BZG has released Unite Pro 1.8.1 with fixes for failed app launches and improvements to its password handling. The site-specific browser that can create native Mac apps from any website addresses crashes that affected Unite apps on macOS 15 Sequoia (as well as local-file apps containing password fields), lets you add saved passwords without manually entering https://, no longer contacts every website represented in your saved passwords to refresh Unite app icons at launch, works better with the 1Password Autofill (Beta), ensures that erased elements stay hidden on sites with stricter security, fixes a Google Chat attachment issue that could repeatedly reopen the Save dialog, and correctly recognizes previously saved camera and microphone permissions. ($39.99 new with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, available on Setapp, 35 MB, release notes, macOS 15+)

Rogue Amoeba has released SoundSource 6.1.6, updating its ARK audio handling plug-in to version 13.5.6 to further reduce latency. The ARK installer has also been hardened to close a potential privilege escalation bug. The audio control utility now prevents Audio Unit effects from causing crackling when macOS’s Game Mode is active, correctly disables processing on bands labeled OFF for imported Headphone EQ profiles, ensures that audio capture of the Steam Helper app works as expected, and improves the Audio Unit hosting service so that it no longer blocks screenshots of plug-in windows. ($49 new with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 57.3 MB, release notes, macOS 15+)

Quicken has updated Quicken Classic for Mac to version 9.3, adding a variety of enhancements to the financial management app. The Sidebar now shows each account’s Display Color by default, the Portfolio Value & Cost Basis report performs better with large investment files, and you can now add the Symbol column to the Investment Performance report. The update adds a Budget vs. Actual report that compares budgeted and actual income and expenses by category; enables you to edit individual budget amounts from the 12-Month view, allows you to group the Portfolio Value report by account, asset class, or security type; ensures weekly cryptocurrency and commodity quotes no longer overwrite daily price history; and keeps newly downloaded transaction counts visible in Connection Status after you complete a multifactor authentication prompt. ($83.88/$107.88/$149.88 annual subscriptions, free update for subscribers, 3.2 MB installer download, release notes, macOS 13+)

Evernote has issued version 11.40.3 of its information management app with improvements to recordings and transcripts. A new audio player includes a waveform for scrubbing, speaker avatars and pins, and a playback speed selector. Live transcripts are now saved in the note, and when you replay a recording, the transcript appears alongside the audio in a resizable panel so you can read and listen at the same time. The release also shows tasks in notes with their priority and a description icon, displays AI title suggestions when you open a note in its own window, ensures shared notebooks show their notebook name in the note list instead of only “Shared with me,” and improves Best Matches in search results to honor advanced operators like tag and intitle. (Free/$99/$249 new from Evernote or the Mac App Store, free update, 348.2 MB, release notes, macOS 11+)

Busy Apps has released BusyCal 2026.4.4 and BusyContacts 2026.4.2, bringing a new way to set event lengths to BusyCal. The calendar app adds an Event Duration field to the Info Panel that enables you to set the length of timed and all-day events with presets or custom durations. The update also improves handling of canceled meetings when using the Bookings feature, enhances calendar selection for Siri and Shortcuts, improves meeting availability checks for all-day events and when rescheduling meetings, fixes a bug with Find and Replace that retained previously used replacement text when starting a new search, resolves an issue with Google sync repeatedly failing for some events after canceled or rejected event updates from the server, and addresses invited Teams meetings opening in a browser instead of the installed Teams app.

BusyContacts adds support for shared address books in Microsoft 365 work or school accounts using Microsoft Graph, introduces a chooser for contact links that match more than one card, adds a Rename Tag option to the tag menu, addresses custom field labels reverting after edits or when switching contacts, fixes international phone formatting (including extensions and significant leading zeros), and resolves an issue with Microsoft Graph sync overlooking contact edits and address book renames made during a sync. ($49.99 new for BusyCal from Busy Apps or the Mac App Store, free update, in Setapp, 111.2 MB, release notes, macOS 13.5+; $49.99 new for BusyContacts from Busy Apps or the Mac App Store, free update, in Setapp, 62.7 MB, release notes, macOS 13.5+)

Nearly three years ago, Microsoft announced it would retire Microsoft Publisher in October 2026. Developer Adam Anderly, whose family’s printing business relied on the software for years, quickly built a converter to turn decades of Publisher documents into PDFs so their archive would remain accessible. He made PubKeep Converter available as a Web-based tool; convert up to three files for free or pay to convert larger batches.

Instead of stopping there, Anderly decided to develop a complete replacement application for Publisher, so his family members and others could keep publishing, not just look back at their past documents. The resulting software, PubKeep, is available as a desktop application for both macOS and Windows. Anderly says it “opens your existing .pub files from Publisher 2000 through Microsoft 365 and keeps them editable, with the ribbon, menus and tools where Publisher had them.”

For us Mac users, it’s the first time we’ve been able to open and work with Publisher documents in a native app that keeps their layouts intact. LibreOffice and Affinity can import .pub files, but they tend to reflow text and shift fonts. Here, for example, is the dinner menu from a friend’s restaurant back in 2008, when I was working on the restaurant’s website. PubKeep opened it without complaint.

As with opening any document someone sends you, you might not have the fonts used to design the original. PubKeep lists any missing fonts so you can track them down and install them. You can also swap in new fonts you already have, or you can accept PubKeep’s substitutions.

Serious designers already have and use Adobe InDesign, Affinity (see “Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App,” 31 October 2025), or even—yes, it still exists!—QuarkXPress, and most other people are likely satisfied with Pages, Microsoft Word, or apps like Swift Publisher or iStudio Publisher. But if you or someone you know has a career’s worth of Microsoft Publisher documents, PubKeep makes them accessible on both macOS and Windows.

PubKeep is available for download as a native Mac application or from the Microsoft Store for Windows. It has a 7-day free trial and costs $149 for a single-user license.

Mozilla has released Firefox 159 with a few updates for macOS users. The Web browser now uses the native macOS share picker (which shows recent contacts alongside AirDrop, Messages, and other apps), enables you to search open tabs using Command-Shift-A, resolves an issue where quick gamepad button presses were being missed in Web games, and stops the Replace button in Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools from inserting the clipboard contents instead of the rewritten text on some sites. The update also makes saved passwords available from the sidebar by default and addresses a rapid growth in memory usage when sites such as the Zoom Web app were left open in a minimized window. Firefox’s Smart Window beta can now watch Web pages for changes such as price drops or restocks (type /watch in the chat to set one up), though that beta feature is rolling out gradually to English-language users in the US and Canada. (Free, 164.8 MB, release notes, macOS 10.15+)

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2899 with an M5 Pro and $4499 with an M5 Max, while the 16-inch model starts at $3399 with an M5 Pro and $4799 with an M5 Max. (The standard 14-inch and 16-inch M5 Pro models start at $2499 and $2999.) Both sizes come in space black and silver. Pre-orders are open now, with deliveries starting 6 November 2026.

The Key Specs

Here are the major differences from the current models:

• Display: Instead of the Mini-LED-based Liquid Retina XDR display, the new models feature a PROLED XDR display built on tandem OLED technology, which increases peak HDR brightness from 1600 to 2000 nits, boosts the contrast ratio by an order of magnitude from 1,000,000:1 to 10,000,000:1, and supports Adobe RGB in addition to the P3 wide color gamut.
• Dynamic Island: The notch that holds the camera gives way to a Dynamic Island that works like the one on the iPhone. It’s the new home for Spotlight (if Siri AI is enabled), Live Activities, and Siri AI, and since the display supports touch input, you can tap it to pause music or accept an AirDrop request. Hands-on reports show that the camera now sits in a small hole-punch cutout, so the menu bar no longer has a large chunk missing from its middle.
• Touch: Despite past naysaying from both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook about the utility of touchscreens on laptops, these new MacBook Pro models allow users to interact with apps by touching the screen. Although macOS translates touches into clicks and offers some tweaks to improve the experience, apps will work best if they are optimized for Apple’s new system gesture APIs. Touch input doesn’t work with the Apple Pencil.
• Industrial design: Impressively, Apple’s hardware designers shaved 0.5 pounds (220 g) off the 14-inch model’s weight, bringing it to 3.0 pounds (1.38 kg). The 16-inch model weighs just 4.0 pounds (1.82 kg), 0.7 pounds (320 g) less than the current 16-inch model. A stiffer hinge resists screen bounce when users touch the display, and the Apple logo on the lid glows once again. The new models are also 4–5 mm less deep and less than a millimeter thinner.
• Camera: Although the 12-megapixel Center Stage camera remains basically the same, Apple added advanced video stabilization so that you can touch the screen during a video call without shaking the image.
• Speakers: The basic specs for the MacBook Pro’s six-speaker audio system haven’t changed, but Apple claims that an all-new woofer design provides 50% deeper bass and that all-new tweeters offer better clarity. Apple also tuned the audio for closed-lid use when the MacBook Pro is connected to an external display.
• Ports: Again, the ports remain the same, but the new models support genlock over Thunderbolt 5, which “synchronizes a display’s refresh rate with a camera’s capture to minimize ghosting, tearing, and other visual artifacts when filming.”
• Storage: Apple has increased the maximum storage size to 16 TB. That’s available only with the M5 Max configurations, and it raises the cost by $7000 over the 2 TB default.

Thoughts on the New Models

Although I hate the ungainly “with PROLED XDR Display” descriptor dragging down the name, I’m quite impressed with these new models. I’m looking forward to seeing the display side by side with the current models to judge whether the fuss about OLED is warranted, but I’m sure the displays are absolutely gorgeous. Swapping the notch for the Dynamic Island is an obvious move, and whether or not it’s perfect, it will undoubtedly be better.

I’m more skeptical about the touch interface, not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because it will be tiring to use for any amount of time, so people won’t use it as much as they might. Plus, because rich touch interfaces will require developer support, it’s not obvious to me that it will catch on. Touch may end up like the poorly supported and unloved Touch Bar, though it’s easier to ignore if you don’t want to use it, and there’s no downside to having it available.

But what impresses me most is that all this technology comes at only a $400 price increase. The MacBook Pro models weren’t cheap before, but if you want the power they provide, another $400 doesn’t seem unreasonable for an even better screen with the Dynamic Island and Touch, especially since it comes in a noticeably lighter package.

Of course, the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display models are truly aimed at creative professionals in the audio, video, and photography worlds, although Apple also nods to medical imaging professionals who might benefit from the display improvements. Most Mac users will be served just as well by Apple’s less expensive laptops. I don’t think Apple will sell huge quantities of these MacBook Pro models, but that’s not the point. Apple is serving what is undoubtedly its most important niche market, and it’s pointing toward where laptop technology might head.

Before the announcement, there was speculation that Apple might call these models “MacBook Ultra.” In retrospect, I can see why Apple didn’t—they’re no more powerful—and, more importantly, I think Apple is trialing some of these technologies at the high end with the eventual goal of incorporating them more broadly in the lineup. For instance, all iPhones have OLED displays now, and all but the iPhone 17e have the Dynamic Island. It’s easy to imagine OLED displays and the Dynamic Island coming to other Apple laptops over time as prices come down. Similarly, if Touch proves popular, it could migrate down the product line, too.

Are you planning to order a new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display? If so, what do you plan to use it for?

These are routine speed bump updates aimed merely at bringing these Macs into the current chip generation. This time, at least, Apple hasn’t increased prices beyond where they ended up in June (see “Apple Raises Prices for Many Products,” 26 June 2026).

14-inch MacBook Pro with M6

Naturally, the new MacBook Pro is faster. Apple claims 30% faster graphics, up to 25% faster AI workloads than the M5 model, and 1.2x to 1.3x gains in tasks like image processing in Affinity and compiling code in Xcode. Beyond the chip, the main other change is Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which adds Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support.

Everything else carries over, including the Liquid Retina XDR display with its nano-texture option, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3, up to 24 hours of battery life, and the space black and silver finishes.

The M6 MacBook Pro starts at $1999 with 16 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage, the same as the M5 model it replaces, at least after the June price increases.

24-inch iMac with M6

The iMac skipped the M5 entirely, so its performance gains over the two-year-old M4 model are larger. Apple says graphics and storage are both up to twice as fast. The N1 chip brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support, and wired networking moves from Gigabit Ethernet to 2.5Gb Ethernet, which is standard on the model with four Thunderbolt ports and optional on the two-port model. The iMac’s industrial design, 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, camera, and seven colors remain unchanged.

The two-port iMac with M6 starts at $1499, and the four-port model starts at $1699. Both come with 16 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage, which is on the small side for real work but fine for a Mac used primarily with Web apps. The iMac started at $1299 when the M4 model launched in 2024, but the $1499 price is unchanged since the June increase.

Tough Sells

I’ve never been excited about the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro. At $1999, it costs $700 more than the 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 ($1299) and just $500 less than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip ($2499; see “MacBook Air Gets M5, MacBook Pro Gains M5 Pro and M5 Max,” 3 March 2026). Its M6 is a generation newer than the MacBook Air’s M5, but most people won’t notice the difference, and the M6 MacBook Air is presumably on the horizon. What the extra money actually buys is everything around the chip: the Liquid Retina XDR display, HDMI and SD card ports, a third Thunderbolt port, 24 hours of battery life instead of 18, and twice the storage. Those features have value, of course, but are they worth $700? If so, you may be better off spending another $500 on the significantly more powerful M5 Pro model, which also gets you more memory.

The iMac isn’t squeezed between competing models, since it’s the only all-in-one Apple sells, but it has the same upgrade problem. No one buys an iMac for performance reasons, which is probably why Apple never bothered to release an M5 version. If you have an M4 iMac, or any Apple silicon Mac that meets your needs, the M6 iMac isn’t sufficiently improved to warrant an upgrade. If you’re replacing an Intel-based iMac or want a new iMac for other reasons, it’s a welcome update, but the M6 chip doesn’t change the purchasing calculus in any real way.

I am sad that the iMac has become such a footnote in Apple’s lineup. The 27-inch iMac with Retina display was a popular and beloved machine, and while there’s nothing really wrong with the 24-inch iMac Apple now sells, it just doesn’t generate anywhere near the same level of enthusiasm.

This new iPad mini’s enhanced feature set doesn’t come cheap. The Wi-Fi model starts at $699, and the Wi-Fi + Cellular model at $849. Apple raised the iPad mini price in June (see “Apple Raises Prices for Many Products,” 26 June 2026) from $499 to $599 for the A17 Pro model, and this new version adds another $100 on top of that. The iPad mini now costs 40% more than it did four months ago.

The new iPad mini comes only in midnight and starlight (no more blue, purple, or space gray colors) with 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB storage options. The iPad mini works with both Apple Pencil Pro ($129) and Apple Pencil (USB-C) ($79).

Pre-orders are open now, with availability starting 6 November 2026.

Larger, Brighter, Blacker OLED Display

The iPad mini’s most visible upgrade is the new 8.5-inch Super Retina XDR display, which expands from the previous 8.3 inches while maintaining the iPad mini’s physical footprint, thanks to thinner bezels.

Apple makes much of the new OLED display, promoting the pixel-level lighting control for deeper blacks that iPhone users have experienced since the iPhone X. Along with the iPhone, Apple currently uses OLED displays in all Apple Watch models and recent iPad Pro models.

Peak brightness jumps to 1200 nits, more than double the previous generation, and the display can dim to just 1 nit for use in dark environments—useful for reading in bed. The increased brightness and 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio will be welcome for those who work outdoors or in challenging lighting. To reduce glare, Apple also offers a $100 nano-texture glass option on the 256 GB and 512 GB models, as on the iPad Pro.

New Cameras and Audio System

Several other changes tweak the iPad mini’s industrial design. Most notably, the 12-megapixel Center Stage front camera has moved to the landscape edge, finally making video calls feel natural when the iPad is in its typical landscape orientation. The 12-megapixel rear camera gains an Adaptive True Tone flash that Apple says improves both low-light photography and document scanning.

Even more unusual is what Apple calls an Acoustic Display—a redesigned audio system that hides woofers and tweeters beneath the iPad mini’s glass and aluminum enclosure. Apple claims this delivers punchier bass and clearer highs, but more interestingly, the sealed design makes the iPad mini the first iPad with an IP67 rating for water and dust resistance. At least when it’s new, that means it should be able to survive submersion in up to 1 m of water for 30 minutes. I still don’t recommend dropping it in the pool, but it won’t mind being caught in a drizzle.

More Performance from the A20 Pro, N1, and C2 Chips

Apple has outfitted the new iPad mini with the A20 Pro chip used in the iPhone 18 Pro models. Compared to the A17 Pro iPad mini, it delivers up to 4.5x faster AI performance, 2.7x faster graphics, and 60% faster multithreaded CPU performance.

Apple included its custom networking chips: the N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, plus—in cellular models—the C2 modem for up to 50% faster cellular speeds with improved power efficiency. The iPad mini uses eSIM exclusively, with no physical SIM card slot.

Performance wasn’t a common complaint with previous versions of the iPad mini, so while the faster performance is welcome, it’s unlikely to be the primary reason most people buy one.

Purchasing Decisions

If you have a sixth-generation iPad mini from 2021 or an earlier model, the A20 Pro iPad mini is a massive upgrade in every way—display quality, performance, cameras, and durability. The improvements are less dramatic for those with an A17 Pro iPad mini from 2024, but they’re still noticeable.

However, the real question surrounding upgrades is how you use your existing iPad mini and whether the improvements would make a noticeable difference to you. It’s not like the screen was bad before, and most people probably weren’t running performance-intensive apps on an iPad mini to begin with. Water resistance is certainly welcome, but again, relatively few people put their iPad minis in situations where they might get wet.

I suspect that most iPad mini users are pretty happy with their existing devices and will be tempted to upgrade mostly to address poor battery life, a cracked screen, or some other physical problem. That’s not to say you shouldn’t upgrade if you want to, just that the iPad mini wasn’t doing a bad job before. Anyone considering their first iPad mini now will appreciate the improvements.

The overall cost is more of an issue. At $699, the iPad mini costs $250 more than the $449 base-level iPad with an A16 chip, and only $50 less than the $749 11-inch iPad Air with an M4 chip. More so than ever before, you’re paying a premium for the iPad mini’s compact form factor. But if a small iPad is precisely what you want, this iPad mini is the best one Apple has made.

Bare Bones Software has released Yojimbo 4.7 with interface and usability improvements for the information organizer. The update refines the interface for searching in Notes and PDFs by moving it into the same window rather than relying on a separate window, and enlarges the text in labels and fields in the Bookmark, Password, and Serial Number item editors. It also addresses a crash that could occur when loading a Web archive, improves syncing reliability when certain iCloud account errors are reported, corrects the text background color for new Note items, and fixes a bug where Note items whose names begin with a period couldn’t be viewed in Yojimbo for iPad after syncing. Yojimbo 4.7 now requires macOS 10.15.6 Catalina or later. ($30 new, free update, 9.1 MB, release notes, macOS 10.15.6+)

Ergonis has released Typinator 10.3, improving the reliability of syncing your text expansion sets, including subscribed and shared sets. The update now provides clearer notifications when another app temporarily blocks Typinator (such as a password manager), improves compatibility with macOS 27 Golden Gate, speeds up loading and saving (especially with large sets), and includes numerous unspecified stability and crash fixes. Additionally, Typinator no longer needs a restart if your keyboard connection is interrupted (such as after sleep or a permission change). ($49.99 one-time or $29.99 annual subscription with a 25% discount for TidBITS members, upgrade discounts available to previous owners, 49.6 MB, release notes, macOS 13+)

BeLight Software updated its Live Home 3D home design software to version 5.0 in September, adding a new Render with AI feature. You can now turn your 3D layouts into photorealistic generative AI renders with over 260 interior and home design style presets. In addition to bringing full compatibility with macOS 27 Golden Gate and support for Liquid Glass user interface elements, the release also added the ability to flip and mirror individual objects or entire projects, enabled you to import your own 360-degree panoramic images as project backgrounds, added integration with Sketchfab 3D objects, and introduced user accounts for easily sharing in-app purchases across platforms. Version 5.1 was issued to improve the Cloud AI Rendering dialog so that you can keep working on your project while the current render is in progress. For a limited time, BeLight is offering a $20 discount on both the standard and Pro editions of Live Home 3D (on sale for $59.99 and $129.99, respectively). ($79.99/$149.99 new from BeLight and the Mac App Store, free update, 681.9 MB, release notes, macOS 13+)

