An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of dismissing the idea of putting a touchscreen on a MacBook, it seems Apple may have finally caved. Its MacBook Pro overhaul in 2026 is now expected to be the first-ever MacBook to feature a touchscreen display, according to a report from supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on X.

The change will reportedly affect Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro, which could feature an OLED display and "incorporate a touch panel using on-cell touch technology." The OLED MacBook Pro isn't expected to enter production until late 2026, and before then, Apple is expected to launch the M5 MacBook Pro in early 2026.

Apple released iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 today, introducing Liquid Glass, a translucent design language that represents the biggest visual redesign since iOS 7 in 2013. The new interface elements dynamically refract and reflect background content across all three platforms. iOS 26 requires iPhone 11 or later and second-generation iPhone SE or newer. iPadOS 26 runs on the same hardware as iPadOS 18 except the 7th-generation iPad. macOS Tahoe 26 supports all Apple silicon Macs, the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 and later iMac, and 2019 and later Mac Pro. The transparent menu bar on macOS increases perceived display size.

iOS 26's adaptive Lock Screen time display resizes around notifications and Live Activities. Desktop icons, folders, app icons and widgets support light, dark, tinted, and clear appearances across all systems. iOS 26 adds Visual Intelligence for on-screen content analysis through screenshot button combinations. Live Translation operates across Messages, FaceTime and Phone on all platforms, translating text and audio in real-time on-device. The Camera app received streamlined navigation and lens cleaning hints for iPhone 15 and later models.

iPadOS 26 brings Mac-style windowing and multitasking. Apps support free-form placement and menu bars. The Phone app and new Apple Games app arrived on iPad. macOS gained the Phone app through Continuity, including Call Screening and Hold Assist features. Spotlight executes hundreds of actions without opening applications and automatically assigns quick keys to frequent actions. Apple Intelligence expands across all systems. The Shortcuts app gained intelligent actions for text summarization and image generation. The Wallet app tracks orders across platforms, while Apple Music introduced AutoMix for song transitions.

Apple has filed a lawsuit against former Apple Watch staffer Dr. Chen Shi, alleging that he "conspired to steal Apple's trade secrets relating to Apple Watch and to disclose them to his new employers (Oppo)." The company alleges he downloaded 63 sensitive documents, attended technical meetings, and coordinated with Oppo to transfer proprietary information, though Oppo denies wrongdoing. The Verge reports: Ahead of starting his new job at Oppo, the employee, Dr. Chen Shi, attended "dozens" of meetings with technical members on the Apple Watch team to learn about their work and downloaded 63 documents "from a protected Box folder" that he loaded onto a USB drive, according to the lawsuit. Shi allegedly sent a message to Oppo saying that he was working to "collect as much information as possible" before starting his job. And he searched the internet for terms like "how to wipe out macbook" and "Can somebody see if I've opened a file on a shared drive?" from his Apple-issued MacBook before leaving the company.

Shi was formerly a sensor system architect at Apple, and the company says he had "a front row seat to Apple's development of its cutting-edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents, and specifications for ECG sensor technology." He now heads up a team working on sensing technology at Oppo -- which Apple says it learned because of "messages he left on his Apple-issued work iPhone." In his resignation letter to Apple, Shi said he was leaving "due to personal and family reasons." Via that iPhone, Apple also says it found messages from Oppo demonstrating that it "encouraged, approved, and agreed to Dr. Shi's plan to collect Apple's proprietary information before leaving Apple."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.

The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."

Apple reported its strongest quarterly revenue growth since 2021, with iPhone sales jumping 13% and total revenue up 10%. CEO Tim Cook also announced increased AI investments and hinted at future acquisitions to accelerate Apple's AI roadmap. CNBC reports: "It was an exceptional quarter by any measure," Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Steve Kovach. Cook said that about 1% of the company's 10 percentage points of revenue growth could be attributed to customers buying more products to get ahead of potential tariffs. The company's most important business remains the iPhone, which saw 13% growth on an annual basis during the quarter to $44.58 billion in sales. Cook said that iPhone revenue was strong because the iPhone 16 is more popular compared to the iPhone 15 devices on sale last year at the same time. Cook said iPhone 16 sales were up "strong double digits" versus its predecessor. Cook specifically highlighted popularity among current iPhone users upgrading to a new one.

Apple's Mac business grew the fastest of any of Apple's units during the June quarter, growing nearly 15% to $8.05 billion in revenue. Apple released updated MacBook Air laptops, its best-selling Mac, just before the quarter started. The company's services business, which includes the company's warranties, content subscriptions, licensing deals with Google, and iCloud continued to grow to $27.42 billion in the period, a 13% increase. Cook highlighted growth in the company's iCloud subscriptions and said App Store revenue grew "double digits" during the quarter.

