Apple

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New iPhones use Apple N1 wireless chip—and we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere

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Apple’s most famous chips are the A- and M-series processors that power its iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but this year, its effort to build its own wireless chips is starting to bear fruit. Earlier this spring, the iPhone 16e included Apple’s C1 modem, furthering Apple’s ambitions to shed its dependence on Qualcomm, and today’s iPhone Air brought a faster Apple C1X variant, plus something new: the Apple N1, a chip that provides Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support for all of today’s new iPhones.

Apple didn’t dive deep into the capabilities of the N1, or why it had switched from using third-party suppliers (historically, Apple has mostly leaned on Broadcom for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). However, the company’s press releases say that it should make Continuity features like Personal Hotspot and AirDrop more reliable—these features use Bluetooth for initial communication and then Wi-Fi to establish a high-speed local link between two devices. Other features that use a similar combination of wireless technologies, like using an iPad as an extended Mac display, should also benefit.

These aren’t Apple’s first chips to integrate Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology. The Apple Watches rely on W-series chips to provide their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity; the Apple H1 and H2 chips also provide Bluetooth connectivity for many of Apple’s wireless headphones. But this is the first time that Apple has switched to its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in one of its iPhones, suggesting that the chips have matured enough to provide higher connectivity speeds for more demanding devices.

Apple will likely expand the use of the N1 (and other N-series chips) beyond the iPhone soon enough. Macs and iPads are obvious candidates, but the presence of Thread support also suggests that we’ll see it in new smart home devices like the Apple TV or HomePod.

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Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one

Apple, IPhone, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / /

i have touched the new phones

A new form-vs.-function spectrum emerges as Apple’s phone designs diverge.

The iPhone Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

CUPERTINO, Calif.—We’re a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to “basically the same phone in two sizes” a decade or so ago, and then to a version of “one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones” in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.

But thanks to Apple’s newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they’ve ever had before. Apple’s phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.

We’ve gone hands-on with all four of Apple’s new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.

The iPhone Air: Designed for first impressions

There’s no more iPhone mini, and there’s no more iPhone Plus. Now we have an iPhone Air, and it is very much its own thing.

The phone is just over two-thirds the thickness of the iPhone 17, not counting what Apple now calls a “camera plateau” that stretches across the top of the device. It’s 0.22 inches thick and weighs 5.82 ounces, compared to 0.31 inches thick and 6.24 ounces for the iPhone 17. You have to go back to the iPhone 12 (5.78 ounces) to find a full-size iPhone that’s equally light, and that one had a 6.1-inch screen instead of the Air’s more expansive 6.5 inches.

Those don’t look like huge numbers on paper, but when you’re holding the iPhone Air, it does make a substantial difference. While the camera plateau makes it look top-heavy in photos, in reality, it’s light, and that weight is distributed evenly enough that it feels as well-balanced as any of the other iPhones.

The combination of a large-ish screen and light weight created a strong perception of lightness, compared to the iPhone 17 or especially the 7.27-ounce iPhone 17 Pro. I also found that the shiny titanium frame, while a fingerprint magnet, did slide around in my hand less than an aluminum finish.

It’s a phone built to make a strong first impression, whether you’re holding it in an Apple Store or just after an Apple event in a throng of YouTubers who are all throwing elbows so that they can film each individual phone in the hands-on area for 20 minutes apiece. But I do worry that living with the Air would be frustrating in the long haul, specifically because of battery life.

Again, on paper, the numbers Apple is quoting aren’t so far apart. The Air is rated for 27 hours of local video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 hours for the 17 Pro. But there’s a bigger gap between the numbers for streaming video—22 hours, 27 hours, and 30 hours for the Air, 17, and 17 Pro, respectively—that suggests that any activity that’s actively using the A19 Pro chip or wireless communication is going to drain the battery even faster.

Extrapolate that out two years, when your battery is going to be operating at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its original capacity, and a midday charge starts to sound like an inevitability. It’s telling that a thickness-and-weight-increasing external battery accessory was announced in the same breath as the iPhone Air.