BZG has updated its Coherence X site-specific browser to version 6.2 to enable automatic app updates by default, ensuring your apps receive the latest fixes whenever Coherence updates. The release also brings a redesigned Update Apps window that provides smoother progress and clearer results; adds per-app compatibility for 1Password, Apple Passwords, and Touch ID (with supported browser engines); preserves open tabs where possible when changing an app’s browser engine; ensures apps launch more reliably in macOS 27 Golden Gate; and addresses a crash that could occur when App Suggestions failed to load. ($39.99 new, $29.99 upgrade, in Setapp, 25.8 MB, release notes, macOS 15+)

Back in late September, MacPaw released CleanMyMac 5.7, introducing the Email Cleanup feature, a major addition to the Mac maintenance utility. Currently limited to Gmail, Email Cleanup helps you remove emails, archive them, or unsubscribe from unwanted senders. The app scans your inbox and analyzes email metadata without reading message content, lets you review emails by category (such as Old Promotions and Forgotten Emails), and then moves emails to Gmail’s Trash, either in bulk or one by one.

MacPaw subsequently issued version 5.7.1 with a new Screen Cleaning Mode, which temporarily locks your keyboard and trackpad for two minutes while you wipe the screen. Version 5.7.2 introduces the Browser Care extension to help you manage tabs in the Google Chrome Web browser.

Controlled from the Chrome toolbar, it lets you see which tabs use the most memory and CPU, then pause or close them. The extension also identifies duplicate tabs across your windows and those tabs that have been open for more than a day. The Browser Care extension is free and requires Google Chrome 150.0.7871.125 or later. ($39.95 annual subscription, $119.95 one-time fee, in Setapp, free update for subscribers, 218.3 MB, release notes, macOS 11+)

Flexibits has published Cardhop 2.5.1 with a handful of improvements for the contact management app. The release adds an option to use drag-and-drop to reorder fields on contact cards, improves navigation in the contact list and on contact cards when using VoiceOver, and fixes an issue where search results sometimes scrolled out of view. ($57 annual subscription includes Fantastical from Flexibits and the Mac App Store, free updates, 25 MB, release notes, macOS 12+)

The marquee changes affect Siri AI. It can now remember past conversations, draw on more of your personal data, and work in more languages. Other broad changes include context-aware suggestions in Messages, Shared Albums improvements in Photos, a Sound Glow light show and Mac audio output for HomePod, and Find My support for the Siri Remote. The updates also address a large number of security vulnerabilities.

Siri AI Gets Smarter

Apple has spread the Siri AI enhancements across its platforms unevenly, so here’s what’s new and where it applies:

• Conversation memory: Siri AI can recall past conversations, so you can ask about things it told you before. Memory is a core feature of chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT, and it should make Siri AI significantly more useful, because you’re likely to have conversations about the same topics over time. Oddly, this feature appears in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS, but not visionOS.
• More personal context: Siri AI can now use photos attached in Messages, Calendar event attendees, your voicemails, and, Apple says, “better results” from Safari history and Reading List. On the Apple Watch, this data comes from your iPhone. It’s also available everywhere expected, other than visionOS.
• Excluded Apps: A new device-level setting lets you control which apps Siri, Search, and suggestions can access. Previously, you had to restrict this access in each app’s settings, which was infeasible for people with lots of apps.
• Granular text selection: Although this has been possible in macOS all along, you can now select and copy just part of a Siri response instead of the whole thing in iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
• Write with Siri in more places: On the Mac, Write with Siri now appears in the formatting bar when you compose a message in Mail. On the iPad, it appears when you hover over a text selection or an empty line with a trackpad, and when you select handwritten text in Notes.
• Faster responses on Apple Watch: watchOS 27.2 promises faster Siri AI responses on the wrist. About time—Siri on the Apple Watch has been extremely sluggish!
• New languages: Siri AI now supports French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, in addition to English. The visionOS release notes omit Portuguese, presumably because the Vision Pro isn’t sold in Portugal or Brazil.

Other Shared Improvements

Beyond Siri AI, a handful of features appear in most of Apple’s operating systems:

• Suggestions in Messages: Messages can now offer actions based on your conversation, such as creating a Calendar event for a dinner you’re planning.
• Shared Albums upgrades: You can now edit captions and comments, Photos helps you avoid adding duplicate photos, and an optional reminder before an album expires gives participants time to save photos and videos.
• SynthID watermarking: Support for SynthID watermarking helps identify images that were generated or modified with generative AI tools in Photos and Image Playground.
• Podcasts Home tab: The Home tab now has separate New Episodes and Continue Playing sections, so new episodes are listed apart from the ones you’ve already started.
• FaceTime accessibility: You can add a third-party sign language interpreter or live captioner to a FaceTime call.

iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2 Improvements

Several changes apply only to iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2:

• Games app Friends tab: In the Games app on the iPhone and iPad, the Friends tab now explains why it suggests particular friends, and friends’ player pages show the games they’ve played recently.
• Apple TV app Simple Profiles: Everyone in your household can have their own profile in the Apple TV app, with separate recommendations.

There’s only one iPad-specific change:

• Easier side-by-side multitasking: When you tile an app to the left or right with the window controls or the menu bar, iPadOS now lets you pick a second app to fill the other half.

iPhone Duo owners get two features specific to that device:

• Apple Pencil support: Apple promised Apple Pencil support for later in the year, and it has arrived just days after the iPhone Duo itself. It works only with the Apple Pencil (USB-C).
• Edge Light: The Edge Light feature uses the screen to light your face during low-light video calls; it first appeared in macOS 26.2 Tahoe (see “OS 26.2 Adds Reminder Alarms, Edge Light, Podcast Chapters, and Enhanced Safety Alerts,” 12 December 2025).

tvOS 27.2 Improvements

tvOS 27.2 adds a few useful features for the Apple TV 4K—I’m particularly looking forward to customizing the screen savers:

• FaceTime links: You can join FaceTime calls directly from your Apple TV using a FaceTime link.
• FaceTime interpreters and captioners: Like the other platforms, tvOS lets you add a third-party sign language interpreter or captioning service to a call.
• Screen saver photo picking: You can use your iPhone to choose specific photos for the screen saver, without sharing your entire photo library with the Apple TV.
• Screen saver shuffle: A new Shuffle option rotates through the different screen saver categories.
• Find My for the Siri Remote: Since tvOS 17, you’ve been able to use the Apple TV Remote in your iPhone’s Control Center to home in on a missing Siri Remote. Now the Siri Remote (2nd generation) and later appear in Find My itself.

tvOS 27.2 runs on the Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) and later. Owners of the Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K (1st generation) get tvOS 26.6.1 instead, which adds support for the Siri Remote (4th generation), along with unspecified security fixes.

HomePod Software 27.2 Improvements

In the first feature release since HomePod Software 26.0, HomePod Software 27.2 has a few actual changes, although most of them are limited to the current generation of HomePods:

• Sound Glow: The top of the HomePod mini, HomePod mini 2, and HomePod (2nd generation) becomes a light display that pulses in time with your media and plays light animations for soundscapes. Sorry, original HomePods, you’re not groovy enough.
• Home theater surround sound: With an Apple TV 4K (4th generation), you can connect four HomePods for surround sound. You need a matching front and rear pair of either HomePod mini 2 or HomePod (2nd generation) speakers.
• HomePod as Mac audio output: You can set a HomePod as the audio output for everything on your Mac. Apple promises a “responsive and persistent AirPlay connection.”
• Lock controls: You can now turn off the HomePod’s touch controls so accidental taps don’t pause music, skip songs, or change the volume.

Security Updates, Including Older Operating Systems

As always, Apple included a vast number of security fixes in these updates. You’ll notice that the company also included older operating systems and Safari 27.2 for Sequoia and Tahoe:

• iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2: 163 vulnerabilities fixed
• iOS 26.7.2 and iPadOS 26.7.2: 134 vulnerabilities fixed
• iOS 18.7.11 and iPadOS 18.7.11: 3 vulnerabilities fixed, including one zero-day
• macOS Golden Gate 27.2: 263 vulnerabilities fixed, another record number
• macOS Tahoe 26.7.2: 213 vulnerabilities fixed
• macOS Sequoia 15.8.2: 197 vulnerabilities fixed
• tvOS 27.2: 72 vulnerabilities fixed
• watchOS 27.2: 62 vulnerabilities fixed
• visionOS 27.2: 125 vulnerabilities fixed
• Safari 27.2: 33 vulnerabilities fixed

Should You Update?

If you’re already running one of the OS 27 releases, these updates are probably safe to install, and the security fixes alone make them worth getting. The Siri AI improvements are the main attraction, especially for French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish speakers who couldn’t use it before.

If you have been waiting for macOS 27 Golden Gate to settle down before upgrading, I recommend waiting for 27.3, probably due out in mid-December.

At that point, The Browser Company’s CEO said:

In the meantime, please know this: we’re not trying to shut Arc down. We know you use it and rely on it. Many of our family and friends do, too. We still love it, spent years of our life on it — and whether it’s through us or the community, our hope and intention is that Arc finds a future that’s just as considered as its past.

So much for that future. Since Dia’s release, Arc has limped along in maintenance mode, receiving Chromium updates but little else for the past 18 months. There was a brief moment of hope when The Browser Company was acquired (see “Atlassian Acquires The Browser Company for $610 Million,” 4 September 2025), but nothing ever really comes out of maintenance mode.

The Browser Company has now officially announced that Arc will be “sunsetting” on 22 December 2026—such a nice euphemism for forcibly taking an app away from people who rely on it.

Here are the important dates:

• 22 October: New Arc accounts can no longer be created. Once you update to the latest version of Arc, you can export all your pinned tabs and favorites using Arc > Settings > Advanced > Export Data. Whether anything will be able to import that data usefully remains to be seen, but I hope to see other browsers adding support for that file format very soon.
• 23 November: Browse for Me and other AI features in the iOS Arc Search app will be disabled. Arc Search will continue to work as a browser, but you will no longer be able to sign in or sync tabs, which is the main reason to use it.
• 22 December: I’m not entirely certain how this works technically, but it appears that The Browser Company has a kill switch embedded in Arc, since it says, “You will no longer be able to access or use Arc on macOS or Windows.” In other words, you must switch before then. On that day, Arc accounts will be deactivated, and their personal data will be deleted within 30 days.

Alternatives to Arc

What are the best alternative Web browsers for Arc users? If you don’t mind staying in a dysfunctional relationship, the simplest transition is undoubtedly to Dia, because The Browser Company has added numerous Arc features back to Dia over the past year. Dia can’t do everything Arc can yet, but it’s now close enough for everyday use. The recently improved import capabilities caused me to give Dia a real try over the past few weeks, and it’s a largely similar experience to Arc. However, The Browser Company remains entirely untrustworthy, and numerous other browsers have emerged as alternatives to the mainstream set of Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

The main Arc alternatives I’ve seen mentioned are Zen, which intentionally mimics Arc in many ways, and Vivaldi, which has a boatload of features I have had trouble wrapping my head around. People also suggest Brave, Floorp, Orion, Ortix, and SigmaOS.

Arc Features Worth Looking For

The problem is that Arc isn’t just a basic Web browser. The Browser Company spent years developing and polishing Arc’s features and interfaces to make Web usage significantly smoother and more efficient. Arc features that I rely upon and will be looking for in an alternative browser include:

• Vertical sidebar: I find top-mounted tabs to be unusable once I have more than a couple.
• Persistent pinned tabs: I don’t want to open a new tab for every bookmark; I want to click a pinned tab and have it open directly. Plus, when I pin a page as a tab, I want to be able to return to that specific page later, even if I have navigated within the site represented by the tab.
• Nested tab groups: In Arc, I collect pinned tabs into folders, which can be nested to create a hierarchical organization that makes things easy to find. This is one of my main irritations with Dia.
• Tab switcher: Apple’s macOS App Switcher works extremely well, and Arc’s tab switcher is similarly good. I switch back and forth between tabs all day long with Arc’s Control-Tab shortcut.
• Split view: Even better than switching between tabs is being able to see two tabs side by side. I often use split views to keep one page open for reference while writing in another tab.
• Workspace syncing: I want to be able to access the same set of pinned tabs, in exactly the same organization, across multiple Macs.
• iOS version: Equally important is being able to access all those pinned tabs on my iPhone, with immediate syncing. If I used an iPad, the same would be true there.
• Little Arc window: Arc could open links from external apps in a standalone window, making it easy to open a page from an emailed link, read it, and close it without getting sucked into other open tabs or cluttering the full tab list.

How about you? If you’re using Arc now, which features matter most to you, and what apps are you planning to test in the next two months?

Busy Apps has released BusyCal 2026.4.2, introducing a new Bookings feature that lets people book your free time through a personal scheduling link. You can create a booking page for different types of meetings (such as a 30-minute call), then share the link so potential attendees can choose an available time slot. The calendar app also adds hashtag support in Quick Entry and the menu bar’s Quick Add, adds task duration support for AppleScript and MCP automation, improves Outlook and Microsoft 365 sync for recurring events, enhances sync reliability for shared CalDAV calendars and large Stalwart calendars, fixes a bug where month view ignored the selected event time format, and ensures Zoom links no longer disappear from Google Calendar event locations. ($49.99 new from Busy Apps or the Mac App Store, free update, in Setapp, 111.5 MB, release notes, macOS 13.5+)

My injuries were non-trivial, although they could have been much worse. I hit the left side of my head, cracking my helmet, strained muscles in my left hand, fractured the scaphoid bone in my right wrist, and picked up discrete points of road rash on my left ankle, knee, hip, chest, and elbow, plus all down the center of my face: forehead, nose, upper lip, and chin. Weirdly, despite the hand injuries, I had no road rash on my hands, even though I had forgotten to wear my biking gloves. The ElliptiGO mostly suffered scratches and abrasions, although the bar-end grip on the right handlebar was broken.