The two tougher spots in Apple's report were iPad sales and the company's other products division, which it sometimes calls its wearables. It consists of Apple Watch, AirPods, and other accessories. Revenue for iPad was down 8% to $6.58 billion, despite the company launching a low-cost iPad in March. Apple's wearables unit declined 8.64% to $7.4 billion during the quarter. Apple also saw success in China during the quarter, with sales rising 4% on an annual basis to $15.37 billion. Apple reports its sales from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the same unit. It's a reversal from the past two quarters, where Apple's China sales declined 2% in Apple's second fiscal quarter and 11% in the first quarter. Cook said a Chinese subsidy for some devices helped Apple in the region. "The subsidy does apply to some of our products, and it clearly helps," Cook said.

Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken (also harrymccSlashdot reader #1,641,347) writes: As part of Fast Company's "1995 week", I wrote about IBM's ThinkPad 701, the famous model with an expanding "butterfly" keyboard [which could be stretched from 9.7-inches to 11.5 inches]. By putting full-sized keys in a subnotebook-sized laptop, it solved one of mobile computing's biggest problems.

IBM discontinued it before the end of the year, and neither it nor anyone else ever made anything similar again. And yet it remains amazing.
Check out this 1995 ad for the keyboard! The article calls the butterfly ThinkPad "one of the best things the technology industry has ever done with moving parts," and revisits 1995's race "to design a subnotebook-sized laptop with a desktop-sized keyboard." It's still comically thick, standing almost as tall as four MacBook Airs stacked on each other. That height is required to accommodate multiple technologies later rendered obsolete by technological progress, such as a dial-up fax/modem, an infrared port, two PCMCIA expansion card slots, and a bulky connector for an external docking station... Lifting the screen set off a system of concealed gears and levers that propelled the two sections of keyboard into position with balletic grace... A Businesweek article cited sales of 215,000 units and said it was 1995's best-selling PC laptop. Yet by the time that story appeared in February 1996, the 701 had been discontinued. IBM never made anything like it again. Neither did anyone else...

As portable computers became more popular, progress in display technology had made it possible for PC makers to use larger screens. Manufacturers were also getting better at fitting a laptop's necessary components into less space. These advances let them design a new generation of thin, light laptops that went beyond the limitations of subnotebooks. Once IBM could make a lightweight laptop with a wider screen, "the need for an expanding keyboard was no longer essential," says [butterfly ThinkPad engineer] George Karidis. "It would have just been a novelty."
The article notes a fan's open source guides for repairing butterfly Thinkpads at Project Butterfly, and all the fan-community videos about it on YouTube, "from an excellent documentary to people simply being entranced by it.

"As a thing of wonder, it continues to transcend its own obsolescence."

Apple added the 2013 "Trash Can" Mac Pro to its vintage products list alongside the 2019 13-inch MacBook Air, 2019 iMac, 2018 iPad Pro models, and the 128GB iPhone 8. The cylindrical Mac Pro remained on sale until December 2019, when Apple replaced it with the redesigned "Cheese Grater" model.

Products typically reach vintage status five years after their last distribution date. The 2013 Mac Pro's radical cylindrical design prevented internal component upgrades and created thermal limitations that Apple acknowledged in 2017. "I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner," Apple hardware chief Craig Federighi said at the time.

Apple also moved several AirPort devices to its obsolete list, including the second-generation AirPort Express and AirPort Time Capsules. The 2013 Mac Pro's radical design created thermal limitations that Apple acknowledged in 2017.

A year after Right to Repair laws took effect in California and Minnesota, many product manufacturers continue to obstruct consumer repairs, according to a new study from advocacy group US PIRG. The organization's "Leaders and Laggards II" report evaluated 25 products across five categories and found 40% received failing grades of D or F.

Apple delivered the study's biggest surprise, earning a B+ for its latest iPad and B for the M3 MacBook Pro after releasing repair manuals for the iPad in May. The Framework Laptop 13 and Valve's Steam Deck topped the rankings with A+ scores. Dishwashers from Beko, Bosch, Frigidaire, GE, and LG performed worst alongside gaming consoles from MSI, Atari, and Sony. Researchers could not access repair manuals for 48% of products and found no available spare parts for 44%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant's lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows' user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.

This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support -- so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That's because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%. The shrinking Windows user base can be attributed to a combination of factors -- a major one being the global move toward a mobile-first world, where smartphones and tablets are increasingly replacing traditional PCs for everyday computing needs.

At the same time, Microsoft's strict hardware requirements for Windows 11 have alienated users with perfectly functional older machines, prompting some to stick with unsupported versions or abandon Windows entirely. Additionally, many users find Windows 11 less intuitive than its predecessor and are frustrated by Microsoft's push toward data collection and Apple-style design changes.

