Apple

Satechi’s new, perfectly-sized stand / hub for the M4 Mac Mini will be available this spring. You’ll be able to outfit it with NVMe storage without paying Apple’s ludicrous upgrade prices. And yes, it features several USB-A ports along with an SD card slot.

Pricing will be available closer to when it ships next year.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI) are prepping a new bill granting Meta’s wish of putting the onus for age verification on app store operators, The Washington Post reports. Parents could reportedly sue those companies if their kids are exposed to things like sexual material, but businesses could shield themselves by implementing age verification.

The “Default Apps” section that Apple added to the iOS 18.2 beta in October now lets you pick a contactless payment default besides Apple’s Wallet app.

The new option, which Apple promised in August, is there in the just-released iOS 18.2 public beta 3. But 9to5Mac notes the change was present in the second beta, as well.

According to Shazam, that’s equal to 12 songs named for each person on Earth.

There will never be another show quite like HBO’s The Wire. But Apple TV Plus sounds like it’s going to try to recapture that magic with Dope Thief, Peter Craig’s new series based on Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel about “long-time Philly friends and delinquents who pose as DEA agents to rob an unknown house in the countryside, only to have their small-time grift become a life-and-death enterprise.”

The first two (of eight) episodes premiere on March 14th.

The folks at 404 Media are reporting on leaked documents revealing the capabilities of Graykey, a tool that law enforcement uses to hack into seized phones. From the looks of it, Graykey can only retrieve some data from the iPhone 12 and newer, whereas it’s possible to recover “full” info from an iPhone 11. The cat and mouse game continues.

You can now grab iOS 18.1.1, iPadOS 18.1.1, macOS 15.1.1, and visionOS 2.1.1, though all of the updates appear to be focused just on those security fixes. Apple shared more detail about some of the issues, which may have been actively exploited, in support documents.

Update: Added support documents.

After previously relying on a third party to handle ad sales on its News app, Apple will now sell ads and sponsorships itself, according to a report from Axios. Apple already sells ads directly to advertisers on the App Store.

Apple has revealed the first look at its upcoming comedy The Studio, which stars Seth Rogen as a budding film studio head. While the show looks full of delightful disasters, perhaps more impressive is the cast which includes the likes of Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, and Bryan Cranston. It starts streaming on March 26th.

The NYT’s The Daily topped the list of the most popular shows, followed by Crime Junkie and The Joe Rogan Experience. These three shows also made Apple’s top episodes list, with Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump coming in at number two.

iCloud device backups will require iOS 9 as of December 18th, meaning that if you have one stored in iCloud from iOS 8 or earlier, you’ll need to save it locally if you don’t want to lose it.

Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw has the details:

Apple is focused on licensing its movies to other companies, such as foreign TV networks and stores, where viewers can rent or buy them, according to a person familiar with the plans. The company isn’t planning to license its original TV shows to third parties. (At least not yet.)

In addition to iPad-like smart home displays and tabletop robots, Apple’s smart home future could include a television set, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in Power On today.

The company is only “evaluating” the idea, but I’m so curious what it would call an actual TV in a world with Apple TV (the app), Apple TV (the set-top box) and Apple TV Plus (the service).

Apple’s wireless tracker’s rumored follow-up next year will have improved range, a better wireless chip, and a harder-to-remove speaker, according to Mark Gurman’s latest Power On newsletter for Bloomberg.

Would-be stalkers often remove AirTag speakers to prevent victims from finding the device by playing sound on it when they’re alerted that it’s traveling with them, Gurman writes — hence that last change.

I’m glad Apple Intelligence summaries exist. Because this is a beautiful mess.

And life-changing, just like Tim Cook said.

As spotted by TechCrunch, researcher Jiska Classen posted a video showing that iOS 18 will reboot your iPhone after three days of inactivity. The security feature, which 404 Media originally reported on, is apparently making it more difficult for police to break into suspects’ phones.

The AI chatbot can now “see” what’s on your screen in VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, and iTerm2, allowing ChatGPT to provide suggestions or answer questions about your code without having to copy and paste it into the app.

Though ChatGPT still can’t write code directly within coding platforms, it seems OpenAI is working on that.