Whenever an incident involves memory loss, medical professionals become extremely interested in why. At the ER, I had a CT scan that showed no brain bleeds or other injuries, and since I was entirely lucid and talkative, they focused more on my hand and skin injuries. But when I talked to my primary care physician a day or two later, he referred me to neurology and cardiology to learn more about what happened.

Head Trauma or Blackout?

There were two basic possibilities. Most obviously, I hit my head! That can cause amnesia, as we all know from exciting movie plots. But another, more worrying possibility loomed. What if I didn’t remember what happened because I blacked out or had a seizure, and that caused the crash? People faint all the time, and in fact, I had a fainting episode four years ago while doing via ferrata at Whistler in British Columbia (see “AppBITS: Drink More with HiWater,” 13 February 2026). Plus, could my February 2025 skating accident have been caused by a similar brief blackout? Not being able to remember was maddening, because there’s a big difference between crashing because a dog ran in front of me and my brain turning off briefly.

Arguing against a crash caused by a car, dog, or some other external factor was the fact that all of my skin injuries were relatively small, just an inch or two in diameter. People who go down while riding at speed almost always end up with large scrapes covering much of the skin that was exposed to the road. How could I have hurt my ankle, knee, and hip without scraping any of the skin on my leg in between those spots? And if I were moving quickly, how did I not injure the skin on my hands?

Exploring the Data

Perhaps my iPhone and Apple Watch could shed some light on the situation. Looking at my Strava effort, I could see that I started the ride at 10:26 AM and rode for about 4 minutes (and yes, Strava’s AI-based “Athlete Intelligence” is truly stupid—it seems to think that the ride was short because I was recovering from a crash rather than because I crashed). Because Strava (left) was running on my iPhone for navigation, it didn’t have heart rate data. However, I was also using Workouts on the Apple Watch, which does record heart rate data, so I have two entries in Apple’s Fitness app for the workout. Inexplicably, Fitness shows the Strava-sourced entry with extensive heart rate data (right), while the Apple Watch Workout entry has much less, the opposite of what I’d expect.

Aha! If I started at 10:26 AM and rode for four minutes, that would suggest I crashed at 10:30. The graph in the Fitness app pretty clearly shows a precipitous drop in heart rate from about 120 bpm to about 60. That suggests what’s called cardioinhibitory syncope, where a drop in heart rate causes fainting.

However, when I fainted at Whistler, my heart rate was 38 bpm, and it stayed that way for several hours in the ER afterward. Plus, I felt terrible when I woke up after fainting and continued to feel lousy for a few days afterward. In contrast, although the drop to about 60 came quickly, it remained there, and apart from the shock of falling, I felt basically normal within a few minutes after waking up. So something was different.

The next question was how this drop in heart rate compared to what my heart does after a normal workout. That was relatively easily answered by looking at previous rides in the Fitness app, which showed an average post-workout drop of about 25 bpm over 2 minutes. When I looked at the All Recorded Data screen for heart rate in Apple’s Health app, I discovered that the 60 bpm after the crash took only 46 seconds. More interestingly, the timestamps showed the heart rate drop starting at 10:30:12 and ending at 10:30:58, seemingly after the crash, not before it. Curiouser and curiouser.

My doctor was also interested in how long I was out. Unfortunately, the woman who helped me, and whose name and phone number I somehow ended up with, was second on the scene, and we’ve been unable to track down the first woman to ask her if she remembered seeing the crash or anything else from when she first came upon me. (In a classic small-town scenario, our friends who live nearby know her by first name and sight, but only while walking, so we have to wait until they happen to run into her again.) It appears I crashed at 10:30, and the Phone app shows me calling my wife Tonya at 10:41, so by then I was cognizant enough to make a phone call at the urging of my helpers. But that was 11 minutes later and thus not helpful.

By this time, I had neurologist and cardiologist appointments scheduled, and I wanted to provide them with as many of the details as I could summon along with a history of other potentially similar events, such as fainting at Whistler and falling while skating. (I had a couple of other situations where I felt lightheaded or had vertigo for unexplained reasons.) Between my injured hands and mental fatigue from the post-concussive symptoms, I decided that the best way to collect all this data was to talk at Claude and have it build what turned into an 8-page PDF summarizing everything I said. This turned out to be a fascinating and instructive experience, because Claude also wanted to analyze everything I told it and asked for data beyond the Strava speed graph and the Fitness heart rate graph.

Claude Digs Deeper

Although the Health app lets you see all recorded data, it does not let you export selected data, which is what Claude was prompting me to do. The only way to get data out of Health is to export everything by tapping the profile icon at the top right of the Summary screen and then selecting Export All Health Data. When I did that, I got a 255 MB ZIP file that expanded to a whopping 6.7 GB of data. BBEdit was able to open the main 4.7 GB export.xml file eventually, but it was way too big to work with in any real way. Claude was undeterred, though. Working in the Linux virtual machine that runs via Claude’s desktop app on my Mac, it converted the export into an SQLite database and queried it with Python. Magic! This enabled me to ask natural language questions about absolutely everything recorded in Apple Health since the beginning, which was 19 September 2014, right after I installed iOS 8.

Armed with this newfound capability, I asked Claude about all the data in Health in the minutes surrounding the crash. (I could also query it about fainting at Whistler and the skating fall, but there was much less data from both of those times.) For the cycling crash, Claude found GPS-related speed data along with heart rate readings, and even a recorded fall—Health has an Other Data category that records falls. Then it built a graph showing speed and heart rate with per-second precision for speed and every 3–5 seconds for heart rate data.

First, the graph confirmed that I didn’t crash at speed. Instead, I slowed down from 15 mph to almost a stop over about 6 seconds before falling. That suggests I felt something was wrong and braked, but couldn’t come to a complete stop before my brain shut off.

The graph also confirmed that the heart rate drop came after the crash. I probably hit the ground in the seconds just before 10:30, since the watch auto-paused at 10:30:01. But what about the fall entry being time-stamped almost 90 seconds later? This is weird. However, Apple says:

If your Apple Watch detects that you’re immobile for about a minute, it begins a 30-second countdown, while tapping you on the wrist and sounding an alert. The alert gets louder, so that you or someone nearby can hear it. If you don’t want to call emergency services, tap Cancel. When the countdown ends, your Apple Watch automatically contacts emergency services as well as your emergency contacts.