The iPhone Air’s $99 MagSafe battery accessory. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s official acknowledgement of and solution to the battery life issue is a $99 external battery that attaches with MagSafe and charges the phone wirelessly; by Apple’s estimates, it adds roughly 13 hours of runtime on top of what you get from the internal battery.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having an iPhone Air, I hear you asking? Maybe so! But it is at least a better aesthetic match for the iPhone than a chunky third-party brick, and one that’s pretty easy to detach and put away once it has done its job and charged your phone. It has its own separate USB-C port for charging, and a small status light (orange when charging, green when charged) below the Apple logo. The magnetic connection feels sturdy enough that it would be hard to dislodge the battery by accident, but I can’t say that it absolutely couldn’t fall off if you were trying to jam the phone into a pocket or bag and caught the battery on something.

I can say that the iPhone Air probably isn’t for me, because the main things I want from a phone are more battery life and better cameras—I can appreciate something smaller and lighter, but only if it doesn’t compromise that other stuff (I got exactly this kind of upgrade when I jumped from an iPhone 13 Pro to a 15 Pro). That’s fine—when you introduce four phones at once, you don’t need to appeal to every iPhone user with every one of them. But I do wonder whether people will find the Air more convincing than they apparently found the now-departed iPhone mini and iPhone Plus.

The iPhone 17 Pro: Industrial design

If you look at the iPhone Air and you say, “I would actually take a thicker, heavier phone if it had a bigger battery in it,” Apple does already make that phone for you.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are more of a design departure from the standard iPhones than they have been in years past, with a distinctive aluminum unibody design and a gigantic camera plateau that replaces the old (and already substantial) three-lens camera bump on the older Pros.

Frankly, I’m not in love with the look of this new design—the aluminum unibody design may be good for durability, but it requires Apple to leave cutouts for other wireless-permeable materials all over the phone’s body, and the result is a two-tone design and a lumpy profile that gives the impression that form follows function on this one. It’s the iPhone equivalent of a polished concrete floor—utilitarian with a trendy veneer. It’s a phone I would be happy to put in a case.

It’s also a bit disappointing that the iPhone 17 Pro continues the Pro phones’ drift back upward in weight—we went from 7.27 ounces to 6.6 ounces from the iPhone 14 Pro to the 15 Pro, then to 7.03 ounces for the 16 Pro, and now right back to 7.27 ounces again. But weight is obviously incidental to other features for many Pro users, and the 17 Pro does at least do cool things that make the increased weight worth it.

The two-toned design, festooned with cutouts, makes the phone look a bit uneven to me. Andrew Cunningham

The one feature that’s easy to wrap your arms around in just a few minutes with the new phone is the upgraded telephoto camera lens, which shifts to a 48MP sensor that enables Apple’s Fusion Camera functionality for telephoto shots for the first time.

If you don’t know, the Fusion Camera system shoots 48MP images and then shrinks them to 12 or 24MP, depending on the phone you’re using—benefiting from the extra detail captured by the 48MP sensor, but keeping photo sizes manageable. To create “optical zoom,” the camera instead crops a native-resolution 12MP image out of the center of that sensor. Quality is reduced somewhat because you lose the benefits of the “pixel binning” process that is used to turn 48MP shots into 12MP or 24MP shots, but you’re still capturing native-resolution images without digital zoom.

Adding that to the telephoto lens for the first time doubles the amount of zoom Apple can offer—it starts at 4x zoom, and can go as high as 8x before you start relying on digital zoom.

Standard lens, iPhone 15 Pro. Andrew Cunningham

We were able to do a bit of shooting with the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera on the Apple Park campus. Compared to my iPhone 15 Pro and its 3x telephoto lens, the default 4x zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro already gets us a little closer, and the 8x zoom option gets you a lot closer. Zoom all the way in to the orange “hello” and you’ll notice some fuzziness and less-than-tack-sharp details, but for photo prints or sharing digitally the results are impressive.

The extra weight and unfinished look of the iPhone 17 Pro don’t make as good a first impression as the iPhone Air did, but I suspect iPhone Pro users (myself included) will find its larger battery and better camera to be acceptable trade-offs. It will be the easier phone to live with in the long term, in other words.

The iPhone 17: Still the default

The iPhone 17: It’s an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In between the industrial chic aesthetic of the iPhone 17 Pro and the lightness of the iPhone Air is the regular iPhone, which looks a whole lot like last year’s but might actually get the most noticeable functional upgrades of all three of them.

I’m mainly talking about the ProMotion screen, a 120 Hz OLED display panel with a dynamic refresh rate that can go as low as 1 Hz when the phone isn’t being used. Both ProMotion and the always-on screen feature that it enables have been exclusive to the iPhone Pro for years, even as higher-refresh-rate screens have spread through midrange and budget Android phones.

