Code in an early macOS 26.7 release candidate suggests Apple has been developing two unreleased game controllers that identify as first-party hardware, according to reporting from MacRumors‘ Juli Clover.

MacRumors reader Pdfu found GameController profiles for devices labeled T6502 and T1057 in the first 26.7 release candidate, which shipped in mid-August. Both appear to include standard gamepad parts: a D-pad, dual analog sticks, shoulder buttons, Home and Menu buttons, and analog triggers. The two designs differ in haptics. T1057 also includes accelerometer and gyroscope support; T6502 does not.

Dedicated hardware plug-ins for each device were present as well, which Clover noted is more consistent with real hardware than leftover placeholder strings. Apple later removed the references in the second 26.7 release candidate.

The find sits alongside a broader set of unreleased-device strings previously spotted in the same build. Apple has long rumored work on a physical game controller and has never shipped one, despite chances around Apple TV, Apple Arcade, and Vision Pro. The company has instead leaned on third-party pads and, in the Vision Pro case, partnered with Sony on PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers.

The strings could describe shipping products or internal test hardware used to validate controller support. If Apple did bring a controller to market, features such as Find My and instant pairing across Apple devices would be the most obvious ways to stand out from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo pads that many players already own.

The relevant diffs are available in the blacktop/ipsw-diffs repository on GitHub, with Pdfu’s notes in the MacRumors forums.

MacDailyNews Take: To accompany the next-gen Apple TV hardware?

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Apple is seemingly dropping a long-standing Apple Watch shortcut in watchOS 27: double-clicking the Digital Crown no longer triggers the App Switcher allowing users to jump between and/or close recently used apps.

According to 9to5Mac’s Zac Hall, the change first showed up in the watchOS 27 beta and has stuck around all summer. For years, a double-click on the crown let users bounce quickly between two apps — or between an app and the watch face — without opening the full app grid. Hall says he used the gesture so often it became muscle memory, especially for jumping between Workout and Music.

That same recent-apps view also gave Watch owners a way to quit apps. On watchOS 26, users can still double-click the Digital Crown to open the App Switcher, swipe left on an app, and tap the X to close or quit it. iPhone users on iOS 26 have a similar option: open the recently used apps view and swipe left on an app to close or quit it. watchOS 27 takes away the double-click path that made that Watch workflow possible.

watchOS 27 instead pushes a new “dynamic app grid.” A single press of the Digital Crown now shows the Siri icon, five suggested apps, and a shortcut to the full grid. Hall writes that the new launcher has grown on him when the right app is already suggested. What it does not replace is a guaranteed, one-motion switch between two apps — or the swipe-left close action tied to the old App Switcher.

In the current beta, a double-click does the same thing as a single click. Hall argues that is a poor trade on a device with so few physical buttons. Only Apple Watch Ultra models have an Action button, and the side button below the crown still opens Wallet. Removing a dedicated double-click action from the crown, he says, leaves a useful control unused.

Hall first flagged the issue when the public beta launched in July and says he sent feedback to Apple in June. He still hopes Apple restores the crown gesture before watchOS 27 ships this month, or at least brings it back in watchOS 27.1.

Whether most Watch users will notice depends on how often they relied on the old shortcut. For those who used it both to jump between apps and to swipe left to quit them, watchOS 27 currently offers no equivalent.

MacDailyNews Take: Unless Apple has new plans for double-clicking the Digital Crown, they should bring back the App Switcher for that action.

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On the heels of the riveting season three finale of “Silo,” Apple TV today announced that the globally acclaimed, hit world-building drama will return for its fourth and final season on July 9, 2027, and unveiled a sneak peek at the final chapter of the “gripping,” “thought-provoking” and “masterful dystopian tale” hailing from Emmy Award-winning creator Graham Yost, and starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson.

Based on Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling trilogy, season three of “Silo” reveals an origin story set centuries earlier, while continuing the saga of a dystopian society of 10,000 people living underground under mysterious circumstances. In the present, Juliette Nichols (Ferguson) survives her forced “cleaning” but returns with memory loss as the silo recovers from rebellion and faces a dangerous new threat. Meanwhile, in the “Before Times,” journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) and Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) uncover a conspiracy that pulls them into a chain of events with catastrophic, irreversible consequences.

SPOILER WARNING: Do not watch if you haven’t seen “Silo” season 3 finale

“Silo” is produced by Apple Studios. The series is executive produced by Yost, Michael Dinner, Nina Jack, Joanna Thapa, Ferguson, Morten Tyldum, Howey, Amber Templemore, Fred Golan, Rémi Aubuchon and AMC Studios.

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 880 wins and 3,826 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $14.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple is preparing a dedicated home-security product line and a companion monitoring service, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, as the company maps a broader expansion of its smart-home business beyond next week’s iPhone event.

In a Sept. 4 report on Apple’s product pipeline under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus, Gurman said the company is working on an in-home security sensor and system slated for 2027. The device is described as a privacy-centric camera and automation accessory that would use artificial intelligence to watch a room’s environment rather than continuously storing traditional video footage. That hardware, he wrote, is expected to tap into a new Apple home-security and monitoring service.

The framing is consistent with earlier Gurman reporting that Apple has been developing battery-powered security hardware — previously discussed as a camera and later as a small sensor, internally associated with the J450 project — that can recognize people, use infrared sensing, and trigger automations such as lights or music when a household member enters or leaves a room. Apple has also been said to be exploring a wider lineup that could eventually include additional cameras and a facial-recognition doorbell aimed at rivals such as Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest.

A service layer would be a notable shift. Apple already offers HomeKit Secure Video through iCloud, but Gurman’s latest account points to a more complete security and monitoring offering — the kind of recurring product that could sit alongside Apple’s other subscription businesses. Industry coverage of the same Bloomberg report has noted that such a service could later be bundled into Apple One, though Apple has not announced pricing, professional monitoring, or how much processing would stay on-device.

The security push is part of a larger home reset. Gurman and other reports have said Apple is first rolling out refreshed living-room hardware, including a new Apple TV 4K, an updated HomePod mini, and a screen-equipped home hub often referred to as a HomePad, before the 2027 security system arrives. The company has long lagged Amazon and Google in connected-home hardware even as it has marketed privacy as a differentiator. An AI-first sensor that avoids constant video recording would be an attempt to turn that brand position into a product category.

Apple has not publicly confirmed the devices or the service. Details on design, battery life, outdoor coverage, emergency dispatch, and whether video would still be captured after an AI alert remain unreported. What Gurman’s reporting does make clear is that Apple now sees home security as both a hardware line and a services opportunity — and that the company is targeting 2027 to bring them to market together.
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MacDailyNews Take: This will be great – as long as it works with our Eufy cameras!

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Apple is, of course, already working on the next MacBook Neo, a follow-up to the budget laptop that became one of its surprise hits this year. According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, the company is testing an updated model with an A19 Pro processor, more memory, and additional color options as part of a broader Mac refresh stretching through 2026 and 2027.

The current MacBook Neo launched in March with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, an aluminum chassis, and Apple’s A18 Pro chip. It ships with 8GB of unified memory and either 256GB or 512GB of storage. Apple introduced it at $599, or $499 with education pricing, in blush, indigo, silver, and citrus. The starting price later rose to $699 during an industrywide memory squeeze.

That 8GB memory ceiling is the machine’s most cited limit. Everyday browsing and documents are fine. Heavy tab stacks, several apps at once, and on-device Apple Intelligence features run tighter. Gurman has reported that the next Neo is being built around the A19 Pro and a larger memory configuration. Prior reporting around that same pipeline has pointed to 12GB as the likely step up, which would give the laptop more headroom for multitasking and local AI workloads.

Color remains part of the plan. Gurman has said Apple intends to keep refreshing the Neo’s finishes. That fits how the product was sold: as a cheaper Mac that still looks like a statement.

The next Neo is not expected to jump to M-series chips, MagSafe, or a touch display. Those upgrades sit on other MacBook lines in the same multi-year overhaul Gurman has outlined, including redesigned Pro models with touch and OLED. The Neo’s job stays the same: a lower-priced aluminum notebook that uses A-series Apple Silicon to undercut Windows laptops and Chromebooks.

A spring 2027 window has been the working assumption in coverage of Gurman’s reporting, alongside other consumer hardware. Pricing is the open question. Component costs already forced Apple to lift the first Neo’s sticker. A faster chip and more RAM could make another increase likely, even if the company keeps the model clearly below the MacBook Air.

MacDailyNews Take: Until Apple confirms the specs, the next MacBook Neo sounds like a targeted refresh: A19 Pro, more memory, new colors, and the same basic idea that made the first one sell: macOS in a machine more people can afford.

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Apple is preparing a practical multi-device feature for iOS 27 that lets users keep a single phone number while moving between two iPhones. The capability, called iPhone Handoff, was first spotted in detail by MacRumors after appearing only as a brief line on a WWDC 2026 feature slide.

The idea is straightforward. One iPhone is set as the main device and keeps the user’s primary eSIM. The second phone is designated a companion and receives a companion eSIM tied to the same number and carrier account. The number then follows whichever iPhone is unlocked and in active use, rather than ringing on both devices at once. A Dynamic Island notification can appear when the number transfers. Cellular settings stay on the main iPhone, while location sharing updates to the device currently using the number.

Setup lives in Settings under Cellular. Both phones need iOS 27, and the feature depends on carrier support. Early reports point to T-Mobile in the United States and Deutsche Telekom in Germany as possible first partners, though availability will vary by network. The approach builds on how an iPhone already shares a number with a cellular Apple Watch, using eSIM provisioning instead of cloning a line or swapping physical SIMs.

MacDailyNews Take: The use case is niche, but useful for people who keep a smaller iPhone and a larger one, a personal device and a work device, or a future foldable alongside a standard iPhone. iOS 27 is expected later this month, so more official details and carrier confirmations should arrive soon.

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Apple is preparing its first major showcase under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus, and the September 9th “Surprise and Shine” event is expected to mark more than another annual iPhone refresh. According to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, the keynote will introduce the latest iPhones and Apple Watches — and kick off what he describes as the company’s biggest run of new devices in years.

For much of the past decade and a half, Apple has spent more energy refining existing lines and expanding services than inventing new categories. Gurman’s reporting frames next week as the start of a different stretch: new form factors and entirely new product areas arriving across 2026, 2027 and beyond, with Ternus taking the stage as the public face of that shift.

The centerpiece is expected to be Apple’s first foldable iPhone, widely rumored to carry an Ultra-style name. Reporting tied to Gurman and other briefings describes a book-style device rather than a clamshell: a cover display around 5.5 inches and an inner screen near 7.8 inches, closer to an iPad mini when opened. The hinge and pocketability have reportedly impressed people who have handled prototypes. Trade-offs are also part of the story — a two-lens rear camera without a dedicated telephoto, and Touch ID on the side button instead of a conventional Face ID system because of how thin the folded body is. Pricing is expected to start above $2,000.

Alongside the foldable, Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. The standard iPhone 18, a cheaper 18e model and a follow-on iPhone Air are widely expected to wait until 2027. Memory and component costs have already pushed rivals higher; Gurman has indicated Apple is likely to raise Pro pricing as well, with the 18 Pro discussed in the neighborhood of $1,199 before taxes and configurations. Camera upgrades, including talk of a variable-aperture main lens, are among the features watchers will look for on the conventional Pros.

New watches are also on the agenda. The Apple Watch Series 12 is expected to be a relatively modest update, while the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is rumored to take a larger design step. AirPods 5 could appear as well, though camera-equipped AirPods and several home products sit further out on the roadmap Gurman has sketched in recent months.

That longer map is the other half of the Sept. 9 story. Gurman has written that Ternus inherits a pipeline far larger than the handful of new categories launched during Tim Cook’s tenure. A touch-screen MacBook is among the follow-on products flagged in the Bloomberg piece’s own framing. Smart-home displays, more ambitious wearables and other experiments have been discussed as 2027–2028 possibilities, even as some larger foldable tablet or Mac concepts have been reported as delayed or canceled.

MacDailyNews Take: The event is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific at Apple Park, livestreamed on Apple’s site, the Apple TV app, and YouTube. Pre-orders for the new iPhones could follow within a day or two if Apple sticks to its usual cadence, though early foldable supply may be tight. Whether “Surprise and Shine” delivers a true surprise or simply the first official look at products the rumor mill has already mapped in detail, Ternus’s debut as CEO will be judged on whether Apple can turn a foldable iPhone and a more active product calendar into the kind of growth it has not seen from hardware in years.

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German chemical conglomerate BASF has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in a U.S. federal court, accusing the iPhone maker of using its technology in Face ID and related facial authentication systems without a license.

The complaint, lodged in the United States, claims Apple’s TrueDepth camera system, Secure Enclave processing, and liveness-detection features in iPhones, iPads, and other devices infringe multiple BASF-owned patents covering methods for secure biometric matching, three-dimensional facial mapping, and anti-spoofing analysis. BASF alleges these technologies have been incorporated into Apple products since the introduction of Face ID in 2017 and continue to be used for device unlocking, Apple Pay, and other authentication functions.

BASF, best known for chemicals, materials, and agricultural products, maintains a sizable intellectual-property portfolio that extends beyond its core industries. The company asserts the patents in question describe techniques for capturing and verifying facial geometry in a way that resists photographs, masks, or other presentation attacks — capabilities central to modern smartphone security.

Apple has not publicly commented on the specific filing. The company has faced a series of Face ID and Touch ID-related patent cases over the years from various rights holders and has generally defended its biometric systems as independently developed and implemented within its own secure hardware architecture.

