Apple introduced its next major macOS release, macOS 27 Golden Gate, at its WWDC event. The new operating system update, coming this fall, includes a series of new artificial intelligence gestures, as well as iterations to the "liquid glass" design introduced in last year's release, macOS 26 Tahoe.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that the 27 releases were focused on more polished and intuitive operating systems, trust and safety (including for children), and updates to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Unlike previous years, Apple spent most of its time highlighting changes that affect the entirety of its platforms, meaning that many of the improvements on Mac are also available in some form on the iPhone or iPad, and vice versa, reflecting the continuing deep integration in Apple's ecosystem of products, including iPhone (iOS 27), iPad (iOS 27), and watchOS (watchOS 27).

macOS will include some specific upgrades, including ultrawide display support with higher resolutions, and an updated video podcast player, while many others, like updates to iCloud shared albums and changes to Maps, are across multiple platforms. In many ways, the focus on fixes is reminiscent of 2009's OS X Snow Leopard, which was famous for fixing problems rather than introducing tons of new features.

Liquid Glass

Apple is making changes to Liquid Glass across its platforms to make content more readable and decrease distractions. Glass will now better diffuse content behind it.

A new slider in settings will let you move from from ultra-clear to fully tinted, letting you customize how much it affects readability.

Specifically on the Mac, Apple is adding a uniform tool bar across the top of apps, which harkens back to more traditional Mac design. Expanded sidebars will move to the edge of windows, and sidebar icons will regain their colors. Additionally, every window will have tighter corner radii, even if they're not updated, for improved consistency across the OS. These were all complaints from Mac diehards over the last year.

In app icons across platforms, there will be additional layers of glass in icons to make them sharper and more defined.

Improvements

Apple said that it is bringing a massive amount of improvements under the hood of macOS and other platforms, with focus on CPU usage, memory usage, display rendering, and more. Apple claims apps can launch 30% faster on the iPhone and iPad, while new photos will show up in the library up to 70% faster. The advanced CPU scheduler on the iPhone is being optimized and brought all the way back to the iPhone 11, which will be the oldest iPhone supporting iOS 27.

Network transitions — especially between cellular and Wi-Fi — were also highlighted, so you don't have to toggle as often.

The company also highlighted a new content index across Spotlight, photos, mail and more, which will index your existing files immediately and continue to do so as new content comes in. Apple demonstrated a new ranking system for mail on Mac, showing more relevant results, even if it's years old.

AI and Siri

Federighi claimed that the mission is to turn AI into helpful and intuitive products, rather than AI for the sake of AI.

"Truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Federighi said, saying it needs to be designed for devices, apps, and with privacy in mind. Surprisingly, Federighi briefly mentioned that its foundation models are integrated with Gemini and will be used "on-device and in servers" with private cloud compute. Additionally, Apple has a more powerful on-device model.

Apple SVP for Siri engineering Mike Rockwell showed off a revamped Siri. The new Siri grows out of the dynamic island with "Hey Siri" or when you hold the buttons. It retains context between interactions.

A new voice experience includes a more conversational tone. Voice can now be customized for expressivity and pace, with sliders to adjust them in a new Siri app.

Rockwell asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, and Siri told him when the concert will be. You can even inquire about tickets, which in this case were part of a lottery. Rockwell asked to be added to the lottery and to play her newest single in separate requests, as it remembered context.

He also demonstrated finding photos from a recent trip, asking Siri to pick out photos that include just specific people, and then share them with family members via text – without even having to go into the Photos app.

On iOS, you can swipe down, use the side button, or say "Hey Siri." On the Mac, Siri is integrated into Spotlight, or you can use Siri requests in system menus. One demonstration included using Siri on a Mac to help build a Maker Space at a child's school. When "How should I think about building a maker space in a shed” was typed into Spotlight, macOS realized it was a question specifically for the assistant. Siri was able to search through texts from the demonstrator's son, to address lingering electrical issues and find a fix.

Siri AI is also coming to iPadOS, where you can use the dedicated Siri App. You'll be able to see a conversational history synced with iCloud across devices, including Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone. On visionOS, you can simply look at Siri and initiate your query.

Visual Intelligence will be integrated into the iPhone camera app. You can tap the shutter button for Siri AI to “see what you see” and provide contextual information, powered by Apple Foundation models. Pointing your iPhone at a plate of food can give you nutritional information, while showing the camera an image of a restaurant bill will let you split it among friends. You can also use visual intelligence to ask about items presented on your screen.

You'll also be able to write with Siri anywhere you type. Siri can generate drafts, including emails, and will provide suggestions and automatic proofreading, available systemwide, even in third-party apps.

Siri AI won't be available in the European Union and China initially, as Apple deals with international regulation and privacy laws. Siri AI will first be available in English.

Apple Intelligence in apps

Apple also demonstrated how Intelligence can be used within and across applications, including Safari, Passwords, Photos, and Home.

In Safari, Apple has introduced tab management features, which can organize tabs into topics. Another option lets you monitor a page and asks you to "Notify me" for changes on a page, like a product coming back in stock or a ticket becoming available. You can then close the tab, but Siri will notify you when the page has changed. Perhaps the most impressive change is one to Shortcuts. You can describe what you want a Shortcut to do in natural language, and it brings together the steps automatically. One example: “When I’m leaving home, message Pedro” brings together a shortcut using Maps and Messages, which should open up Shortcuts to a much wider variety of people who may have been put off by its complicated nature.

Other demos included custom Safari extensions to adapt web pages for you, a Password app that can automatically fix compromised passwords for you on "eligible" accounts. In messages, you can get one-tap suggestions, and the phone app can find flight information when calling an airline.

For Home, Apple Intelligence can understand how a number of unrelated notifications work together to create fewer notifications and provide images from multiple security cameras. It can even track package deliveries across multiple cameras. 4K resolution will work on supported cameras.

In the Image Playground, you can create high-quality images in any style, with the image generation model running on private cloud compute. You can use natural language to adjust existing images and use it across the device, such as on your lock screen. The Photos app may have the most controversial aspects, as you can extend photos to change photo borders without cropping. There's also an option to reframe the entire scene with a spatial camera, as if you were moving the lens in the original shot. This feature works on any image in your library, even if you've taken the photos on other cameras or phones.

These features will support all languages Apple Intelligence works with. Some features will have usage limits that will adjust based on iCloud+ subscriptions.

Developers will have access to improved models, including server models, through a new API that will support natural language and images.

Lastly, Apple highlighted updates to XCode, including agentic coding, choosing the model and agent of your choice (including the newly added Google Gemini). It can connect to Figma and GitHub for design, and a new Device Hub will let developers simulate devices, including touch screens, alongside real-world testing devices.

Trust and Safety

Apple also demonstrated new child safety tools, with new child accounts and parental controls. Child accounts will automatically block adult websites and implement app store age restrictions.

Children will be able to ask parents for permission to buy or download apps in messages, as well as browse new websites in Safari for children under 13. There will be similar permissions for contacting new people outside of your family.

A new safety communication warns about nude images and intervenes, but will also be expanded to gore or violent content. Parents will have Time Allowances across entertainment, games, and social media, with shared allowances across all three, or you can set them individually. A redesigned Screen Time will let parents see how devices are being used. Developer tools are being made more capable for third-party apps to take advantage of the new features.

Golden Gate will be the first version of macOS to exclusively support Apple Silicon Macs. Last year, Apple announced that Tahoe would be the final major release to support Intel-based systems. (Intel-based Macs will still receive three years of security updates.) This is the last macOS release to support Rosetta 2, the tool that lets Apple Silicon computers run Intel applications through an emulation layer (though parts may stick around to keep legacy games running). Without Intel processors to support, Apple is urging developers to make native applications for its own silicon.

Support and Release Dates

Developer betas for the 27-suite of OS releases are available today, with public betas starting in July. Final releases are expected in the fall.

macOS 27 Golden Gate will be supported on devices with Apple Silicon. Apple's website specifies:

• MacBook Neo
• MacBook Air (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• MacBook Pro (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• iMac (2021 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac mini (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Studio (2022 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (2023)

However, adjustments to Siri's voice and advanced dictation will require newer chips on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. On the Mac, that means "an M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory." Otherwise, you need an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, or Apple Vision Pro with M5.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the top job to serve as executive chairman of the company's board of directors. He will be replaced by current senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, the company announced in a press release.

Cook will serve as CEO until Ternus takes the top job on September 1. The company notes that as executive chairman, Cook will continue to engage with "policymakers around the world," likely leaving him in charge of relationships with the Trump administration, China, India, and other areas where Apple has manufacturing and political interests.

Cook, 65, originally joined Apple in 1998 from Compaq. He was handpicked by Steve Jobs to become CEO in 2011, and became known for turning Apple's supply chain operation into a well-oiled international machine. Apple's press release highlights that during Cook's Tenure, "Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025."

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company," Cook said in the release. "I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world... I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with [Ternus] on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”

Ternus has worked at Apple for over 25 years and has served as an increasingly visible hardware mind in Cupertino, most recently showcasing the iPhone Air and the MacBook Neo. He also oversaw the Mac's shift to Apple Silicon and away from Intel.

Ternus began at Apple in 2001 on the product design team and rose through the ranks, overseeing hardware engineering across multiple products, including the introduction of the iPad and AirPods. Before working at Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

At 50 years old, Ternus is the same age that Cook was when he became chief executive, affording him stability and a long tenure. He will serve as Apple's eighth CEO.

Cook's legacy is likely to be one that was safe and extremely profitable. While showing off his supply chain mastery, he also introduced Apple to the services business, including Apple TV and Apple News, which has become a sector worth more than $100 billion in its own right. During Cook's leadership, the company debuted the Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Silicon Macs. Cook also promised to reduce the company's carbon footprint, including a goal to become carbon neutral by 2030.

But under Cook, Apple also faltered with artificial intelligence, and the company hasn't been on the cutting edge of the latest technology. Apple is expected to release an update to its Siri voice assistant later this year, but it will have been several times delayed and will be based on Google's Gemini model.

When he becomes CEO, Ternus will join the company's board of directors. Arthur Levinson, the company's non-executive chairman for the last 15 years, will become lead independent director.

Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, will immediately become chief hardware officer, leading the department that Ternus oversaw and getting a significantly expanded role. Srouji, who previously served at Intel and IBM, joined Apple in 2008 to lead development on A4, Apple's first system-on-a-chip, for the iPhone 4. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Srouji was looking for a bigger role or would consider leaving. Srouji told staff he "didn't plan on leaving anytime soon."

Speaking from personal experience, using a Mac as a server or server-like contraption is quite an interesting proposition, as despite its Unix roots, the operating system isn't exactly designed for unattended, 24/7 usage and is difficult to set up and use as such — fighting words, but I stand by them. While most every user will reboot their Mac at least once in the space of a few weeks, if you happen to leave one running for precisely 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds, many parts will suddenly stop working as its TCP/IP networking stack dies.

Those are the findings of the folks at Photon, who did some serious sleuthing after encountering a mysterious issue in a fleet of Macs they use to monitor iMessage services. The problem revealed itself when some machines just up and stopped responding to network connections out of the blue, even though they answered ping requests with an "all good here, boss!"

Said machines kept their existing network connections going, making the situation even harder to diagnose, as the failure was unexplainable and otherwise invisible. Not left with much of an option, Photon's boffins had to reboot the machines to clear the issue, something any systems administrator hates as a "solution" to a mystery issue. After all, if it happened once, it'll happen again, and assuredly at the worst possible time.

After the team spotted another set of machines that was reaching the 49.7-day uptime, they set up some scripts to test their theory. Alas, they found that when the fateful moment arrived, the Mac they had continuously creating new connections just stopped doing so without so much as an error.

The team then turned its attention to the root cause, as it was clearly related to a networking-related timer. They found the culprit to be the "tcp_now" internal counter, a figure that was "destined to overflow." The job tcp_now does is to keep track of the current time since boot as far as the TCP stack is concerned, down to the millisecond. tcp_now is represented as a 32-bit unsigned integer, and those have a maximum value of 4,294,967,295 (2^32 - 1) before they wrap around to zero. Since it tracks milliseconds, tcp_now's maximum is 4,294,967 seconds, or 49.7 days.

As defined by standards, operating systems collect and remove closed TCP connections after a short while; 30 seconds in the case of macOS. The result of attempting to clean up these inactive connections when tcp_now is close to or at its limit (and gets stuck there thanks to a bug in Apple's XNU kernel) is that any connection's expiration status is calculated against that frozen number, resulting in a value that always overflows a 32-bit unsigned integer. When the periodic check comes to see whether a closed connection is meant to be deleted, the result is always "no," because the comparison math doesn't work.

The TCP stack then fills up with errantly held ephemeral ports and effectively grinds to a halt when no more are available. How quickly that happens depends on the amount of network activity, but in any server or professional environment that's bound to be a rapid event. This class of problems is hardly known, integer overflows have been the cause of Windows 98's famous 49.7-day crash and the upcoming Year 2038 problem.

According to Photon, the current mitigation is a reboot, although the team says it's working on an alternative solution. They also found this issue to be the source of some bugs discussed online in the Apple Community forums, too. The long-existing RFC 7323 specifies what should happen to the timestamp clock (tcp_now) when it reaches its limit, but Apple's kernel performs an incorrect implementation. It's safe to say this issue will likely be fixed quickly—and hopefully before 49.7 days after the report.

This week, Apple’s Mac OS X hit a quarter-century milestone. It officially launched on March 24, 2001, though a public beta had been available for tinkerers for almost six months. Heralded by Steve Jobs as “the future of the Mac,” the fresh new operating system presented an ‘Aqua’ aesthetic dipped GUI over a Unix-based foundation. In 2026, even after three upheavals to the underlying Mac computer architecture, OS X is more popular than ever, and looks set to win flocks of new converts with the affordable MacBook Neo.

You can’t just launch an OS on an established platform without some mitigations and workarounds. I remember at the time of OS X’s introduction, we had a very polished ‘classic’ Mac OS version 9, though it may have been slightly fragile. As a transition user (I used Macs at work and home at the time), OS X felt rough, a big step backwards in usability, despite all the marketing bombast of Jobs and Co. For several years, Mac users had to juggle with ‘Carbon’ apps running natively and others causing the computer to start up the ‘Classic’ environment – an OS9 instance in a sandbox.

It wasn’t a very smooth experience mixing legacy and newer applications for several years. Nevertheless, in many ways, it was an achievement by Apple to transition its users from one OS to another while gaining popularity. This transition occurred when Macs were enjoying pretty good momentum from the colorful iMac G3 era.

Stepping back a little, it must be remembered that Apple’s development teams already had transitional success moving from the Motorola 680X0 architecture (from 1984 to around 1994-6) to PowerPC (1994 to 2006). They might have had an inkling at the time of OS X’s development and release that there would be another underlying hardware shakeup on the way.

