Apple

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.

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 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A newer version of the DarkSword exploit that targets devices running iOS 18.4 to 18.6.2 has appeared on GitHub.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!

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.

According to 9to5Mac:

YouTube’s DirectorFeng has released yet another teardown of the new Apple MacBook Neo but in this video they go one step further and upgrade the laptop’s 256GB NAND chip to 1TB of storage, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The upgrade works, but it’s a complicated process requiring some serious skills and a steady hand.

The exec, Brian Lynch, will be Oura’s SVP of hardware engineering, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

That’s one way to get MagSafe on the iPhone 16E! According to iFixit, however, even if you make the swap, the older iPhone doesn’t have the fancy MagSafe animation.

When Victoria Song reviewed the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2, she found a lot to like about their slimmer ear hook and wireless charging, even before their iOS 26 upgrade. Now, Beats is launching this color-splashed collaboration, which is at least bright, even if it lacks the internal hardware updates of Apple’s new AirPods Max headphones.

Apple’s original AirPods Max are pretty extraordinary headphones with some very obvious flaws. More than five years on, we’re finally getting a sequel — which fixes absolutely none of them. Make it make sense, Apple.

On Monday, MotionVFX announced on its website that it’s “joining the Apple team.” MotionVFX is the developer behind a suite of tools for Apple-owned Final Cut Pro, including several AI features like AI upscaling and captions. The suite is currently still available as a monthly subscription catered toward creators, similar to Apple’s Creator Studio subscription.

Some of you may have secretly (or not so secretly) hoped that with Alan Dye out of the picture, Apple would change course and ditch Liquid Glass. No such luck. Dramatic interface changes are, as you might expect, a major undertaking. According to Mark Gurman: