2026-11-12 03:00:00
Flying home robots like Amazon’s Ring drones, how close we’d let AI agents like Claude Duet and Muse get, the body trackers we wear and what we’ve learned, and our thoughts on the whole Nvidia thing.
2026-11-12 02:00:00
I have never owned an Apple Watch. And apart from trying a watch on here and there for demo purposes, I’ve never really worn an Apple Watch, not for an extended period anyhow. And up until the Apple Watch Series 12’s unveiling earlier this year, I expected that to remain the case for years to come.
This is no knock specifically on the Apple Watch, incidentally. I could say the same thing for a Galaxy Watch, a Pixel Watch, even just a regular old wristwatch. I don’t like wearing things on my wrist. Even if you slap one of those ID bands you sometimes wear at concerts or other public venues on me, I’ll spend half my time mindlessly pawing at my arm, trying to shake off whatever’s on my wrist.
How committed am I to the No Wristwatches Ever bit? For much of my life, I carried around a pocket watch, and it was only partially because I was adopting an affectation. Once the iPhone came along, providing a slightly more advanced clock to carry around in my pocket, the pocket watch went back into the dresser drawer for good.
So why is the Apple Watch Series 12 finally the device that’s going to break this anti-watch stance I’ve adopted? Well, I may not like wearing things on my wrist, but I dislike not being able to hear things even more. And the Audio Intelligence features on the latest Apple smartwatches seem like a promising solution for problems caused by my dodgy hearing.
As a gentleman whose odometer passed the half-century mark a few years back, I’m in relatively good shape in most areas. Unfortunately, those areas do not include my hearing, which has been in steady decline since my 20s. Things aren’t so bad that I need a hearing aid to go about my business, but depending on the setting, making heads or tails out of what someone is saying can prove challenging.
When my wife tries to tell me something from an adjoining room, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll have no idea what she’s talking about. If you’re speaking while facing away from me, you might as well be in a cone of silence. And in noisy settings — a crowded restaurant, a busy commuter train or heaven forfend a concert — I’m going to do a lot of nodding politely and smiling to cover for the fact that I haven’t heard a word anybody’s said.
It’s not the worst affliction to have in the world. There’s an out-of-kilter signal-to-noise ratio out there in the world, and not being able to hear a lot of it filters out much of the latter. But yes, there are times I need to hear what’s being said to me and plaintively asking “Would you mind repeating that?” only helps so much. That’s where the Apple Watch Series 12 and its Live Rewind feature come into play.
Announced by Apple at its September product event, Live Rewind is a feature coming via the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 that provides a transcript of anything that someone has said to you in the last 15 seconds. You activate the feature by double-pressing the Digital Crown on your watch; you also have to enable the feature in the Watch app by selecting Siri and tapping Live Rewind followed by turning on the Double Click Digital Crown Setting.
With an Apple Watch 12 on my wrist — the Ultra’s too fancy for the likes of me — I can glance at the display when I didn’t quite make out all the details of what someone just told me. Didn’t quite catch what the nurse at my mom’s care facility just said? Missed the particulars of some instructions my wife gave me as she was heading out the door? Did the bartender rattle off the beers on tap just a bit too quickly? Now the Apple Watch and Live Rewind hold the answers to life’s mysteries.
Live Rewind, which is part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, is just one of the Audio Intelligence features that take advantage of the built-in microphone and S11 chip found on Apple’s latest watches. Siri Recap, also part of the watchOS 27.3 beta, can provide you with AI-generated summaries of conversations you’ve had during the day. Sound Recognition and Music Recognition are already part of watchOS 27 — the former notifies you when it detects alarms, doorbells and sirens while the latter is essentially Shazam on your wrist. All four features are a boon to those of us who don’t hear as well as we used to.
Naturally, the idea that the latest Apple Watches are always listening and taking notes is going to raise some concerns — legitimate ones, too. The people whose conversations get summarized by Siri Recap or whose words are being repeated back to you via Live Rewind didn’t consent to any of this, so a very strong argument could be made that these features are crowding in on people’s privacy.
Apple’s response — both in an Audio Intelligence support document and a white paper on privacy that goes into even greater detail — essentially boils down to the fact that nothing’s being recorded or stored. Instead, the audio is routed through a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, where it can’t be accessed by anything else, including Apple.
Live Rewind and Sound Recognition do all their processing on device. Siri Recap is sending detected summaries of transcribed audio off-device, but it’s doing that through Private Cloud Compute to maintain privacy. And what you’re getting back isn’t a word-for-word transcript but more of a summary meant to refresh your memory.
That’s all well and good for you and your privacy, but what about the people around you? Live Rewind plays a chime when it’s activated to cut down on the chance of surreptitious listening. Apple also says the feature is supposed to focus on conversations you’re involved in, not eavesdrop on ones taking place around you. And there’s no speaker identification or attribution, though if names come up in a conversation, they’ll be reflected in the summary.
Most of those explanations work for me, to the point where I’d be comfortable that Live Rewind isn’t infringing on people’s privacy. Still, I recognize that technology designed for benign uses can be exploited by bad actors, so that’s something Apple — and Apple Watch owners — are going to have to remain vigilant about.
Of course, all this Apple Watch talk ignores that there’s an alternative out there for those of us with hearing issues — a pair of AirPods Pro earbuds can double as a hearing aid, at least if you’ve got the second or third generation on hand. A Live Listen feature turns your iPhone into a microphone to help you better hear conversations, and it works with a wider variety of AirPods, too.
I’m not quite sure that’s the best solution for my particular needs. For starters, I’d have to upgrade to the AirPods Pro 3, and while that $249 outlay is cheaper than an Apple Watch Series 12, it’s not that much cheaper when you factor in the other capabilities a smartwatch offers. Plus, the hearing aid feature would require me to wear AirPods more consistently, something that strikes me as awkward when I’m out on a social call. Say what you will about wearing something on your wrist — and I’ve said plenty — but at least it feels more natural than keeping your AirPods on during a fancy dinner.
So am I ready to run out and get an Apple Watch now that it has a feature I find truly useful? Not quite — but I’m closer to getting a smartwatch than I ever have been, and Live Rewind certainly is helping me get there. And that’s kind of how technology works.
We don’t buy gadgets and gizmos just to own the latest thing — we buy them because they solve a need in our lives. For a lot of people, the Apple Watch became a more attractive option as Apple built out the health and fitness tracking features that made this device more than just a wrist-sized version of the iPhone. Those users wanted a better picture of their health, and Apple managed to produce something that provided exactly that.
Up until now, I could take or leave those health-monitoring capabilities. But a device that helps me understand what people are saying to me in a noisy room, that’s a watch feature whose time has finally come.
2026-11-11 23:23:56
When I was in Los Angeles getting briefed on the MacBook Pro with PROLED, I asked Apple representatives directly about how they made the Apple logo on the back glow again, given that OLED displays don’t leak light out the back.
They jokingly told me it was “magic,” said that it was actually hard work to do, and refused to get into details.
Okay, I said—I’ll just wait for iFixit to tear one apart.
On old MacBooks, light from the LCD backlight shone through an apple-shaped window in the lid. But the PROLED’s pixels make their own light. So, yes, Apple waited until the first MacBook Pro without a backlight to bring back the backlit logo.
Of course we had to get inside.
The result is pretty much what you’d expect:
Under a taped patch in the middle we found four LEDs, all in a strip along one edge. The light hits a reflective layer and passes through a diffuser, turning four little points of light into one evenly glowing apple. The logo itself has a mirror-like coating that looks shiny with the lights off.
(There’s also a YouTube video of the teardown.)
My favorite aspect of this new easter egg of a feature is that with the light off, you can’t tell that it’s the new MacBook Pro. It doesn’t look like the white logo cut-out of years past; it looks exactly like the mirrored metallic logos of the last decade. Except… then it lights up. Magic indeed.
2026-11-11 23:13:39
In a long-overdue move, Apple has brought down the hammer on its “Apple Support Community” forum. As Joe Rossignol at MacRumors reports:
Apple’s full notice added to the site: “The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state. You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site. We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.”
It is the end of an era. Apple offered an online discussion forum for user-to-user technical support since 1998, when it launched the Apple Tech Exchange. The forums were renamed to Apple Discussions in 2000, and then to the Apple Support Communities in 2011, before taking on their current Apple Support Community name in 2022.
