MacBook Pro models sharing the MacBook Ultra redesign is, and isn’t, surprising
We’ve been hearing for a long time now that a new high-end MacBook Ultra model with a touchscreen will get a significant redesign with a slimmer form factor. The new design appeared to be one of the things that would differentiate the high-end model from the MacBook Pro. However, a report yesterday said that an entry-level MacBook Pro set for release early next year will have a new design in line with that of the Ultra …

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Gorgeous shots winning 2026 iPhone Photography Awards show old models still cut it
The winners of the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards have been announced, with many of them taken using older iPhones, including an iPhone 8 Plus.The iPhone Photography Awards winners are inThe 2026 IPPA winners were announced after entries from more than 140 countries were submitted. Four overall winners were announced, ranging from Grand Prix to Bronze.Category winners, runners-up, and honorable mentions were also shared, giving us a wider look at the quality of images that were submitted this year. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Amazon forgot to raise M4 iPad Air prices–grab one for $200 off right now
Macworld Apple iPad Air M4 View Deal (function () { document.querySelector("#sticky-promo-block a").addEventListener("click", function(e) { const debug = document.location.host.search(/lndo.site|go-vip.net/) !== -1; const text = this.closest("#sticky-promo-block").querySelector("p.promo-title").textContent; const data = { event: "stickyConversionUnitClick", eventCategory: "Sticky Conversion", eventAction: "Click", eventLabel: text }; if(debug)console.log("Sticky Conversion CLick - pushing to dataLayer: ", data); dataLayer.push(data); return true; }); })(); Apple raised iPad Air prices by $150 last week, but over at Amazon you can still get one for even less than the old price. You can grab Apple’s 11-inch M4 iPad Air for $559 or the 13-inch M4 iPad Air for just $749 right now. That’s not quite as low as Prime Day’s $80-$100 savings, but that was before Apple raised prices. So, now you’re saving $200 off the new MSRP and $40-$50 off the older price. This is a powerful tablet that you’ll get to take with you everywhere. The M4 chip delivers advanced graphics and a snappy performance that’s fantastic for multitasking. Whether you’re bouncing between apps or editing photos, this tablet will perform just fine. The chip also supports Apple Intelligence, so you’ll have tons of fun with those features too, including the new Siri Ai coming this fall with iPad OS 27. The tablet comes with 128GB of storage space, which isn’t a ton, but it’s a decent amount of room for apps, games, and whatever else you need to store on there. The display is as gorgeous as ever, as the 11-inch or 13-inch Liquid Retina screen delivers vivid colors, great contrast, and super low reflectivity. Pair that with the excellent all-day battery, and you have a device you can use for work, doomscrolling, gaming, and whatever else you feel like around the block. If you want to take things further and make this into a true productivity tool, you’ll need to pay a bit extra for an Apple Pencil Pro and the Magic Keyboard, both of which are sold separately. The bottom line is that you can save $200 on an Apple iPad Air with a speedy M4 chip, and that’s a smart choice.

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Most Americans would ban social media for under-16s, with parents the most vocal
A large-scale survey has shown that most Americans would support a ban social media use by children under the age of 16. The biggest supporters of the proposal were parents with kids under 18 years old, where almost two-thirds were in favor …

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Confident Apple increases its iPhone Fold orders to 10 million
A new report claims that Apple expects to sell 10 million of the iPhone Fold in 2026 and into early 2027, considerably up from most previous estimates.Mockup of a possible iPhone Fold design - image credit: AppleInsiderNothing varies quite like the rumors that the iPhone Fold is or is not going to be launched in September, but the number Apple will make comes close. In April 2026, for example, Nikkei Asia and most other analysts believed that Apple was ordering 7 million to 8 million for the year.At the same time leaker Digital Chat Station claimed it was 11 million. Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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macOS 27 Golden Gate marks the end of built-in DVD support
Macworld If you’re still using DVD media on a Mac with the most current operating system, you’ll need to make arrangements soon to continue using those discs. As noted in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 2 release notes, the DVDPlayback framework is not in the macOS 27 Golden Gate SDK, which means that apps can no longer use it. The notes go on to say that “in a future macOS release,” Apple will remove the framework completely. That leaves the door open for the built-in DVD Player app to be included in macOS 27 Golden Gate when it is officially released this fall. This also likely means that Golden Gate will be the last version of macOS to include a native DVD app. Users will eventually have to turn to a third-party app, such as VLC. The DVDPlayback framework is quite old and Apple has not updated it in years. The neglect shows–DVD Player produces playback that is jerky and of low image quality. I’ve had much better results using VLC. Apple doesn’t even make the DVD Player app easily findable; it’s located in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications folder, not in the regular Applications folder. The DVD Player app automatically launches if you insert a DVD into a connected DVD drive.