Apple’s developers were very likely better prepared for the PowerPC to Intel architecture transition, not only thanks to prior experience, but also due to the UNIX underpinnings of OS X being built on components that already had portable multi-architecture support. While the 68K to PPC transition saw the necessity is the mother of invention, ‘fat binaries’ of mixed architecture code were introduced, OS X reused this concept with ‘Universal Binaries.’ Moreover, the Rosetta PPC-x86 (2006) translator was simpler than the 68K emulator that the first versions of Mac OS X had to incorporate.

OS X was introduced to modernize Apple’s desktop OS with features like protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a real kernel, and modern graphics stack. However, probably by accident rather than design, it ended up being much easier to transition to Intel.

The latest version of Mac OS X is currently macOS 26 (they changed the nomenclature about a decade ago), Tahoe. Apple’s grown-up OS hasn’t risen without a few of its own ‘Vista’ or ‘Windows 11’ moments over the years, though. For example, the newest release has been criticized for gatekeeper tightening behavior, making running unapproved or unsigned apps tricker than before. It also had a ‘Vista UAC’ type issue with users being annoyed by re-authorization prompts for app permissions.

Long before the MacBook ever existed, Apple offered consumers its iconic iBook line. Born after Steve Jobs' return to the company in 1996, it was a cheaper and less powerful follow-up to Apple's professional laptop solution, the PowerBook. Clearly, that segmentation didn't hurt its support, because even 27 years after its launch, the iBook lineup is still capable of receiving updates from Apple's servers.

MacOS which officially supports 27 year old iBooks can still connect to a modern Wi-Fi network, and download updates from apple servers without any modifications, Apple is the opposite of planned obsolescence. from r/MacOS

The post above — which has triggered this wave of nostalgiac outpouring — shows an iBook G4, released later in 2003, but the longevity of Apple's legacy software support in theory applies to the whole iBook lineup, including the older, colorful iBook G3, first released in 1999.

The poster was able to download a few patches in the ripe year of 2026; granted, these aren't truly full updates, as even security support for the iBook G4 ended in 2011. Still, the fact that these files are sitting ready, just waiting for anyone who needs them, is impressive. Having a functional macOS still up and running on this machine is equivalent to Windows 98 being hosted on Microsoft's servers today (spoiler alert: it isn't).

While the post's author was quick to praise Apple, the comments do point out the nuance that these are just decade-old updates piled up over the years. OP likely opened his iBook just now or connected it to the internet for the first time in a while and received these updates. That's another aspect to point out here: this 21-year-old device is capable of connecting to a modern Wi-Fi network without any mods, a significant part of the iBook G4's legacy.

The iBook was a very important device for Apple as it repositioned the public's image toward both the company and toward laptops in general. It was the first mainstream consumer laptop with Wi-Fi (Apple called it AirPort), and coupled with the hula-hooping demo on stage, it was like you could see the wireless future right there. It's only poetic that almost three decades later, people are impressed seeing how seamlessly it connects to the internet. It may not be able to browse websites as efficiently, but it paved the way for every laptop to come.

A youthful Steve Jobs unveiled the original Apple Macintosh 42 years ago. Far more than just yet-another-PC launch, Jobs’ unveiling was a pivot point in the way that humans would interact with computers for work and play. It popularized the intuitive windows, icons, menus, and pointers (WIMP) model of computer interactivity. We’re still wedded to this paradigm, despite the best efforts of 3D, AR, XR, VR, voice interaction, gesture controls, and even brain computer interface designers.

Jobs gives the audience a live Macintosh demo, on January 24, 1984.

The Apple co-founder started his presentation with an inauspicious looking rectangular bag on a desk. It looked a lot like one of the now-familiar insulated takeaway delivery bags, used by delivery app riders.

Jobs lifted the Apple Macintosh out of its cover, placed it on the desk, plugged in a power cable and mouse. The screen briskly came to life with the on-screen disk icon prompting to be fed. Then the Apple exec coolly pulled a 3.5-inch floppy from his blazer pocket, inserted it, and the audience watched a killer computer demonstration - all generated by the computer.

The original Mac demo began with a large ‘MACINTOSH’ scrolling banner, to rapturous applause. However, the key to the popularity and success of WIMP model computing since that time to today came along next. The audience saw a slideshow with a series of GUI-based apps that would introduce intuitive creative workflows to computing. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) painting, DTP, and a multitude of fonts were all demonstrated 42 years ago, and these capabilities would ship from that momentous day onwards.

We note that the lush Vangelis Chariots of Fire soundtrack you hear was not played by the Mac. The event managers simply cued up and played this music in the auditorium, as an inspiring audioscape for the unveiling.

This first Mac became known as the Macintosh 128K, as it launched with this memory quota. It was available straight away from dealers throughout the U.S. for $2,495, which is over $7,500 when inflation adjusted to 2026 prices.

So, Apple may have popularized GUI-based computing in 1984, though everyone now talks about how derivative Mac OS was of prior work from Xerox PARC.

It didn’t take very long for other GUI, mouse and keyboard rivals to appear. Both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga would launch their (also) Motorola 68000 CPU powered computers in mid 1985. The CPU may have been the same, but the GUI OSes of these three MC68000 were so varied, as were the supporting chipsets. Then, in November 1985, Microsoft and IBM would introduce Windows 1.0 computers. Microsoft’s move to go all-in with GUI-based computing wouldn’t be seen for a full decade, with Windows 95, of course.

In 2026, modern PC and Mac users can easily replicate those classic computers we’ve mentioned above. For classic Mac specific fun, we recommend the Infinite Mac site. And, yes, it does include Apple Macintosh System 1.0, which came on a floppy with the computer you saw Steve Jobs demo on stage 42 years ago.

A new emulator makes running classic Apple Macintosh 68K software a breeze on a cheap, portable, IoT development kit. Developer amcchord has ported the popular Basilisk II Mac emulator to the ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5 ($60). The device name gives away that this is a small (5-inch) tablet that relies on an ESP32-P4 SoC for horsepower. We’ve seen 68K Mac emulation on microcontrollers before, but as Hackaday points out, this represents a major step forward in performance on one of these tiny SoCs. In brief, its RISC CPU is capable of delivering 68040 Mac-level computing in OS8.1.

This ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5 port of Basilisk II is particularly appealing for Mac emulation tinkerers, as it is quite a well-rounded platform. It is a tablet, and can be used as such in the emulator, with its native touch functionality replacing mouse interactivity. In computer terms, it becomes almost a touch-enabled All-in-One, with your keyboard/mouse of choice attached via USB.

First-decade Apple Macs were also most famously represented by All-in-One designs with tiny screens (9-inch 512x342 pixel mono displays). In comparison, the Tab5’s 2x scaled 640x360 resolution 8-bit color output piped to the 5-inch 1280x720 IPS touchscreen could challenge your near vision.

For processing power, the Basilisk II ESP32 is said to be up to the level of a Motorola 68040 with FPU (68881). That would be like a mid-90s professional Macintosh. This implementation is limited to a maximum of 16MB of memory, though, using half of the ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5’s 32MB. That should be enough for tinkering in MacOS versions all the way up to version 8.1, but the refresh speeds will be limited to 15fps, which is fine for productivity but might irk in classic game titles.

The ESP32 here has a dual-core RISC-V architecture running at 400 MHz, and the emulator uses one core for video and I/O, with the other for the 68040 interpreter, and other low-level system function patching.

For storage, users of this IoT tab can make use of HDD and CD images that are saved on an SD card. In addition to the OS and apps you have, this is where you will put your Mac boot ROM files.

Overall, it is a very neat and portable all-in-one emulation solution. It would also be a great starting platform for modding, as you could make a mini Mac Classic with this and a 3D printer without jumping through too many hoops.

68K Mac emulation in a browser

If the above tale of cute portable classic Macintoshes has stirred something deep inside, you can very easily and quickly enjoy a quick 68K Mac fix through your browser.

A couple of years ago, we shared a guide on How to emulate an original Apple Macintosh in your browser. Check that out, and we will talk you through visiting Infinite Mac. We also discuss various Infinite Mac configuration options for those who want to have more than a fleeting encounter with a vintage Mac OS and software.

On this day in 1988, Steve Jobs unveiled the new apple of his eye, the NeXT Computer. While ‘The Cube’ wasn’t a commercial success, it shaped the future of personal computing in several ways.

An event at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was chosen for the unveiling of The Cube. Contemporary reports suggest this theatrical setting was used because one of the crowd-pleasing demos of the NeXT Computer highlighted its built-in DSP, which can be a boon to computer audio processing, among other things. During the staged gala event, The Cube even ‘played a duet’ with a professional violinist.

This big NeXT reveal came just three years after the most famous Apple cofounder was ousted from the Cupertino company, in the wake of a power struggle with the board. Despite the relatively short gap, the NeXT Computer made some significant strides. However, typical for Jobs, NeXT didn’t shy away from premium pricing, and the $5,600 ticket on this will have dampened excitement. Inflation adjusted, The Cube would cost over $15,000 today…

"It's great to be back.”

So, we’ve already mentioned the built-in DSP, but what other silicon throbbed inside the 1ft x 1ft x 1ft die-cast magnesium chassis?

Like Apple Macs of the era, The Cube used a Motorola 680X0 main processor, the 68030 in this instance. It came with the 68882 floating-point coprocessor, and ran at 25 MHz. These computers shipped with 8MB of RAM as standard, expandable to 64MB via four available SIMM slots. For storage, the NeXT Computer came with a 256MB magneto-optical drive (an optical rewritable format), and there was an optional 330MB or 660MB hard disk to configure.

Supporting this interesting array of hardware was the NeXTSTEP operating system. This was “based on the Mach microkernel and BSD-derived Unix, with a proprietary GUI using a Display PostScript-based back end,” says a Wikipedia entry.

Of course, many already know that Jobs’ NeXT business was basically a side-quest of his Apple career, as he would return with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in December 1996, and reclaim the Cupertino throne to become Apple’s de facto leader within a year.

NeXT machines used for the development of the WWW and Doom

Beyond its artfully modern styling, advanced hardware for the era, and Unix-based OS, the NeXT Computer was famously used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the first web server and browser, laying the foundation for the Internet as we know it today. Moreover, NeXT Computers were used by id Software to develop Doom, Doom II, and Quake.

NeXT DNA in modern Apple

Apple’s turnaround, reinvigorated after the second coming of Jobs in the late 90s, was pivotal to its incredibly lucrative future. A lot of the company's upcoming glittering success leant on the DNA of The Cube.

What might be surprising is how much of the NeXTSTEP OS is still found in Mac OS X, which first released in 2001. So, even in 2025, there are still significant remnants of the NeXT system’s OS within macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

We've all been there: it's time to upgrade to a new computer, and you need to shuffle all your data from the old system to the new one. For those who don't want to start from scratch, one of the simplest methods is to restore from a previous backup. Whether you use the built-in backup/restore tool in Windows or Apple's Time Machine, this can be a lengthy process depending on the speed of your external storage or network/internet connection.

If you're a Mac user, there's also another option that makes transferring data from your old system to your new one as quick and painless as possible. I'm talking, of course, about Migration Assistant. Migration Assistant can transfer some or all of your information to a new system in a few short steps. Migration Assistant is also versatile, allowing you to transfer data from a Time Machine backup, a Windows PC, or directly from another Mac via Wi-Fi, a wired network, USB-C cable, or Thunderbolt cable.

For the fastest possible performance when transferring from one Mac to another Mac, Thunderbolt is the preferred option, and that's the method I'll discuss in this guide.

Preparing your old Mac for use with the Migration Assistant

In my case, I have an older MacBook Pro that my wife will use going forward. My replacement is a 13-inch MacBook Air, and I want all of my apps and settings to be identical to the way they are with the MacBook Pro.

So, the first step in this process is to open Migration Assistant. For me, the fastest way to do this is to start typing "Migration" in Spotlight and then click on the app from the search results.

Once opened, a message pops up informing you that all open apps will be closed to continue the process. After acknowledging that prompt, you're presented with the above screen that asks how you want to transfer your data. I chose the third option, "To another Mac."

Migration Assistant: Making data transfer fast and straightforward

I left the source MacBook Pro on that screen and turned on my new MacBook Air. After clicking through a couple of prompts to confirm my language preferences and connect to a Wi-Fi network, I saw the same Migration Assistant screen.

For the MacBook Air, I selected "From a Mac, Time Machine backup, or Startup Disk." It was at this time that I grabbed a Thunderbolt cable and plugged one end into the MacBook Air and one end into the MacBook Pro. I then clicked Continue on both systems.

The MacBook Pro's screen now showed that it was discoverable to other devices. On the other side of the equation, the MacBook Air showed me available sources to draw data from: my Mac mini, which also doubles as a Time Machine server, and the MacBook Pro. I, of course, selected the MacBook Pro and clicked Continue. At that point, matching codes appeared on both displays to signify a successful link.

Next, the "Transfer your Information" page gives you the option to select which data you want to transfer individually: Applications, user data, Other Files & Photos, and System and Network settings. Since I wanted an exact copy of my MacBook Pro, I selected everything, which included over 47GB of application data and 148GB of personal user data for my account. Factoring in all of the system files and settings, over 800,000 files were marked for transfer.

After clicking Continue, the following screen asked me to set a password for my user account, which I did. I next accepted Apple's Terms and Conditions, after which the transfer process began. Once the process started, I peeped the Connection Details button in the bottom left of the screen on the MacBook Air, which showed that the Thunderbolt connection was standing firm at nearly 3,000 MB/s.

Initially, Migration Assistant said that the process would take over 2 hours and 30 minutes to complete. However, that time quickly whittled down as the process ramped up. When all was said and done, all of my data was transferred from the MacBook Pro to the MacBook Air in a speedy nine minutes. At this point, the "Migration Complete" message popped up on the MacBook Air and gave me the option to restart the system.

I unplugged the Thunderbolt cable and rebooted the MacBook Air. Once the system rebooted, I was asked to register my fingerprint with Touch ID and add my credit cards to Apple Pay (since that sensitive personal data doesn't transfer over). After logging in, I was then presented with a carbon copy of my MacBook Pro on my MacBook Air, much to my delight. All of my apps, settings, and data were intact.

I had to reactivate my copy of Microsoft Office 2024 and TG Pro, which I use to monitor system temperatures and fan speeds (not applicable on the MacBook Air), as it complained that my license was no longer active. I entered my email address and license code, to which the app responded that it was already registered to another system (my MacBook Pro). However, Tunabelly Software provides a handy button that lets you transfer your license from an old system to a new one. After clicking that button, I was back in business. Those were the only two hiccups that I ran into during the process, and both were easily rectified.

Factory resetting your old Mac

After a successful migration, the next step was to completely wipe the MacBook Pro so that my wife could use it with her Apple Account. For this, I went to System Settings → General → Transfer or Reset. Next, click the Erase All Contents and Settings button. A prompt will then appear, asking you to enter your user password.

