2026-01-13 22:55:38
Wonder no longer about what the future holds for Apple’s pro apps. On Tuesday, the company announced its Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, and MainStage as well as additional features for productivity apps Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The bundle will be available starting on January 28.
Let’s start with the top line news: the subscription, which is a universal purchase across Apple’s platforms, is sharable across up to six members of an Apple family and will cost $12.99 per month or $129 for a year, with a one-month free trial. There’s also a substantial education discount for the bundle: $2.99 per month or just $29.99 per year. Additionally, customers purchasing a new Mac or a specific model of iPad1 will be able to get three months of the bundle for free.
You can also continue to buy the Mac versions of any these apps as an individual one-time purchase. The productivity apps themselves will stay free—subscribing to the bundle will only unlock additional features for that software.
All the pro apps gain new features as part of this update. Final Cut Pro gets Transcription Search to search through footage and find the right piece of audio; Beat Detection, which lets you time videos to beats in music; and Montage Maker, which uses AI to edit together a dynamic video where you can adjust the settings.
Logic Pro gains a Synth Player for its AI Session Players; Chord ID, which can turn audio into a chord progression; and a new Sound Library. The iPad version also gets the Mac version’s Quick Swipe Comping feature as well as Music Understanding functionality that helps you find a loop by using natural language to describe it.
Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.
As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.
Overall, this ground is well trod. Other companies like Adobe and Affinity have offered creative bundles of their software suites, and recurring subscription revenue is an attractive prospect for the company.
I’m glad that Apple is retaining the individual purchase option for the Mac apps: if you’re a pro who really only needs a single app, an individual purchase seems to make more sense. Any more than that, and you might be better off with the subscription—as long, of course, as you don’t mind paying in perpetuity.
I do wonder a bit about those who’d prefer to have the iPad apps as individual purchases, but I’d speculate that Apple has probably looked at what customers’ buying habits on that platform and see this as a way to juice adoption there.
2026-01-13 07:18:54
Google and Apple join forces to corner the market on smartphone AI models, John Ternus gets a profile in the New York Times, live NBA basketball comes to the Vision Pro, and Apple inconsistently refuses to stop bad App Store behavior.
2026-01-13 02:00:52
At Macworld Expo in January 2005, miniaturization was on Steve Jobs’s mind. Since the world was in the midst of iPod fever, most of the focus was on the tiny iPod Shuffle. But 21 years ago, Apple’s CEO also unveiled one of the most notable new Macs of all time. Yes, the Mac mini is now old enough to drink.
As someone who has owned many different Mac minis over the years, I’m about to extoll the virtues of Apple’s tiny, versatile Mac wonder. But even I, a noted Mac mini lover, have to admit that the most important thing about the Mac mini was its price.
It cost $499, which is still the lowest list price ever for a brand-new Mac. (The cheapest starting list price for a current Mac at the moment is the $599 Mac mini.) As Jobs pointed out, this price meant that Apple was cutting all the frills out of the Mac mini’s packaging: This was strictly BYODKM, or Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse.
2026-01-13 00:30:47
I came across two seemingly unrelated pieces of news recently that I am tying together as the theme of this column.
First, the heartbreaking garbage information that senior citizens may receive as many as 50 calls a day from salespeople trying to get them to reveal enough personal data that it can be used to commit fraud or identity theft, including charging Medicare for unneeded care or supplies or never-performed procedures.
Second, a wildly varying set of statistics about the percentage of iPhone owners who have upgraded to iOS 26. Is it 15%, 26%, 55%, or far more? We don’t know. But it appears to be far less adoption this far out than updates to iOS 18 a year ago. Blame Liquid Glass, or user exhaustion, or the amount of unused storage required.
The practical combination is that tools introduced in the 26 releases for Phone and Messages, particularly useful on an iPhone, are either not being used or could be used better.
Apple stepped up to the plate on overhauling and improving the way that unwanted and full-on spam messages are identified and categorized, and can be blocked. Let’s look at how you could configure your phone—and that of people you love—to better lock out the creepo fraudsters.
In that Times Medicare scam article, one senior explained to the reporter why he answers every call:
His family can’t set the phone to allow calls only from preapproved numbers, because that would filter out some medical calls. And changing his phone number seems unfeasible, given that every legitimate contact would have to be notified.
“I’m counting the days until open enrollment ends,” Ms. Kurutz said.
With iOS 26, there’s a lot more that can be done, even by a user who isn’t a smartphone expert. Most of the actions that can be taken are as complex as answering a call or not much more so. The benefits of acting on them should be enough to reinforce behavior.
The most incredible thing you can enable for yourself or someone else right away is the Screen Unknown Callers feature in the Settings app in Apps: Phone. To balance the need to get calls from unknown parties while also avoiding fraud, enable Ask Reason for Calling. Now, any incoming call that isn’t from a number in contacts requires the calling party to provide a little information, which is automatically transcribed and can be viewed in real time.