Apple plans to release a cheaper MacBook powered by the A18 Pro chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro line, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The laptop will be priced below $999 -- first time for a MacBook Air -- and go into production in late 2025 or early 2026 on the new laptop, the analyst noted.

The device will feature the same 13-inch screen as the current MacBook Air, with the chip representing the primary difference between models. The A18 Pro chip delivers single-core performance around 3,500 on Geekbench, trailing the M4 chip only slightly, though multicore performance lags significantly at approximately 8,780 versus 15,000 for the M4. The A18's multicore performance matches the original 2020 M1 chip.

Apple announced that macOS 26 "Tahoe" will be the final version to support Intel-based Macs, with future macOS releases running exclusively on Apple Silicon devices (that is, 2020 M1 models and newer). They will, however, continue to receive security updates for a few more years. 9to5Mac reports: In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non-Apple Silicon models of its lineup. macOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac mini for instance. But Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore macOS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years, however. Going forward, the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards, as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1. M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros followed in 2021.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 25 (WWDC) kicks off next week, June 9th, showcasing the company's latest software and new technologies. That includes the next version of iOS, which is rumored to have the most significant design overhaul since the introduction of iOS 7. Here's an overview of what to expect: Major Software Redesigns
Apple plans to shift its operating system naming to reflect the release year, moving from sequential numbers to year-based identifiers. Consequently, the upcoming releases will be labeled as iOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, etc., streamlining the versioning across platforms.

iOS 26 is anticipated to feature a glossy, glass-like interface inspired by visionOS, incorporating translucent elements and rounded buttons. This design language is expected to extend across iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, promoting a cohesive user experience across devices. Core applications like Phone, Safari, and Camera are slated for significant redesigns, too. For instance, Safari may introduce a translucent, "glassy" address bar, aligning with the new visual aesthetics.

While AI is not expected to be the main focus due to Siri's current readiness, some AI-related updates are rumored. The Shortcuts app may gain "Apple Intelligence," enabling users to create shortcuts using natural language. It's also possible that Gemini will be offered as an option for AI functionalities on the iPhone, similar to ChatGPT.

Other App and Feature Updates
The lock screen might display charging estimates, indicating how long it will take for the phone to fully charge. There's a rumor about bringing live translation features to AirPods. The Messages app could receive automatic translations and call support; the Music app might introduce full-screen animated lock screen art; and Apple Notes may get markdown support. Users may also only need to log into a captive Wi-Fi portal once, and all their devices will automatically be logged in.

Significant updates are expected for Apple Home. There's speculation about the potential announcement of a "HomePad" with a screen, Apple's competitor to devices like the Nest Hub Mini. A new dedicated Apple gaming app is also anticipated to replace Game Center. If you're expecting new hardware, don't hold your breath. The event is expected to focus primarily on software developments. It may even see discontinued support for several older Intel-based Macs in macOS 26, including models like the 2018 MacBook Pro and the 2019 iMac, as Apple continues its transition towards exclusive support for Apple Silicon devices.

Sources:
Apple WWDC 2025 Rumors and Predictions! (Waveform)
WWDC 2025 Overview (MacRumors)
WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year's conference (TechCrunch)
What to expect from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next week (Ars Technica)
Apple's WWDC 2025: How to Watch and What to Expect (Wired)

Apple's upcoming macOS 26 operating system may abandon support for several older Mac models, according to AppleInsider. The casualties will include 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini -- all currently the oldest machines compatible with macOS Sequoia, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. The 2019 MacBook Pro models and 2020 5K iMac models will retain compatibility with the new system, codenamed "Cheer," said AppleInsider.

A year ago, the original creator of SerenityOS posted that "for the past two years, I've been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS." So it became a stand-alone project that "aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security." And they're also building a new web engine.

"We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit..." says Ladybird's official web site, adding that they're driven "by a web standards first approach." They promise it will be truly independent, with "no code from other browsers" (and no "default search engine" deals).

"We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters." More from the Ladybird FAQ: We currently have 7 paid full-time engineers working on Ladybird. There is also a large community of volunteer contributors... The focus of the Ladybird project is to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don't use code from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine...

For historical reasons, the browser uses various libraries from the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch. Now that Ladybird has forked from SerenityOS, it is no longer bound by this culture, and we will be making use of 3rd party libraries for common functionality (e.g image/audio/video formats, encryption, graphics, etc.) We are already using some of the same 3rd party libraries that other browsers use, but we will never adopt another browser engine instead of building our own...

We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"Ladybird's founder Andreas Kling has a solid background in WebKit-based C++ development with both Apple and Nokia,," writes software developer/author David Eastman: "You are likely reading this on a browser that is slightly faster because of my work," he wrote on his blog's introduction page. After leaving Apple, clearly burnt out, Kling found himself in need of something to healthily occupy his time. He could have chosen to learn needlepoint, but instead he opted to build his own operating system, called Serenity. Ladybird is a web project spin-off from this, to which Kling now devotes his time...