The suit seeks an injunction against further sales of accused devices, monetary damages for past infringement, and other relief. Patent cases of this type often take years to resolve and frequently involve challenges to patent validity at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in parallel with district-court litigation.

The dispute highlights how companies outside the traditional consumer-electronics sector sometimes assert older or adjacent patents against high-volume products such as smartphones. Whether BASF’s claims will survive early motions or claim-construction proceedings remains to be seen. Apple routinely contests such assertions and has prevailed in several prior biometric-patent matters.

MacDailyNews Take: The case is yet another in the crowded field of Face ID-related litigation that has dogged Apple since the feature launched nearly a decade ago. Courts and the patent office will now determine whether BASF’s patents actually cover the specific combination of sensors, algorithms, and secure processing Apple deploys.

And, yes, we haven’t thought of BASF since:

Also, yes, we’re old.

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Inde Navarrette is lining up her next high-profile film after “Obsession” and Marvel’s “X-Men.” She will star in “The Waffle House Index,” a sci-fi thriller acquired by Apple Original Films. The project also marks her first turn as an executive producer.

Plan B Entertainment is producing. Andrew Nunnelly wrote the screenplay, a 2025 Black List title that sources say sold in a seven-figure deal, according to THR. Louis Paxton, whose Sundance NEXT Innovator Award-winning “The Incomer” arrives in theaters later this month, is attached to direct.

The title borrows a real-world shorthand for hurricane damage. Because Waffle House restaurants typically stay open around the clock, emergency officials use the chain as an informal gauge: green means full service and limited disruption; yellow means a reduced menu and strained supplies; red means the restaurant is closed and conditions are unsafe.

Nunnelly’s story begins closer to the diner floor. A Waffle House waitress is already having a rough night when a stranger with a gun walks in. From there the plot escalates into a mass flood, killer crocodiles, a nuclear explosion, a magical bunker beneath the restaurant, and aliens.

The film adds to Plan B’s relationship with Apple. The company, led by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner, was among the producers of the racing drama “F1.” Plan B recently made the horror film “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” and is preparing Sarah Polley’s “The Bell Jar.”

Navarrette’s breakout in Curry Barker’s “Obsession” has turned her into one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young stars. The film has grossed more than $505 million worldwide, drawn strong reviews, and spilled into pop culture, including a “Halloween Horror Nights” presence at Universal Studios. Oscar talk has followed her performance. She is also set to play Rogue in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men movie. Earlier credits include Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” and The CW’s “Superman & Lois.” A source described the Apple deal as a measure of how large her profile has become at a studio built around stars.

Navarrette is represented by CAA, Untitled Entertainment, and Hansen Jacobson. Nunnelly is represented by Buchwald, Untitled, and Hansen Jacobson. Paxton is represented by CAA and Independent Talent.

MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $14.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple has already put the M5 Ultra in a machine: the new Mac Studio, announced in late August with a first-of-its-kind quad-die UltraFusion design, up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and as much as 512GB of unified memory. That should have closed the book on where the chip would land. It hasn’t.

Earlier this year, software identifiers in an iOS beta pointed to both M5 Max and M5 Ultra silicon in contexts that looked a lot like upcoming MacBook hardware. Apple’s internal naming has long been consistent: “C” for Max, “D” for Ultra. Those codes were enough for some analysts to float a once-unthinkable idea: an M5 Ultra MacBook Pro.

That rumor never became the official plan. Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman has since reported that Apple’s first OLED, touchscreen high-end laptop — widely expected to be branded MacBook Ultra rather than another MacBook Pro — will ship with the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, not the Ultra and not the skipped high-end M6 parts. A follow-up with M7 Pro and M7 Max is already in testing for late 2027.

So why keep talking about an M5 Ultra MacBook Pro?

Because the engineering and product logic hasn’t fully gone away. Apple skipped an M4 Ultra entirely. It built the M5 Ultra anyway, then put it in a compact desktop that can swallow the heat and power. A laptop version would be a different problem: more dies, far higher memory bandwidth (Apple cites 1.2TB/s on the Studio chip), and a thermal envelope that the current 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro chassis was never designed to hold. Battery life would suffer unless Apple cut clocks, limited cores, or redesigned the cooling stack from scratch.

That last option is exactly what the rumored MacBook Ultra is supposed to be — a thinner, redesigned chassis with OLED, a touchscreen, and a Dynamic Island. The first models are slated for late 2026 or early 2027 and are expected to stay on M5 Pro and M5 Max so Apple doesn’t have to wait for M7. Putting a true Ultra in that body would be the most aggressive move Apple has made with portable silicon since the original M1 Max.

There is still a narrow path where an M5 Ultra laptop appears. Apple could treat it as a limited, top-of-line SKU rather than the volume product. It could use a derated Ultra configuration. Or the early beta strings were simply leftover desktop code that happened to sit next to laptop identifiers. The safer read, based on the latest reporting, is that the Ultra stays on the desk for this generation and the new laptop line differentiates itself with display, input, and industrial design instead of raw die count.

Even so, the combination of an announced M5 Ultra, older software leaks that named it alongside MacBook-class chips, and a high-end laptop that Apple is clearly treating as a new flagship is why the rumor won’t die.

MacDailyNews Take: If Apple is testing an M5 Ultra MacBook Pro, it would be the first time the company has tried to put its biggest fused SoC in a notebook. That would be a statement product — and a thermal engineering marvel.

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Apple is facing a massive £2 billion ($2.7 billion) collective lawsuit in the UK, accused of abusing its dominant position in the smartphone market by enforcing unfair privacy rules that hobbled rival app developers while boosting its own advertising empire.

The class-action claim, filed Thursday at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal by ATT Collective Action Limited, alleges that the tech giant’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework introduced in 2021 placed stringent restrictions on third-party developers while giving its own internal services a distinct competitive edge.

Privacy Feature or Self-Serving Gatekeeping?

Apple launched the ATT framework in 2021, marketing it as a privacy-first feature designed to give users control over whether third-party apps could track their browsing and usage activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

However, lawyers and claimants behind the action argue that Apple operated under a double standard. While third-party developers faced a mandatory prompt that dramatically curtailed opt-in rates for targeted advertising, Apple’s own ad platform operated under far less restrictive conditions—gathering user data without imposing the same burdensome consent friction on users.

“Apple’s policy resulted in very significant harm to businesses that depend on Apple as a gatekeeper,” said Ann Pope, a former senior official with Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) who is leading the litigation. “This action is important to protect the rights of British businesses that depend on Apple, to ensure that the rules that Apple applies are fair, and to compensate the losses that British companies have suffered.”

Under the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal’s opt-out regime, the class action covers all affected UK-based developers automatically unless they choose to explicitly opt out.

Growing Regulatory Scrutiny Across Europe

The London claim is part of a broader regulatory backlash against Apple’s privacy policies across Europe. Multiple antitrust watchdogs have investigated whether the iPhone maker used privacy safeguards as a shield for self-preferencing:

• Germany: Germany’s Federal Cartel Office launched an abuse-of-dominance probe into ATT, which resulted in Apple agreeing to modify its ad-tracking data rules for developers.

• France & Italy: Competition regulators in France and Italy previously levied major fines—exceeding £150 million and £98 million respectively—over anti-competitive practices tied to user consent frameworks.

• Broad Industry Pushback: Major platforms dependent on ad targeting, including Meta (formerly Facebook), alongside news publishers and independent mobile developers, have long criticized ATT for disproportionately choking off revenue models reliant on digital ads.
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MacDailyNews Take: Apple has historically defended ATT as a core consumer feature aimed solely at granting users transparent choices over their personal data.

The outcome of the tribunal proceedings could set a major precedent for digital gatekeeper regulation across Europe, adding to a slew of ongoing legal challenges regarding App Store fees and ecosystem dominance.

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Amazon has rolled out a major markdown on Apple’s upgraded Studio Display, offering buyers a rare chance to pick up the high-end monitor at its best price yet.

The deal applies to the Studio Display with Nano-Texture Glass and Tilt-Adjustable Stand, which is currently discounted to $1,684.88 — down $214.12 from its standard $1,899.00 retail price. To secure the full savings, shoppers must clip an on-page coupon on Amazon, with the final discounted price reflected at checkout.

This offer marks the lowest price tracked for this specific configuration, beating the previous record low by more than $100. It also represents the first significant discount on Apple’s 2026 Studio Display lineup in nearly three months.

Apple refreshed its Studio Display family earlier this year in March. The updated line features two Thunderbolt 5 ports, a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera with Desk View support, and a studio-quality six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio. The nano-texture glass option is designed to minimize glare in bright environments while preserving high image contrast and clarity.

While Amazon has listed a few other Labor Day markdowns across the Studio Display lineup, this nano-texture tilt-adjustable variant boasts the largest savings of the bunch.
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MacDailyNews Take: Because Amazon coupons on high-ticket Apple hardware tend to sell out quickly, prospective buyers should act fast before inventory or the clip-and-save offer expires.

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Millions of users worldwide were left staring at blank prompt boxes and error screens on September 3, 2026, as the world’s leading artificial intelligence models — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok — suffered simultaneous global outages.
India Today

The widespread disruption began halting traffic around mid-morning EDT, with outage tracking site Downdetector showing sharp spikes in error reports across all three platforms within minutes of each other. Users attempting to send prompts were met with failed connection warnings, severe latency, or complete internal server error messages. Secondary services and developer APIs that rely on these foundational models, including popular coding agent tools like Cursor, also confirmed downtime as upstream infrastructure collapsed.

While occasional single-platform downtime is common in tech, a near-simultaneous failure across competing models developed by separate companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — is exceptionally rare. Early speculation points toward shared dependencies, such as regional cloud backbone providers, major domain name system (DNS) routing failures, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting core AI infrastructure networks.

Engineering teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI acknowledged the disruptions via their respective status pages, confirming active investigations into platform instability and API timeouts.

The widespread dark-out instantly disrupted workflows across tech, media, and finance, where reliance on AI assistants for coding, research, and content generation has become deeply embedded. Social media platforms like X were quickly flooded with memes and posts from developers, students, and professionals suddenly forced to resume manual operations.

Updates are ongoing as network engineers work to isolate the root cause and restore normal service across affected clusters.
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MacDailyNews Take: Oh, the inhumanity!

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On Wednesday, September 2, Apple TV celebrated its highly anticipated Australian thriller series “Last Seen” with a special screening event in Sydney, Australia, attended by stars Patrick Brammall, Brendan Cowell, Daniel Henshall, and Chloe Jean Lourdes, alongside executive producers Hakan Kousetta, Kris Mrksa, and Joanna Werner.

Entirely set and filmed in Victoria, Australia, “Last Seen” is a gripping six-episode drama starring Gotham Award winner Patrick Brammall. Produced by 60Forty Films, the series is adapted by acclaimed writer and executive producer Kris Mrksa from CWA John Creasey Dagger Award-winning author Ryan David Jahn’s book “The Dispatcher.” Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker Christian Schwochow directs and executive produces the series. “Last Seen” will make its global debut on Apple TV on Wednesday, September 9, with two episodes, followed by a new episode every Wednesday through October 7.

Police detective Ian Ridley’s (Brammall) life fell apart 11 years ago when his young daughter, Maggie, disappeared without a trace. Now working as a police dispatcher, the only thing that has kept him going is his implacable refusal to accept that she might be gone forever. When he receives a distress call from a teenage girl he is certain is Maggie, he will stop at nothing to find her and reunite his broken family, whatever the cost.

In addition to Brammall (“Colin from Accounts,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “Evil”), the series also stars Maxine Peake (“Say Nothing,” “Black Mirror”), Brendan Cowell (“Dune: Prophecy,” “Plum”), Daniel Henshall (“Mickey 17,” “How to Make Gravy”), Zahra Newman (“Thirteen Lives,” “Addition”), Jessica Wren (“Mr. Inbetween,” “Devil’s Playground”), Tobias Muhafidin (“Bali 2002”) and introduces Chloe Jean Lourdes.

The series is executive produced by Jamie Laurenson and Hakan Kousetta at 60Forty Films (“Hijack,” “Slow Horses,” “Down Cemetery Road”), with executive producers Schwochow (“The Crown,” “Bad Banks,” “Munich: The Edge of War”), Mrksa (“Requiem,” “No Escape,” “The Murders at White House Farm”) and Joanna Werner (“The Newsreader,” “Riot,” “Clickbait”).

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 878 wins and 3,819 award nominations and counting, including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $14.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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An alleged circuit and solder-joint diagram for Apple’s upcoming A20 Pro chip offers a detailed look at the internal architecture expected to power the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and Apple’s rumored first foldable iPhone.

The leak comes from Chinese social media network Weibo, where tech user “Fried White Rice” reconstructed the processor’s layout by mapping solder ball positions and overlaying them with die-level images. While analyzing chip layouts via solder points is indirect and far from an exact science, the findings highlight a series of plausible, performance-focused internal upgrades.

Key Architectural Highlights

• 7-Core GPU (Up from 6 Cores): The diagram indicates a shift from the 6-core graphics configuration found on the A19 Pro to a 7-core design on the A20 Pro—a roughly 16% increase in GPU cores.

• Wider Memory Interface (96-bit Bus): The layout suggests a upgrade to a 96-bit memory interface for LPDDR5x RAM, expanding beyond the 64-bit interface used in the previous generation. This 50% widening of the memory bus would significantly boost overall memory bandwidth, helping feed graphics-heavy games and onboard machine learning models.

• Expanded L2 Efficiency Cache: While the CPU retains its standard configuration—two performance cores paired with four efficiency cores—the shared L2 cache for the four efficiency cores reportedly increases from 6MB to 8MB. The two performance cores appear to keep their existing 16MB L2 cache.

• Performance Expectations: Coupled with recent supply chain rumors, the A20 Pro is projected to deliver up to 18% faster overall speeds and 30% better power efficiency compared to its predecessor.

Outlook and Expected Announcement

Beyond processing improvements, the A20 Pro is expected to accommodate a revamped Image Signal Processor (ISP) and Neural Engine.

MacDailyNews Take: With Apple anticipated to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup shortly, these architectural changes point toward a heavy emphasis on graphics performance, local Apple Intelligence processing, and memory-intensive workflows. However, as with all pre-launch board-level leaks, these architectural deductions remain unconfirmed until Apple officially takes the stage.

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Apple Original Films this week unveiled the teaser trailer and key art for “Being Heumann,” a powerful new feature film that chronicles the “mother of the disability rights movement,” Judy Heumann, as she leads a group of young adults who come together to find their collective voice in a fight against discrimination. The film marks the second collaboration for Apple Original Films and writer/director Siân Heder, who directed the multi-Academy Award-winning film “CODA,” which made history as the first film with a predominantly deaf cast to receive the Best Picture honor. “Being Heumann” will debut in select theaters November 6, 2026 and premiere globally on Apple TV Friday, November 13, 2026.

The teaser trailer has been unveiled just ahead of the premiere of “Being Heumann” as the opening film of the Toronto International Film Festival, set to take place on September 10.

They wouldn’t take Judy Heumann’s phone calls, so she took their building. In 1977, a young disabled woman (Ruth Madeley) and a scrappy coalition of outsiders decide they’ve had enough. What begins as one impulsive act becomes the longest occupation of a federal building in American history, as hundreds spontaneously seize government offices and refuse to leave until the bureaucrat in their way (Mark Ruffalo) takes action. Bringing rebellion in all its forms to the hallowed halls, a movement’s accidental leaders struggle to find their path forward where none has ever been paved for them. Directed by Academy Award winner Heder and based on true events, “Being Heumann” is the revolutionary, irreverent and deeply human story of the least likely people trying to pull off the impossible and change the lives of millions.

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 80 wins and 3,826 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple’s board has structured incoming CEO John Ternus’ first full-year compensation so that the bulk of his wealth depends on whether the company’s stock outperforms other members of the S&P 500. Ternus will receive a $3 million base salary and a targeted annual equity award of $55 million beginning in fiscal 2027. Three-quarters of that award consists of performance-based restricted stock units that vest according to Apple’s total shareholder return relative to the rest of the index. The remaining 25 percent vests on a simple time schedule — 12.5 percent every six months over four years.

The design is straightforward: Ternus has a direct financial incentive to deliver returns that beat the broader large-cap market and, by extension, to reward shareholders. Apple also granted him a smaller, prorated restricted-stock award of $2.5 million for the few weeks he served as CEO in fiscal 2026. Cook, now executive chairman, received a reduced $2 million salary and a $45 million target equity award that is less heavily weighted toward relative performance.

The structure continues Apple’s long-standing practice of linking a large share of executive pay to multi-year stock results rather than short-term operational metrics. Because the performance hurdle is measured against S&P 500 peers rather than an absolute stock-price target, Ternus cannot simply ride a rising market; Apple must outperform. That alignment is meant to keep management focused on capital allocation, product execution, and capital-return decisions that actually move the needle versus the index.

Whether that same incentive could eventually support another stock split is an open question. Apple last split its shares 4-for-1 in 2020 when the stock price had climbed high enough that some retail investors found individual shares cumbersome. A split does not change the company’s market value or the economic substance of Ternus’ award, but it can improve liquidity, broaden the shareholder base, and make the stock more accessible to index funds and individual buyers. If the board and Ternus conclude that a more widely held, more liquid stock would help Apple’s relative total-shareholder-return ranking over the multi-year vesting window, a split could become one of several tools they consider. Nothing in the current filing points to an imminent split, and any such decision would still rest with the board. The pay package simply makes clear that Ternus’ personal payoff will be larger if Apple’s stock does better than its S&P 500 neighbors — regardless of how that outperformance is achieved.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s CEO compensation structure is largely the same; the differences are in size and in what has been disclosed so far.

Cook’s last full-year CEO package (fiscal 2025) used the same architecture Apple is now using for Ternus: $3 million salary, equity that is 75% performance-based and 25% time-based, and performance vesting tied to Apple’s total shareholder return versus other S&P 500 companies.

That 75/25 mix and the relative-TSR test are unchanged for Ternus’ $55 million fiscal 2027 equity award.

Cook’s reported 2025 total of about $74.3 million was higher than his $59 million target because the cash bonus paid out at $12 million (twice target) and because the accounting value of the stock awards was $57.5 million rather than the $50 million target.

Ternus’ disclosed package is slightly richer on equity ($55 million vs $50 million) and silent so far on an annual cash bonus.

SEC filings omit details regarding an annual cash bonus program for Ternus. If Apple awards him a standard executive annual cash bonus structure matching Cook’s $6 million target, his full target will land around $64 million (above Cook’s $59 million target). If no cash bonus is awarded, his disclosed baseline target ($58 million) sits slightly below Cook’s total $59 million target.

The package does not represent a new philosophy. Apple kept the same pay architecture, the same relative-performance test, and the same salary. The material changes are modest: a $5 million larger equity target for Ternus, an undisclosed cash-bonus question, and the absence (so far) of the perks and above-target cash that inflated Cook’s reported 2025 total. Alignment with shareholders via beating the S&P 500 is the same idea under which Cook already lived.

MacDailyNews Take: Bottom line: It’s good news for Apple shareholders that the CEO is rewarded for AAPL outperforming the broader market.

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Apple’s first foldable iPhone could contribute about $14 billion in revenue in the December quarter, according to Morgan Stanley, which called next week’s product event the company’s most consequential since the iPhone X.

Analyst Erik Woodring described the device as the biggest iPhone form-factor change since 2017. The bank expects strong early demand, but tight supply, with 7 million to 8 million units built in the second half of 2026 and as many as 20 million over the first product cycle. Shipments are expected to start in October or early November.

Morgan Stanley also framed the launch as a test of Apple’s pricing power. Rising NAND and DRAM costs are expected to push Pro models more than $200 higher year over year. The key upgrade on the iPhone 18 Pro is likely TSMC’s 2-nanometer process, aimed at stronger on-device AI performance. The bank said Apple appears more focused on securing components than finding buyers, though memory supply could still limit near-term production.

The September 9th event will also mark a leadership shift. New CEO John Ternus is expected to introduce the foldable — rumored as iPhone Fold or Ultra — alongside what Morgan Stanley called the broadest like-for-like iPhone price increases in company history. Woodring kept an Overweight rating and a $360 price target, noting Apple stock often outperforms into launch events, but can fade on the day itself. Sustained gains, he said, will depend on later estimate revisions.

Other analysts have put the foldable at roughly $2,300 to $2,500. Independent checks from Ming-Chi Kuo have pointed to similarly constrained early volumes and the possibility of weeks-long wait times.
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MacDailyNews Take: We’ll see how supply holds up when pre-orders beign – likely within a minute or two. If you want one of the first foldable iPhones, you’ll need to pre-order within the first minutes!

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Even before its unveiling, Apple’s first foldable iPhone has already become the design benchmark the rest of the industry is racing to copy. Google, Oppo and Vivo are now preparing to adopt the same dual ultra-thin glass (UTG) structure Apple pioneered, TheElec reports citing industry sources.

The dual-UTG approach places one sheet of ultra-thin glass above the OLED panel as the cover window and a second sheet beneath it for structural support. The upper layer, thinned to tens of micrometers, protects the display from impacts and scratches while still folding repeatedly. The lower layer spreads stress around the hinge and stiffens the panel from below. Together, the two glass layers give manufacturers tighter control over rigidity and folding stress, which helps reduce the crease that has long defined cheaper foldables.

Apple chose this construction as a late entrant precisely because it wanted to minimize crease visibility and raise overall quality rather than simply match existing products. That decision is now being treated as the new premium standard. Samsung Display is already building dual-UTG OLED prototypes to the specifications of Google, Oppo, and Vivo, working with partner Dowoo Insys on both the upper and lower glass layers. Mass production is targeted for the companies’ 2027 launches.

Samsung’s own Galaxy Z Fold8 series takes a different route: a single UTG layer on top plus a titanium alloy film and reinforced titanium plate underneath. That architecture is simpler and cheaper to manufacture at scale. Apple’s rivals, however, have decided the extra glass is worth the cost. Oppo and Vivo in particular have made crease reduction and durability central selling points for their Find N and X Fold lines. Google is expected to follow the same path with its next Pixel Fold.

The three companies all sell book-style foldables — the Pixel Fold series, Find N series, and X Fold series. Their current flagships are the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, Find N6 and X Fold6. New models using dual UTG are slated for early 2027 at Oppo, the first half of the year at Vivo, and the second half at Google.

For the UTG supply chain the shift is unambiguously good news. Even if overall foldable shipments stay flat, each device will now consume two sheets of glass instead of one. Apple’s decision to lead with dual UTG did not just improve its own product; it doubled the material content the rest of the market is now lining up to use.
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MacDailyNews Take: Apple leads. All others follow. As usual.

As with fingerprint and facial recognition, when Apple debuts a foldable iPhone, then foldable smartphones will have been done right. – MacDailyNews, January 17, 2019

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Today, Apple TV revealed a first look and premiere date for the highly anticipated second season of “The Sisters Grimm,” premiering globally on Friday, October 2nd. Based on Michael Buckley’s New York Times bestselling book series, “The Sisters Grimm” is a journey of adventure and heart about sleuth-solving sisters descended from the Brothers Grimm who, while very different, make a pretty great team. Season one earned a 100 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

In season two, one year after their parents’ mysterious disappearance, sisters Sabrina and Daphne Grimm continue uncovering the secrets of Ferryport Landing, where fairy tales and fairy tale creatures are real, as they face new adventures and mysteries.
The series is led by a stellar voice cast, including Ariel Winter (“Modern Family”) as Sabrina, Leah Newman as Daphne, Laraine Newman (“Saturday Night Live”) as Relda, Abubakar Salim (“Raised by Wolves”) as Charming, Billy Harris (“Ted Lasso”) as Puck and Harry Trevaldwyn (“How to Train Your Dragon”) as Mirror.

“The Sisters Grimm” is developed by Emmy Award nominee Amy Higgins (“Star vs. the Forces of Evil”), who serves as showrunner, and Emmy Award nominee Erica Rothschild (“Sofia the First”). Emmy Award-winning studio Titmouse (“Duck & Goose,” “Harriet the Spy,” “Frog and Toad”) produces the animation. The six-episode series is executive produced by Higgins, Buckley (“Robotomy”), Emmy Award winner Elliot Blake (“Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider”), Emmy Award winner Philip Alberstat (“The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie”), Steven Amato (“27 Mins”) and Theresa Park (“Roar,” “Expats”) alongside Titmouse’s Chris Prynoski (“The Legend of Vox Machina”), Shannon Prynoski (“Scavengers Reign”), Ben Kalina (“Big Mouth”) and Antonio Canobbio (“Digman!”). Sage Cotugno serves as supervising director.

The exciting slate of recent offerings for kids and families on Apple TV includes “My Brother the Minotaur,” from Academy Award-nominated animation studio Cartoon Saloon and award-winning children’s media company Dog Ears; “Wonder Pets: In the City,” from Emmy Award winner Jennifer Oxley and produced by Nickelodeon Animation; animated adventure trilogy “WondLa,” based on Tony DiTerlizzi’s New York Times bestselling book series “The Search for WondLa”; “Yo Gabba GabbaLand!,” inspired by the hit, Emmy Award-nominated cultural phenomenon “Yo Gabba Gabba!”; season two of Emmy Award-winning “Shape Island,” based on the internationally bestselling picture books by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen; “Goldie,” inspired by Emily Brundige’s award-winning 2019 short film of the same name; Television Critics Association Award-winning “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical”; “Snoopy Presents: There’s No Place Like Home, Snoopy”; animated series “Camp Snoopy”; and many more.

Award-winning all-ages offerings now streaming globally on Apple TV include the BAFTA Award and Emmy Award-winning live-action animated hybrid special “The Velveteen Rabbit”; BAFTA Award and Humanitas Prize-winning “El Deafo”; BAFTA Award-winning “Lovely Little Farm”; DreamWorks Animation’s music-driven animated comedy “BE@RBRICK”; “Duck & Goose”; “Get Rolling With Otis”; Spin Master Entertainment’s “Sago Mini Friends”; Emmy Award-winning “Frog and Toad,” based on the Caldecott and Newbery Honor-winning books; Annie Award-nominated “Not a Box”; GLAAD Media Award-nominated “Pinecone & Pony”; The Jim Henson Company’s Emmy Award-winning “Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock,” “Harriet the Spy” and “Slumberkins”; Sesame Workshop’s “Helpsters”; Scholastic’s “Puppy Place”; Joseph Gordon-Levitt, HITRECORD and Bento Box Entertainment’s “Wolfboy and the Everything Factory”; and Jack McBrayer and Angela C. Santomero’s Emmy Award-nominated “Hello, Jack! The Kindness Show.”

Live-action offerings include “Me,” an elevated, cinematic coming-of-age story from Barry L. Levy; Bonnie Hunt’s DGA Award and WGA Award-nominated “Amber Brown”; DGA Award-winning “Best Foot Forward”; “Surfside Girls”; WGA Award-winning “Life by Ella”; Sesame Workshop and Sinking Ship’s Emmy Award-winning “Ghostwriter”; and Emmy Award and Environmental Media Association Award-winning “Jane.” The collection also features “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” the Emmy Award-winning television event based on the New York Times bestselling book and TIME Best Book of the Year by Oliver Jeffers.

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 859 wins and 3,816 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Amazon is offering cash discounts on Apple’s just-announced 2026 Mac mini lineup, just weeks before the machines ship on September 22nd.

The retailer has marked down two M6 configurations and one M5 Pro model for pre-order:

• M6 Mac mini with 16GB unified memory and 256GB SSD: $879.99, down from $899 ($19 off)

• M6 Mac mini with 16GB unified memory and 512GB SSD: $1,069.99, down from $1,099 ($29 off)

• M5 Pro Mac mini with 24GB unified memory and 512GB SSD: $1,669.99 ($29 off)

These are the first advertised dollar-off pre-order deals on the new Mac mini at Amazon.

Apple ‘s new M6 Mac mini can deliver up to 40% faster CPU performance, up to 4× faster AI performance, up to 2× faster graphics, and up to 2× faster storage versus the prior-generation M4 model it used for comparison (a 10-core M4 with 32GB memory and 2TB storage). Those figures come from Apple and apply to specific workloads, not every task.

Pre-order pricing can change, and stock or delivery dates may vary by configuration. If you are shopping specifically for an Amazon Mac mini deal, those three SKUs are the ones currently listed below Apple’s starting prices.

MacDailyNews Take: get ’em while they last here!

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This evening at AMC Lincoln Square in New York City, Apple Original Films hosted the world premiere for its highly anticipated buddy action comedy “Mayday.” Led by Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, and hailing from directors, writers and producers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, “Mayday” will make its global debut on Apple TV on Friday, September 4, 2026.

Attendees at the world premiere event included star and executive producer Ryan Reynolds and stars Kenneth Branagh, Maria Bakalova, Marcin Dorocinski, Louis Cancelmi and Wendy Crewson, as well as directors, producers and writers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, producers Ashley Fox and Johnny Pariseau, executive producer John G. Scotti and more. Additional attendees included cinematographer Barry Peterson, editor Jamie Gross, costume designer Debra McGuire, costume designer and composter Colin Stetson and more.

Reynolds and Branagh team up in “Mayday,” a genre-bending, action-packed buddy comedy that flips the spy thriller on its head. When hotshot U.S. Navy pilot Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Reynolds) is sent on a top-secret mission into Russian territory at the height of the Cold War, the operation implodes, leaving him stranded behind enemy lines. Discovered by Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), a gruff ex-KGB agent with a penchant for American culture, Troy thinks he’s toast — but could an unlikely alliance between the two lead to Troy’s rescue and a bond neither saw coming?

An Apple Original Film hailing from Skydance Media, “Mayday” is co-directed, written and produced by Daley and Goldstein. The film is produced by Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger, and Maximum Effort’s Ashley Fox and Johnny Pariseau. Executive producers are Maximum Effort’s Reynolds and George Dewey, alongside John G. Scotti.

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 880 wins and 3,826 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple has disclosed compensation targets for its new leadership team, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, after an SEC filing on John Ternus’s first day as chief executive.

Apple said new CEO John Ternus will have a fiscal 2027 compensation package worth about $58 million, while Tim Cook’s package as executive chairman is targeted at about $47 million. The company disclosed the figures in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026 — Ternus’s first day in the role.

Ternus will receive a $3 million annual base salary and a stock grant with a target value of $55 million for fiscal 2027. About 75% of that equity award will be performance-based restricted stock units that vest based on Apple’s total shareholder return relative to other S&P 500 companies. The remaining 25% will be time-based RSUs that vest semiannually in equal 12.5% installments over four years.

Apple also granted Ternus a one-time, prorated RSU award with a target value of about $2.5 million for his partial-year service as CEO in fiscal 2026, which ends in September.

Cook, 65, is stepping down after a 15-year run as CEO. In his new role as executive chairman, his annual salary will fall to $2 million from $3 million, and the target value of his fiscal 2027 equity award is $45 million. Half of Cook’s equity will be performance-based and half time-based. His total compensation as CEO in 2025 was $74.3 million.

The target figures do not include performance-based cash bonuses, so the amounts actually paid in fiscal 2027 could differ. Ternus, 51, previously led Apple’s hardware engineering organization after 25 years at the company. Under Cook, Apple’s stock rose more than 2,200%.

MacDailyNews Take: Cook is either being wildly overpaid as Executive Chairman or he’s planning to be very involved, neither of which are good news unless Ternus has the authority to overrule Cook’s risk-averse instincts. Apple can afford to overpay executive figureheads for, basically, forever, but it cannot afford to operate as Tim Cook’s Apple any longer.

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Apple has updated Apple Maps so that U.S. users see Lake Ontario labeled as Lake America, matching a change recorded in the U.S. Geographic Names Information System after President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the lake for federal use.

The update appeared on the web version of Apple Maps on Tuesday and is rolling out more broadly. Apple said U.S. users will see “Lake America,” users in Canada will continue to see Lake Ontario, and users elsewhere will see both names. That is the same approach Apple used after the Gulf of Mexico was renamed the Gulf of America on U.S. maps.

Google Maps made a similar change for U.S. users over the weekend. Both companies have pointed to official U.S. geographic naming records as the basis for what American users see.

Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes. About 52 percent of its surface area lies in Canada, with the rest in New York. Trump’s order applies to U.S. federal usage and does not require Canada or international bodies to adopt the new name.

The lake rename follows last year’s Gulf of America change, which Apple and Google also reflected for U.S. users. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the president contacted Apple directly about aligning maps with the new official U.S. name.

Apple confirmed the Maps update tracks the Geographic Names Information System listing. For travelers, boaters, and anyone using Apple Maps in the United States, the lake now appears under the name adopted in U.S. federal records.

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MacDailyNews Take: President Trump’s full Executive Order, “Honoring The American History Of The Great Lakes And Renaming Lake Ontario As Lake America,” can be read here.

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Apple is seeing another high-profile executive from the Tim Cook era scale back his remaining responsibilities, as former chief financial officer Luca Maestri has dropped his role overseeing corporate services.

Maestri, who handed the CFO title to Kevan Parekh at the end of 2024, had stayed on as a vice president running corporate services. That group covered information systems and technology, information security, and corporate real estate. According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, Maestri stepped away from those duties in recent weeks. He remains on Apple’s payroll, but now has no operational responsibilities beyond teaching a class at Apple University. He visits the office about once a week and is winding down toward retirement.

The corporate services portfolio has shifted to current CFO Kevan Parekh. Maestri previously reported to Cook and does not report to new CEO John Ternus, who took over this week. Cook often kept departing senior leaders in reduced roles; it is unclear whether Ternus will follow the same practice.

Maestri’s earlier tenure as CFO also drew scrutiny over Apple’s artificial-intelligence pace. Reports have said that in 2023, after Cook approved a plan to roughly double the company’s GPU budget for AI work, Maestri reduced the increase to less than half of what had been requested and pushed the team to extract more efficiency from existing chips. Critics have argued that the more conservative spending left Apple with fewer modern accelerators than rivals and contributed to the company falling behind in the generative-AI race.

Apple has since ramped up AI investment under its Apple Intelligence initiative and a leadership transition that puts greater emphasis on the technology. Maestri’s latest step back marks one more change as Ternus begins reshaping the company’s senior ranks.

MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully Ternus will drop Cook’s milquetoast habit of keeping longtime executives known for poor, costly decisions on the payroll in low-responsibility jobs. Cut ’em loose and focus in the future, John!

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Apple TV is once again expanding beyond its original programming with a new batch of licensed Hollywood movies that subscribers can stream at no extra cost. Fifteen titles joined the service on September 1, 2026, following a similar surprise drop in August.

The latest additions mix crowd-pleasers and prestige films. Among the comedies and crowd-pleasers are Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, School of Rock, Superbad, Easy A, Mamma Mia! The Movie, and Definitely, Maybe. More dramatic and awards-adjacent titles include The Social Network, Her, The Wolf of Wall Street, Zero Dark Thirty, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Troy, A League of Their Own, War of the Worlds, and The Informant!.

Here is the full list of newly added movies, in alphabetical order:

• A League of Their Own
• Definitely, Maybe
• Easy A
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• Her
• Mamma Mia! The Movie
• Master and Commander
• School of Rock
• Superbad
• The Informant!
• The Social Network
• The Wolf of Wall Street
• Troy
• War of the Worlds
• Zero Dark Thirty

Apple TV has historically leaned on originals such as Ted Lasso, Severance, and Shrinking. Licensed catalog titles were rare. Last month’s collection — films such as E.T., The Bourne Identity, The Sixth Sense, and A Beautiful Mind —s howed a shift. Most of those titles have already rotated off the free-with-subscription tier, though a few holdovers remain. The new September slate is expected to follow the same pattern: available for a limited window, then back to rental or purchase pricing.

Availability is strongest in the United States. Other regions may see a shorter list or none of the titles at all. In the Apple TV app, the films appear under a “Great Movies Available Now on Apple” row on the Home tab. If the app asks you to rent or buy, you are looking at the store catalog rather than the included-with-subscription collection.

Apple TV remains $14.99 a month in the U.S., or discounted as part of an Apple One bundle. New subscribers can still start with a free trial. Because these licensed windows tend to be short, anyone who wants to catch The Social Network, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or The Wolf of Wall Street on the service should start soon. September also brings new Apple original films and series, so the catalog is growing on both the licensed and original sides at once.
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MacDailyNews Take: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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The post Apple TV adds more classic films – here’s the full list appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Norman Reedus is joining the series-regular cast of Apple TV’s upcoming action thriller “Disavowed.”

The project, created by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man, Uncharted), stars James Marsden as legendary CIA case officer Brad Griffin. Griffin is abruptly fired in the middle of a global hunt for an elusive assassin who killed his colleague. Disgraced and cut off from the intelligence world, he decides to pursue the $15 million federal bounty on the assassin’s head. Reedus’ character has not been revealed.

The series comes from Apple Studios. Marcum and Holloway executive produce alongside Tom Spezialy, Michelle MacLaren, Rebecca Hobbs, and Marsden. Blue Marble Pictures (Pachinko) produces, with Theresa Kang and Caroline Garity also serving as executive producers. MacLaren (The Morning Show, Breaking Bad) will direct the first two episodes and executive produce with Hobbs under her overall deal with Apple TV.

Reedus is best known for playing Daryl Dixon across 11 seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead and the spinoff The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which is set to conclude after its upcoming fourth season. He also starred as Murphy MacManus in The Boondock Saints and its sequel, and is in pre-production on a third installment as star and executive producer. Recent credits include Takashi Miike’s untitled Kyoto project; he next appears in Mark Heyman’s Pendulum.

MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple Chief Executive Officer John Ternus touted the company’s strong product pipeline and teased a “phenomenal” iPhone launch next week in his first remarks to employees as their new leader, according to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman.

Ternus, who officially began as CEO on Tuesday, sent a company-wide memo on his first day. The former head of hardware engineering thanked staff for their well-wishes and lauded Apple’s upcoming products and longer-term pipeline.

“Today, on my first day as CEO, I just wanted to send a quick note to thank everyone for the warm wishes,” Ternus wrote. “I also want to extend my deep appreciation to Tim for sharing so much of his knowledge and experience during this transition, and more importantly, for everything he contributed to Apple over the years. We’re so lucky to have had a CEO who led with his values and with such decency and humanity. We are all better for it, and I’m so grateful he’ll be our executive chairman.”

He added: “I’m honored to be stepping into this role at what is truly the greatest company in the world, and I am so excited about everything we have in store. We have a huge launch next week that’s going to be phenomenal. Thanks for everything you’ve all done to make it possible.”

The September 9th event, branded “Surprise and Shine,” will be Ternus’s first major product launch as CEO and is widely anticipated to include new high-end iPhones and Apple’s first foldable iPhone. Apple typically uses its September event to introduce the products that generate most of its revenue.

Ternus said he is equally focused on what comes after the launch. The CEO said that he’s excited about what “lies beyond” the new iPhone release, “including the incredible products already in the works and the ones we haven’t even imagined yet that we’ll dream up and create together.”

“There’s no team in the world I’d rather build the future with,” he wrote. “More to come. In the meantime, thanks for your excellent work!”

The remarks come as Ternus inherits a company preparing a broader hardware push beyond the annual iPhone cycle, including products already in development that Gurman has previously reported span new categories planned over the next several years.
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MacDailyNews Take: Let’s go!

We haven't been this excited for Apple since December 20, 1996! https://t.co/pH4iszAGDm

— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) September 1, 2026

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Perplexity has launched Hybrid Compute for its Computer agent on Apple Silicon Macs, a system that splits a single task between frontier models in the cloud and compact models running locally so confidential files and personal data never have to leave the machine.

The idea is simple and, if it holds up in daily use, important: Computer still starts work in the cloud, where large models handle research, planning, and long-horizon reasoning. When a local classifier spots sensitive information — names, emails, account numbers, privileged files — the user is prompted to keep that slice of the job on the Mac, mask the details, or send it to the cloud anyway. Cloud and local pieces stay in the same workflow. The user does not have to restart the task or shuttle files between tools.

At launch, local options include Gemma 4 E4B, Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and a Perplexity post-trained Qwen variant. Users pick the cloud orchestrator; Perplexity selects helper frontier models. Hybrid Compute is available today to Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers in the Perplexity Mac app on Apple silicon running macOS 15 or later, with 24GB of unified memory as the minimum and 32GB recommended. Setup is a one-click model download rather than a custom local-runtime stack.

The Mac does not have to be the device that starts the job. A prompt from iPhone or iPad can still kick off a session; if the Mac is on and running Perplexity, sensitive steps can execute there against local files and apps. That makes a always-on Mac mini a plausible private compute node for people who work from a phone most of the day.

Perplexity has been building toward this split for months. In June it described hybrid agentic inference as a way to optimize for accuracy, privacy, and token cost at once: keep financial records, health information, and personal files local; send only the work that truly needs a frontier model to the server. Portable Computer, a more local-first variant, already existed for users who want most of the stack on device and only escalate with permission. Hybrid Compute approaches the same problem from the other direction — cloud-first orchestration with an on-device privacy gate.

That gate is the linchpin. An on-device PII classifier, which Perplexity says it has open-sourced and trained with its Secure Intelligence Institute, inspects content before anything is transmitted. Credentials, payment numbers, and government IDs get the strictest treatment. For enterprises, admins can set organization-wide rules for what must stay local, what may be masked, and what requires approval, plus audit when data leaves a device. That is the pitch for law, finance, healthcare, and other regulated shops that want agentic tools without dumping client records into someone else’s cluster.

Competitors are chasing the same mix of on-device privacy and cloud intelligence. Perplexity’s claim is that it can start a job in the cloud, peel off the confidential pieces mid-task, and finish without losing context. For Mac users sitting on 24GB-plus Apple silicon — and for the new M5/M6 machines Apple just put on the table — that is now a shipping product rather than a Computex slide.

MacDailyNews Take: The use cases Perplexity and early reviewers walk through are familiar: an attorney updating a brief with client files that stay on the Mac while case-law research runs in the cloud; an analyst rebuilding a confidential model against public comps; a small-business owner starting pricing research from a phone while private price lists never leave the desktop. In each case the agent is only as useful as the data it can touch. Hybrid Compute is an attempt to let it touch private data without treating the cloud as the default home for that data.

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Apple’s new CEO is expected to walk onto the Steve Jobs Theater floor eight days into the job. That is not the same thing as bringing back the old live keynote.

John Ternus officially became Apple’s CEO today. His first public test arrives almost immediately: the company’s “Surprise and shine” event on Wednesday, September 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific, live-streamed from Apple Park.

Fans have been asking the obvious question. After years of polished, pre-taped presentations, will Ternus restore the live, in-the-room keynote that defined Steve Jobs and, for a long stretch, Tim Cook?

The short answer: he is expected on stage. The long answer is that Apple has not announced a return to a fully live show.

Ternus has already appeared in product videos and on stage as hardware chief. That experience matters now that he is the face of the company.

What Apple has actually confirmed

Apple has confirmed the date, the venue, and the livestream. It has not confirmed the format of the presentation itself. Invitations went out with the tagline “Surprise and shine.” They name no presenter and no product.

Recent Apple events have followed a hybrid script: a small invited crowd at the Steve Jobs Theater, executives appearing in person for greetings, then a pre-recorded keynote on the big screen. Coverage of this year’s event still describes that same mix. Trusted Reviews put it plainly: Apple is expected to combine an in-person gathering with a prerecorded presentation, as it has in recent launches.

Why people think Ternus will still walk out

That hybrid format still leaves room for a live moment, and almost everyone covering the company expects Ternus to take it.

CNBC’s Apple reporters said investors and longtime watchers expect him on stage on September 9. Skipping it, they argued, would raise questions he does not want in his first month. The theater is small. The stream is not. Tens of millions of people watch these events. This is how a new CEO introduces himself.

That tracks with how Apple used WWDC in June. Cook hosted what was widely treated as his last major keynote as CEO. Ternus was on campus, mingling with attendees, and did not appear in the taped presentation. Hardware was not the story that day. It will be on September 9.

Why a full live return is a bigger leap than it sounds

Apple did not abandon live keynotes on a whim. The taped format gives the company control over demos, lighting, product shots, and timing. A foldable iPhone, if it arrives as expected, is a hinge-and-glass product. That is exactly the kind of device companies prefer to show in a controlled video rather than risk a live snag in front of the world.

A live keynote also changes the job. Jobs treated the stage as theater. Cook simply wasn’t good at it. Ternus is an engineer who spent 25 years inside hardware, not a showman by reputation. Appearing in person to open and close the event is a natural first step. Performing an hour of unrehearsed product theater is a different bet.W

What September 9 is actually for

The event is already loaded even without a format change. It is Ternus’s first major launch as CEO. It is expected to include iPhone 18 Pro models and, according to a wide range of reports, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. A rebuilt Siri is also in the mix after the WWDC preview. The standard iPhone 18 is widely expected to slip later, which would make this a premium-heavy fall show rather than the usual full-lineup dump.

The realistic headline for next week

Ternus will almost certainly step onto the floor of the Steve Jobs Theater. He will greet the room. He will be the person associated with whatever Apple unveils. It won;t be, on current evidence, a return to a live keynote.

MacDailyNews Take: From what we’ve already seen of Ternus on-stage, he could handle it:

If Apple flips back to the live format at the last minute, that will be news — and we’d love to see it, even if it risks mistakes, because it would be an important statement.

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John Ternus officially became chief executive of Apple on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, succeeding Tim Cook after a 15-year run of iterating Steve Jobs-era products that turned the company into one of the world’s most valuable businesses.

Ternus, previously senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over a company with a market capitalization around $4.6 trillion. Apple shares, which closed Monday at $316.85, traded higher during Tuesday’s session, showing gains of roughly 2.5% (+$8.00, +2.52% as of 10:59:06 AM EDT) as investors digested the handoff and looked ahead to the fall product cycle.

The transition was announced in April and approved unanimously by the board. Cook becomes executive chairman and will remain involved, particularly on government relations and Apple’s ties with the United States and China. Ternus also joins the board.

Ternus, 51, joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 after studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and a brief stint designing virtual-reality hardware. He rose through hardware engineering, becoming a vice president in 2013 and SVP in 2021. He oversaw work on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro, and played a central role in Apple’s shift to its own silicon.

Cook praised him as having “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor.” Ternus has said he wants to restore some of the product “magic” associated with Steve Jobs while pushing Apple further into artificial intelligence.

Apple is expected to show its first foldable iPhone and other devices at its September event, along with updates to Siri and other AI features that have lagged rivals. Analysts say hardware innovation and a clearer AI strategy will define his early tenure.

Markets had months to price in the change. The stock has risen about 37% since Cook announced he’d step down and sits not far from its summer highs. Whether Tuesday’s bounce holds will depend less on the title change itself than on what Ternus delivers in the coming product cycle and in Apple’s long-awaited AI response.

MacDailyNews Take: Today is a very happy day for Apple, full of promise!

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Apple has entered a new chapter: John Ternus’s first day as CEO, succeeding Tim Cook after 15 years. The hardware veteran takes the helm of a $4.7 trillion company facing two sharp pressures — Apple’s still-unsettled place in AI and a global memory shortage that’s already pushing up device prices. His first major public test comes September 9th at the company’s special media event, expected to feature new iPhones and Apple Watches, as investors watch whether he can evolve Apple beyond his predecessor’s iterative playbook.

Kif Leswing for CNBC:
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Ternus is tasked with convincing shareholders, employees and customers that he can lead the company into the future and that he’s not just doing what the old boss would do.

“What worked for Tim Cook is not going to be the same that works for John Ternus,” [Kathy Gersch, CEO of Kotter, a consulting firm focused on leadership changes and transitions], said in an interview. “The company is in a new environment. It’s going to have to keep evolving and competing.”

Ternus’ hardware expertise and his decades spent hiring engineering talent could be a boon for Apple as it enters a potentially new era of devices, said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management.

“They went with a product person, and I think that’s important,” Munster said. In the next couple years, Munster said, Ternus needs to “light up recruiting and bring in awesome talent, because they still need to reinvent themselves.”

It’s a challenge Ternus has been pondering for years, and one he talked about with CNBC in 2023.

“From the very beginning, we’re thinking about how are all these pieces going to come together to make the best possible product for our customers,” he said.

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MacDailyNews Take: Apple should always be run by a product person.

See also: Time to Think Different: Tim Cook’s leadership has run its course at Apple – MacDailyNews, June 20, 2025

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The post Apple enters its John Ternus era appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Apple’s recent Vision Pro layoffs reached further across the company than initially disclosed, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman.

Last month, Gurman reported that Apple cut about 100 jobs from the Vision Products Group, largely by shutting down the headset’s gaming team and shrinking the unit that produces immersive video. Combined with reductions on Siri and related software teams, the changes affected more than 200 people. Apple said it was realigning teams to focus on new devices and AI, while creating some new roles and offering affected employees a chance to apply elsewhere.

Gurman now says the cuts also hit Vision Pro-related staff in other parts of Apple, including device security, audio engineering, Siri integration, testing, and visionOS. Because visionOS is expected to underpin upcoming smart glasses as well as the headset, the broader reductions affect shared software rather than Vision Pro hardware alone.

According to Gurman, the company has told employees that Vision Pro and visionOS are not going away. A redesigned successor, internally known as N224, is still not expected before late 2028. Near-term emphasis has shifted to AI wearables, including smart glasses code-named N50 that remain on track for next year. Those glasses are not expected to support the same immersive video or advanced gaming experiences as the current headset.

The moves follow the June departure of Paul Meade, who led Vision Pro and smart glasses work before leaving for OpenAI. People inside the Vision organization have spent months urging new CEO John Ternus to keep investing in the platform even as sales lag, Gurman reports. Colleagues who have discussed the headset with Ternus say he was skeptical from the start that a bulky, expensive enclosed device could reach a mass market. He is still said to support the glasses project, but Gurman reports he would consider walking away from head-worn devices as a category if they fail to catch on.

Apple has described the changes as limited and tied to evolving product priorities. Vision Pro launched in 2024 as the company’s spatial-computing flagship but never became a high-volume product, constrained by price and form factor. In-house immersive videos can cost millions to produce and have not proven cost-effective given relatively small active use. Apple now plans fewer internal productions and more third-party content.
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MacDailyNews Take: Vision Pro should never have shipped in its initial or present form and it never would have shipped under Steve Jobs or, it sounds like, under John Ternus.

[This] is exactly what you’d expect to occur when a product is released too early to average users… Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers. – MacDailyNews, March 26, 2024

As we wrote on March 22nd:

There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.

More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).

You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.

Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs

See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023

Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.

See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024

So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.

While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024

When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017

Thankfully, blessedly, today is finally a Brand New Day for Apple!

See also: Time to Think Different: Tim Cook’s leadership has run its course at Apple – MacDailyNews, June 20, 2025

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Apple has updated their Leadership page as John Ternus becomes the company’s eighth CEO.

The full list of Apple CEOs in chronological order is:

• Michael Scott (1977–1981)
• Mike Markkula (1981–1983)
• John Sculley (1983–1993)
• Michael Spindler (1993–1996)
• Gil Amelio (1996–1997)
• Steve Jobs (1997–2011)
• Tim Cook (2011–September 1, 2026)
• John Ternus (September 1, 2026–present)

Apple Leadership page:
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John Ternus is the CEO of Apple and serves on its board of directors.

John joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and became a vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2013. He joined the executive team in 2021 as senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Throughout his tenure at Apple, John has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products and was instrumental in the introduction of multiple new product lines, including iPad and AirPods, as well as many generations of products across iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch.

John has led much of the company’s focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient. He has also driven much of Apple’s innovation in materials and hardware design that have reduced the carbon footprint of its products, including the creation of a new recycled aluminum compound that has been introduced across multiple product lines, the use of 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products.

Prior to Apple, John worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

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MacDailyNews Take: This is an important day for Apple, whose fifteen-year, iterative slumber may have finally ended!

Of note is the emphasis on durability and reliability in John’s bio. Apple products do last a long time and they do hold their value much better than do rival products. Expect Apple to emphasize this as the worldwide memory crunch causes higher prices.

See also: Time to Think Different: Tim Cook’s leadership has run its course at Apple – MacDailyNews, June 20, 2025

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Apple ratcheted up its lawsuit against OpenAI on Monday, telling a federal judge that the ChatGPT maker is destroying evidence while a former iPhone engineer used a confidential Apple circuit schematic in his new job.

In a court brief filed in support of expedited discovery, Apple said OpenAI is actively destroying crucial evidence in the Northern District of California case, which accuses the AI company, hardware chief Tang Yew Tan, former Apple engineer Chang Liu, and io Products of misappropriating hardware trade secrets. Apple also alleged that Liu “not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work” at OpenAI.

The filing comes as Apple presses for early document production, forensic imaging of devices and accounts, and depositions of key witnesses. OpenAI has sought to dismiss the suit and has opposed Apple’s request for a fast-track discovery schedule and a preliminary injunction that would bar defendants from using or disclosing alleged Apple secrets while the case proceeds.

Apple sued in July, claiming a pattern of theft after OpenAI hired hundreds of former Apple employees and acquired Jony Ive’s hardware startup io. The complaint centers on Liu, an eight-year Apple senior systems electrical engineer who left in January 2026, and Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran who led iPhone and Watch product design and is now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. Apple says Liu kept an Apple-issued laptop, exploited residual network access and an authentication bug, and downloaded dozens of confidential files—engineering presentations, specs for unreleased products, and manufacturing details for main logic boards—while already working for OpenAI. Tan, Apple alleges, used internal Apple project names in interviews and encouraged recruits to bring parts, prototypes, and supplier information.

OpenAI has denied the claims, calling the lawsuit careless and “oddly personal,” and saying it has no interest in Apple’s trade secrets. It has published messages it says show Apple employees contacting Liu after he left and asking for technical help, and it argues Apple delayed raising the core allegations for months.

As Bloomberg News’ Chris Welch and other reporters covering the Silicon Valley hardware race have noted, the case sits at the collision of two of tech’s most closely watched product efforts: Apple’s next devices under new CEO John Ternus and OpenAI’s push into consumer hardware after buying io. A hearing on Apple’s expedited-discovery motion is scheduled for Oct. 1 before Judge Edward Davila, though the court could rule sooner. Both companies declined additional comment beyond prior statements.

MacDailyNews Take: If you have nothing to hide, you don’t need a shredder. If your first device depends on Apple’s trade secrets, you definitely don’t want the schematics on your laptops.

Judge Davila gets this in October. Until then, OpenAI can keep insisting it’s all a misunderstanding. Apple is simply asking the court to look before the hard drives get “accidentally” wiped.

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Apple on Monday released the eighth developer betas of macOS 27, iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, and watchOS 27, continuing the final stretch of testing before the software is expected to ship to the public in September.

The new builds arrive one week after the seventh developer betas, which went out on August 24. At this point in the cycle, Apple is typically focused on bug fixes, performance, and stability rather than large new user-facing features. Release candidates are widely expected after Apple’s September hardware event.

Build numbers

• iOS 27 beta 8: 24A5430a (replacing 24A5424a)
• iPadOS 27 beta 8: 24A5430a (replacing 24A5424a)
• macOS 27 beta 8: 26A5425a (replacing 26A5421a)
• watchOS 27 beta 8: 24R5360a (replacing 24R5358a)

Apple also issued matching eighth betas for tvOS 27 and visionOS 27.

macOS 27 continues under the Golden Gate name. It is the first macOS release limited to Apple silicon Macs.

How to install

Registered developers can install the updates over the air:

• iPhone and iPad: Settings → General → Software Update → Beta Updates, then choose the iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 Developer Beta.

• Mac: System Settings → General → Software Update.

• Apple Watch: Use the Watch app on a paired iPhone. The watch should be on the charger, on Wi-Fi, and at least 50 percent charged.

Full restore images are also available from the Apple Developer site. Public beta testers usually receive corresponding public builds shortly after the developer drop.

What these releases are building toward

The “27” operating systems were first shown at WWDC 2026 on June 8, with developer beta 1 following the same day. Public betas began in mid-July. The official fall releases are expected alongside new iPhones and other hardware.

Headline features across the platforms include:

Siri AI. Apple’s rebuilt assistant is the centerpiece. It is designed as a more conversational chatbot with general world knowledge, personal context from apps such as Messages and Mail, and on-screen awareness. iOS 27 also adds a standalone Siri app for conversation history, systemwide Write with Siri, and Visual Intelligence relocated into the Camera app with a Siri mode. On Apple Watch, Siri AI requires a paired iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later).

Apple Intelligence elsewhere. New AI features land in Photos, Safari, Shortcuts, Wallet, and Passwords. On the Mac, Spotlight and Shortcuts pick up deeper Siri AI integration, including natural-language shortcut creation.

Liquid Glass refinements. After last year’s more aggressive glass look, Apple has improved legibility and added a transparency slider so users can dial the effect from glassy to more opaque. macOS 27 also revisits window chrome, including traffic-light controls and more consistent corner radii.

Performance. Apple has emphasized faster app launches, quicker keyboard appearance, snappier AirDrop, better Wi-Fi/cellular handoff, and improvements that are noticeable even on older supported iPhones. watchOS 27 includes battery optimizations, an updated Find My experience with Precision Finding, Workout Buddy improvements that work without a nearby iPhone, and a Dynamic app grid with Siri suggestions.

Some capabilities remain limited by region or regulation. Earlier in the cycle, Siri AI features were reported as blocked for EU developers under Digital Markets Act rules, and certain Apple Intelligence features have been unavailable in China while Apple works through local requirements.

What to expect next

Ninth-week betas this late in the summer are often the last regular developer drops before release candidates. Those RCs frequently appear after Apple’s September event, when the company also tends to reveal any remaining watch faces, health features, or hardware-tied software that was held back from earlier betas.

The finished versions of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27 are still expected for the public this fall.

MacDailyNews Note: As always, beta software can be unstable. A backup is strongly recommended before installing.

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Apple’s Phil Schiller, one of the company’s most visible executives spanning the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from running the App Store and Apple’s product events, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman.

The 66-year-old, who left the senior vice president of marketing role in 2020 and became an Apple Fellow, made the change in recent days, people familiar with the matter told Gurman. Schiller will remain at Apple as a Fellow and work on unspecified initiatives. Company employees view the move as a significant step toward an eventual retirement.

Schiller first joined Apple in 1987, left in 1993, and returned in 1997 when Jobs came back. He was a central figure in launches of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and later oversaw App Store policy through years of regulatory pressure, including Europe’s Digital Markets Act. In 2020, Apple said he would keep leading the App Store and events after handing marketing to Greg Joswiak. As recently as 2024, he was still reported to be working nearly 80 hours a week.

Responsibility for the App Store is moving to the services organization led by Eddy Cue, who previously oversaw the store until 2015. Day-to-day operations, including app distribution, third-party marketplaces, and Apple Arcade, will be handled by Carson Oliver. Ann Thai, who has worked on distribution tools and alternative marketplaces, will report to Oliver. Leadership of product events is going to Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s deputy since 2023, who will report to communications vice president Kristin Huguet Quayle.

The shift comes on Tim Cook’s last day as CEO and as John Ternus prepares to take over, with Cook becoming executive chairman. The App Store remains a major services business, widely estimated to generate more than $30 billion a year. Weinstein’s team is preparing for Apple’s September 9th event, expected to include a foldable iPhone and updated Apple Watch models.

MacDailyNews Take: The only constant is change,

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After 65 years of honoring individual designers, copywriters, directors, and other creative leaders, The One Club for Creativity is breaking its own tradition. Apple has been named the first brand inducted into a newly created Brand Hall of Fame, part of the organization’s long-running Creative Hall of Fame.

The honor, announced Monday, recognizes more than 50 years of work in design, branding, and communications. The One Club said Apple was chosen for a sustained record of creative excellence, bold ideas, and cultural impact — not a single campaign.

“It’s an incredible honor for Apple to join the Creative Hall of Fame, because imagination is woven into everything we do,” outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “It drives how we innovate, how we design, and how we work every day to empower people everywhere to create their own extraordinary things. We’re grateful to be recognized by an institution that has championed creative voices for so many generations.”

The Creative Hall of Fame dates to 1961, when advertising pioneer Leo Burnett became its first inductee. Its roll later expanded to figures such as Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Gordon Parks, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who was inducted posthumously in 2012. Until now, membership had been reserved for people.

That changes at a black-tie gala on September 16th at Capitale in New York. Apple will be presented with the new brand honor at the same dinner that inducts this year’s individual laureates. Tickets start at $1,250, and the evening doubles as a fundraiser for The One Club, a nonprofit that promotes advertising and design worldwide.

The organization said it created the Brand Hall of Fame to recognize companies with a longstanding commitment to creative work. Every two years, it plans to review more than a century of winners from The One Show and the Art Directors Club’s ADC Annual Awards, then put a shortlist to a vote of its national and international boards. Apple is the first name through that process.

The case for Apple rests on a catalog that has become advertising shorthand. The list cited by The One Club and subsequent reports includes Ridley Scott’s 1984 Super Bowl spot for the original Macintosh; the late-1990s “Think Different” campaign; the early-2000s iPod silhouette ads; and the “Get a Mac” series, better known as “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC.” Later work includes “Shot on iPhone,” now in its 11th year; “Privacy. That’s iPhone”; Emmy-winning holiday films such as “Misunderstood” and “Fuzzy Feelings”; accessibility spots including “I Am the Greatest” and “I’m Not Remarkable”; and the HomePod film “Welcome Home.”

The club also looked beyond commercials. Apple’s visual language, it said, runs through product design, packaging, and retail stores, not only television and digital ads. Much of the advertising itself was produced internally and with Chiat/Day and, later, TBWA\Media Arts Lab — one of the industry’s longest-running brand-agency partnerships. Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab have twice won The One Show’s Penta Pencil, in 2017 and again in 2026, an award for outstanding work over a five-year span.

The brand honor arrives alongside a conventional Hall of Fame class. This year’s individual inductees include Rosie Arnold, known for work including Levi’s campaigns in the U.K.; Janet Champ, the Wieden+Kennedy copywriter behind Nike’s “If You Let Me Play”; John C Jay, whose résumé includes Nike and Uniqlo; Caroline R. Jones, the first Black woman to become a vice president at a major U.S. agency; Joyce King Thomas, a key creative force behind Mastercard’s “Priceless”; and Piyush Pandey, often described as a founding figure of modern Indian advertising. Michael Conrad, co-founder of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, will enter the Educators Hall of Fame.

The timing is not accidental. Apple marked its 50th anniversary in 2026, and the company has continued to collect advertising prizes this year, including recent Webby Awards for an Apple Pay campaign and a Lionel Messi spot for Apple TV. The Hall of Fame honor is different in kind: it treats the brand itself, rather than one film or one season of work, as the achievement.

MacDailyNews Take: Whether other companies follow Apple into the Brand Hall of Fame will depend on the next nomination cycle. For now, the institution that spent six decades celebrating the people behind the work has decided that one company’s body of work belongs in the same room.

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Apple’s longtime hardware chief John Ternus becomes chief executive on September 1st, stepping into the role just days before the company’s fall product blitz and with a clear mandate: close the gap in artificial intelligence.

The changing of the guard will be gradual. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook moves to executive chairman and, according to reporting by Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, will continue handling Apple’s relationships with President Donald Trump and the Chinese government while remaining available to support his successor. Board chair Art Levinson becomes lead independent director on the same date.

Ternus will not have a quiet first week. Apple’s annual autumn rollout is expected to include an unusually ambitious slate he shepherded as hardware chief: the company’s first foldable iPhone and a smart display designed to recognize who is speaking and tailor content to them. A September 9th event at Apple’s Cupertino campus is also expected to showcase new Apple Watches and a rebuilt Siri powered by large language models.

Further out, Ternus has overseen work on camera-equipped AirPods that can interpret a user’s surroundings, smart glasses, a home security system, a home display mounted on a robotic arm, and a camera-equipped pendant that can be worn as a necklace or clipped to a shirt. Those products sit at the center of Apple’s attempt to extend its decades-long run into the AI era.

Apple remains a gadget company at heart. Ternus spent 25 years helping design and refine its devices, starting as a Mac engineer before taking on iPads, AirPods, iPhones and eventually the entire hardware engineering organization. What he has less of is experience in finance, sales, legal affairs, government relations, and procurement. People close to the company told Bloomberg News he will lean heavily on COO Sabih Khan, CFO Kevan Parekh, and services chief Eddy Cue, all of whom are expected to take on larger roles.
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MacDailyNews Take: One more day!

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When John Ternus becomes Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, he inherits a company that looks, on paper, unbeatable. Apple is valued at nearly $5 trillion and remains one of the most profitable businesses on Earth. That is also the problem. Starting at the summit is harder than climbing it. As The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler has put it, Ternus must take Apple beyond Tim Cook’s iterative supply-chain mastery if the company is going to reach new heights from already extraordinary ones.

Ternus takes over from Cook, who will stay on as executive chairman. Cook spent 15 years turning Steve Jobs’s product company into a supply-chain, services, and cash-flow machine. He extracted enormous value from the iPhone, expanded the App Store and iCloud, and built Apple into a colossus. What he did not leave behind is an undisputed next act.

The question hanging over Cupertino is whether Ternus can do more than keep the machine running. Can he revive the kind of product-led risk that defined Jobs, without throwing away the operational discipline that made Cook’s era so lucrative?

The hardware lifer

Ternus is not a celebrity CEO. He is a mechanical engineer who joined Apple in 2001, rose through Mac hardware, and eventually ran engineering for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro. He is 50 — the same age Cook was when he succeeded Jobs. Colleagues describe him as even-tempered, detail-obsessed, and fluent in Apple’s internal politics.

That profile is both his advantage and his constraint. He knows how Apple products are actually built. He helped shepherd the shift to Apple silicon, one of the most consequential engineering moves of the last two decades. He also oversaw incremental refinements that made devices thinner, more durable, and easier to repair. Those are real achievements. They are not, by themselves, a new category.

If Jobs was the visionary and Cook the operator, Ternus sits in the middle: a hardware savant asked to become a public strategist. He will have to lean on other executives for finance, sales, legal, government relations, and procurement — areas where Cook excelled.

The AI gap

Apple’s most visible vulnerability is artificial intelligence. Since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, rivals have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into models and data centers. Apple has emphasized on-device intelligence, privacy, and integration with existing gadgets. That is a coherent strategy. It has not yet produced a moment that reset the industry conversation.

Ternus’s bet is that hardware is still the point. Apple’s argument is that people will use AI through devices they already love—phones, earbuds, glasses, home screens — rather than through chat windows alone. Camera-equipped AirPods, smart glasses, a voice-aware home display, a robotic-arm screen, and a wearable pendant are all in various stages of development. Some are expected this fall. Others are further out. All of them depend on making AI feel native, private, and physical.

That is a harder product problem than buying more GPUs. It is also the only problem Apple is uniquely positioned to solve. Whether investors will wait for it is another matter. Apple’s stock has lagged other megacap tech names for much of the generative-AI boom, even as its profits stayed enormous.

A first act already scheduled

Ternus will not get a quiet first month. Apple’s fall event is set for September 9th at the Steve Jobs Theater, under the tagline “Surprise and shine.” The centerpiece is widely expected to be Apple’s first foldable iPhone, alongside new Pro models. The timing was not accidental. Ternus led the hardware work on the foldable, and the CEO transition was aligned with its debut.

A foldable is not a new idea. Samsung has sold them for years. Apple’s version will be judged on crease, durability, software, and whether unfolding a phone feels inevitable rather than novelty. Reports describe a book-style device with a compact outer screen and a roughly tablet-sized inner display, priced well above $2,000. Early supply is expected to be tight.

That product is a test of more than engineering. It is a test of whether Apple can still introduce a form factor that changes how people use a phone — the last time it did that at this scale was the iPhone X in 2017.

What “innovation” actually means now

There is a temptation to frame Ternus as “the next Jobs” or “Cook 2.0.” Neither is useful. Jobs could force the company through a single product vision because Apple was smaller and more desperate. Cook could optimize a global manufacturing system because the iPhone had already won. Ternus faces a third problem: how to invent the next platform while defending a $5 trillion franchise, a China-centric supply chain under political strain, and regulators who treat Apple as infrastructure rather than a gadget maker.

The Jobs engine was never just “think different.” It was an integrated loop of hardware, software, and a willingness to kill good-enough products. Cook’s engine was iteration, predictability, scale, and services attached to devices people already owned. Ternus has to run both at once.

That means new devices that justify themselves, not annual spec bumps. It means an AI strategy that does not look like a late partnership bolted onto Siri. It means keeping Apple’s culture of secrecy and craft without freezing the company in the last successful decade.

Cook built the Apple colossus. Ternus has to decide whether the next decade is about defending it — or risking another product that makes the last one look incomplete. The foldable iPhone will be the first public answer. It will not be the last.
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MacDailyNews Take: Good luck, John. No pressure!

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John Ternus takes over as Apple’s chief executive on September 1st, succeeding Tim Cook, who will become executive chairman after a 15-year run of iteration that turned the company into a multi-trillion-dollar giant. The handover is designed to look orderly. The work underneath it will not be.

Ternus inherits a product calendar that starts almost immediately. Apple is preparing its annual fall event for September 9th, with a slate that includes a first foldable iPhone and other devices he championed as hardware chief. Those launches will define the opening weeks of his tenure. The longer-term test is organizational: whether he can refresh a senior team that has steered Apple’s culture for more than a decade without fracturing the company that team built.

According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, that overhaul is among the first and most consequential challenges Ternus will face. Several long-tenured executives are approaching the end of their runs. Deirdre O’Brien, who oversees retail and people operations after nearly 40 years at Apple, is expected to leave within a few years. Former finance chief Luca Maestri is also seen as likely to depart. Those exits would force Apple to decide whether to keep retail and human resources combined or split them again, and whether to promote internally or recruit from outside for people operations.

At the same time, three executives are positioned to gain influence. Chief operating officer Sabih Khan, finance chief Kevan Parekh, and services head Eddy Cue are expected to take on larger roles. Parekh is viewed as a potential long-term lieutenant in the mold of Maestri’s relationship with Cook. Khan’s remit could expand beyond the supply chain, with product operations leader Priya Balasubramaniam seen as a possible future senior vice president of operations. Hardware leadership has already been restructured: Johny Srouji is chief hardware officer, with Tom Marieb taking day-to-day hardware engineering as Ternus moves into the CEO job.

The logic of the transition is clear. Cook built Apple’s scale through operations, services, and global supply-chain mastery. Ternus is a product engineer who joined in 2001, rose through Macs, iPads, AirPods, and iPhones, and later became the executive sponsor of design. He is less tested in finance, government relations, legal affairs, and sales. That is why the next layer of leaders matters as much as the products arriving this fall.

Cook will remain involved as executive chairman, particularly on policy and international relationships. Arthur Levinson will become lead independent director, and Ternus will join the board. Continuity is the official message. The unofficial one is succession in layers: a new CEO, a shifting reporting map, and a generation of Jobs- and Cook-era executives whose departures will determine the course of Apple’s next decade and beyond.

MacDailyNews Take: Ternus does not get a quiet first month!

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Apple Maps still shows the traditional name for the Great Lake that straddles New York and Ontario, but the company may follow Google and U.S. federal maps after discussions with President Donald Trump, according to reporting around a new Reuters dispatch on Monday.

Trump signed an executive order on August 27th directing U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to change Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in federal usage, including the Geographic Names Information System, within 30 days.

Burgum moved quickly. “We’re on it, Mr. President,” he wrote on X. “The places and waters that border our nation and support our economy should reflect the greatness of the United States.”

We’re on it, Mr. President!

The places and waters that border our nation and support our economy should reflect the greatness of the United States.@USGS maps our country for the world to see, and we are PROUD to implement your Executive Order to rename LAKE AMERICA. https://t.co/b1vSbklB4E

— Secretary Doug Burgum (@SecretaryBurgum) August 27, 2026

He also published a secretarial order to “immediately rename the body of water known as Lake Ontario to Lake America.” The U.S. Geological Survey later said the new name had been designated in official USGS electronic documents.

Make the Great Lakes Great Again! pic.twitter.com/jTPEl59ZkG

— Secretary Doug Burgum (@SecretaryBurgum) August 27, 2026

“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to Lake America,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “The lake change was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually.”

He also said, “The Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re nasty people,” and later joked, “We have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

Google has already updated Maps for U.S. users. “Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said.

Apple Maps had not made the same switch as of August 31st. Apple did not immediately comment in earlier coverage. Last year it did adopt “Gulf of America” after Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico.
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MacDailyNews Take: The name change is unfolding inside a broader U.S.–Canada trade war after talks collapsed and both sides imposed tariffs. Any Apple Maps change would be a company decision, not a legal requirement of the executive order. Apple had not publicly confirmed an update as of the latest available reporting.

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Apple is preparing incremental updates to the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 for its September 9th event, while internally experimenting with a shorter Apple Pencil for its first foldable iPhone — an accessory that is unlikely to ship with the phone.

According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, neither the Series 12 nor the Ultra 4 is expected to receive a major design overhaul versus last year’s Series 11 and Ultra 3. Touch ID is not expected this cycle. What Apple has tested is a return of ceramic cases for the Series 12, in both white and dark gray finishes reminiscent of the high-end Series 3 from 2017. New band colors and configurations are also in the works.

The more meaningful work is inside the watch. After multiple years on essentially the same silicon, the new models are expected to get a faster chip — likely an S11 or similar — along with health and fitness upgrades. One feature in testing would let the heart-rate sensor collect data continuously throughout the day rather than in periodic snapshots. Apple is also reworking its Health and Fitness apps so they surface wellness metrics in a style closer to dedicated trackers such as Whoop and Oura.

A broader Apple Watch redesign is still planned, but not for this generation. This year’s watches are framed as a modest step: more speed, richer all-day health data, and a premium ceramic option, not a new silhouette.

The foldable iPhone, expected to debut at the same September event and often referred to internally as iPhone Ultra, prompted a more unusual experiment. Apple prototyped, tested, and considered selling a dedicated Apple Pencil sized for the device. The stylus was stubbier than iPad Pencils to match the shorter height of the folded phone. Like current Pencils, it was designed to snap magnetically to the side for storage and charging.

That side mount is part of why the accessory is not expected to launch next month. A Pencil parked along the tall edge gets in the way when the phone is opened — including the many times a user has no intention of drawing. The other problem is the display itself. Foldable panels use a softer top layer than conventional glass; a hard stylus tip can leave visible marks similar to a fingernail.

Steve Jobs famously dismissed phone styluses when the original iPhone launched. Apple later built a highly refined Pencil for iPad. For the first folding iPhone, the company got far enough to weigh a companion stylus, then appears to have concluded the engineering and product-fit problems outweigh the benefit — at least for day one.

MacDailyNews Take: The September 9th event is still expected to center on iPhone 18 Pro models and the foldable, with Series 12 and Ultra 4 as the wearable counterparts. Buyers looking for a ceramic Watch or continuous heart-rate logging may find those in the new hardware and software. Buyers hoping the foldable arrives with a pocket-sized Pencil should plan on fingers for now.

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Grok, the AI assistant from xAI, is still one of the most useful AI tools on Apple devices. The standalone iPhone and iPad app is mature, grok.com is the full desktop experience, and since August 2026 there is also an official Grok Bot Mac and iPhone app — a separate product for handing off real work, not a replacement for chat.

There is still no official native Grok chat app for macOS. If a site offers a “Grok for Mac” DMG that isn’t Grok Bot from x.ai/bot or Cursor’s downloads, treat it as unofficial.

On iPhone and iPad (best everyday experience)

The official app is Grok (listed as Grok – AI Assistant, “AI chat & video generation”). Developer: xAI; App Store seller: X Corp. It runs on iPhone and iPad and also supports Apple Vision.

1. Open the App Store and search Grok. Confirm the listing is from xAI / X Corp. (App ID 6670324846).
2. Download the free app. It requires iOS 17 or later or iPadOS 17 or later.
3. Sign in with your xAI / X account, Apple Account, or email.

What the app actually does:

• Real-time answers with web and X search, plus deeper research modes

• Grok Imagine: images and short videos (including ~6-second clips with sound, and photo-to-video)

• Image 2.0 editing: background removal, targeted edits, resizing

• Voice Mode, including Live Camera so Grok can see what you see

• Photo, document, and link analysis

• Optional AI companions (Ani, Rudi, Valentine) if you want character-style chats

• Model switching inside the app as newer Grok 4.x models roll out

Older iPhones that cannot run iOS 17 cannot install this app. Use the X app (older iOS supported) or Safari at grok.com instead.

Useful iPhone extras

• Add a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget if the app offers one in the widget gallery.

• Action Button: Settings → Action Button → Shortcut, then pick a Grok shortcut if the app published one.

• Siri Shortcuts still work if you’ve added Grok actions.

Separate app: Grok Bot on iPhone (and Mac)

Do not confuse this with the main Grok app.

Grok Bot is an agent product: AI teammates that get their own cloud computer, sign into the tools you already use, and keep working after you close the laptop. The iPhone app is iPhone-only, requires iOS 18 or later, and is listed separately in the App Store. It is not an iPad app.

Access started as a tight beta (SuperGrok Heavy / high-end Cursor plans) and has been widening. Eligibility still depends on plan; check x.ai/bot or the App Store listing before you assume you can sign in. Android for Bot is not the main path yet.

On Mac

For chatting, Imagine, voice-on-web, research, and coding help: use the browser.

1. RecommendedOpen Safari (or Chrome) and go to grok.com.
2. Sign in.
3. In Safari: File → Add to Dock to get a standalone window. That is still the cleanest official “app-like” Grok chat on a Mac.

Also useful:

• Grok inside the X.com website

• iPhone Mirroring (recent macOS + a paired iPhone) to run the full iOS Grok app on the Mac screen

• Grok Bot if you want agents, not a chatbot: official macOS app (Apple silicon and Intel builds) from x.ai/bot. Drag Grok Bot.app to Applications and sign in with an eligible account. Homebrew Cask even tracks it as grok-bot.

What is not official:

• Random “Grok Desktop” wrappers on GitHub or third-party download sites

• Mac App Store apps that merely wrap the API and use the Grok name

• “Grok Build” community GUIs — the official coding path is the Grok Build CLI / web / mobile Build features, not a consumer Mac chat app

xAI has said native Grok chat desktop apps are in development. As of August 29, 2026, they have not replaced grok.com.

@samat

Quick start tips (all devices)

• Free tier exists, with rate limits. Paid tiers unlock higher limits, newer models, and Imagine/video headroom. Names you’ll see in the app: SuperGrok Lite, SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy, plus X Premium / Premium+ bundles. List prices have been in the roughly $10 / $30 / $100 / $300 range in the U.S., but they move and are localized — confirm in the app or on xAI’s pricing page before you subscribe.

• Be specific. Grok is better when you give constraints, files, and the outcome you want.

• Switch models in the picker when you need speed versus heavier reasoning.

• Advanced Imagine canvas work is still often better on the web than on the phone.

• Same account follows you across grok.com, the Grok app, and X.

MacDailyNews Take: In a nutshel: On iPhone and iPad, install the official Grok app and you’re done. On a Mac, grok.com in a Dock web app is still the real Grok. Add Grok Bot only if you want agents that work in your tools — it is a different product, with different requirements.

Whether you’re brainstorming ideas on your Mac, analyzing a photo on your iPhone, or just having a fun conversation on your iPad, Grok brings a refreshingly honest and capable AI experience to your Apple devices.

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Apple’s fall event is set for September 9th, and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is widely expected to share the stage with the Series 12, the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, and, of course, Apple first foldable iPhone. With only days to go, the rumor picture is clearer on internals than on looks.

The Ultra line does not refresh every year. When it does, buyers tend to want more than a new number on the box. This cycle, most of the credible reporting points to health hardware and a new processor, not a radical new shape.

A new chip, timed for on-wrist AI

The last meaningful Apple Watch performance jump was the S9 in 2023. Last year’s Ultra 3 and Series 11 reused the S10. This year’s models are expected to debut a new S-class chip, usually described as S11 or S12.

That timing is not accidental. watchOS 27 is expected to bring Siri AI to the wrist. A faster, more efficient system-in-package would help those features feel usable rather than sluggish, and it is also the simplest path to better battery life without a bigger cell. Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman has framed this year’s watches as getting a long-awaited bump in chips and speed.

Sensors are the main hardware story

Digitimes has said more than once that the Ultra 4 will get a “significant upgrade” to sensing, including claims that the number of sensor components could double. Some write-ups describe an eight-sensor rear array instead of the current clustered pack used for heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature, and ECG.

The practical payoff, if true, would be better signal quality and less reliance on software guesswork – useful for altitude work, sleep, and long-term heart-health tracking. Gurman has separately said fitness-tracking upgrades are coming. Exact sensor names have not leaked in a way that can be treated as confirmed.

Blood pressure: more alerts, not a cuff on your wrist

Hypertension notifications already exist on compatible watches. The next step rumored for this fall is a refined high-blood-pressure feature that Digitimes said has been under FDA review. Most reporting treats this as trend detection and better alerts, not a medical-grade, cuff-style reading on demand. Glucose monitoring is not expected this generation.

That is still a meaningful Ultra-class addition: the watch that already lives on an athlete’s wrist becoming a better early-warning device for cardiovascular risk.

Design: thinner in some reports, familiar in others

This is the split in the rumor mill.

Digitimes has talked about a major or “full” redesign and a thinner titanium case—sometimes cited as roughly 10–15% slimmer while keeping the 49mm footprint, sapphire front, and rugged identity. A few outlets have also floated Touch ID in the Action button or side button.

Gurman has pushed the other way: no major design overhaul for this year’s watches. That comment also weakens Touch ID, because a new biometric control would count as a visible hardware change. Treat slimmer cases and fingerprints as possible, not locked in. Titanium should stay. A ceramic option has been mentioned as something that could return this year or next, not as a sure Ultra 4 exclusive.

Battery, software, and price

Battery talk is mostly about efficiency from the new chip rather than a giant cell. Some older speculation floated multi-day endurance in the 48–72 hour range depending on settings; that should be read as aspiration until Apple publishes numbers. Display rumors mostly keep a bright always-on OLED around the current 3,000-nit class rather than a sudden jump to microLED.

Software will matter as much as the case. watchOS 27 is expected to carry Siri AI and a Health app that surfaces longer-term trends more clearly. Rumors of a single place for health, fitness, and medical data are consistent with Apple’s direction even if the exact UI is still unknown.

Pricing is the other open question. The Ultra has sat at $799. Several reports say this could be the first Ultra that starts higher: $849 to $899 is the range that keeps circulating. That would match a richer sensor pack and new silicon, but it is still speculation.

What looks solid versus what is noise

• Most consistent: September 9th announcement, new chip, sensor/health upgrades, watchOS 27 with on-device AI, continued titanium Ultra identity.

• Contested: thinner case, Touch ID, a true full redesign, a price hike.

• Unlikely this year: cuff-accurate blood pressure, glucose sensing, a complete visual break from Ultra 3.

MacDailyNews Take: If you already own an Ultra 3, the upgrade case is “better sensors and a chip built for Siri AI,” not a new silhouette. If you have been waiting for the first Ultra that feels like a generation leap inside the same rugged brief, that’s the bet the rumor mill is making, until Apple actually reveals its flagship Apple Watch on September 9th.

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Apple unveiled a new Mac mini this week with M6 and M5 Pro options, but the announcement left a few important specs offstage. According to 9to5Mac’s Ryan Christoffel, three details buried in the fine print could matter more to buyers than the headline upgrades.

First, memory bandwidth is not the same across every M6 configuration. The base model with 16GB of unified memory is listed at 153GB/s. Step up to 24GB or 32GB and that figure rises to 170GB/s. The top bandwidth of 307GB/s still requires the M5 Pro chip. Every option is faster than the previous M4 Mac mini, Christoffel notes, but the RAM choice now affects more than just capacity.

Second, the new Mac mini includes Apple’s N1 wireless chip. Apple promoted Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 during the event — clear upgrades from the M4 model’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. What it did not spotlight is Thread support, which arrives with the N1. Thread has been on iPhone since the iPhone 15 Pro and is used for smart-home accessories and automation. It is new to the Mac mini.

Third, the machine ships with macOS 27 Golden Gate already installed. That is not spelled out on Apple’s product pages, but the company confirmed it to John Gruber. The Mac mini does not ship until September 22, after macOS 27 is expected around September 14, so the preload is not a surprise. Anyone who prefers to delay major OS upgrades should plan accordingly.

Pre-orders start at $899.
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MacDailyNews Take: These details do not change the overall story of a faster, better-connected mini desktop, but they do change how configurations should be compared before checkout.

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Apple is raising the price of Apple TV in the United States, lifting the standalone monthly plan from $12.99 to $14.99 and the annual plan from $99 to $119. The Individual Apple One bundle is going up as well, from $19.95 to $21.95 a month. Family and Premier Apple One plans are unchanged this time.

The new rates take effect immediately for new subscribers as of Friday, August 28, 2026. Existing customers will get about a month’s notice before they are charged the higher amount. MacRumors reports that Apple TV prices also rose today in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, with no other countries listed as affected.

This is the fourth U.S. price increase for the service since it launched in 2019 at $4.99 a month as Apple TV+. Subsequent jumps took it to $6.99 in 2022, $9.99 in 2023, and $12.99 in August 2025. The monthly price has now tripled from launch.

The move comes weeks after Apple raised Apple Music and the Family and Premier Apple One tiers in July. That earlier round left the Individual Apple One plan untouched; today’s Apple TV increase is what finally pushed that cheapest bundle higher.

Apple has spent the past year expanding what a standard Apple TV subscription includes. Formula 1 races in the U.S. are now part of the regular plan after an exclusive broadcast deal announced last October. Major League Soccer, previously sold as a separate Season Pass, was folded into the main subscription earlier this year. Live sports sit alongside a growing slate of originals, including the record-setting return of Ted Lasso Season 4, the Season 2 premiere of Dark Matter, and Slow Horses Season 6 arriving in mid-September.

Even after the hike, Apple TV remains cheaper than many ad-free rivals. Netflix’s standard ad-free plan is $19.99 a month (premium is higher), Disney+ with Hulu is around $19.99, and HBO Max’s ad-free tiers sit in the high teens to low twenties. Paramount+ is still a dollar cheaper on its comparable plan. Apple’s catalog is smaller than Netflix or Disney’s, but the company has leaned on a higher hit rate for prestige series rather than a vast library.

The timing fits a broader 2026 pattern. Netflix, YouTube Premium, Prime Video, and Peacock have all raised prices this year. Streaming services have treated annual or near-annual increases as routine while they add sports rights, returning hits, and higher production costs. Apple has not broken out Apple TV subscriber counts, but executives said in July that viewership hit an all-time high last quarter.

• New sign-ups pay $14.99 a month or $119 a year starting today.

• Current Apple TV and Apple One Individual customers should watch for an email roughly a month before renewal.

• Apple One Family and Premier customers are not affected by this specific change.

• Annual billing still works out to about $9.92 a month, versus $14.99 billed monthly.

MacDailyNews Take: Whether $14.99 is a fair price depends on how much of the lineup a household actually watches. For viewers who mainly want F1, MLS, Severance, Silo, Slow Horses, and a strong lineup of other originals, the service is still priced below lower-quality rivals. For anyone stacking multiple streamers, another $24 a year is one more increment in a year already full of them.

As always, as Apple One Premier subscribers, we recommend Apple One plans as the most cost-effective way to get Apple services like Apple TV and to make the most of your Apple devices.

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Apple is rolling out Emergency SOS Live Video to iPhone users in Brazil, the first time the feature has launched outside the United States. The company said the service lets people share encrypted, real-time video with emergency responders during a crisis.

The Brazil expansion puts the tool into a large market with high smartphone use and significant public-safety demand. Apple framed the feature as part of a broader set of iPhone safety tools that sit alongside hardware, software, and services.

Emergency SOS Live Video is designed for high-stakes moments when a voice call alone may not be enough. Users can stream live video so dispatchers and first responders can see the scene, while the connection remains encrypted. The rollout is tied to Brazil’s emergency network: about 190 emergency centers using RapidSOS UNITE are the near-term benchmark for how widely the feature can be used.

From an investor perspective, the story is less about a single product add-on and more about ecosystem lock-in. Safety features that work only on iPhone can make the device harder to leave. They also support Apple’s longer-running pitch that services, connectivity, and on-device intelligence — not just new hardware cycles — are what keep customers in the platform.

What matters next is adoption, not the announcement. Watch how many Brazilian emergency agencies actually activate and use the live-video workflow over the coming quarters. If usage becomes routine, the feature looks like a durable part of the iPhone experience in another major country. If it stays limited to a handful of centers, it remains a headline more than a habit.

MacDailyNews Take: This is yet another example of something an iPhone can do that a non-Apple phone cannot, and one more test of whether tools like Emergency SOS Live Video travel well outside of the U.S.

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Apple TV on Friday announced it has landed season one of “Small Prophets,” the acclaimed six-episode comedy from BAFTA Award-winning creator, writer, and director Mackenzie Crook (“Detectorists”) which premiered on BBC iPlayer and BBC Two in the U.K. earlier this year. The series will premiere on Apple TV on October 7, 2026, excluding the U.K., where it will be available to Apple TV subscribers in 2027.

The series features a host of beloved comedy stars including Mackenzie Crook, Pearce Quigley (“Detectorists”), Lauren Patel (“Waterloo Road”), BAFTA Award winner Sir Michael Palin (“Monty Python”), BAFTA Award winner Sophie Willan (“Alma’s Not Normal”), BAFTA Award nominee Jon Pointing (“Big Boys”) and SAG Award nominee Paul Kaye (“Game of Thrones”).

Hailed as a “jewel-like, unhurried masterpiece that is funny, profound and manages to break and mend your heart in equal measures,” the “truly fantastic” first season of the series, which is “full of gorgeous surprises,” holds a rare, perfect 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and won the Best Series Award, International Panorama at Series Mania in March 2026. Celebrated as “completely lovely” and “compulsory viewing,” “Small Prophets” is “richly steeped in Mackenzie Crook’s glorious brand of gentleness, his ability to imbue the ordinary with extraordinariness,” and is an “impossible marvel of TV making.”

“Small Prophets” is a comic tale of the eccentric Michael Sleep (Quigley) who, since his darling Clea disappeared seven years ago, has lived a very ordinary life. He works in a DIY store, visits his dad Brian (Palin) and hopes for Clea to return. One day Brian shares an old recipe involving rainwater, horse manure and more than a little alchemy. With recipe in hand, Michael sets out (albeit with some skepticism) to create homunculi — magical spirits that can predict the future — in the hope they have the answer to his burning question: “Will I ever see Clea again?”

Michael gets help from his young coworker Kacey (Patel), an unlikely friendship that blossoms partly, but not wholly, through their mutual dislike of store manager Gordon (Mackenzie Crook). Their friendship adds to the frustration and intrigue of his nosy neighbors (Willan, Pointing) who are obsessed with trying to find out what the hell is going on in the garden shed.

“Small Prophets” was filmed and set in and around Manchester. The series incorporates visually stunning animation elements throughout a story of friendship and hope, the magical and the mundane, and where secrets and lies lurk in a suburban cul-de-sac.
The series is produced by Treasure Trove Productions and Blue House Productions, and is created, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook. Executive producers are Mackenzie Crook and Lisa Thomas for Treasure Trove Productions, and Christine Gernon and Emma Strain for Blue House Productions. Apple TV acquired “Small Prophets” from international distributor Sphere Abacus.

Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 878 wins and 3,819 award nominations and counting, including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.

MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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Apple TV’s multiverse thriller “Dark Matter” is back. Season two premieres today, Friday, August 28, more than two years after the first season wrapped — and this time the story leaves Blake Crouch’s 2016 novel behind.

The 10-episode run starts with a single episode, “A Quiet Life.” New installments arrive every Friday through October 30. Apple typically makes Friday premieres available the night before in some regions; 9to5Mac reported the opener was already live for subscribers Thursday evening Pacific time.

What season two is about

Season one adapted Crouch’s book almost to the end: Chicago physicist Jason Dessen is abducted into another version of his life, then fights his way back through the Box — a corridor that opens onto every life he might have lived.

Season two is original. Apple’s official logline:

Season two picks up with the Dessens as they settle into a quiet life in a world that finally seems safe, until the unimaginable forces them to run once again. As Jason’s obsession with the Box deepens, Daniela’s growing paranoia pushes her to the brink, and their son Charlie starves for a sense of stability as their family is threatened. Elsewhere, Amanda and Ryan join forces in a desperate attempt to find their way home. With Blair determined to stop him, Leighton relentlessly chases his grand vision of creating a perfect world.

Crouch is still showrunner. He co-wrote every episode with Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry. That matters for book readers: there is no published sequel. The new season is the author’s own continuation, not a studio rewrite of leftover pages.

Who’s back — and who’s new

Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly return as Jason and Daniela Dessen and again serve as executive producers. Also back: Alice Braga (Amanda), Jimmi Simpson (Ryan), Dayo Okeniyi (Leighton), Oakes Fegley (Charlie), and Amanda Brugel (Blair). Chris Diamantopoulos joins in a recurring role as Agent Mitchel MacMara. Sony Pictures Television produces the series for Apple TV.

Apple unveiled the season two trailer in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con in July. The streamer is also launching Dark Matter: The Official Podcast, hosted by Crouch and Ben-Zekry, with a season-one recap dropping ahead of the premiere.

Weekly schedule

1. A Quiet Life – Aug. 28
2. A Perfect World – Sept. 4
3. Everything Beautiful, Everything Terrible – Sept. 11
4. Stars, Hide Your Fires – Sept. 18
5. Love and Be Loved – Sept. 25
6. What the Universe Is Made Of – Oct. 2
7. The Pyramid – Oct. 9
8. The Basic Oneness of Everything – Oct. 16
9. How to Build the Box – Oct. 23
10. No Quiet Life – Oct. 30

MacDailyNews Note: Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K or Mac can enjoy three months of Apple TV for free.

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