The next screen tells you all of the data that will be removed from the Mac (including your Apple Account, Touch ID data, and Bluetooth peripheral connections). You'll next need to enter your Apple Account password to sign out of all your online Apple services. Finally, a confirmation screen appears, asking you to confirm that you want to nuke everything from your system. Click "Erase All Contents & Settings," and your system should reboot and begin the cleaning process. Once complete, the system will boot to the Welcome/Setup screen.

Yesterday, CD Projekt Red revealed that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is coming to Apple Silicon Macs on July 17. Now, the developer has posted the system requirements for the game and, as expected, they're quite demanding.

Cyberpunk is supported across all Macs with an M-series processor as long as you're running macOS Sequioa 15.5 and meet the RAM prerequisite. The minimum tier starts with a base M1 paired with 16GB of unified memory, which will get you 30 frames per second at roughly 900p resolution in the game, upscaled from a lower internal resolution using MetalFX dynamic resolution scaling — Apple's upscaling tech similar to AMD FSR. In fact, MetalFX upscaling will be enabled by default.

The recommended specs list an M3 Pro along with 18 GB of memory, enough to run the game at 1080p and 60 FPS. Then, there's the "High Fidelity" tier, which requires an M2 Ultra or M3 Max, outputting at 1440p. Finally, "Very High Fidelity" demands an M3 Ultra or M4 Max for the same 1440p resolution but with increased details. Both of these tiers require at least 36GB RAM and still aim for 60 FPS, so if you tried to save a few hundred bucks at checkout, you might be out of luck.

Interestingly, none of these specs include ray tracing. It will remain a separate toggle that strains your system quite a bit. CD Projekt lists the recommended specs for ray tracing on a separate page; to run the game at 1080p with ray tracing set to medium, you'll need an M3 Pro with 18 GB RAM, which will target 30 FPS. That memory requirement doubles to 36 GB if you want 60 FPS, along with an M3 Max. Older-gen M1 and M2-series chips don't support ray tracing.

There is a new "For this Mac" preset that will automatically assign the best settings according to your hardware, saving you the hassle of manually tweaking everything. Moreover, if you choose to download Cyberpunk 2077 from Steam, Epic Games Store, or GOG (CD Projekt Red's own DRM-free marketplace), you'll need at least 92 GB of free storage. The App Store version, which includes all voiceovers, will be just shy of 160 GB.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will release for macOS with the latest 2.3 update that fans have been looking forward to. It will support Spatial Audio, native HDR, and take full advantage of Apple's Metal API.

This marks the first major game release in modern Mac history that launches on Mac exclusively and not on iPads or iPhones — like Death Stranding, Assassin's Creed Shadows, or Resident Evil 4. If you already own the game on any platform (except for the App Store), it's a free download. You can also choose to buy the Phantom Liberty DLC separately if you've only played the base game.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is finally landing on the Mac. The game will run on every Apple Silicon Mac using M1 through M4 and running macOS Sequoia 15.5.

Developer CD Projekt RED is taking advantage of a ton of Apple technologies, including MetalFX upscaling, Spatial Audio with head tracking when using AirPods, dynamic HDR optimized for Apple XDR displays, and support for the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. CD Projekt RED and Apple are also touting a version of AMD FSR upscaling and frame generation "optimized for Apple Silicon." The FSR frame generation works with either MetalFX upscaling or AMD FSR upscaling.

The game will feature new "For this Mac" graphics presets, which are optimized for each Apple Silicon Mac. Every piece of Mac hardware with at least 16GB of memory, no matter the chip, should be able to run the game with optimizations. The game should run on systems with 8GB of RAM and achieve 30 frames per second in much of the base game, though it's possible that Phantom Liberty will stress that little RAM, necessitating CD Projekt Red's recommended specs. You can read more about CD Projekt Red's requirements here.

The Ultimate Edition, which includes the original Cyberpunk 2077 and the Phantom Liberty DLC, should see feature parity with other platforms, including cross-progression, as well as Patch 2.3 with a new Photo Mode. It will also feature the performance benchmark from the PC version.

CD Projekt Red has embraced Apple's version of tiled rendering, which breaks up the rendering into smaller chunks, and assigns each one to a GPU core. To do this, the developer added support for Apple's Metal API, and used the Metal C++ interface and shader converter to optimize for Apple Silicon GPUs.

When Metal 4 launches later this year, Metal FX Frame Interpolation and MetalFX Denoising are set to be integrated into the game. Similar to Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's Xess Frame generation, Frame Interpolation "generates an intermediate frame for every two input frames to achieve higher and more stable frame rates." Paired with upscaling, the companies are promising 120 frames per second on Ultra settings using this form of frame generation, though it's unclear which resolutions are supported on which Macs. Denoising is set to allow for real-time path tracing, even on the game's toughest settings.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will be available on the Mac App Store, as well as Steam, GOG.com, and the Epic Games Store. If you already own the game on one of those third-party launchers, you should be able to play it on the Mac without purchasing it again.

This game is a strong pillar of Apple's push to turn the Mac — and its other devices — into a gaming platform. While Cyberpunk first launched on PCs and consoles in 2020 in a somewhat disastrous state, the game has since improved and become a fan favorite. It's almost five years late to the Mac, but it will be a flagship opportunity to showcase what a high-end PC game looks like when ported to the Mac using Apple's technologies, especially since some gamers won't have to buy it again.

Apple's other ports have included Control: Ultimate Edition, Stray, multiple Resident Evil and Assassin's Creed games, Palworld, Death Stranding: Director's Cut, and more. Assassin's Creed Shadows released simultaneously on the Mac alongside Windows PCs and consoles.

Ideas man David Delahunty is behind a new flash storage device which looks like a classic MacOS folder icon dragged into the real world. This USB-C attached 128GB capacity storage product is called the FolderDrive, and it will be available soon for about $40.

We don’t have a lot of technical details for the FolderDrive, something which may disappoint the most hard-nosed segment of the Tom’s Hardware readership. However, this product is admittedly one that is first and foremost “whimsical, minimal,” yet functional. So, if you are simply after the best performance and capacity, you better check our guide to the best flash drives.

Dalhunty’s “literal folder for your digital folders” comes in just a single 128GB capacity option, connects via USB-C, and measures 3.25 wide x 2.5 tall x 0.5-inches thick. That’s the full spec sheet, but it is vaguely promised to be fast, reliable and lightweight - without any stats to back up these assertions.

We might have also thought it came in one color – the old MacOS default kind of light blue. Except, Delahunty’s Twitter/X feed shares a glance at some FolderDrives in a few other MacOS appropriate shades.

Small-scale producer Super Fantastic is Delahunty’s partner for getting this FolderDrive into consumer hands (linked top). It indicates the product will be “3D printed with care." Such attention to detail is important, as this product leans heavy on its appearance for being a “great conversation starter for designers, developers, and tech lovers.”

In the Twitter/X thread, we note a little controversy over another designer who originated a folder-icon-like flash drive a few months earlier. But that is quite a different design, and not in production, as far as we are aware.

Reverse skeuomorphism

Apple might have been a pioneer in popularizing skeuomorphism for computer UIs, and I remember some very striking iOS features and apps using this design direction several years ago. Reversing this idea thus seems attractively retro-whimsical.

Similar products based on Floppy icons, CD icons, and other memorable icons would also be quite fun to bring into the real world. A quick search surfaced some floppy disk USB drives for sale, but not in a cutesy computer UI style design. Along similar lines, there is also the WinRAR bag, which we mentioned recently.

Apple may be willing to look outside its walls to get Siri up to snuff with artificial intelligence features. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company is considering using tech from Anthropic or OpenAI to right its struggles in AI.

This would be a massive change for Apple, which is currently using its in-house Apple Foundation Models to power its Apple Intelligence AI features.

The Cupertino, California-based company has reportedly spoken to the two companies about training their models so that they can be deployed on Apple's own cloud infrastructure. Apple hasn't decided if it's using external models, and it reportedly still has a version of Siri using its own models in development.

A version of Siri with AI features is expected in 2026, following delays from a version that was expected in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15.

Apple already uses OpenAI for some Siri features, answering search queries and creating generative content. But those are effectively an extension that you have to enable, and Apple still controls its assistant.

Using a model from Anthropic or OpenAI could boost Apple into AI relevance and match what some other hardware manufacturers have done. Samsung has its own Galaxy AI features, for example, but also uses Google's Gemini (and that's the entire interface, not just the models). There have also been reports that Apple has considered outright purchasing Perplexity.

Apple launched the iPhone 16 last year as "built for Apple Intelligence," but since then has appeared to be floundering in AI as it turned Siri over from AI head John Giannandrea to software engineering lead Craig Federighi and Siri boss Mike Rockwell (who previously launched the Vision Pro).

Bloomberg states that switching to an external AI model is hurting morale among the AI team at a time when some tech companies are on the hunt for new talent and are willing to pay top dollar.

Apple Intelligence and Siri don't just affect the iPhone. They're also on the iPad and the Mac. In losing Siri, Giannandrea also lost Apple's robotics department. And the Siri delays also reportedly delayed a new piece of hardware, a mix between the HomePod and iPad that would work as a home assistant, similar to an Amazon Echo Show.

Apple's own models don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. At WWDC, the company said it would open its on-device models, the likes of which are used for Genmoji and Writing Tools, to developers this year, letting third-party developers build AI features using its own tools.

But those local models, while private, are slower and have proven less impressive than what can be done by competitors in the cloud. (Apple does have servers for some cloud-based requests.) Running a third-party model on Apple's servers may give Apple a mix of the two worlds, touting user privacy while also giving it a boost to catch up in the AI race.

The activation method for a rather ancient Easter egg, hidden deep within the ROMs of beige Apple Power Mac G3 computers, has been uncovered. Self-confessed "combined Apple/Linux/Windows geek" Doug Brown published a blog on Tuesday, discussing how he rediscovered the 'hidden dev team' Easter egg on a lazy Sunday. There was no known documented way of displaying this Easter egg in the Finder (Apple desktop). However, thanks to deeper detective work, some programming knowledge, and the help of friends, Brown eventually found and shared the method of activating this significant Easter egg. It is pretty easy, when you know how.

The PowerMac G3 computers were the mainstay of Apple computer-reliant businesses in the late 90s – until everything went pastel translucent with the introduction of the iMac line. As a reprographics worker at the time, I owned a couple of beige G3 machines for home use, and remember them fondly, moving up from Mac OS 7.5.3 through to 9.x. I also remember lots of software having fun Easter eggs that could be activated. That was quite high-octane Mac computing fun at the time, and this would be at least five years ahead of YouTube being a thing, for example. The Easter eggs I remember most clearly were conjured up by holding various modifier keys while selecting various menu items.

Brown found that the existence of the image was already known and documented from previous ROM hacking adventures. However, no one knew how a casual Mac user might see the image pop up as a ‘surprise’ on their system.

Intrigued and warming to the potential challenge, Brown looked more closely at text strings in similar locations to the image (a JPG). Working using various tools, including Ghidra, a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework, he eventually narrowed down the RAM disk driver as the prime suspect.

After Ghidra decompiled the code, it was determined that a process associated with the RAM disk would check for a string that was equal to ‘secret ROM image’ before it would create and write a file named ‘The Team.’ This was enough information to start to try and hunt the Easter egg in the ‘real world’ of the classic Mac OS, or so Brown thought...

Help came from fellow InfoSec Exchange user Alex, who managed to trigger the Easter egg as follows: “with hints from (Downtown) Doug Brown, we just discovered the trigger for the beige PowerMac G3's secret ROM image: go to the Memory control panel, set up a RAM disk, reboot to mount it, go Special → Erase Disk and name the volume secret ROM image — you'll get a file The Team at its root, type JPEG, creator ttxt. enjoy!”

This file will open in the Mac’s basic built-in editor, SimpleText, which is just advanced enough to be able to render JPG images. Just double-click 'The Team' file, and you will see the 26-strong team in the photo, reproduced top.

Enjoy this Easter egg via the magic of emulation

Apple's macOS 26 Tahoe will be the last major release to support Intel-based Macs. The news was delivered at a virtual Platform State of the Union at WWDC25.

"Apple Silicon enables us all to achieve things that were previously unimaginable, and it's time to put all of our focus and innovation there," Matthew Firlik, senior director of developer relations, said on the video.

However, Intel-based Macs will still receive three years of security updates after the launch of Tahoe. Currently-supported Macs utilizing Intel chips include the 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019, the 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020 with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the 27-inch iMac from 2020, and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Those last few Intel Macs will still get most of Tahoe's enhancements, including the new liquid glass design and improvements to Spotlight search.

Rosetta 2, the tool that enables Apple Silicon computers to run Intel applications, will be available through macOS 27, but in the video, Firlik urged developers to help users move to native Apple Silicon versions of their apps. Some portions of Rosetta may need to be retained for older games that are no longer updated and rely on frameworks designed for Intel hardware.

It's not surprising that Apple is phasing out these Intel parts. In fact, to some, the shock is that they lasted this long. These Intel chips are aging, with the last having launched in 2020 (though the server-grade Xeons in the 2019 Mac Pro may still have some life in them). Apple introduced M1 in the fall of 2020, greatly increasing battery life and performance.

The Intel-era chips also kept Hackintosh projects alive. It's possible that after the macOS 26 release, it will enter a sort of maintenance and security mode, with no future releases targeting the x86 processors.

Apple clearly wants to keep focus on its vertically integrated stack, from operating systems to chips. This move was inevitable, and while people running macOS on Hackintoshes or other unauthorized hardware may be upset, it will streamline Apple's engineering operations and allocate more development resources to native Apple Silicon applications for the Mac.

The next version of macOS will see a dramatic aesthetic change. This fall, Apple will release macOS 26 "Tahoe" (named after Lake Tahoe in California), featuring a new "liquid glass" look that's coming to all of Apple's operating systems. There's also a new Games app, along with updates to Spotlight and new features coming from the iPhone.

The new design features changes to the Dock, as well as toolbars and sidebars. This includes a transparent menu bar, which Apple says makes the display feel enlarged. The liquid glass will have more rounded corners, feature dynamic sizing for windows, apps, and toolbars, and feature clear accents that Apple's human interface design head says blur the line between hardware and software.

Mac Gaming

As Apple continues to try to push the Mac forward as a platform for video games, it's adding a new dedicated app, Apple Games, for macOS Tahoe. The new app lets you launch your games, find new ones, and play with friends. Versions of this app will also show up on iOS and iPadOS.

There's a new Game Overlay in macOS, which will let you quickly change system settings, chat with friends, and enable low power mode when on battery, all without leaving games.

Developers bringing games to macOS will be able to use Metal 4, an update to Apple's graphics API, with new technologies like MetalFX Frame Interpolation and MetalFX Denoising, which Apple says will lead to faster frame rates and smoother gameplay.

Spotlight and Apple Intelligence

Spotlight, the go-to search on macOS, will use new relevance-based sorting to show files, folders, events, and more results to you. The company also says that filtering options will narrow searches faster than ever. You can also do a ton more in Spotlight, including sending emails, playing podcasts, and whatever developers build into their own apps. You'll also be able to reach your clipboard history and use new "quick keys" to use brief character strings to get to actions quickly.

While Apple Intelligence isn't seeing huge features, Shortcuts will be able to connect to Apple's models to handle more elaborate tasks than before.

The existing Genmoji and Image Playground are becoming more intricate, and Reminders will be able to see emails, websites, or other information on your Mac to search for what you need to do.

New Features

There are a slew of new features, including the addition of the iPhone's Phone app and Live Activities. New iOS features like call screening and hold assist are also included, which keep your spot in line and let you know when an agent is ready.

The same updates coming to Messages on iOS will show up in macOS, including polls and backgrounds, as well as the Journal app. Notes will let you import or export notes into markdown files, while FaceTime will offer a new landing page that lets you launch into conversations using your contact posters.

There are also new accessibility features, including a Magnifier that lets you use Continuity Camera with an iPhone or plug in a USB camera to zoom in, change angles, or add filters to content. A new Accessibility Reader is designed to make reading easier, while Braile Access has a new interface for users with braille displays. Vehicle Motion Cues is coming from iPhone, which puts up a pattern to help reduce motion sickness while using your Mac in a car.

Numbering and availability

The jump from macOS 15 (Sequoia) to macOS 26 (Tahoe) is a big skip in version numbering, but one that allows Apple to keep its various operating systems (iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, VisionOS) on the same version number, matching the year ahead — similar to the way cars are sold. To be fair, Mac OS X maintained the version number at 10 for 14 years, skewing the actual version number if it had received a new update number every year, as it does now.

Apple will release macOS 26 widely this fall. A developer beta will start today, and a general beta will launch next month.

Tahoe will be available on these devices:

• MacBook Air with Apple Silicon (2020 and later)
• MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon (2020 and later)
• MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• iMac (2020 and later)
• Mac Mini (2020 and later)
• Mac Studio (2022 and later)
• Mac Pro (2019 and later)
  
  
  
  

While these are mostly Apple Silicon devices, some, like the Mac Pro, 2019 MacBook Pro, and 2020 MacBook Pro with. four Thunderbolt 3 ports, maintain support for Intel processors.

Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, has come to another platform: the Mac. In the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, Microsoft has released a dedicated app in the Mac App Store. (In fact, it's the top app featured by Apple on the App Store as of this writing)

The new app requires a Mac with an M1 processor or later and at least macOS 14 Sonoma. While it's open in the background, you can use a default shortcut (Option + Space) to quickly message it. That's just a key away from Command + Space, which launches the familiar Spotlight search.

The full app also features the Think Deeper feature (powered by OpenAI's o1 model) as well as voice conversations. You can also get news tories from Copilot daily and access your conversations from other devices. If you've used Copilot on any other platform, including Windows, it's all pretty familiar here.

Technically, it's not the first time Copilot has been on the Mac. It was already built into the Edge browser and in certain Office 365 apps. But now it's standalone.

The move came after Mac owners received the ability to type to Siri with Apple Intelligence, alongside ChatGPT extensions for Siri. OpenAI also has its own Mac app, as AI companies look to expand their user base to multiple platforms. Siri has yet to receive some Apple Intelligence upgrades, so there's room on the Mac for other AI agents to steal the show, at least for now.

Microsoft had not been abandoning Apple platforms, though. Copilot had already been available for the iPhone and the Mac. Today, Apple is also adding Split Screen capability to the iPad app, and both iOS and iPad users can now upload text files and PDFs to Copilot to query the assistant about the documents or summarize them. (Microsoft says this is coming to the Mac soon).

While the Mac might not be the most obvious choice for a Microsoft-owned AI (after all, it definitely doesn't qualify to be a Copilot+ PC with those current rules!), Microsoft has been pretty good about keeping its software available everywhere, not just Windows. So some diehards who love macOS but also love Office and other Microsoft offerings may finally have just what they want.

Update February 27 at 3:32 p.m. EST: Microsoft let Tom's Hardware know that Copilot on Mac is also available in Canada, which had not been previously stated. This was added to the story. 

Developer Nolen Royalty published source code for a game of Pong playable on an array of 240 Google Chrome browser tab favicons, alongside a lengthy development blog post. This incredibly unconventional port of Pong, dubbed faviconic, was inspired by a similarly unconventional port of Flappy Bird, though Flappyfavi was notoriously limited to a single favicon, making fine height control quite difficult. Faviconic Pong seems a lot more playable in comparison, though its Apple exclusivity due to its reliance on AppleScript will undoubtedly displease some Windows and Linux users who had hoped to try this with their own versions of Google Chrome.

This isn't necessarily the most obscure way to play Pong, surprisingly enough. In fact, it's downright conventional compared to the likes of the palm-sized Pong machine we covered in December or the hydrogel "brain" taught to play Pong that I discussed back in August 2024.

Unfortunately, AppleSript-based Faviconic Pong isn't all perfect. While the basic display function does work and is split with the lower half of the screen being in the main browser window and the upper half being in the tab-favicon array, the segment of the game actually being rendered in the tabs runs at a noticeably lower framerate.

In any case, Faviconic Pong is an impressively unconventional use of AppleScript and modern web browsing interfaces, specifically Chrome and its Chromium branch. This game's effective exclusivity to Mac OS is something of a shame but a necessary compromise based on how AppleScript was used for its development.

Seeing another port of Pong, in general, always strikes me as pretty cool, especially in these scenarios where the game is being communicated to the player in a highly unusual fashion. Of course, running Pong itself obviously isn't a huge technical toll on most systems and devices out there since its original release was in 1973, an era when video games were far, far simpler than they are now. Getting the game working through a large array of browser tab favicons is truly ingenious, though, and we recommend the extended development blog post for those who would like to learn more about how this was executed.

Earlier this week, a team of security researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhr University Bochum presented a pair of papers on two side-channel speculative execution attacks targeted at Apple silicon, dubbed SLAP and FLOP [h/t Bleeping Computer]. A dedicated web page for the attacks, showing some examples, documentation, and links to the original two papers, is also available at the aptly-named URL Predictors.Fail.

So, what are these attacks? To understand either, you first need a working understanding of what speculative execution attacks are. In March of last year, I covered a speculative execution attack called GhostRace, and back in 2016, the one-two punch of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks helped introduce the concept into the wider public consciousness. "Speculative execution" isn't a bad thing in and of itself— you can think of it as a performance optimization that lets a CPU "speculate" what it needs to execute next— but unless it's tightly controlled, it is prone to security exploits that are near-impossible to fix without performance degradation.

So, SLAP and FLOP may be new speculative execution attacks, but the fundamentals of how they work are well known.

SLAP, or Data Speculation Attacks via Load Address Prediction, functions by exploiting Apple Silicon's Load Address Predictor, which guesses the next memory address the CPU will use. By exploiting this functionality and forcing it to guess wrong, information like emails and browsing history can effectively be stolen. This impacts Apple CPUs, starting with Apple M2 and A15.

Meanwhile, FLOP, or False Load Output Predictions, exploits Apple Silicon's Load Value Predictor, which guesses data values to be returned by the memory on the next CPU cycle. If this is exploited and forced to guess wrong, memory safety can be bypassed entirely to leak things like credit card information and location history.

In a statement made to Bleeping Computer, Apple said: "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these types of threats, (but) based on our analysis, we do not believe this issue poses an immediate risk to our users."

The researchers do note that attacks actually using these exploits have yet to be spotted in the wild after initially discovering and reporting them to Apple in March (SLAP) and September (FLOP) in 2024, but also that users hoping to avoid them entirely can still disable JavaScript in Safari (tested browser) on their Apple devices until further notice. Doing this will introduce lots of site compatibility issues, though, so hopefully Apple actually patches this sooner rather than later.

A macOS user discovered that the latest M4 Apple silicon does not support visualization of operating systems prior to macOS 13.4 Ventura, which was released in May 2023. When the user tried loading older versions of macOS, the virtual machine failed to load, with the display showing a black screen. They even tried to create the virtual machine (VM) directly on the M4 Mac, which was successful at first, but eventually resulted in the same black screen, according to The Eclectic Light Company. So, if you need to run older macOS versions prior to 13.4 Ventura, the only current solution is to use an older Mac system.

Unfortunately, diagnosing the black screen issue is next to impossible on the client side, as the VM refuses to boot. The host doesn’t show an error either, as it’s unable to load the virtual machine normally. It’s not until the operating system itself tries to boot that it runs into the problem. The Activity Monitor shows only one active core for the VM, despite the system being allocated multiple cores, so The Eclectic suggests that the failure happens “before the VM kernel boots the other cores, an event that occurs early during the kernel boot phase.”

It seems that the error happens before or during the initial kernel boot. So, even if you try other desktop virtualization software like VMWare’s products (which are now free for all users), you’d still end up with the same clueless puzzle. At this point, the only solution is to dig into the kernel of macOS versions older than 13.4 and for Apple to publish fixed IPSWs. However, this isn’t likely, given that only a few users would most probably benefit from such an update. So, if you’re one of those who need to use older macOS versions, the only thing that you can do for now is to keep a prior-generation Mac in your arsenal.

If you’ve already bought a new M4 device, like the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro we recently reviewed, you can still virtualize macOS 13.4 and newer on your device. Alternatively, you can run Windows 11 on M1 Apple Silicon or later.

A retro tech enthusiast has revitalized a classic Apple iMac G4 ‘lampshade’ computer with a state-of-the-art M4 injection. Shoehorning one of the new Mac Mini M4 computers into this classic pedestal 20-inch all-in-one PC design delivers more than just a performance update. It transforms an obsolete retro curiosity from 2002 into a device that is fighting fit for 2024—and a few years beyond.

The YouTube channel Action Retro loves to mix old technologies with new ones interestingly. And it isn’t surprising to see the channel indulge in this melding of computing eras, as this identical iMac G4 was updated with the guts of an Apple M2 Mac Mini not long ago. That was already a massive step into modernity, remembering that the iMac G4 was launched during the Mac OS 9 and X crossover era.

The Dock Light Modboard (20-inch) from Juicy Crumb Systems was already in place from the Mini M2 mod. This board sits at the bottom of the pedestal, delivering various modern interfaces. Importantly, its round PCB positions modern ports for the 20-inch iMac G4 pedestal chassis in all the right places. Action Retro pointed out that the system sports separate LCD power and system power buttons towards the rear of the circular base.

With the iMac G4 already modified and gutted, as outlined above, you may assume that physically fitting in the Mac Mini M4 won’t be the most challenging project. Action Retro began this retrofitting work by suggesting that all that needs to be done is to remove the plastic bottom on the Mini and be careful with the oddly positioned power button and wiring. These two power wires were quickly desoldered from the Mac Mini power button so they could be fixed to the iMac base power button.

While inside the pedestal chassis, Action Retro also wisely replaced a noisy old Apple fan with a Noctua model of matching size (92mm).

Now, it was time to fit the Mac Mini inside. However, after double-checking the physical clearance available, Action Retro decided to de-case the Mac Mini M4. It might have fit as it was, but the enthusiast felt safer removing the metallic shell. This meant it would be less of a squeeze to cleanly seal up the modded iMac G4 computer, with less chance of chassis, PCB, and component clashing.

Before closing up the system, all the inner cable connecting and routing were taken care of. After a test boot, the system was sealed up, and from the front, it would look physically identical to the old 2002-produced Apple iMac.

Summing up, Action Retro seemed very happy with his work revitalizing the rather ancient iMac G4, which still looks kind of futuristic today. He also thought the separate monitor power and system power buttons were suitable. However, to finesse his handiwork, Action Retro decided to wire up the new Noctua system fan to take power from the Mac Mini M4, not its LCD/chassis host.

Those familiar with the restricted, soldered storage design of standard Apple silicon-built MacBooks have reason to rejoice. Mac Logic Board Enthusiast iBoff RCC has shown this restrictive storage design can be circumvented with specialized breakout PCBs that allow for full storage drive swapping over the NVMe M.2 interface.

One major notable restriction of MacBook storage has been overcome here — and it bodes particularly well for the long-term future of devices that follow this modding route, since a corrupted SSD can outright prevent a MacBook from booting... and is, of course, near-impossible to deal with for most end users. This is noted as a fundamental concern for long-term MacBook repairs and maintenance and not something Apple should be forcing its users to deal with by soldering storage to the board, to begin with.

Unfortunately, there are some major caveats here worth discussing. The biggest issue for Joe Public is the requirement for a second MacBook to help you reboot your original MacBook after replacing the original SSD storage. Beyond that, the high-difficulty, high-risk mod process involving the removal of the original SSD chips may also raise some eyebrows. However, the final results indicate that modding the M.2 slot does not negatively impact SSD performance.

While some may question the practicality of even considering an upgrade like this, it's important to remember that such steps wouldn't be necessary if Apple weren't insistent on setting arbitrary limits on users of its hardware. These arbitrary limits, especially soldering SSD storage instead of allowing it to be freely swapped, speak to a desire to nickel-and-dime consumers instead of leaving the tools and processes for easy DIY repairs and upgrades in place. Those stuck with a low-capacity MacBook model aren't going to have recourse besides slower external storage or solutions like this.

In terms of saving physical footprint, it seems obvious that soldering SSD drives and RAM offers virtually no benefit when compared to simply supporting the smallest swappable version of these existing standards. What Apple might be saving in millimeters within the build is easily being lost by consumers when issues that would otherwise warrant a quick hardware swap become nigh unsolvable.

The Apple M1 iMac, originally released in May 2021, may have a design flaw that is only now becoming apparent. A flood of users have noted that their Apple Silicon desktop All-in-Ones are suffering from a series of display failures causing dark horizontal lines to persist on their screens. A thread on the Apple Community site discussing this specific issue in detail began in October 2023 and has since garnered 17 pages of responses from disgruntled users. However, Apple has yet to recognize it as a manufacturing defect or flaw, with no official announcements from the company regarding a fix for this issue.

Many affected users assert that Apple’s service centers describe this screen issue as an irreparable malfunction, and that the only viable solution is to replace it. However, since the problem only typically appears after two years, most devices are already out of warranty, meaning those affected have to pay around $600 to $700 for a screen replacement. At that price, you could buy a brand-new base-model M2 Mac Mini, for example

According to an investigation by one of the affected users, the Apple iMac screen uses a flex cable that must sustain a voltage of around 50 volts when the screen is set to high or maximum brightness. This causes the connector to burn out over time,  it was theorized, resulting in short circuits that cause the black lines to appear on the screen. Thus, you could spend the money on a screen replacement, only for the issue to return in a year or two.

The user theorized that there are three possible reasons why this is happening: a design flaw, a manufacturing defect, or a supplier delivering parts that didn’t meet Apple’s standards. 

We were interested to see another user reporting that their M3 iMac, which they bought in May 2024, was suffering from a similar problem. If Apple did not change the flex cable design from the previous generation iMac, then it is conceivable the defect could occur again in newer generation iMacs. However, we must remember that even tens or a few hundred users complaining about this issue account for a very small percentage of iMacs sold.