[B]eyond the extensive open source politics, the main reason for supporting other independent browser projects is to maintain diverse alternatives — to prevent the web platform from being entirely captured by one company. This is where Ladybird comes in. It doesn't have any commercial foundation and it doesn't seem to be waiting to grab a commercial opportunity. It has a range of sponsors, some of which might be strategic (for example, Shopify), but most are goodwill or alignment-led. If you sponsor Ladybird, it will put your logo on its webpage and say thank you. That's it. This might seem uncontroversial, but other nonprofit organisations also give board seats to high-paying sponsors. Ladybird explicitly refuses to do this...

The Acid3 Browser test (which has nothing whatsoever to do with ACID compliance in databases) is an old method of checking compliance with web standards, but vendors can still check how their products do against a battery of tests. They check compliance for the DOM2, CSS3, HTML4 and the other standards that make sure that webpages work in a predictable way. If I point my Chrome browser on my MacBook to http://acid3.acidtests.org/, it gets 94/100. Safari does a bit better, getting to 97/100. Ladybird reportedly passes all 100 tests.
"All the code is hosted on GitHub," says the Ladybird home page. "Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it!"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday the company plans to ship 100 million AI "companion" devices as part of what he called "the chance to do the biggest thing we've ever done as a company here," according to WSJ.

Speaking at an internal meeting, Altman said the $6.5 billion acquisition of former Apple designer Jony Ive's startup has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI. The pocket-sized, screen-free devices will be contextually aware of users' surroundings and designed to help wean people from traditional screens.

Altman said the device will not be a phone or glasses, but rather a third core device that would sit on a desk alongside a MacBook Pro and iPhone. The company aims to ship the devices "faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before," with a target release of late next year.

OpenAI's latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than the company's previous AI systems, according to both internal testing and third-party research. On OpenAI's PersonQA benchmark, o3 hallucinated 33% of the time -- double the rate of older models o1 (16%) and o3-mini (14.8%). The o4-mini performed even worse, hallucinating 48% of the time. Nonprofit AI lab Transluce discovered o3 fabricating processes it claimed to use, including running code on a 2021 MacBook Pro "outside of ChatGPT." Stanford adjunct professor Kian Katanforoosh noted his team found o3 frequently generates broken website links.

OpenAI says in its technical report that "more research is needed" to understand why hallucinations worsen as reasoning models scale up.

A software engineer successfully ran Meta's Llama 2 generative AI model on a 20-year-old PowerBook G4, demonstrating how well-optimized code can push the limits of legacy hardware. MacRumors' Joe Rossignol reports: While hardware requirements for large language models (LLMs) are typically high, this particular PowerBook G4 model from 2005 is equipped with a mere 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor and 1GB of RAM. Despite this 20-year-old hardware, my brother was able to achieve inference with Meta's LLM model Llama 2 on the laptop. The experiment involved porting the open-source llama2.c project, and then accelerating performance with a PowerPC vector extension called AltiVec. His full blog post offers more technical details about the project.

Apple has refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with the M4 processor, adding a new sky blue color option and reducing prices across the board. The 13-inch model now starts at $999, while the 15-inch begins at $1,199. Both models are available to order immediately and will ship on March 12.

The updated MacBook Airs feature the same thin design as previous generations but now include the 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam found in current MacBook Pro models. Both variants come with the M4 chip, aligning them with Apple's recent Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro refreshes.

Base configurations include an M4 with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 256GB of storage. Customers can upgrade to a 10-core GPU (matching the base 14-inch MacBook Pro), 32GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of storage. A significant technical improvement is the support for two external 6K displays while keeping the laptop's lid open, addressing a limitation of previous Air models.

Apple CEO Tim Took took to X today to tease a special Apple product launch happening next week on Wednesday, February 19. 9to5Mac reports: Few specific details were shared, but Cook did include a brief video featuring the Apple logo in silver plus the following words: "Get ready to meet the newest member of the family. Wednesday, February 19. #AppleLaunch" [...] The most likely product is the brand new iPhone SE 4, which rumors suggest will pack a variety of powerful upgrades. [...] There are several other hardware possibilities for the February 19 launch. We're currently expecting at least three other products to debut in the near future: the M4 MacBook Air, an M3 iPad Air, and a new 11th generation base model iPad.

Reading into the teaser, the silver color does subtly give off Mac vibes, so perhaps the M4 MacBook Air is coming. The circle design in the video has some wondering if AirTag 2 could be the focus of the launch. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, however, doesn't believe that's the case. Gurman suggests the iPhone SE 4 will be the new product. That would make the circle a potential reference to the device's single rear camera.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes.

It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages.

Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.