I don’t remember seeing the fall alert, let alone dismissing it, but there was no automatic call to emergency services in the Phone app, which suggests I canceled it just before it would have called. We athletes tend to assume that we’re fine and certainly don’t need help, no matter how bad the fall, so it’s entirely likely that I canceled the alert during the period of memory loss. I can’t explain why the fall was recorded, since Apple also says:

Falls are automatically recorded in the Health app, unless you reply that you didn’t fall when your Apple Watch asks. To check your fall history, open the Health app on your iPhone, then tap the Browse tab. Tap Other Data, then tap Number of Times Fallen.

Even though the fall data didn’t shed any useful light on the event, my cardiologist called the graph “mind-blowingly awesome” because it suggested that vasodepressive syncope (fainting because of a blood pressure drop) was far more likely than cardioinhibitory syncope (fainting because of a heart rate drop). In both cases, the brain doesn’t get enough blood, which is a Very Bad Thing, even for a very short time—hence the fainting. He was unperturbed by the quick drop in heart rate after the fall, saying that such a response was relatively normal. (The neurologist had me get an EEG and MRI, both of which were entirely normal and thus argued for syncope and against a seizure.)

Just the Facts, AI

While he was nice about it, the cardiologist was much less enthusiastic when I asked him if the overall 8-page PDF summarizing everything was useful. He said it was too much to read, especially in the short time he had for appointments, and he even preferred human-written medical notes to AI-summarized dictated notes, which he felt were unnecessarily verbose. My takeaway is that using AI to extract and summarize Health data for a medical professional can be extremely useful, but you need to put effort into making it focus on the essentials, preferably with charts and graphs.

Personally, I’m still working my way through the medical flow chart. It looks like I’ll have a tilt table test sometime soon to see if that helps explain the fainting episodes, though I’m hoping the post-concussive symptoms continue to decline such that I can avoid having to see the concussion specialists. For now, the cardiologist reiterated his 2022 advice to drink more water and eat more salt, which I’m taking even more seriously this time. The next challenge will be to see if an app or an AI can help me figure out how I am possibly going to consume 5–7 g of sodium (not salt, which is only about 40% sodium) per day, given that I cook most of my food from scratch rather than eating the processed or prepared food that gives most Americans their excessive sodium intake. I’m also looking forward to getting a blood pressure monitor that syncs its data to Health so I can analyze the effects of these dietary changes.

Ulysses updated its eponymous writing app to version 41 back in September, paving the way for supporting macOS 27 Golden Gate as well as Siri AI (including onscreen awareness and Write with Siri). The release also added a customizable toolbar that lets you freely rearrange toolbar items; updated the default toolbar to include buttons for strong, emphasis, links, and paragraph markup; improved HDR image handling in both the editor and dashboard; and fixed performance issues when typewriter scrolling was activated. Since that release, Ulysses has issued a couple of maintenance updates to fix a potential hang on first launch when already subscribed (version 41.1), resolve issues reading Markdown files on Intel-based Macs (version 41.2), and address a crash when using the share extension (version 41.3). ($5.99/$39.99 monthly/yearly subscription from the Mac App Store, in Setapp, free update, 35.8 MB, release notes, macOS 15.4+)

The approach is unusual for Apple, and the company has not said who did what. Phrases like “working closely” and “a true collaboration” abound in the press release. The products wouldn’t seem out of place in an Apple-intensive home—look at the Siri Remote, which Apple designed entirely in-house, and you can see the same aesthetic sensibility at work here.

The implication is that Apple guided the design and integration while letting its partners handle manufacturing and support. This gives Apple a way to ensure a curated smart home experience without entering the low-margin hardware business of cameras, locks, and thermostats directly. Whether these devices offer anything technically beyond what existing HomeKit accessories can do remains unclear; the main appeal seems to be Apple’s stamp of approval in a market full of inconsistent products. Apple also tends to stick with products for a long time, and the company may not have wanted to commit to maintaining these product lines indefinitely.

Home Monitoring Cameras

The home monitoring products include the following devices:

• LG Video Doorbell ($249.95): Provides dual cameras to capture separate views of visitors and packages, plus a built-in spotlight and a chime that plays through a HomeView or any HomePod. The front camera captures 2.5K resolution video, and the bottom camera, which doesn’t need as much detail, captures HD resolution.
  
• LG Floodlight Cam ($399.95): This triple-headed device provides two adaptive floodlights that activate automatically when motion is detected and a camera that captures 2.5K video with low-light night vision.
  
• LG Outdoor Cam ($299.95): If you don’t need the floodlights, this camera provides low-light color night vision for $100 less.
  
• LG Indoor Cam ($199.95): For indoor security, this camera automatically tilts to adjust the view when the user checks in on the home from afar, but automatically faces down when the first member of the household returns. Users can also tilt it manually or in the Home app at any time.
  

The cameras store their content in iCloud+, providing 10 days of event history, and with eligible iCloud+ plans, Apple Intelligence can provide automatic video descriptions of what’s happening, along with the ability to search footage using natural language queries. The cameras also feature built-in storage, so they can record even if Wi-Fi goes down. Live footage can be viewed in the Home app at any time.

That “eligible iCloud+ plans” phrase is doing a lot. A simple 200 GB ($2.99 per month) iCloud+ plan is enough for basic HomeKit Secure Video recording for up to five cameras, but adding Apple Intelligence features gets expensive fast. You need a 2 TB ($9.99) plan for one camera, a 6 TB ($29.99) plan for two cameras, and a 12 TB ($59.99) plan for up to five cameras. In contrast, The Verge says (gift link) that Amazon and Google charge about $20 per month for similar capabilities.

Home Access

If you’re installing an LG Video Doorbell, you might want to add an LG Smart Deadbolt Lock ($349.95) next to it. It uses Ultra Wideband technology to unlock automatically when someone with a home key on a compatible iPhone or Apple Watch walks up. If that doesn’t work for some reason, you can also tap to unlock with an iPhone or Apple Watch, enter a code on the integrated PIN pad, or use the hidden physical backup key slot. You can also grant guest access through the Home app, making it easy to give a visitor or house sitter access.

The LG Video Doorbell and Smart Deadbolt Lock can work together, so when someone rings the doorbell, you can see who’s at the door, speak to the visitor, and unlock the door. Apple says this lock is Matter-compatible and supports Aliro, so it can work entirely locally without an Internet connection. Aliro is a new standard that lets iPhones and Apple Watches act as keys directly at the lock, while Matter provides local smart home control, so neither the lock nor the Home app’s in-home control depends on an Internet connection.

Home Climate Control

The Apple Home Collection includes two smart thermostats, one from Schneider Electric (left) and another from LG (right). It’s unclear why Apple chose to work with two companies in this space, since the thermostats cost the same ($199.95) and offer the same basic features—even an HVAC newsletter isn’t clear on the differences. Perhaps they don’t work with the same set of heating and cooling systems?

In terms of features, both support Adaptive Temperature in the Home app, which automatically adjusts the thermostat based on time of day and whether someone is home. In the contiguous US, Clean Energy Guidance can shift heating and cooling to cleaner, lower-cost times of day for users whose utility plan supports it. Both thermostats support standalone temperature and humidity sensors ($39.95), or they can rely on the sensors built into the HomeView and Apple’s current HomePods.