Unless you have an active AppleCare+ plan, repairing this issue would be prohibitively expensive, unless Apple decides to do a recall. At the moment, if you don’t want to spend money on the screen repair and are hoping that Apple will someday repair it for free, your only choice is to attach an external monitor and use the system that way.

One user did get a free repair authorized by a senior Apple representative, but this seems to be an exception rather than the norm. And if Apple still uses the same flex cable design that is purportedly causing the issue, with the same thirst for power, then the same screen issues may proliferate across generations.

The subsequent big Hackintosh distribution may end up being for Valve's Steam Deck for all devices—at least according to an October 3 tweet from whatdahopper on Twitter, which showcased a very early version of a Hackintosh macOS X Sequoia recovery dialog displayed on Steam Deck. 

While the recovery dialog works, it's not quite aligned with the Deck's screen properly, and this Hackintosh'd Steam Deck is so barebones that it doesn't even have GPU acceleration intact yet. However, it is still able to boot!

For those unfamiliar, "Hackintosh" refers to the practice of running macOS on devices other than an Apple iMac or corresponding Apple laptops, such as the MacBook Air. For select users who want the offerings of macOS but don't want to make a full-time commitment to that ecosystem with a Mac purchase, it often makes sense to use a hacked-together Hackintosh distribution with a custom-built PC rather than paying Apple's (usually) much higher entry fee for playing around with macOS.

As @whatdahopper notes in the original thread, this exercise is mostly pointless besides its utility to educate and/or prove a point. However, it's believed that the Steam Deck could actually end up being an ideal fit for Hackintosh since RDNA2 is already supported by MacOS and "akin to NootRX, the hardware in the Steam Deck is practically perfect." According to its GitHub page, NootRX is "an unsupported AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPU kext" to enable improved RDNA 2 support on Mac OS X.

This version of Steam Deck Hackintosh— or Deckintosh, if you will— definitely isn't meant as a serious replacement for SteamOS 3 or anything like that. However, its development continues, and on October 4, we got an update Tweet showcasing the Steam Deck, which is now fully booted into Mac OS X while reading as an iMac Pro to the operating system. Full booting compared to a recovery screen is impressive, but until GPU acceleration is added, any remotely mainstream use of Deckintosh will likely remain a pipe dream.

It's still a pretty cool technical achievement on this modder's part, though, so we'll be keeping an eye on the development of Steam Deck Hackintosh as it progresses if it should progress significantly past this point. Deckintosh may end up being just a proof of concept, at the end of the day— but in the long run, it could prove one of the most tantalizingly price-accessible ways to play around with macOS.

An Apple Mac expert has written at Six Colors about an unfathomable issue one of his children faced after trying to download a Steam game to an M2 MacBook Pro with an almost full SSD. You might think the problem would be like water off a duck’s back for Seattle-based technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, but increasingly technical and sophisticated attempts to free up space on the SSD failed. Poking around the Finder, issuing commands in the Terminal, and delving into the Disk Utility all drew blanks. Ultimately, Fleishman resorted to drastic measures – completely wiping the SSD for a fresh start.

The MacBook Pro in the headline was equipped with a 1TB SSD, and was part of a home network with regular Time Machine backups scheduled. Before asking dad to banish the Mac’s disk full alert, their offspring had tried the most obvious thing – emptying the trash to make room on the disk. Fleishman tried that again, and was greeted with the unhelpful message “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.”

Expert Mac user unsheathes his sharpest tools

Attempts to use Terminal, the Mac’s powerful command line interface, also fell flat, with the system grumbling about lack of space. Moving to the disk utility hit a brick wall, with the same “No space left on device” error.

Fleishman still had some tricks up his sleeve but, you guessed it, restarting and clearing caches was fruitless, as were subsequent recovery disk shenanigans.

Drastic measures were obviously called for. Erasing the drive and installing various versions of the MacOS was the next step – ‘safe’ in the knowledge that there were a series of Time Machine backups to restore or part restore once everything was back to normal.

However, the version of MacOS on the restored machine was found to have an issue with “the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores,” wrote Fleishman, and most exasperatingly “no one had found a solution.”

Luckily his offspring didn’t seem to care about many of the old files created, saved, or downloaded. So, they seemed quite happy to start afresh after grabbing a few files salvaged from a Time Machine backup saved on an external 1TB SSD.

“Systemic, cascading failures”

Fleishman’s conclusion is that perhaps he would have tried further recovery techniques, but after already sinking a day of effort into resolving this disk full issue, enough was enough. He hates to think about how less experienced Mac aficionados would cope with “systemic, cascading failures like this,” as do we.

A retro computing enthusiast has successfully shoehorned 4MB of RAM into an Apple Macintosh Classic computer without using a daughterboard. Normally, this isn’t possible, but Adrian Black of Adrian’s Digital Basement compared the similar Motorola 68000 CPU-packing Mac Classic and SE models, and the inspired hardware hacking session paid off.

Black explains that he had a leftover Mac Classic motherboard with some chips missing after a repair session. He wanted to upgrade this from its standard onboard 1MB of RAM to an expansive 4MB. However, Mac Classics normally require the use of a RAM-packing daughterboard to accomplish such an upgrade.

After pondering over the schematics of the Mac Classic and the similar Mac SE, Black noticed that the latter could accept 4MB added to the motherboard via four SIMM slots — no daughterboard required. The Macintosh Classic schematics revealed it basically uses “a Macintosh SE motherboard — shrunk down.” That meant he could probably hack the Classic to 4MB onboard without ordering and waiting for a daughterboard.

A combination of convenience and inquisitiveness, rather than necessity, was the mother of invention here, but it still makes for a captivating video. Before he gets on with the modding process, Black admits that replacement daughterboards that can expand a Mac Classic to 4MB are quite easy to get and cost only $30 or $40. Thus, he notes, the mod is “probably kinda pointless,” except in the rare case that one of the two support chips is damaged, as those UL1 CAS PAL chips are harder to acquire.

The hardware hacking part of the video shows two redundant chips removed from the motherboard, along with a couple of other minor component changes, before swapping out the RAM chips that are already present on the Mac Classic motherboard. Specifically, the eight ‘44256 RAM chips’ are replaced by four ‘4400 RAM chips’ taken from a common 4MB 72-pin SIMM. Later, some wires had to be run and a couple of resistors were inserted to get the new RAM configuration to work and echo the Mac SE RAM subsystem design.

The first boot after the mod almost worked but ended with the ‘sad Mac’ error code. Black initially thought the error code pointed to a RAM issue, but some other ancient Mac tinkerers told him it was a non-volatile RAM settings issue. Those earlier suspicions turned out to be correct, though, as the schematics led him to switch around some of the bodge wires with a successful boot to the ‘Mac OS missing’ screen.

Black wraps up the video by successfully running the system through the Speedometer test suite, which would usually fail if any of the components had issues. And now, 40 years or so later, this Mac Classic how has quadruple the onboard memory.

Apple Computers was founded on 1 April, 1976, by college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. From these humble beginnings we now have a brand that is just as much about style and design as it is computing prowess.

Apple Computers’ first computer was the Apple I. In 1977 the Apple II was released and it soon found its niche in U.S schools. After this we saw the Apple Lisa (1983), a merging of the Apple II aesthetic with what would become the Macintosh range of machines. Sadly Lisa was a flop, but in 1984 we saw the introduction of the Macintosh range with the Macintosh 128K. 

This small machine changed the fortune of Apple and it started a range of Macintosh machines that exists to this day, in the form of the iMac. In this how to we’ll take a look at the classic era of Apple Machines, specifically the Apple Macintosh 128K, which celebrates its 40th birthday.

There are many ways to emulate an Apple machine, and one of the most popular is to use Basilisk II which is an emulator for Apple machines using the Motorola 68000 series CPUs. This was the pre-OS X era, an era where this author was at college and using System 7.5 OS, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Aldus Pagemaker (now Adobe) to create magazines.

Emulating an Apple Macintosh 128K via Basilisk II is possible, but it is far easier to emulate one in the browser! Using Infinite Mac we can emulate a Mac in the browser, in fact we can emulate a plethora of different models. But let's start with where the Mac began, way back in 1984.

Emulating the Apple Macintosh 128K

January 24, 1984: I was four years old when this machine arrived. It wasn’t until high school art lessons that I first used an Apple Mac to design a flyer. Back then the machine looked wondrous. A portable computer, way more powerful (so I thought) than my Commodore 64, with a high resolution screen and something called a “mouse”.

Emulating a 128K today is a simple task.

1. Open a browser to Infinite Mac.

2. Select 1984, System 1.0 Mac 128K and click Run.

3. Wait for the desktop to boot. The Mac desktop (finder) will load and after a few seconds two disks will appear. System Disk is the boot disk from which our OS runs. Infinite HD is a disk full of period specific applications.

4. Double click on the Infinite HD disk icon to open the disk.

5. Choose an application and double click to open its folder. We chose to open Microsoft Basic 1.0, because we have a love for BASIC programming. Using MacDraw and MacPaint you can design graphics. MacWrite for a spot of word processing, or make a database using FileMaker 1.0. The most fun to be had is playing Missile Command 3.0.

6. To close an application, hold the left mouse button and navigate to File >> Quit, release the mouse button to select. Windows and applications can also be closed via the square in the top left corner of the window.

7. To insert another disk, locate a compatible disk image (DSK or ISO) and drag the icon from your main PC’s desktop to the emulated Mac desktop. This will insert and mount the disk. Double click on the disk icon to open the folder and then run your chosen application. Here we have loaded Lode Runner for some retro gaming fun. The legality of disk images (colloquially called ROMs in the retro communities) is grey at best. Even though they are decades old, they will still fall under copyright / intellectual property laws. Check your local laws!

8. An additional menu is available, click on Home (next to the Apple logo) and select Settings. From here you can export the current configuration for later use, import existing configurations or save disk images for use with other emulators. Via this “hidden” menu we can also load disk images.

Making a Bespoke Mac

Each of the emulated Macs on offer can be tailored to meet your needs.

1. Hover your mouse of the chosen system and Customize will appear. Click on Customize to launch the configuration options.

2. From the menu select Machine, RAM and System disk options. We can also load our own disk images and extra disk images from the Infinite HD and Saved HD options.

If your retro tastes are more “modern” then what about Mac OS 9 from 1999? We can create art in Adobe Photoshop 3.0

Or we can enjoy a game of Another World (also known as Out of This World), learn page layout with Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress, or create 3D worlds with Bryce.

Editor’s Note: The introduction paragraphs about the history of the Mac were repurposed from Les’s earlier article for Linux Format Magazine, which is also owned by our parent company, Future Plc.

A recent survey of university students in Japan appears to make it clear that an awareness of basic keyboard shortcuts is lacking. Keyboard shortcuts for copying (CTRL+C) and pasting (CTRL+V) data are decades old and work across every modern desktop OS that we know of. However, around 40% of the well-educated sample of young adults surveyed were unaware of them. The survey was conducted by digital skills and training outfit Menter, part of White Inc. Japan.

Before going further we don’t have experience of the quality of Menter’s prior surveys and note that the questionnaire was completed by only a modest number of students. Of the 519 university students, based all around Japan, the survey says that nearly all of them own a laptop or desktop, with just 5.8% saying they owned neither. Perhaps for this small portion of users, a smartphone or tablet has been sufficient to address their digital life.

In the chart above it is easy to see the most popular shortcut key combos, and the level of awareness of them by the students surveyed. Leading the pack as far as awareness goes, you can see 62.6% of folk knew that you could copy data using CTRL+C. Surprisingly the same number didn’t know how to paste the captured data, but CTRL+V aware students weren’t a lot fewer at 59.2%.

There is a big drop in awareness of the next most well-known keyboard shortcut: using CTRL+Z for undoing the most recent action. Only about 30% of surveyed university students knew about this very useful shortcut. Awareness of other experienced computer operator staples like CTRL+X, CTRL+S, CTRL+A, and CTRL+P were all around this level.

At the bottom of the awareness chart at 19.8% isn’t any particular keyboard shortcut combo. This is the percentage of students who didn’t know any shortcut keys at all, according to the survey.

Menter’s survey wasn’t all about keyboard shortcuts. As it is involved in digital skills and training it also looked at the students’ self-professed abilities concerning video conferencing, office suite software experience, and familiarity with using a computer mouse.

Takashi Yokoyama, the CEO of White Inc. offered some conclusions from Menter’s survey to Japan’s ITMedia. He said that the survey showed that even at university there should be more opportunities “to properly learn how to use a PC.” It shouldn’t be assumed that young people can use PCs, he added, so it may be a valuable area for targeted investment by educational institutions.

Whether you’ve found this story about Control+C and Control+V illuminating, or not, it might be worth a look at our feature on essential Windows 11 shortcut keys. People who spend a lot of time copying and pasting can even buy a dedicated Stack Overflow The Key v2, as pictured (top), which started as an April Fool’s joke. Another option is to program single macro keys or invest in something like the 8BitDo mechanical keyboard with giant programmable super buttons.

Earlier this year we also published a handy feature detailing how to navigate Windows without a mouse or touchpad. Sometimes using a keyboard for shortcuts and system navigation is faster and easier. Other times it can be useful if your mouse or trackpad is broken or glitching.

Starting February 15, 2024, Steam will no longer provide support for macOS versions 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave). The latter is the final version that supports 32-bit games, so such beloved titles as Civilization IV, Half-Life 2, and Metro 2033 will become unplayable on Macs with those versions of macOS.

The decision to discontinue support for these older macOS versions stems from several factors. First up, macOS Mojave is the final version that supports 32-bit games. Apple's move to stop supporting 32-bit applications in macOS 10.15 has rendered many older games incompatible with newer macOS versions. This change will also be reflected in the Steam store, which will no longer list games with only 32-bit macOS binaries as compatible with Mac at the end of 2023. 

Valve says that over 98% of Mac Steam users have migrated to newer macOS versions, so very few people will likely be impacted. Meanwhile, users of the older versions are urged to upgrade for continued access to Steam features and security updates. Furthermore, while Steam and its games may continue to function on these older versions for a time, their performance and compatibility cannot be guaranteed beyond the February 2024 deadline. 

For users still on macOS 10.13 or 10.14, upgrading to a more recent macOS version is essential to get the latest security fixes and new features, but there are Macs that do not support Mojave. If people running those versions update Steam (which is done automatically), they might lose access to 32-bit games. There are likely older Macs are kept specifically by their owners to run legacy applications, including older games. 

The technical aspects of Steam's operation are also a factor in this shift. The platform relies on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which does not work with macOS versions older than 10.15. (We saw this happen earlier this year for users of macOS 10.11 El Capitan and 10.12 Sierra.) Future versions of Steam will need macOS features and security updates only present in newer versions, further necessitating the move away from older platforms 

Finally, the security implications for users on outdated macOS versions are significant. Apple stopped providing security updates and technical support for macOS 10.13 in December 2020 and macOS 10.14 in October 2021.

It’s been less than two months since the release of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS 14, but Apple is already well underway on the subsequent versions of those popular operating systems. Apple has settled on a yearly upgrade pace for its major software platform, and with that quick iteration has come questions about bugs and stability. According to a new report, Craig Federighi, Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering, temporarily paused the development of iOS 18 and macOS 15 to meet quality targets.

The goal for the pause was to give programmers some breathing room to deal with a plethora of bugs that have crept up early in the gestation process, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple’s primary goal is to fix the bugs causing performance problems or breaking apps to ensure customers have a stable experience on day one. Once those major issues are resolved, then work can proceed on adding new features that will become the highlight of operating systems like iOS 18 and macOS 15.

According to Gurman, the one-week “pause” was initiated last week after senior management identified an alarming number of “escapes,” which refers to bugs not discovered during internal testing. A pause of one week might not sound like a long time, but it’s a significant event for a company of Apple’s size and scope. "It’s a problem of 10,000 people typing code and completely breaking the operating system," said one of Gurman’s anonymous sources.

Apple reportedly finished work on the M1 version of iOS 18/iPadOS 18 (codename Crystal) and macOS 15 (Glow). M1 refers to the first development milestone of an Apple software platform. The pause in development refers to the M2 versions of the above operating systems.

Apple has already issued several updates for iOS 17 to address bugs that customers encountered. The most recent release, iOS 17.1, fixed issues with screen “burn-in” on the iPhone 15 and keyboard responsiveness, among other things. Owners of new iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro users even encountered a strange bug that would put the phones in an update loop when trying to transfer data from an old iPhone.

We hope that Apple’s latest step to boost software quality means that customers will encounter fewer of these bugs in the future.

According to Apple's FY23 earnings call, sales of Apple's desktop and laptop computers were down 34% year-over-year in Q4 FY2023. Q4 of FY2022 was the most successful quarter for Macs ever, but this represents the fourth consecutive quarter of YoY declines for Macs. Apple remains optimistic about the future of its PCs as its M3-based lineup looks more competitive (and generally more expensive) than the previous-generation M2-powered family.

Sales of Macs and iPhones Disappoint

Sales of Macs totaled $7.614 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 and $29.357 billion for the whole, year, down nearly 34% and 27% year-over-year, respectively. While the declines look dramatic, fiscal 2022 was a record year for Macs in general as the company sold huge amounts of its high-performance M1 Pro and M1 Max-based MacBook Pro notebooks and Mac Studio desktops. Meanwhile, the company faced major shipments constraints in Q3 FY2022, which is why Q4 FY2022 was the record quarter for Macs ever.  

"In Mac, revenue came in at $7.6 billion, down 34% year-over-year from the prior year's record quarter," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, at the earnings call with financial analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "This was due to challenging market conditions, as well as difficult compares against the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago." 

While comparison with Q4 FY2022 may be a bit off, there is another reason why sales of Macs decline: owners of Apple's PCs who wanted to get an Apple Silicon-based machine have already got one. Given that their M1-based desktops and notebooks are three years old at most, Q3 of calendar 2023 was not their time for an upgrade given mediocre performance difference between M1 and M2-series processors. Apple admits that only half of the Macs last quarter were bought by Mac owners, the rest of sales came from people who were new Apple customers.

"We have great confidence in our Mac line-up and are excited about the recently announced iMac and MacBook Pro powered by our M3 chips," said Cook. "Our installed base is at an all-time high and half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product, driven by MacBook Air." 

Apple's iPad brought in $6.4 billion in revenue in Q4 FY2023, marking a 10% decrease compared to the same period last year. This downturn mirrors the situation seen with Mac sales in Q4 FY2022. Just like Macs, iPads were significantly impacted by supply chain disruptions in the June quarter, which led to an unusual spike in demand in the following September quarter as the pent-up demand was met.

But iPhones and Services Prosper

Apple's iPhone revenue saw an increase in Q4 FY2023, reaching $43.8 billion, a rise from the previous year's $42.6 billion. However, looking at the annual figures, iPhone revenue experienced a decline, falling to $200.6 billion from $205.5 billion the year before. 

While Apple's hardware business was a mixed bag both for Q4 FY2023 and for the whole year, the company's Services business thrived as the company's install base increased to two billion active devices. Revenue from services hit an record high, reaching $22.3 billion in Q4 FY2023 (up a 16% from Q2 FY2022) and 85.2 billion in FY2023 (up 9% from FY2022).

As Apple Increases R&D Spending to $30 Billion

Being the world's largest supplier of consumer electronics by revenue and the world's most valuable public company is a hard job. You not only need to meet customer's expectations, but also exceed those of investors. While Apple generally produces competitive and user-friendly products, it cannot force its customers to upgrade if subsequent models are moderately better than those on the market, especially amid economic downturn. Which is why some may consider Apple's results disappointing.  

But Apple still makes tons of money. The company earned $89.5 billion in Q4 FY2023 and $383.285 billion for the whole year. Despite lower sales, the company upped its research and development spending form $26.251 billion in FY2022 to $29.915 billion in FY2023, which makes the company one of the largest R&D spenders in the world.

Apple's A17 processor was the first chip to use TSMC's N3 (3nm-class) process technology, and this week, the company expanded its N3 lineup with a family of PC-oriented M3 chips for desktop and laptop computers. Analyst Jay Goldberg from Digits to Dollars believes the company spent as much as $1 billion on M3's design and tape-outs alone.

"We have to assume that [M3-series] tape out costs alone for the three [SoCs] has to be close to $1 billion," Goldberg wrote. "Very few companies can afford this large an undertaking."

Apple's M3 family consists of three fairly complex CPUs for now: the 25-billion-transistor M3 that's aimed at entry-level and mainstream desktops, laptops, and high-end tablets; the 37-billion-transistor M3 Pro for performance-mainstream machines; and the M3 Max that packs 92 billion transistors for high-end laptops and entry-level workstations. Each chip is designed to address different computing needs, from everyday tasks to professional coding, heavy engineering simulations, and video production.

Apple's vanilla M3, which comes with eight general-purpose cores and a new built-in GPU, is as complex as AMD's highly praised Phoenix processor (25 billion vs. 25.4 billion), whereas the M3 Pro and M3 Max are considerably more complex.

In fact, with 92 billion MOSFETs inside, the M3 Max is the most complex single-die processor released to date (though, based on what we know about some of the upcoming AI processors, not for long).

Apple used TSMC's N3 fabrication process to increase the economic efficiency of its M3 family, a risky move because the technology is relatively new -- but it looks like it has paid off. As chip detective @Frederic_Orange pointed out, Apple could presumably fit as many as 415 M3 dies on a single 300-mm wafer, which indicates a die size of around 146 mm^2.

By contrast, AMD's Phoenix (which has a similar complexity) has a die size of 178 mm^2. We can only guess whether Apple's M3 is cheaper to make than AMD's Phoenix based on rumors about TSMC's quotes, but smaller chips are typically easier to yield and produce. 

Apple spent $26.251 billion on R&D in 2022, and a significant part of this spending was assigned to chip design. The scale of investment in silicon, in general, and the M3-series SoCs, in particular, indicates that Apple is one of the few companies with the economic capability to undertake such development endeavors. 

Developing complex PC-oriented processors requires extended development cycles, often on the order of years, and intense capital investment. When it comes to an all-new platform — such as the Apple M3 family — the cost of development is staggering, particularly in Apple's case since the company tends to develop as much IP internally as possible. With M3, Apple not only uses its own custom general-purpose cores based on an Arm instruction set architecture but also packs an all-new GPU architecture supporting hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shaders, a new AI NPU, and a new multimedia engine.

When Apple introduced its M3 family of processors this week, it mentioned its GPU Dynamic Caching technology as one of the key advantages of its GPU architecture that allowed it to bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to its M-series SoCs. Indeed, it looks like Apple has spent years developing this technology and filed the first patent that covers it in early 2020. 

Traditional GPUs operate on static caching mechanisms and fixed memory spaces which sometimes results in inefficient management and retrieval of page table information, underutilization of certain physical memory regions, and limitations of allocated memory for certain workloads. Apple's GPU Dynamic Caching ensures that cache and memory spaces are dynamically assigned based on the actual needs of different tasks and workloads. This adaptability ensures optimized memory usage, preventing wastage of memory resources and allowing tasks to access the memory they need (assuming that there is enough memory for a given task).

Dynamic caching and on-demand memory allocation can significantly benefit things like hardware ray tracing. Ray tracing is a computationally intensive rendering technique that simulates physical behavior of light to generate images. Given the complexity and variability of ray tracing computations, having the flexibility to allocate memory as needed and speed up access to frequently used data can significantly improve performance. What is also crucial for Apple is that its technology also allows to improve performance efficiency and in some cases reduce memory consumption, both of which are important considerations.

In addition to ray tracing, dynamic caching and on-demand memory allocation can benefit memory bandwidth-hungry graphics applications in general, so the technology possibly plays a role in improved performance of Apple M3's GPUs too. Meanwhile, mesh shading also plays a significant role in improving overall performance of Apple's new GPUs.

In a post shared today to Twitter/X, maker and developer Ivan Kuleshov shared a cool mod for his Mac Mini that we’re too stoked about not to share. With a little ingenuity, his latest mod has enabled him to successfully power a Mac Mini using PoE — yes, powered only by the ethernet cable — and the ethernet cable can also serve as a power backup for redundancy. If the name sounds familiar, Kuleshov’s the mastermind behind the Raspberry Pi Compute Blade we covered earlier this year.

Kuleshov delved into the creation process of this PoE Mac Mini mod which apparently involved a bit of reconstruction on the original Ethernet port. The native connector had to be completely unsoldered and modified to use the new PoE hardware. In this case, Kuleshove is using a MagJack connector.

According to Kuleshov, the best way to get the hardware he needed was to take apart an existing MagJack. If you aren’t familiar with this component, it’s a type of RJ45 Ethernet connector with the integrated magnets necessary to enable PoE functionality for the port.

Just like in the Compute Blade project, Kuleshov uses off-the-shelf modules for this mod. These components handle all of the signal interpretation with the PoE switch, which is how it’s able to convert and power the Mac Mini with 12V. He provided a close-up look at the mod in the original Twitter/X thread, which we definitely recommend checking out. You can expand the tweet below to see the video and thread.

There are plans in the works to share more details about the development in the near future, including both an in-depth article and a video. In the meantime, you can check out the demo in action over at Twitter/X. This is just one of many cool creations put together by Kuleshov. Be sure to follow him for more clever projects as well as any future updates on this one.

Today at WWDC, Apple announced the latest update to its desktop/laptop operating system, and it’s called macOS Sonoma. The update brings features introduced with iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, including an upgraded Messages app and new predictive autocorrect functionality. But perhaps the biggest announcement relates to gaming.

Apple says that Apple Silicon made it possible to bring new gaming experiences to the Mac platform. With macOS Sonoma, there’s a new Game Mode that prioritizes CPU and GPU usage for your games to provide more consistent frame rates. The Bluetooth sampling rate has been doubled to help improve support for PlayStation and Xbox controllers. 

A new Gaming Porting Toolkit for developer is designed to help significantly reduce the amount of time required to port games from the PC to Mac. More specifically, a “simpler conversion process” is included for shaders and graphics code in the Metal API. 

To put this new gaming focus into perspective, Metal Gear Solid auteur Hideo Kojima announced on the stream that hs is bringing Death Stranding: Director’s Cut to macOS later this year. The developer is also actively working to bring future titles to macOS. 

Apple is focusing on infusing macOS Sonoma with tools to improve your productivity. Stage Manager has been given a makeover to improve upon its somewhat shaky start in previous macOS versions by making it easier and faster to move between apps (and windows). Video overlay allows you to add AR effects to video, like when sharing your screen. These features are available in all conferencing apps, like Zoom, Teams, etc. You can now share passwords and passkeys to a person or a group from your iCloud keychain. Apple says that this feature is end-to-end encrypted for security.

Safari gains a new Profiles feature that allows you to have different profiles with separate favorites, cookies and extensions (among other settings).

Widgets were previously only available in the Notification Center. Now, you can break them out and place them on your desktop where you wish. (In a way, it is reminiscent of OS X from the early 2000's). For example, you could have Weather and Stocks permanently set on your desktop at all times; they then fade slightly from view when you focus on a new app window. 

MacOS Sonoma arrives this fall, when it will leverage all of the hardware capabilities of the new 15-inch MacBook Air, M2 Ultra Mac Studio and M2 Ultra Mac Pro.

Earlier this month, it was discovered that Apple had included a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper in every release of macOS since the 2018 release of macOS Mojave. However, now that's coming to an end. 9to5Mac found that in the most recent beta release of macOS Ventura (13.4 beta 3), the copy of the paper stashed deep in the system file is gone.

It's unclear why the whitepaper, authored by the presumably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, ever ended up in shipped versions of macOS in the first place. The document was in a folder within the Image Capture software, including a tool called VirtualScanner.app, which was also removed from the beta. Virtual Scanner II may have been an internal tool for testing scanning without any actual hardware.

Why the Bitcoin whitepaper? It may have been a test document that was never supposed to be seen by the public. Whether it was an in-joke among developers or just an easy file to use will never be known for sure.

If you haven't yet updated, you can still find the document with the following command in Terminal:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

Presumably, the document and affiliated application will be removed from the final version of macOS Ventura 13.4.

Whether an in-joke or a vestige of testing, it makes sense that Apple is extracting the document from macOS. After technologist Andy Baio posted on his blog about the document, the press covered it thoroughly (including Tom's Hardware). At the moment, Apple has no business in cryptocurrency (outside of wallet and exchange apps allowed on its App Store), and the PDF emboldened conspiracy theorists claiming that Nakamato was actually Apple co-founder and long-time CEO Steve Jobs.

In November 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that while he personally owns cryptocurrency "as part of a diversified portfolio," the company had no intentions to buy any.

Most Mac owners won't notice the change, but it was a fun gag while it lasted.

It's almost the end of the road for Steam on some Macs. After announcing plans to stop supporting Steam for Windows 7 and 8, Valve today announced it will drop support for Macs running macOS 10.11 El Capitan and 10.12 Sierra. The company made the announcement in a short blog post on its support site.

While the older versions of Windows will get dropped in Jan. 2024, the older macOS versions will get the boot earlier in Sept. 2023. Starting Sept. 1, 2023, the Steam Client will no longer run, and you'll have to update to macOS 10.13 High Sierra in order to play any games that run through Steam on your Mac.

Valve is dropping support for macOS El Capitan and Sierra for the same reasons it's dropping support for Windows 7 and 8: because "core features" of Steam use an embedded version of Chrome, which won't work on these older operating systems. 

"In addition, future versions of Steam will require macOS feature and security updates only present in macOS 10.13 and above," the unsigned blog post reads. 

