Popular Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp received a handful of new feature additions today, along with the global rollout of its new Communities feature.
Communities is designed to allow people to bring together separate groups under a single umbrella, providing users with a way to receive updates that are sent to an entire community, and then organize smaller discussion groups on important topics.
An example use case could be school parents creating an overarching "School" community, which breaks out into smaller groups based on grade and other factors. WhatsApp first started testing Communities in April, and now they're gradually rolling out worldwide.
The encrypted chat platform has also gained in-chat polls, something that has been in beta testing since March. Users are now able to ask a poll question and group members can choose from pre-defined answers. Like chats, polls are end-to-end encrypted, meaning only people in the group can see the poll and the results.
In addition, video calls can now have up to 32 participants, and the maximum group size has been doubled from 512 to 1024 users.
WhatsApp has worked to improve the group chat experience over the last few years in an effort to keep up with competing platforms, introducing group descriptions, a catch-up feature, a one-way messaging option, and protection for users who are being added repeatedly to groups they've left.
Thursday October 31, 2024 9:42 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple is set to release iOS 18.2 in December, bringing the second round of Apple Intelligence features to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models. This update brings several major advancements to Apple's AI integration, including completely new image generation tools and a range of Visual Intelligence-based enhancements. There are a handful of new non-AI related feature controls incoming as well.
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We're officially in the month of Black Friday, which will take place on Friday, November 29 in 2024. As always, this will be the best time of the year to shop for great deals, including popular Apple products like AirPods, iPad, Apple Watch, and more.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment,...
Thursday October 31, 2024 7:06 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
The first Geekbench 6 benchmark results for the M4 Pro chip surfaced today. Impressively, the results that are available so far show that the highest-end M4 Pro chip is faster than the highest-end M2 Ultra chip in terms of peak multi-core CPU performance.
Here is a comparison of the results:
Mac mini with M4 Pro (14-core CPU): 22,094 multi-core score (average of 11 results)
Mac Studio...
Friday November 1, 2024 4:04 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
The iPhone SE 4 that's set to come out early next year is expected to debut Apple's first in-house 5G modem, according to Jeff Pu, an analyst who covers companies within Apple's supply chain.
In a research note this week with Hong Kong-based investment firm Haitong International Securities, Pu said Apple is expected to roll out its custom-made 5G modem starting with the next-generation...
Monday November 4, 2024 10:54 am PST by Juli Clover
With the second beta of iOS 18.2 that's available for developers today, Apple has further fleshed out the ChatGPT integration that's available with Siri. In the Settings app, there's now a section that shows the ChatGPT daily limit, and offers an option to upgrade to the paid ChatGPT Plus plan.
The beta includes an Advanced Capabilities section with a "Daily Limit" reading that shows up as...
Friday November 1, 2024 8:04 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple's new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips are impressively fast in terms of CPU performance, topping the M2 Ultra, but what about graphics performance?
The first Geekbench 6 results for GPU performance are now available for the M4 Pro and M4 Max, and the Metal scores reveal some impressive year-over-year gains. Based on the Metal scores that are available so far, the M4 Pro and M4 Max are up to...
Friday November 1, 2024 9:40 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
After a busy October in which Apple announced new Macs and Apple Intelligence launched, the calendar has now turned to November. Below, we outline what to expect from Apple this month as the slower-but-still-busy holiday season approaches.
After seeding the first betas of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 with additional Apple Intelligence features last month, Apple will likely...
Don't touch Metaverse products with a barge pole if you value any kind of privacy.
Are iCloud Messages even encrypted? I thought Apple has a key for iCloud backup.
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I still need WhatsApp since it’s simply more feature rich then iMessage and the storage management of iMessage drives me up the wall but I still continue to give it a chance. iMessage still has a long way to go and I don’t care about Memoji. First think I turned off