That extra smoothness is tough to give up once you’ve gotten used to it, and it pairs especially well with the extra motion and bounciness present in Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface. Fitting 6.3 inches of screen into a phone the same size as the 6.1-inch iPhone 16 also heightens the edge-to-edge screen effect. And both ProMotion and the larger screen help put some space between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 16e, Apple’s current “budget” offering that comes in at just $200 under the price of the regular iPhone.

From the back: Still an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The other major functional upgrade for people who just walk into the store (or log on to their carrier’s website) and buy the default iPhone is that the base model has been bumped up to 256GB of storage, a reasonably generous allotment that should keep you from having too much trouble with gigantic movie files or years-old gigabytes-large iMessage conversations that you just can’t bear to delete.

This looks like an iPhone, and it feels like an iPhone, and there’s not a lot to convey from a quick hands-on session other than that. In this case, a lack of surprises is a good thing.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

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Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late ’00s. The community was working to get around Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That “master library” would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today’s addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project’s launch last October. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

Ars’ story on the project shook out a few more iPod owners with syncable iPod game libraries, and subsequent updates in the following days left just a handful of titles unpreserved. But that’s when the project stalled, Olsro said, with months wasted on false leads and technical issues that hampered the effort to get a complete library.

“I’ve put a lot of time into coaching people that [had problems] transferring the files and authorizing the account once with me on the [Virtual Machine],” Olsro told Ars. “But I kept motivation to continue coaching anyone else coming to me (by mail/Discord) and making regular posts to increase awareness until I could find finally someone that could, this time, go with me through all the steps of the preservation process,” he added on Reddit.

Getting this working copy of Real Soccer 2009 was an “especially cursed” process, Olsro said.

Getting this working copy of Real Soccer 2009 was an “especially cursed” process, Olsro said. Credit: Olsro / Reddit

Getting working access to the final unpreserved game, Real Soccer 2009, was “especially cursed,” Olsro tells Ars. “Multiple [people] came to me during this summer and all attempts failed until a new one from yesterday,” he said. “I even had a situation when someone had an iPod Nano 5G with a playable copy of Real Soccer, but the drive was appearing empty in the Windows Explorer. He tried recovery tools & the iPod NAND just corrupted itself, asking for recovery…”

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What to expect (and not expect) from yet another September Apple event

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An all-new iPhone variant, plus a long list of useful (if predictable) upgrades.

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product event is happening on September 9, and while the company hasn’t technically dropped any hints about what’s coming, anyone with a working memory and a sense of object permanence can tell you that an Apple event in the month of September means next-generation iPhones.

Apple’s flagship phones have changed in mostly subtle ways since 2022’s iPhone 14 Pro added the Dynamic Island and 2023’s refreshes switched from Lightning to USB-C. Chips get gradually faster, cameras get gradually better, but Apple hasn’t done a seismic iPhone X-style rethinking of its phones since, well, 2017’s iPhone X.

The rumor mill thinks that Apple is working on a foldable iPhone—and such a device would certainly benefit from years of investment in the iPad—but if it’s coming, it probably won’t be this year. That doesn’t mean Apple is totally done iterating on the iPhone X-style design, though. Let’s run down what the most reliable rumors have said we’re getting.

The iPhone 17

Last year’s iPhone 16 Pro bumped the screen sizes from 6.1 and 6.7 inches to 6.3 and 6.9 inches. This year’s iPhone 17 will allegedly get a 6.3-inch screen with a high-refresh-rate ProMotion panel, but the iPhone Plus is said to be going away. Credit: Apple

Apple’s vanilla one-size-fits-most iPhone is always the centerpiece of the lineup, and this year’s iteration is expected to bring the typical batch of gradual iterative upgrades.

The screen will supposedly be the biggest beneficiary, upgrading from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches (the same size as the current iPhone 16 Pro) and adding a high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen that has typically been reserved for the Pro phones. Apple is always careful not to add too many “Pro”-level features to the entry-level iPhones, but this one is probably overdue—even less-expensive Android phones like the Pixel 9a ship often ship with 90 Hz or 120 Hz screens at this point. It’s not clear whether that will also enable the always-on display feature that has also historically been exclusive to the iPhone Pro, but the fluidity upgrade will be nice regardless.

Aside from that, there aren’t many specific improvements we’ve seen reported on, but there are plenty we can comfortably guess at. Improved front- and rear-facing cameras and a new Apple A19-series chip with at least the 8GB of RAM needed to support Apple Intelligence are both pretty safe bets.

But there’s one thing we supposedly won’t get, which is a new large-sized iPhone Plus. That brings us to our next rumor.

The “iPhone Air”

For the last few years, every new iPhone launch has actually brought us four iPhones—a regular iPhone in two different sizes and an iPhone Pro with a better camera, better screen, faster chip, and other improvements in a regular size and a large size.

It’s the second size of the regular iPhone that has apparently given Apple some trouble. It made a couple of generations of “iPhone mini,” an attempt to address a small-but-vocal contingent of Phones Are Just Too Big These Days people that apparently didn’t sell well enough to continue making. That was replaced by the iPhone Plus, aimed at people who wanted a bigger screen but who weren’t ready to pay for an iPhone Pro Max.

The Plus phones at least gave the iPhone lineup a nice symmetry—two tiers of phone, with a regular one and a big one at each tier—but rumors suggest that the Plus phone is also going away this year. Like the iPhone mini before it, it apparently just wasn’t selling well enough to be worth the continued effort.

That brings us to this year’s fourth iPhone: Apple is supposedly planning to release an “iPhone Air,” which will weigh less than the regular iPhone and is said to be 5.5 or 6 mm thick, depending on who you ask (the iPhone 16 is 7.8 mm).

A 6.3-inch ProMotion display and A19-series chip are also expected to be a part of the iPhone Air, but rather than try to squeeze every feature of the iPhone 17 into a thinner phone, it sounds like the iPhone 17 Air will cater to people who are willing to give a few things up in the interest of getting a thinner and lighter device. It will reportedly have worse battery life than the regular iPhone and just a single-lens camera setup (though the 48 MP sensors Apple has switched to in recent iPhones do make it easier to “fake” optical zoom features than it used to be).

We don’t know anything about the pricing for any of these phones, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that the iPhone Air will be positioned between the regular iPhone and the iPhone Pro—more like the iPad lineup, where the Air is the mid-tier choice, and less like the Mac, where the Air is the entry-level laptop.

iPhone 17 Pro

Apple’s Pro iPhones are generally “the regular iPhone, but more,” and sometimes they’re “what all iPhones will look like in a couple of years, but available right now for people who will pay more for it.” The new ones seem set to continue in that vein.

The most radical change will apparently be on the back—Apple is said to be switching to an even larger camera array that stretches across the entire top-rear section of the phone, an arrangement you’ll occasionally see in some high-end Android phones (Google’s Pixel 10 is one). That larger camera bump will likely enable a few upgrades, including a switch from a 12 MP sensor for the telephoto zoom lens to a 48 MP sensor. And it will also be part of a more comprehensive metal-and-glass body that’s more of a departure from the glass-backed-slab design Apple has been using since the iPhone 12.

A 48MP telephoto sensor could increase the amount of pseudo-optical zoom that the iPhone can offer. The main iPhones will condense a 48 MP photo down to 12 MP when you’re in the regular shooting mode, binning pixels to improve image quality. For zoomed-in photos, it can just take a 12 MP section out of the middle of the 48 MP image—you lose the benefit of pixel binning, but you’re still getting a “native resolution” photo without blurry digital zoom. With a better sensor, Apple could do exactly the same thing with the telephoto lens.

Apple reportedly isn’t planning any changes to screen size this year—still 6.3 inches for the regular Pro and 6.9 inches for the Max. But they are said to be getting new “A19 Pro” series chips that are superior to the regular A19 processors (though in what way, exactly, we don’t yet know). But it could shrink the amount of screen space dedicated to the Dynamic Island.

New Apple Watches

Apple Watch Series 10

The Apple Watch Series 10 from 2024. Credit: Apple

New iPhone announcements are usually paired with new Apple Watch announcements, though if anything, the Watch has changed even less than the iPhone has over the last few years.

The Apple Watch Series 11 won’t be getting a screen size increase—the Series 10 bumped things up a smidge just last year, from 41 and 45 mm to 42 and 46 mm. But the screen will apparently have a higher maximum brightness—always useful for outdoor visibility—and there will be a modestly improved Apple S11 chip on the inside.