This change will probably affect far fewer users than the Windows announcement, as Macs aren't nearly as popular for PC gaming. In the March 2023 Steam Hardware Survey, macOS and OS X consisted of just 1.41% of systems running Steam — and of the majority of those Macs were already running macOS 13.2.1 Ventura, which is the latest version. In fact, the oldest version even captured in the survey was macOS 10.15.7, an update to Catalina, and consisted of less than 1% (of the 1.41% of macOS/OS X users). So, yeah — these changes are likely to affect very few people.

Of the Macs in that survey, 54.88% were running systems with Apple Silicon, while the other 45.08% were still on Intel. El Capitan was released in 2015, with Sierra following in 2016. Security updates for those OS versions ended in 2018 and 2019, respectively. 

With free updates each year, there's little reason for Mac owners to not upgrade, as long as their system is still supported. Apple stopped supporting 32-bit applications in 2017, with macOS 10.13 High Sierra, which led to tons of Steam games becoming incompatible with macOS. 

That said, there's probably some people who will be affected by this announcement. But it looks like Valve is ready to modernize, even on this relatively minor platform.

It has been brought to public attention that every release of Apple’s MacOS since Mojave (2018) has included the full Bitcoin whitepaper, as inked by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. Why the file is there is a bit of a mystery, but there are a few theories about its reason for inclusion with the OS.

The presence of the ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ PDF was (re)discovered by Andy Baio from Waxy. The file came into view when Baio was fixing a printer issue. Intriguingly the file is used by a sometimes hidden service called ‘Virtual Scanner II’ which may have something to do with importing documents from Apple’s iOS devices.

If you are a Mac user with an OS from 2018 or newer, you can use the following steps to uncover the Bitcoin whitepaper on your fixed storage:

• Open the Terminal app
• Get ready to type
• Input “open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf” without the quotes
• Hit enter
• View document while stroking chin in satisfaction

The above process should immediately open the PDF in question. However, if you do have a visible device called ‘Virtual Scanner II’ on your system, you can see the first page of the ‘simpledoc.pdf’ in the default scanning preview window when you set the image capture parameters to ‘Document’ and ’72 dpi’.

A source that spoke to Baio says that the inclusion of the Bitcoin whitepaper has been internally filed as an issue at Apple, but has yet to be addressed by the OS development team.

In his post on Waxy, Baio admits that he only just rediscovered this peculiar OS-bundled file. The Bitcoin whitepaper and some other apparently useless files were a hot topic on the Apple Community notice boards back in 2020. Another notable OS stowaway with no apparent link to a system app/tool is a high-resolution JPEG photo of a sign, said to be a scene from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

Back when operating systems came on an embedded ROM or a floppy disk or two, there was no room for bloat, but in the new millennium, it seems like megabytes of random detritus can remain undiscovered and uncommented upon for years.

It turns out that Apple has baked in support into its Apple Silicon processors for an instruction that was designed for Intel's 8080 processor that debuted back in 1974, using a secret undocumented extension to execute the very infrequently-used instructions, thus boosting emulation performance.

Apple’s Rosetta 2 is part of macOS that allows applications written for Intel processors to run on Apple Silicon-equipped Macs, and it works rather well. Named for the Rosetta Stone, which allowed Egyptologists to begin decoding the ancient hieroglyphic writing system in the 1820s. Rosetta has been equally mysterious, but may have begun to give up its secrets, as detailed in a blog post by Australian security researcher Dougall Johnson, in which he reveals an undocumented extension while discussing why Rosetta 2 is so fast. 

The secret extension appears to alter the way the processor stores parity and adjust flags from an application, to provide more accurate emulation. The story is taken up by web developer and retro computing enthusiast Blake Patterson, who explains how and why it does this, with the help of Johnson’s posts on Mastodon.

The whole thing can be traced back to the Intel 8080 from 1974, which was the company’s second-ever chip. This 8-bit microprocessor handled its adjust and parity flags in a particular way, using them to indicate whether to carry numbers in a binary-coded decimal operation, and this has persisted through to today’s x64 chips even though it’s hardly ever used by modern applications. 

The Arm architecture used by Apple Silicon, being unrelated to x64, has no such functionality, so it needed to be emulated. Otherwise, some Intel software wouldn’t work on the new Macs, and computing the same operation without the 8080’s flag-handling would use five times as many instructions and slow the Mac down. 

Rosetta 2 recompiles a binary application meant for an Intel processor at launch rather than providing real-time emulation, but cannot tell if the adjust and parity flags will be used by the app. It uses bits 26 and 27 of the Arm flags register to emulate the 8080’s handling of them to avoid needing to go the long way round every time.

It would break the Arm specification to have this running all the time, so the Apple Silicon processors only do this when running Rosetta 2 - Johnson points out that it doesn’t work when the Apple processor is running a Linux VM, as the processor isn’t as configurable in this situation. 

While not exactly Earth-shattering news, it’s a fascinating insight into the workings of an extremely clever and performant piece of software, albeit one that - in the same way the original Rosetta was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and retired in 10.7 Lion - is likely to fade away once Apple Silicon is a few more generations old.

A problem has arisen in the way the latest version of MacOS mounts Raspberry Pi Pico virtual volumes, meaning Macs updated to 13.0 Ventura, released October 24, cannot copy across the UF2 files used for flashing instructions onto the microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi blog has a post about the error, and the company has reported it to Apple as a bug.

The Finder still mounts the volume onto the desktop when the Pico is connected over USB while the Bootsel button is held down to put it into mass storage mode, just like it would with any other volume from a flash drive to a network server, but throws an unexpected error code 100093 -  kPOSIXErrorENOATTR ("Attribute not found") - when you try to copy a file to the Pico. It seems to have something to do with the volume’s extended attributes, but whatever it means, the file does not copy across. The problem also appears to affect other boards that use "fake" virtual volumes, including third party RP2040-based boards, and there's a long discussion about the issue on GitHub.

This has led to speculation that, since Picos mounted properly in previous versions of the OS, Apple has changed something in the way Ventura deals with external volume attributes, and the Pico falls foul of the change. “We’re not entirely sure what the exact change is; possibly Finder is now carrying out an additional re-read of the metadata after write, or it could be that there has been a change in the way errors are handled based on reading incorrect data. There may even have been some sort of change to the default caching behavior,” writes Raspberry Pi’s head of documentation Alisdair Allen on the blog, also noting that it could be a combination of several changes.

There are currently two workarounds for the problem, both of which address the issue by bypassing Finder. One is to use the command line, from where you can successfully copy a UF2 file across despite yet another error message appearing, and the other is to use Raspberry Pi’s own Picotool, which can achieve the same thing. An Apple Shortcut written by Allen can also be downloaded to help matters.

Raspberry Pi is in talks with Apple about the issue, but notes that the error still occurs in the beta version of Ventura 13.1. Pico owners who encounter the issue can  send a bug report to Apple through the Feedback Assistant app on their Macs, quoting feedback number FB11725030.

When you connect to your wireless router at home or public Wi-Fi, your device needs to be identifiable. The best way to do that is by giving each device that connects its own unique identity that can be trusted to join a network. If you're using a Mac, Windows PC, an Android smartphone or an iPhone, your device is assigned a unique media access control (MAC) address from the factory.

If your computer has a Wi-Fi adapter and a physical Ethernet port, each will have its own unique MAC address. These MAC addresses are permanent fixtures on a computer, smartphone, tablet, etc. So while I may rename my smartphone "Brandon's iPhone 14 Pro" or change its name to "Brandon Rulez," the Wi-Fi MAC address will stay the same, allowing me to easily connect to known networks. You may need to know your MAC address for several reasons, including in order to whitelist it on your router (if you want to create a list of allowed devices).

Below, we’ll show you how to find your MAC address on both macOS 13 Venture and macOS 12 Monterey. If you’re using Windows, see our article on how to find your MAC address in Windows.

How to Find Your MAC Address in macOS 13 Using System Settings

The System Settings app is where you can access the vast majority of configuration options available for your Mac. Accessing your MAC address is relatively straightforward when using the following steps.

1. Navigate to the ‘Network’ tab in System Settings. You can get to System Settings by clicking on the gear icon in the Dock or by searching for ‘System Settings’ in Spotlight. Click on ‘Network’ in the sidebar.

2. Click on ‘Wi-Fi’ or ‘Ethernet,’ depending on what MAC address you need and then click details. If you need to find your Wi-Fi adapter MAC address, click Wi-Fi, then Details.

If you want to find your Ethernet MAC address, click Ethernet, then Details.

3. Now Click Hardware from the sidebar. Clicking the Hardware tab will bring up the final menu that will reveal your MAC address.

4. Look for ‘MAC address’ at the top of the page. If you need to use the MAC address for whatever reason, you can highlight it and copy it directly from this window to paste it wherever you want.

How to Find Your MAC Address in macOS 12 Using Network Preferences

The process in macOS 12 Monterey (and older versions of macOS) is a bit simpler.

1. Click the Wi-Fi icon in the top Menu Bar. When you click the Wi-Fi icon, it will bring up a list of available wireless networks. At the bottom of the popup is a setting for Network Preferences, which you need to click.

2. Select Wi-Fi (or Ethernet): You will need to select which network adapter you wish to view; in this case, we selected the Wi-Fi adapter on a MacBook Pro. Then click on Advanced.

3. Find the section labeled Wi-Fi MAC Address: You'll find your MAC address displayed at the very bottom of the window.

How to Find Your MAC Address in macOS 13 or macOS 12 Using Terminal

An alternative method for finding your MAC address in macOS is to use the Terminal app. This might be preferable if you don’t want to mouse and click through the macOS user interface.

1. Open the Terminal app. The best way to do this is to type ‘Terminal’ in Spotlight.

2. Enter the following ifconfig into Terminal and then hit enter.

3. Look for CSUM> or ROINVERT_SUM>: You'll need to scroll down quite a bit to find the pertinent information regarding your MAC address. In my case, the Wi-Fi MAC address is found under CSUM>. The Ethernet MAC address is found under ROINVERT_CSUM> 

Windows 95 was certainly a breakthrough moment in operating system design, bringing so many of the things we take for granted today to PCs, such as the desktop and the Start button. This week, Microsoft announced the latest 22H2 updates for Windows 10, and gave us a flash of a possible Windows 12 at the Ignite conference — and it might make you wonder if Windows 95 really was all that innovative (or if nostalgia has rose-tinted your memories). 

Well, now you can find out: Slack developer Felix Rieseberg has created a cross-platform Windows 95 that runs as an app, and it’s just reached version 3.1.1. (Thanks to Betanews for bringing this to our attention.) 

And yes, it can run Doom. 

It’s all done through the magic of Electron, GitHub’s open-source software framework used to create desktop apps out of web technologies such as CSS and JavaScript, which is what Rieseberg has used here. Download the .exe file (for Windows — Linux and Mac versions are available). It simply executes without an installation, and pops up the familiar, if old-fashioned, desktop with a welcome message open in Notepad.

Installed software includes Netscape Navigator, as well as classic games such as Wolfenstein 3D, A10 Tank Killer, and Doom. This project displays Electron’s capabilities for creating cross-platform apps with versions for Windows (32-bit, 64-bit, ARM64), Mac (Intel, Apple M1), and Linux (64-bit, ARM64, ARMv7). 

It runs reasonably well — though the author admits it would be even better as a native app. In a cursory test, we found the mouse pointer to be erratic, and Doom got stuck on the menu screen.

As the third release of the portable OS, this Windows 95 sees an update to Electron v18, and also moves to a newer version of the v86 virtualization app that emulates an x86 processor. The new version uses the WebAssembly language and also fixes a few bugs. You can even add new apps to by mounting hard drive images — though if you’ve got a project-critical Windows 95 app, you’re better off with a VM or even an old PC. If you’re using Linux, you can run it in Docker.

On his GitHub page, Rieseberg apologizes for what he’s done, and adds: “Bear in mind that this is written entirely in JavaScript, so please adjust your expectations.” The app is available under an educational license, and has no approval from Microsoft. Download it from GitHub.

Apple has invented and patented a 1980s home computer, or is it a Raspberry Pi 400 clone? The company submitted a patent to the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) that envisions a powerful portable computer built into a keyboard that you can take while traveling and conveniently plug into a monitor or TV.

The patent drawings show a wedge-shaped Magic Keyboard style compact design, with a single cable for all the duties you might require: display, power, and data. Some images show an accompanying wedge resembling the Magic Trackpad; others show it next to a wireless mouse.

In its patent background section, Apple talks about how desktop computers with good performance levels have traditionally been bulky. Now Apple thinks it can create a powerful and highly portable solution, tapping into latent demand for such devices.

We have recently seen the revival of home computer wedge-shaped systems (i.e., the keyboard is the computer) with the launch of the Raspberry Pi 400. However, Apple is promising levels of computing power one would never expect from such a form factor. In addition, Apple has proliferated its very successful Apple Silicon M1 processors throughout its range of Macs and iDevices, and it naturally sees further opportunities for sales expansion.

The built-in CPU and GPU cores in the Apple M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max already deliver high performance at low power levels. So, Apple Silicon would be an obvious choice if you had to choose a computer architecture to build a cool running new computer in a keyboard form factor.  

The patent is definitely angling at a more powerful M1 or M2 powered device, as it says that the keyboard could be fitted with an active fan, and the keyboard baseplate would be used to wick away heat. However, please note that some portable battery-powered M1 devices in existence are fanless (yet are still admirable performers).

Portable Mac Without a Built-in Pointing Device Is Pointless

In some pictures we see the Magic Keyboard Mac wedge with a Magic Trackpad style accompaniment, in others, there is a mouse. However, there is no getting away from the Mac needing a pointing device, as Apple has obstinately avoided making Macs that are touch screen friendly, for example.

With a device like this, which is being positioned as a portable – in contrast to the diminutive Mac Mini computers which are just small desktops – some way to build in or tie the pointing device to the keyboard seems like a must. Imagine taking this device somewhere and forgetting the mouse or trackpad.

Another weakness could be the Apple philosophy of reducing physical ports to an absolute minimum. Yes, it is neat to just have one port/cable for everything, but it might mean you need dongles for tech bits and pieces you want to connect, and who can have too many USB ports?

Many Patents Don't Precipitate Shipping Products

Many patent applications showing products like the above never bear fruit. Though we have a great fondness for wedge-shaped computers from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras (and the new RasPi 400),  there's no guarantee that Apple will ever bring a device like this to market. We've seen plenty of interesting patent applications from Apple over the years, and only a handful have ended up in shipping products. So while this is an intriguing concept from Apple, don't hold your breath on seeing it in the real world.

Running a virtual machine (VM) is a way to run a virtual computer and there are a myriad of ways to accomplish this across all operating systems. A popular method is via QEMU, an open source hypervisor which can emulate different hardware devices. QEMU is a complex and powerful application, and sometimes we just want to run a quick VM for a project. Here is where Quickemu comes in.