If it’s a scammer, it’s easy enough to tap Stop or just ignore. Any legitimate party will say who they are. Later, you can select the call and tap Report Spam. While some fraudsters rotate through numbers like mad, I think some industry and governmental measures in the United States to reduce the ability to fake incoming phone numbers have worked: If I don’t block a number immediately, I will often see calls from it over time until I do. I also find that looking up a number via a search engine leads me to a page with a huge number of spam reports, meaning that number should be blocked in any case.
People unfortunate enough to follow me on Bluesky know that I needed a lot of medical care in 2025—things are going great now!—and I enabled this iOS 26 feature in the summer on a beta release. I constantly had calls coming from healthcare workers, and the filtering feature meant I answered all of those (and then marked them as known callers), and was able to avoid dozens of others.
Because of the possible need to receive calls from unknown numbers, as above, you may want to leave Phone settings for Call Filtering: Unknown Callers turned off. If you don’t, then a screened or missed call from such a number requires tapping the Filter menu and choosing Unknown Callers to review it. At least a red dot appears over the Filter icon when there are messages in Unknown Callers or Spam to give a cue.
The other option in this section, Spam, should be turned on. It lets you rely on a carrier’s analysis from phone network traffic of call patterns or customer reports of spam. I also recommend installing the free version of the apps from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon that let you enable spam detection at the network level—that can block some calls even before they reach your phone.
The Call Blocking & Identification option is yet another way to amp up your iPhone’s intelligence about calls you (or a loved one) doesn’t want. Services from companies like Hiya receive spam reports constantly, and push out updates to a list that’s resident on your device that allows instant matching for potential or well-known spam numbers. Enabling one of these apps lets calls that pass through other layers of filtering display a label identifying a call you might not or surely don’t want. With a paid subscription, you can also show enhanced Caller ID information.
While Phone has received the biggest boost at fighting crud, and Messages is not where most of the Medicare and other kinds of relentless fraud come from, it’s still worth enabling in Settings in Apps: Messages: Screen Unknown Senders and Apps: Messages: Filter Spam. This lets you tap Filter: Unknown Senders or Filter Spam to review messages dropped into those buckets.
This takes more training. I find I have to tap Mark as Known or Not Spam on more messages than phone calls—most phone calls are correctly identified.
While I’m focused on iPhone here, call screening can be used in Phone for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS; some of the other screening options are slightly different or missing on macOS, but if you have them enabled on your iPhone, the effect is the same. It’s only if your iPhone were turned off that you would see a difference.
Look, I know you have feelings about Liquid Glass—speaking to both upgraded people and non-upgraders—but I think there’s a value to overcoming that distaste and taking advantage of the good. Reducing the attention stolen away from you can be worth the cognitive load of adapting to a new interface.
For those who want extra help in sorting out iOS 26 and spam, you can check out three of my books:
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2026-01-12 23:52:46
Updated with the full text of Apple’s statement below.
According to a statement from Apple to CNBC, the company has officially selected Google as the technology partner for its foundation models. News that this deal was in the works had previously been reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman as far back as March of 2024.
The full implications of this deal aren’t yet known, but it’s likely to affect both Siri as well as other Apple Intelligence features, several of which were first announced in 2024 but have yet to actually ship. Gurman has also previously reported that those delayed Apple Intelligence features are likely to make their debut in iOS 26.4 this spring.
It’s unclear exactly where in the timeframe we are. Given that 26.3 is already in beta, and 26.4 is expected in a few months, it’s possible that work has long since started on this, even if it’s only being officially announced now.1 Even with the leg-up provided by Google’s models, it seems unlikely the company could simply roll in that tech for a feature due out in short order.
It had previously been thought that Google’s Gemini would be offered as an option via Siri, in the same way that ChatGPT has been available for some time. That was tacitly confirmed by Apple software chief Craig Federighi who said at the company’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, “we may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future.” But that deal never materialized—perhaps in part because the two companies were discussing this more substantive deal?
Either way, Google’s models are clearly a step up from Apple’s own endeavors thus far. The two companies also have a longstanding relationship over search in Safari, which makes this perhaps an unsurprising continuation of that. But as to whether it can help Apple dig itself out of the AI hole in which it’s found itself, well, we’ll find out soon enough.
Apple provided Six Colors with the full statement:
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
2026-01-12 06:07:38
Norbert Heger gets to the bottom of a problem I’ve been having lately—my inability to resize macOS Tahoe windows at their corners:
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.
If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window… But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window.
That’s right, folks, the solution to resizing the corner of a window in Tahoe is to click outside the edge of the window. I can’t even.