The entry-level Apple Watch SE is also apparently due for an upgrade. The current second-generation SE still uses an Apple S8 chip, and Apple Watch Series 4-era 40 and 44 mm screens that don’t support always-on operation. In other words, there’s plenty that Apple could upgrade here without cannibalizing sales of the mainstream Series 11 watch.

Finally, after missing out on an update last year, Apple also reportedly plans to deliver a new Apple Watch Ultra, with the larger 46 mm screen from the Series 10/11 watches and the same updated S11 chip as the regular Apple Watch. The current Apple Watch Ultra 2 already has a brighter screen than the Series 10—3,000 nits, up from 2,000—so it’s not clear whether the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s screen would also get brighter or if the Series 11’s screen is just getting a brightness boost to match what the Ultra can do.

Smart home, TV, and audio

Though iPhones and Apple Watches are usually a lock for a September event, other products and accessory updates are also possible.

Of these, the most high-profile is probably a refresh for the Apple TV 4K streaming box, which would be its first update in three years. Rumors suggest that the main upgrade for a new model would be an Apple A17 Pro chip, introduced for the iPhone 15 Pro and also used in the iPad mini 7. The A17 Pro is paired with 8GB of RAM, which makes it Apple’s smallest and cheapest chip that’s capable of Apple Intelligence. Apple hasn’t done anything with Apple Intelligence on the Apple TV directly, but to date, that has been partly because none of the hardware is capable of it.

Also in the “possible but not guaranteed” column: new high-end AirPods Pro, the first-ever internal update to 2020’s HomePod Mini speaker, a new AirTag location tracker, and a straightforward internals-only refresh of the Vision Pro headset. Any, all, or none of these could break cover at the event next week, but Gurman claims they’re all “coming soon.”

New software updates

Devices running Apple’s latest beta operating systems. Credit: Apple

We know most of what there is to know about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and Apple’s other software updates this year, thanks to a three-month-old WWDC presentation and months of public beta testing. There might be a feature or two exclusive to the newest iPhones, but that sort of thing is usually camera-related and usually pretty minor.

The main thing to expect will be release dates for the final versions of all of the updates. Apple usually releases a near-final release candidate build on the day of the presentation, gives developers a week or so to finalize and submit their updated apps for App Review, and then releases the updates after that. Expect to see them rolled out to everyone sometime the week of September 15th (though an earlier release is always a possibility).

What’s probably not happening

We’d be surprised to see anything related to the Mac or the iPad at the event next week, even though several models are in a window where the timing is about right for an Apple M5 refresh.

Macs and iPads have shared the stage with the iPhone before, but in more recent years, Apple has held these refreshes back for another, smaller event later in October or November. If Apple has new MacBook Pro or iPad Pro models slated for 2025, we’d expect to see them in a month or two.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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700-piece Lego G3 iMac design faces long-shot odds to get made, but I still want one

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I don’t usually get too excited about user-submitted designs on the Lego Ideas website, especially when those ideas would require negotiating a license with another company—user-generated designs need to reach 10,000 supporters before Lego considers them for production, two pretty high bars to clear even without factoring in some other brand’s conditions and requests.

But I’m both intrigued and impressed by this Lego version of Apple’s old Bondi Blue G3 iMac that has been making the rounds today. Submitted by a user named terauma, the 700-plus-piece set comes complete with keyboard, hockey-puck mouse, a classic Mac OS boot screen, and cathode ray tubes and circuit boards visible through the set’s transparent blue casing (like the original iMac, it may cause controversy by excluding a floppy disk drive). The design has already reached 5,000 supporters, and it has 320 days left to reach the 10,000-supporter benchmark required to be reviewed by Lego.

With its personality-forward aesthetics and Jony Ive-led design, the original iMac was the first step down the path that led to blockbuster products like the iPod and iPhone. It was the company’s first all-new Mac design after CEO Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late ’90s, and while it lacked some features included in contemporary PCs, its tightly integrated design and ease of setup helped it stand out against the beige desktop PCs of the day. Today’s colorful Apple Silicon iMacs are clearly inspired by the original design.

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After successes like Severance and The Studio, Apple TV+ gets a price hike

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To confront all that, streamers have to turn any knobs they can to balance costs with revenue to satisfy the market. Some have turned to ads as an additional source of revenue, others crack down on password sharing or offer different subscription tiers. But virtually all of them have hiked subscription prices, because the previous price ensured short-term losses for long-term growth.