Quickemu was created by Martin Wimpress and the goal of the project was “to enable quick testing of Linux distributions where the virtual machine configurations can be stored anywhere”. Quickemu handles the download and configuration of our guest OS. In fact, the terminal command version has only two commands to download, build and configure your guest OS! Over time Quickemu matured and soon saw the inclusion of Windows and macOS support and this is where we start our how to.

In this how-to, we shall create a Windows 11 and macOS VM using Quickemu and Quickgui a user interface to create, manage and control guest VMs. Later, in the article, we shall tweak our settings to maximise RAM and learn how to use the terminal version of Quickemu.

For this project you will need

• A computer running Ubuntu 20.04 or better
• Minimum 8GB of RAM
• Quad-core CPU

Installing Quickemu and Quickgui

1. Open a terminal and add this PPA (Personal Package Archive) to your

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:flexiondotorg/quickemu

 2. Update the repositories and then install Quickemu.

sudo apt updatesudo apt install quickemu

That is all the installation that we need for the quickemu terminal commands but we are going further and installing a GUI, Quickgui to simplify managing our VMs.

3. Open a terminal and add this PPA (Personal Package Archive) to your repositories.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannick-mauray/quickgui

4. Update the repositories and then install Quickgui.

sudo apt updatesudo apt install quickgui

Running a Windows 11 Guest

Quickemu can be used to emulate Windows versions from 8 to 11 and using the Quickgui application we can automatically download the ISO and configure the VM ready for installation.

3.  Click on Select, found under Operating System.

4.  Scroll or search for Windows and click to select. There is a vast choice of operating systems, including many different Linux distributions and macOS.

5.  Click on Select, found under Version.

6.  Select 11 for Windows 11. You can also choose Windows 10 or even relive the horror of 8.1.

7.  Select your preferred language.

8.  Click on Download to download the ISO. This will also start the VM configuration.

9.  Click on dismiss once the download is complete.

10.  Click X to close the Downloader menu and return to the main menu.

11.  Click on Manage Existing Machines. This will list all of the VMs that have been created.

12.  Click on the play button next to Windows 11 to start the VM. The VM can also be stopped using the stop button.

13.  Follow the Windows 11 installation steps as per a typical install.

14.  Right click on the Windows 11 desktop and select Display Settings. Then set your preferred resolution.

15. Click on the arrows, or press Shift F11 to go fullscreen. To close click on the VM title bar and press Shift F11.

How to create a macOS Guest

1. Open Quickgui, it can be found in your applications menu.
2. Click on Create new machines. This will start the VM creation process.

3.  Click on Select, found under Operating System.

4.  Scroll or search for macOS and click to select. There is a vast choice of operating systems, including many different Linux distributions and macOS.

5.  Click on Select, found under Version.

6.  Select Catalina. There are other versions of macOS available but the project creator confirms that Catalina has the best compatibility for a VM.

7.  Click on Download to download the ISO. This will also start the VM configuration.

8.  Click on dismiss once the download is complete.

9.  Click X to close the Downloader menu and return to the main menu.

10.  Click on Manage Existing Machines. This will list all of the VMs that have been created.

11.  Click on the play button next to macOS Catalina to start the VM. The VM can also be stopped using the stop button.

12.  With macOS Base System selected (the default), press Enter.

13.  Click on Disk Utility then Continue. The macOS Utilities menu is a Swiss Army Knife of tools to manage your macOS device.

14.  Select Apple Inc. VirtIO Block Media and then click Erase. This is the virtual drive created by quickemu.

15.  Name the drive and click Erase.The drive is already empty but this prepares it for macOS installation.

16.  Click Done.

17.  Close Disk Utility.

18.  Select Reinstall macOS and then click Continue to start the macOS install process.

Tweaking Quickemu via the Terminal

Quickemu was designed to be a terminal first application, and this is reflected in its ease of use. Using two lines, we can download an operating system and then run the VM, creating a configuration file as it builds.

quickget windows 11

2. Run quickemu and save the VM configuration to windows11.conf

quickemu --vm windows-11.conf

3. Follow the standard Windows 11 installation process

Quickemu will automatically determine the amount of RAM for our Windows 11 VM but we can override this using the windows11.conf file.

3. Save the file.

4. Run quickemu with the updated config file.

 More configuration options, including manually specifying CPU cores can be found at Quickemu’s Github page under “All the options”.

When a new major operating system update is released, you’d expect to gain new features, improved performance and the usual array of bug fixes. Instead, according to Mac Rumors, some unlucky Mac owners upgrading to the newly launched macOS Monterey wound up with bricked machines.

Apple released macOS Monterey as the successor to macOS Big Sur one week ago, and it comes preinstalled on the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. But for some upgrading older Macs, the upgrade process has been fraught with heartache. Freddy Mini took to Twitter to explain that his 16-inch MacBook Pro (2020) died while installing macOS Monterey. The 18-month-old laptop no longer boots and is now an expensive paperweight.

Another MacBook Pro (2019) owner, Daniel Lin, says that his device is bricked again (after the same thing happened with last year’s Big Sur update). “Ports continue to stop working, not allowing charging, which bricks this,” Lin remarked. “Can’t reset SMC because there’s no power going in. What else could help me determine I bought a lemon?”

And it’s not just reports flooding Twitter regarding macOS Monterey wreaking havoc on Macs; Mac Rumors also points out that nearly a dozen threads popped up on the official Apple Support Communities that additional machines are no longer functional. 

Mpotts94 explained in an Apple Support thread that is currently four pages long, “I also updated my MacBook Pro to Monterey and it is just black when trying to boot up. I know that it’s on for 2 reasons. 1. It can get extremely hot and 2 the mousepad clicks. I took it to Apple Genius Bar and they state it is due to my logic board. I’ve never had any issues until I updated and they say that I will owe $500 to fix it.” 

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the incessant bricking. Users report that iMac, MacBook Pro, and even Mac mini devices are susceptible to the ongoing problem. At this time, Apple has not made an official statement on these issues with macOS Monterey, so if you own a Mac and haven’t already upgraded, perhaps waiting would be prudent. But, on the other hand, you’re not exactly missing out on a lot by delaying the update while any potential bugs are squashed.

With that said, macOS Monterey is currently sitting at version 12.01, while version 12.1 is in beta. Hopefully, this update will solve any lingering bricking issues, but we’ll need to wait for Apple’s confirmation before getting too optimistic about those prospects.

The list of devices that support Windows 11 could grow later this year. Parallels told iMore that it’s planning to add support for the operating system to its Mac-specific virtualization software as it makes its way through the Windows Insider Program.

Parallels SVP of Engineering and Support Nick Dobrovolskiy told iMore, ”the Parallels Engineering team is waiting for the official Windows 11 Insider Preview build to start studying changes introduced in the new OS to deliver full compatibility in future Parallels Desktop updates." However, a specific timeline for those updates wasn’t provided.

Microsoft released the first Insider Preview for Windows 11 on June 28; iMore’s report followed that initial rollout. Parallels hasn’t announced support for that build, but a quick Twitter search reveals that many people have been able to use the company’s virtualization software to experiment with Windows 11 nonetheless.

Several of those people have also said they can use the Insider Preview build on Macs with the M1 chip. Parallels added support for Apple’s custom silicon in April, but that support should be limited to Windows 10 on Arm. The ability to run Windows 11 on the M1 before Parallels officially announces its support is a surprise.

It might be surprising to learn that Windows 11 will run on a Mac at all. The operating system has strict requirements: Microsoft says it’s currently limited to devices featuring an Intel 8th Gen or AMD second-gen Ryzen processor with TPM 2.0 support. (The company is testing support for older processors, though.)

Apple doesn’t sell any Macs with TPM 2.0 support, yet many people successfully use Windows 11 in virtual machines. Intrepid enthusiasts have also managed to get a build of the operating system working on Raspberry Pi.  It almost seems easier to use Windows 11 on these devices than on a PC with a four-year-old CPU.

The process should get even easier as tools like Parallels start to officially support Windows 11, which Microsoft appears to be planning to launch in October. If it can be officially virtualized on macOS, we could actually see Windows 11 on more Macs than PCs since it’s not expected to roll out to Windows 10 devices until early 2022.

Apple has extended an olive branch to Windows-using Mac owners. The company recently updated its Boot Camp utility to support the Windows Precision Touchpad feature on certain devices, as spotted this morning by Reddit user “ar25nan." 

Windows Precision touchpad drivers offer a variety of gestures you can use to switch between windows, access the action center and open Cortana, among other things. It also enables basic functionality, such as two-finger scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. Most of those features have a macOS equivalent, many of which use the same gesture.

Yet, until now Mac owners running Windows 10 via the Boot Camp utility were unable to take advantage of Windows Precision Touchpad. That’s always been a notable omission, especially since Apple places such emphasis on touch-based interactions with its devices. Even the company’s basic mouse was designed with gestures in mind.

That situation has finally been rectified…for some people.

Macs That Support Windows Precision Gestures 

Apple said in a support document that Windows Precision gestures support is limited to Boot Camp users running macOS Big Sur on an Intel-based Mac that features its T2 Security Chip. Anyone using an older version of macOS or an M1-equipped Mac is out of luck.

The list of Macs that meet these criteria is pretty short:

• iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)
• iMac Pro
• Mac Pro (2019)
• Mac Pro (Rack, 2019)
• Mac mini (2018)
• MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2020)
• MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2019)
• MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)

That might seem like a fair number of devices, but that’s only because of the way Apple is counting them. The actual list is just “Macs that were released between 2018 and early 2020.” Every other device—and versions of macOS released prior to Big Sur—will be stuck with the limited tracked options available before this update.

Here’s the good news: The limitation to Intel-based Macs almost certainly stems from the fact that Boot Camp doesn’t even support Apple’s custom silicon yet. Apple has said that it’s up to Microsoft to make sure Windows 10 on Arm runs on its new chips. Hopefully, support for Windows Precision touchpads will be there to greet it.

Either way, this should be a welcome change for the subset of Mac owners it affects, and it shows that Apple hasn’t completely abandoned its Intel-based Macs just yet.

Mac users with M1 chips powering their sleek hardware but still hankering to run Windows apps on it take note: software compatibility layer Wine, which is definitely not an emulator, has made this possible in a recent update.

Wine 6.0.1 is a maintenance release, but the ability to run 64 bit Windows apps on MacOS Big Sur for M1 Macs (along with more than 60 other bugfixes) is a bit of a big deal, as it doesn’t support Boot Camp, and none of the big virtualization apps has managed to get X86 Windows running yet, only the Insider Preview version of the ARM port.

Given that just about all major apps run on M1/Big Sur anyway, thanks to speedy re-compilations for the M1’s ARM architecture or Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation tech, there are only a few reasons why you might want to do this, but if you’ve got a Windows-only app that’s absolutely mission critical, there’s now a way to get it working on your shiny new Macbook Pro.

Or at least, it will work if it’s in the Wine team’s database of compatible applications, which is well worth checking out before you bet the farm on a combination of cutting-edge technology and old XP apps kept alive when they should have been replaced years ago. The top ten of Wine supported software is dominated by classic games from the past 20 years, with World of Warcraft taking the top spot.

Apple's WWDC event always feels like roulette when it comes to whether or not the company will announce any new devices or big software updates. For the past few weeks, rumors have been swirling that Apple might announce new MacBooks or the follow-up to its successful M1 chip today, but that didn't turn out to be the case. We did get news on the latest incarnation of MacOS, called Monterey, but the rest of today's stream was mostly spent on new iOS and iPadOS features (many of which are already present in Android).

Monterey, the latest version of MacOS, was today's biggest announcement outside of the mobile space, although it's not shaping up to be as major of an update as last year's Big Sur. It mostly focuses on bringing continuity across your MacBook and other Apple devices, including the ability to control an iMac, iPad and iPhone all with your MacBook's keyboard and touchpad (or vice versa, presumably). It'll also introduce new features that are coming to iOS and iPadOS to MacOS devices, but these are the most concrete details we know for now.

Apple did discuss that it's going to be moving away from Automator and towards interspersing manual task shortcuts throughout the OS. Sort of like Windows Tiles, these shortcuts will let you open different apps from panels, but they'll also take the form of buttons that show up in other programs and let you easily perform certain tasks. For instance, you might be able to make a gif straight from a photo editing program with a shortcut. It's unclear exactly how intrusive or useful these shortcuts will be, especially since Apple said Automator would still be supported.

Safari is also getting tab groups, similar to the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, and will also add Chrome Sync-like features to allow you to browse more easily across your MacBook and your iPhone (which will also get a tab redesign).

Speaking of iPhones, iOS 15 is adding a bunch of new features to the device, mostly focused around sharing content. These include spatial audio that tries to cancel ambient noise around you on video calls, plus grid and portrait mode options for FaceTime. FaceTime is also getting links you can send to participants that they can click on to join future calls, much like Zoom or Google Meet.

What's more interesting are the new content-sharing features. Facetime will now let users watch content from a streaming app together, each having control of the play and pause functions for perfect, automatic syncing. This also applies to music, plus FaceTime will be adding screensharing support as well. While we don't normally cover phones, these functions are worth nothing as they will be coming to MacOS, too. 

Aside from these features, there was a lot of talk about privacy promises, more niche updates like changes to iCloud (iCloud+) and the health app, and sections covering Apple Watch and smart home devices. Plus, iOS will be introducing translation features and other quality-of-life changes that are similar to what's already on other platforms.

But if, like me, you were hoping for more substantial information on what's next for Apple Hardware, you're going to have to wait a little longer. Still, if you want to check out any of these OS changes, a limited developer beta starts today and a public beta starts next month.

Apple recently updated macOS to resolve an issue that, according to ZDNet, could result in some USB-C docks bricking specific MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models.

Apple said that “macOS Big Sur 11.2.2 prevents MacBook Pro (2019 or later) and MacBook Air (2020 or later) models from incurring damage when they are connected to certain third-party, non-compliant powered USB-C hubs and docks.”

Mac owners affected by the bug initially speculated that Apple’s new M1 chip was to blame. The first Macs to feature the chip weren’t released until 2020, however, so the inclusion of the “MacBook Pro (2019 or later)” line suggests that isn’t the case.

But it wouldn’t be surprising if the M1-equipped MacBook Pro was disproportionately affected by this bug compared to its Intel-bearing counterpart simply because it doesn’t offer nearly as much connectivity out of the box.

The most recent Intel-equipped MacBook Pro offers four USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports; the model featuring the M1 chip only has two USB 4 / Thunderbolt 3 ports. Both have headphone jacks, too, and the MacBook Air has the same configuration.

It’s not hard to imagine someone whose laptop only has two ports—one of which has to be used to charge the device—turning to a USB-C dock sooner than someone whose laptop has two more ports. Those cables have to go somewhere, right?

Luckily the specificity of Apple’s release notes suggests that most USB-C docks were safe—only some “third-party, non-compliant powered” accessories were to blame. Docks that were standards-compliant or non-powered shouldn’t have caused issues.

Still, the best way for anyone who owns a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air affected by this bug to stay safe would be to install macOS Big Sur 11.2.2, which is available now.