Apple informed MacRumors that it decided to sunset the Apple Support Community after a careful evaluation of strategy and customer needs.
These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.
But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.
Good riddance.
2026-11-11 18:00:00
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Apple rushes the iPod to the finish line and then introduces it to an uneasy and uncertain world.
2026-11-11 02:00:00
This may sound like an odd request coming from a guy whose to-do list includes filing a weekly App Report highlighting interesting macOS and iOS offerings, but I really hope Apple keeps a tight lid on the apps that can appear on its HomeView smart display. I’d even take that wish one step further to implore app makers not to flood the zone with HomeView-based offerings if there ever comes a day that Apple does open up development for its latest device.
This is not me hoping for less work in the future due to laziness, though Lord knows, I am that. Rather, it’s a recognition of the fact that, as showcased by Apple, the HomeView seems to serve a very specific purpose and turning it into a device that can run every app under the sun like the iPhone and iPad before it might lessen its effectiveness.
The HomeView needs to act as a hub when you need it to be and stay out of the way the rest of the time. And loading it up with too many apps might make it more difficult for the HomeView to recede into the background.
From what I’ve seen of HomeView during its October debut, Apple designed this $299 hub as a way to control your smarthome devices while also taking care of a few other tasks, whether that’s listening to music, checking out recipes, staying up to date on your messages or what have you. That’s true whether we’re talking about the table-top model with its adjustable Liquid Retina display or the version of HomeView that you mount on the wall. In either case, the guiding principle of HomeView appears to be simplicity.
What HomeView doesn’t appear to be is a device that demands to be at the center of your life, even if “hub” is part of the description. You’re already carrying around a device that keeps you constantly connected in the form of an iPhone, and when you need a big screen for more intensive work, you can turn to a Mac or even an iPad. In contrast, the HomeView seems like it’s designed for very specific purposes and not much else.
The app situation on the initial model arriving in stores on November 13 reflects that. Apple lists 15 included apps on board the HomeView, and apart from Intercom — a HomeView-specific app that lets you make audio announcements throughout the home to connected speakers — they’re going to be familiar offerings to anyone who’s used an Apple device.
There’s the Home app, of course, for controlling smart devices from a central location, and Apple includes a few other familiar faces for managing your daily life. Apps like Calendar, Reminders and Weather give you an overview of your day. Safari lets you browse the web from your HomeView, with a special mode for displaying recipes if you’ve got the device set up in a kitchen. Music and Podcasts let you stream entertainment while you’re going about your business, and you can connect to TV, Audiobooks and a handful of other options on your iPhone for additional entertainment resources. And there’s FaceTime for video chats — ideal for the HomeView since you don’t have to hold the device and talk like you would on an iPhone or iPad.
Save for a workaround for audio and video apps that support CarPlay, you can’t install apps on your HomeView. There’s also no App Store, suggesting that Apple thinks of this device as a closed shop, at least out of the gate.
Of course, the iPhone took the same approach initially. It’s hard to remember after two decades of “There’s an app for that” marketing, but the phone Steve Jobs showed off back in 2007 had 15 apps, and that was that. It took a year for Apple to open up the iPhone for third-party apps, and developers were quick to make up for lost time.
Could a similar scenario play out with the HomeView? Certainly, it’s possible. If you’re already using your home hub to look up recipes, why not add a calorie-counting or meal-planning app? You can access your daily schedule and your to-dos, so why not add your health data as well, with maybe some exercise apps thrown in for good measure? Oh, and the HomeView supports entertainment apps, you say? Well, nothing’s more entertaining than games, all the games, oh so many games.
That’s the sort of mission creep I think Apple must avoid with the HomeView. Some apps for managing your life make sense, so long as they’re consistent with the idea of a central hub that you’re checking when it’s convenient. But if you keep expanding that functionality to an ever-increasing array of apps, the HomeView becomes just another screen you wind up staring at, no different from an iPhone or iPad or what have you. And perhaps paradoxically, the need for a device like a HomeView dissipates as its functionality expands.
So my plea for the HomeView — to Apple, to app makers, to anyone who will listen really — is to think long and hard about expanding the home hub’s ability to add apps. Take it from someone who ekes out a living reviewing these sorts of things: Sometimes less is more.