Apple says that the Apple Home Collection will be available starting in December 2026 at apple.com and Apple Stores, with select accessories arriving in early 2027. Geographic availability varies: the cameras will be sold in the US, Canada, and the UK; locks, thermostats, and sensors will be available only in the US and Canada. For customers in the US who don’t want to install these items themselves, Apple Retail offers third-party installation from ADT for an additional charge.

The vulnerabilities, which have existed for more than a decade, were discovered by Wiz Research, a security firm that used Google’s Gemini 4 Argon and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol frontier AI models along with its own Wiz Atlas autonomous AI system for vulnerability research. This is just the latest example of how AI can be used to find and fix vulnerabilities, but in the wrong hands, it can also be used to exploit them. The executive summary to Wiz Research’s blog post lays it all out:

• Wiz Research uncovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in core PHP, a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers 70% of all websites in the world. Successful exploitation could allow attackers to take control of affected servers, steal sensitive data, and deface the websites running on them.
• PHP is a backbone of the web: it’s the programming language powering WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Wikipedia’s MediaWiki, and many others.
• These vulnerabilities include memory disclosure and unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP itself, independent of the application running on top of it, putting every affected website in immediate risk.
• Every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities, going back to version 5.4. Attackers can exploit them remotely, in some cases fairly easily. Immediate patching is strongly advised.
• On October 21, 2026, PHP released the patch fixing multiple memory-safety vulnerabilities in the core engine.
• These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history. The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability  required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve. Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.

Practically speaking, if you run a website, update PHP immediately or contact your hosting provider to confirm they’ve applied the patch—and pass this warning along to anyone you know who runs a site. Security experts say that exploits are already being deployed against unpatched sites.

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Mellel has released version 6.8 of its eponymous word processor, introducing a new Cloud Sync feature that lets you synchronize resources and settings (such as document templates, style sets, auto expander snippets, and more). Settings and data managed by Cloud Sync are stored on your iCloud Drive, enabling you to maintain the same environment across multiple computers as well as serve as a backup for your settings. The update also now enables you to switch between text selection mode and object selection mode for images, equations, text boxes, and tables by pressing Return; improves the selection behavior after making deletions in the outline; refines the document window appearance with fine adjustments to the coloring of the side pane, ruler, and find and replace pane; and adds support for multi-paragraph snippets in the Auto-Expander. ($69.99 new, free update, 108.1 MB, release notes, macOS 10.13+)

Ian Page has released Mactracker 8.3.1 with some improvements to the My Models feature in his popular encyclopedia of Apple products. The update adds the following to My Models: a key specification view, an option to associate storage capacity with older iPod and Mac models, and an option to mark if you have the original packaging for a device. It also improves the ability to associate a model with entries in My Models and updates support status for Apple’s latest Vintage and Obsolete products. (Free from the Mactracker website or the Mac App Store, 277.8 MB, release notes, macOS 11+)

Flexibits has released Fantastical 4.2.3 to add support for Microsoft 365 calendars shared with your whole organization (rather than directly with you). The calendar app improves searching for invitee email addresses, resolves an issue where importing an .ics file that cancels an event would show an error even though the import succeeded, eliminates a crash that could occur when using emoji in calendar set titles, fixes a bug where calendar items with multiple categories didn’t use the first enabled category to determine their color, and addresses an issue that prevented setting a location for calendar sets and travel time. ($57 annual subscription includes Cardhop from Flexibits and the Mac App Store, free updates, 61 MB, release notes, macOS 12+)

DEVONtechnologies has released DEVONthink 4.4.2, adding the ability to edit BibTeX (.bib) database format files as DEVONthink sheets. The document and information manager also adds support for opening bibliographic RIS (.ris) files as editable sheets, improves indenting and outdenting list items in Markdown documents so the cursor position is preserved, addresses a problem with link colors in the syntax-colorized or WYSIWYG view of Markdown documents, fixes a bug that prevented manually changing the numbering of a numbered list, and reduces high CPU usage caused by overdue smart rules. For Pro users, this version brings updated AI models, including Mistral Large 4, Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT Sol 6.1, Gemini 4 Argon, and Google Nano Banana 2.1. The free quarterly update for Joe Kissell’s Take Control of DEVONthink 4 has also been released and is up to date with version 4.4 (including improvements to external AI features and new scripts for MailMaven). ($99 new for DEVONthink, $199 for DEVONthink Pro, and $499 for DEVONthink Server with a 15% discount for TidBITS members; free update; release notes; 101 MB; macOS 13+)

Since updating Default Folder X to version 6.3 with support for macOS 27 Golden Gate, St. Clair Software has issued a few maintenance updates. Version 6.3.1 corrected a bug in Golden Gate that would immediately open a folder in a Save dialog when it was merely clicked, ensured pop-up menus in Save dialogs worked properly in Golden Gate, and made sure pinning and unpinning recent items in a topmost menu worked correctly. Version 6.3.2 resolved a conflict that could make it impossible to select from pop-up menus in Save dialogs when Apple’s Weather icon was showing in the menu bar, and improved the appearance and behavior of the drag target when dragging files in the Finder.

The most recent 6.3.3 release revisits the fix for pop-up menu failures in the previous version, which broke Save dialogs in macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, and makes sure the revised fix works on all systems. The update also adds a workaround for a Golden Gate issue that could prevent Default Folder X from working in apps based on the Qt cross-platform library, such as FreeCAD and WaveLab. To enable it, hold Option while choosing Settings from the Default Folder X menu, then turn on the “Work around macOS 27 process ID bug” option. ($39.95 new, free update, TidBITS members save $10 on new copies and $5 on upgrades, in Setapp, 28.8 MB, release notes, macOS 10.13+)

Flying Meat has published Acorn 8.7 with new features and improvements for the image editor. The release introduces a Synth Fill tool for brushing away unwanted objects, a Repair tool for spot healing and touch-ups, an Expand Selection option that lets you non-destructively expand the current selection by a set number of pixels, and several new filters (Temperature and Tint, High Pass, Edge Stroke, and Color Overlay). The update also improves Photoshop image imports and SVG import and export, fixes a printing problem that could leave too much whitespace around margins, makes the poly select tool more accurate on shape layers, and fixes HEIC encoding in Web export. ($29.99 new from Flying Meat and the Mac App Store, 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 37 MB, release notes, macOS 14+)

Rumors suggest Apple plans to announce new high-end MacBook models with touchscreens, OLED displays, and a Dynamic Island along the lines of the iPhone’s. More prosaically, others expect an M6-powered version of the base-level MacBook Pro.

Other products that have been batted around as candidates for this release event include an M6-powered version of the iMac and an updated model of the iPad mini with an A20 chip, OLED screen, and landscape-orientation camera.