previously implied that iOS 18.4 will be released in April, as that is when it promised to make Apple Intelligence available in even more languages.
Below, we outline what to expect from iOS 18.4 so far.
Apple Intelligence for Siri
Siri ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 7:32 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Walmart still does not accept Apple Pay or other NFC payments at its more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., and it stood firm on its reasoning for that today.
A spokesperson for Walmart today informed MacRumors that its position on contactless payments has not changed since we last reached out about the matter in 2022. The big-box retailer said it remains focused on its own convenient...
Wednesday January 22, 2025 6:01 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
A new Apple TV is expected to be released later this year. In this article, we recap rumored features and changes for the device.
The next Apple TV will be equipped with Apple's own combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He said the chip supports Wi-Fi 6E, which would be an upgrade over the current Apple TV's standard Wi-Fi 6 support. Wi-Fi 6E extends the...
Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:31 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate version of iOS 18.3 today, and with it comes release notes confirming what's new. While we knew about several of the features that are in the update, there are some lesser known tweaks and bug fixes.
The update adds new Visual Intelligence features for iPhone 16 models, it tweaks Notification summaries on all...
Friday January 24, 2025 9:09 am PST by Juli Clover
The upcoming iPhone 17 models that Apple plans to release this year will not feature a smaller Dynamic Island, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today.
On social media, he said that he is expecting the size of the Dynamic Island to remain "largely unchanged" across the iPhone 17 lineup. His statement is contrary to prior rumors that we've heard about planned changes for the iPhone 17 models.
...
Saturday January 25, 2025 5:07 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple's retail stores will be rolling out "merchandise/floor marketing updates" next week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Gurman did not explicitly say if the store updates are related to any upcoming product announcements, but he did mention that next week is around the time that Apple rolls out its annual Black Unity watch band for the Apple Watch.
In each of the past four years, ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 2:48 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
It's also time for Apple's first product announcement of the year.
Last year, Apple said it would be launching Powerbeats Pro 2 in 2025, and the wireless earbuds are expected to launch very soon.
Powerbeats Pro 2 images found in iOS 18 code
In his Power On newsletter last weekend, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the Powerbeats Pro 2 are "due imminently." In addition to Apple filing the...
Somehow it seems obvious to me... use LTE like you use your smartphone: to look stuff up and do useful things like emailing and checking news/weather when youre away from WiFi and the task isnt well suited to your phone. Then use WiFi for the massive tasks like streaming video. Are there really that many people who watch a lot of video and yet think their LTE plan is a full replacement for WiFi? That seems like an odd mix of being tech-savvy and being clueless.
Even if this is an option, it sucks to decide what you want before you're ready to watch. It can be impossible to know in advance what kind of mood you'll be in at a later time, when you're able to consume the content.
I've been a wifi-only iPad user all along, and get by just fine. Can understand how cellular iPad owners are frustrated thou.
I don't tweet but the hashtag #firstworldproblems seems appropriate here.
Remember when you had to go to Blockbuster to rent DVD movies, and you'd end up taking several home, not knowing if you'd still be in the mood to watch them by the time you had the opportunity?
Remember when you went to Blockbuster to rent VHS movies, and if you wanted to go back to a scene you had to hit rewind and wait for the spooled tape to get to the spot you wanted to see again? Be sure to rewind the tape before you turn it in, or there will be an additional fee.
Remember when to rent movies you had to join a club where you paid $45 to get in, and you still had to pay $3 each time you exchanged your one rented movie for another (though at least at the end of the six-month membership you got to keep the last tape you rented)?
Remember when renting movies was done at a little Fotomat kiosk in the middle of a parking lot where you dropped off film for overnight developing? You chose from a couple of Xerox pages of movies. I think you had to reserve the movie and come back the next day to get it. It was $8 (in 1981 dollars) for a three-day rental of a Beta videocassette.
Remember when you just had to watch what was on TV? If it was a Saturday afternoon, you had better be in the mood for badly-dubbed Japanese sci-fi.
I remember all of it, and I can't believe how easy we have it now in terms of entertainment choices.
anyone else feel like this will lead to fragmentation?
No. The non-retina artwork is still there. Also the iPhone artwork (both retina and non-retina).
For the near future, I think Apple would reject any "retina-only" apps, while they are still selling non-retina iPads.
The only fragmentation is "iPad only" or "iPhone only" apps, and a few that just require more horsepower than older iPhones or iPads can give. That's more obsolescence than fragmentation.
Even apps that take full advantage of the GPU in the new iPad will probably still work on the iPad 2--just with simpler shading and lighting, and of course, lower resolution.
Netflix's iOS App has been updated with new iPad Retina icons and images. The actual video stream hasn't yet been updated to High Definition. 