Apple TV+ does not have ads in any plan, and it hasn’t broken its offering into multiple tiers. (For example, some other streaming services charge more for 4K content.) Because of that, the monthly cost is the only knob it can turn to confront these realities, passing new costs to consumers.

Despite all this, it’s still very possible that even with successes like Ted Lasso, The Studio, and Severance, Apple TV+ is losing some amount of money every year. When reporting to investors each quarter, Apple bundles TV+ into a larger “services” category that includes Apple Music, the App Store, iCloud, AppleCare, and more, making it difficult for outsiders to estimate how well Apple TV+ is doing specifically.

Certainly, its shows have been critically well-received. Both Severance and The Studio in particular have gotten the streaming service positive attention. But the landscape is brutal for a relatively new entry like Apple, so expect Apple’s approach to continue to evolve.

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In Xcode 26, Apple shows first signs of offering ChatGPT alternatives

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The latest Xcode beta contains clear signs that Apple plans to bring Anthropic’s Claude and Opus large language models into the integrated development environment (IDE), expanding on features already available using Apple’s own models or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Apple enthusiast publication 9to5Mac “found multiple references to built-in support for Anthropic accounts,” including in the “Intelligence” menu, where users can currently log in to ChatGPT or enter an API key for higher message limits.

Apple introduced a suite of features meant to compete with GitHub Copilot in Xcode at WWDC24, but first focused on its own models and a more limited set of use cases. That expanded quite a bit at this year’s developer conference, and users can converse about codebases, discuss changes, or ask for suggestions using ChatGPT. They are initially given a limited set of messages, but this can be greatly increased by logging in to a ChatGPT account or entering an API key.

This summer, Apple said it would be possible to use Anthropic’s models with an API key, too, but made no mention of support for Anthropic accounts, which are generally more cost-effective than using the API for most users.

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Apple Watch gets reformulated, non-patent-infringing blood oxygen monitoring

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The redesigned version of the feature will be available on the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Ultra 2 after users install the watchOS 11.6.1 update on their watches and the iOS 18.6.1 update on their paired iPhones.

Apple says that watches outside the US won’t be affected by the update, since they were never subject to the US import ban in the first place. It also won’t affect Apple Watches purchased in the US before the import ban went into effect—Apple never removed the feature from watches it had already sold, so if you bought a Series 9 or Ultra 2 watch in the fall of 2023 or if you’re still using an older watch with the blood oxygen monitoring feature, the updates won’t change anything for you.

Masimo originally sued Apple over the blood oxygen monitoring feature in January of 2020. According to Masimo, Masimo and Apple had initially met in 2013 to talk about a potential partnership or acquisition, but Apple instead poached Masimo’s engineers to implement the feature on its own without Masimo’s involvement.

Apple Watch gets reformulated, non-patent-infringing blood oxygen monitoring Read More »

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Report: Apple’s smart home ambitions include “tabletop robot,” cameras, and more

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Rumors about a touchscreen-equipped smart home device from Apple have been circulating for years, periodically bolstered by leaked references in Apple’s software updates. But a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman indicates that Apple’s ambitions might extend beyond HomePods with screens attached.

Gurman claims that Apple is working on a “tabletop robot” that “resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room.” The device will also turn toward people who are addressing it or toward people whose attention it’s trying to get. Prototypes have used a 7-inch display similar in size to an iPad mini, with a built-in camera for FaceTime calls.

Apple is reportedly targeting a 2027 launch for some version of this robot, although, as with any unannounced Apple product, it could come out earlier, later, or not at all. Gurman reported in January that a different smart home device—essentially a HomePod with a screen, without the moving robot parts—was being planned for 2025, but has said more recently that Apple has bumped it to 2026. The robot could be a follow-up to or a fancier, more expensive version of that device, and it sounds like both will run the same software.

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Musk threatens to sue Apple so Grok can get top App Store ranking

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After spending last week hyping Grok’s spicy new features, Elon Musk kicked off this week by threatening to sue Apple for supposedly gaming the App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT over Grok.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk wrote on X, without providing any evidence. “xAI will take immediate legal action.”

In another post, Musk tagged Apple, asking, “Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?”

“Are you playing politics?” Musk asked. “What gives? Inquiring minds want to know.”

Apple did not respond to the post and has not responded to Ars’ request to comment.

At the heart of Musk’s complaints is an OpenAI partnership that Apple announced last year, integrating ChatGPT into versions of its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems.

Musk has alleged that this partnership incentivized Apple to boost ChatGPT rankings. OpenAI’s popular chatbot “currently holds the top spot in the App Store’s ‘Top Free Apps’ section for iPhones in the US,” Reuters noted, “while xAI’s Grok ranks fifth and Google’s Gemini chatbot sits at 57th.” Sensor Tower data shows ChatGPT similarly tops Google Play Store rankings.

While Musk seems insistent that ChatGPT is artificially locked in the lead, fact-checkers on X added a community note to his post. They confirmed that at least one other AI tool has somewhat recently unseated ChatGPT in the US rankings. Back in January, DeepSeek topped App Store charts and held the lead for days, ABC News reported.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment on Musk’s allegations, but an OpenAI developer, Steven Heidel, did add a quip in response to one of Musk’s posts, writing, “Don’t forget to also blame Google for OpenAI being #1 on Android, and blame SimilarWeb for putting ChatGPT above X on the most-visited websites list, and blame….”

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Apple brings OpenAI’s GPT-5 to iOS and macOS

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OpenAI’s GPT-5 model went live for most ChatGPT users this week, but lots of people use ChatGPT not through OpenAI’s interface but through other platforms or tools. One of the largest deployments is iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows users to make certain queries via GPT-4o. It turns out those users won’t have to wait long for the latest model: Apple will switch to GPT-5 in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe 26, according to 9to5Mac.

Apple has not officially announced when those OS updates will be released to users’ devices, but these major releases have typically been released in September in recent years.

The new model had already rolled out on some other platforms, like the coding tool GitHub Copilot via public preview, as well as Microsoft’s general-purpose Copilot.

GPT-5 purports to hallucinate 80 percent less and heralds a major rework of how OpenAI positions its models; for example, GPT-5 by default automatically chooses whether to use a reasoning-optimized model based on the nature of the user’s prompt. Free users will have to accept whatever the choice is, while paid ChatGPT accounts allow manually picking which model to use on a prompt-by-prompt basis. It’s unclear how that will work in iOS; will it stick to GPT-5’s non-reasoning mode all the time, or will it utilize GPT-5 “(with thinking)”? And if it supports the latter, will paid ChatGPT users be able to manually pick like they can in the ChatGPT app, or will they be limited to whatever ChatGPT deems appropriate, like free users? We don’t know yet.

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Trump wanted a US-made iPhone. Apple gave him a gold statue.

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Once again, Apple escapes Trump’s iPhone pressure

Since Trump took office, analysts have suggested that Cook might be the tech CEO best prepared to navigate Trump’s trade war.

During Trump’s last term, Cook launched a charm offensive, wooing Trump with investment commitments to avoid caving to Trump’s demands for US-made iPhones while securing tariff exemptions.

Back then, Apple notably seemed to avoid following through on some of its commitments, abandoning plans to build three “big, beautiful” Apple plants that Trump announced in 2017. Ultimately, only one plant was built, which made face masks, not Apple products. Similarly, in 2019, Trump toured a Texas facility that he claimed could be used to build iPhones, but Apple only committed to building MacBook Pros there, not the Apple product that Trump sees as the crown jewel of his domestic supply chain dreams.

This time, Apple has committed to a total investment of $600 billion to move more manufacturing into the US over the next four years. But Apple was probably going to spend that money anyway, as “analysts say the numbers align with Apple’s typical spending patterns and echo commitments made during both the Biden administration and Trump’s previous term,” Reuters reported.

Trump has claimed that any company found to be dodging pledges will be retroactively charged tariffs if they fail to follow through on investments. However, Apple seems to be chugging along with its usual business in the US, while manufacturing iPhones elsewhere probably wouldn’t change the tariff calculus, as it is now.

So at least at this stage of Cook and Trump’s friendship, it appears that Apple has once again secured exemptions without committing to building a US-made iPhone or even committing significant new investments.

On Wednesday, at least one analyst—Nancy Tengler, CEO and CIO of Laffer Tengler Investments, which holds Apple shares—told Reuters that Apple’s moves this week were “a savvy solution to the president’s demand that Apple manufacture all iPhones in the US.”

Trump wanted a US-made iPhone. Apple gave him a gold statue. Read More »