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Check out all the winning shots in the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards
The iPhone Photography Awards competition has been running now for 19 years, and the 2026 winners have just been announced. In addition to four overall winners, there are first place awards in a wide range of categories, including abstract, animals, architecture, children, cityscape, landscape, lifestyle, nature, and people …

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Apple has all the tech needed for great Mac games. So where are they?
Macworld I’ve been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember, and that means I’ve sat on both sides of the Mac/PC aisle in my time. And in fact, right now I have both a MacBook Pro and a custom gaming PC sitting on my desk. There’s a good reason for that. I love playing games, and right now Apple simply can’t match the breadth of games available on Windows. If I want to have the most choice available for my gaming downtime—and I do—then there’s very little choice but to have a Windows machine close at hand. It really feels like the situation shouldn’t be this way. macOS has come on leaps and bounds in recent years with its support for cutting-edge gaming technology, including features like upscaling, ray tracing, and frame generation that can make a huge difference to the user experience. The hardware, too, is more capable than it’s ever been. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be able to play a game as notoriously demanding as Cyberpunk 2077 on a Mac, I’d have laughed you out of the building. Yet here we are. But for all that progress, there’s still a major dearth of AAA games on the Mac. It’s the number one reason I haven’t ditched my Windows PC yet, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I can’t help but wonder: if things still aren’t improving on this front, are we ever going to see parity between macOS and Windows in terms of available games? And what is Apple doing to put things right? A barren gaming landscape Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Crimson Desert. It’s a massive open world fantasy adventure in the vein of popular titles like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, and unlike most highly ambitious games of its ilk, it was available on macOS on day one, at the same time as its PC and PlayStation 5 launch. Crimson Desert is the rare example of a top-tier game landing on Mac simultaneously with Windows.Foundry Yet situations like this are few and far between. For Mac gamers, the gaming landscape really is barren compared to what you get on Windows. Sure, there are plenty of big-name draws like Baldur’s Gate 3, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Cyberpunk 2077 on the Mac. But the list of prominent absentees is long and noteworthy, with titles like Call of Duty, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, Arc Raiders and more nowhere to be found. Past entries in popular series like Assassin’s Creed are unavailable and many of the best Mac games—names like Control Ultimate Edition and Disco Elysium—are either years old or debuted on Windows long before they came to the Mac. There’s no sign that that’s about to change. The fact that Crimson Desert arrived on macOS at the same time as on Windows was surprising. If anything, it was the exception that proved the rule: most games come to Mac late, if they arrive at all. The fact that something as high-profile as Crimson Desert bucked the trend demonstrates how strong that trend really is. It’s only in recent years that Apple has made a concerted effort to woo both gamers and game developers, and it’ll take time for any changes to be felt. But if things are going to improve, Apple can’t afford to let up. Limited progress Historically, Mac gaming always faced a chicken-and-egg problem. Developers didn’t want to make games for macOS because there weren’t many Mac players. And gamers didn’t want to switch to macOS because there’s weren’t many games available. This vicious cycle saw each side exacerbate the other. Apple, to its credit, has tried to rectify the situation. On the software side, for example, it’s worked directly with developers to optimize their games for macOS and learn how the company can make the macOS development landscape more appealing. As for hardware, Apple silicon has brought about a step change in the gaming capabilities of the Mac. While it’s not as good as having a discrete graphics card like an Nvidia RTX 5090, of course, it’s made gaming a realistic prospect for most of Apple’s computers. And then there are techs like MetalFX Upscaling and MetalFX Frame Interpolation, which make gaming possible on Macs that never would have stood a chance before. MetalFX Upscaling takes a low-resolution frame and scales it up to a higher resolution, bringing more detail and clarity to your gaming sessions. So, your Mac might render a frame at roughly 1080p, then MetalFX steps in to scale that up to 4K or thereabouts. The key here is that your Mac doesn’t have to actually draw a 4K frame each time, saving resources and increasing frame rates as a result. The Windows equivalents are DLSS for Nvidia graphics cards and FSR for AMD cards. A game like Control: Ultimate Edition wouldn’t run very well without MetalFX upscaling.Remedy MetalFX Frame Interpolation, meanwhile, is Apple’s equivalent of the frame-generation tech used in PC graphics cards made by the likes of Nvidia and AMD. In short, it uses AI to generate one additional frame for every two existing frames. The effect of this is smoother gameplay than you would normally expect from your hardware. Combined, these technologies mean you can get an enjoyable gaming experience on a relatively low-spec Mac – provided game developers actually implement these features, of course. But even when that’s the case, you’ll still get the nagging feeling—borne out by benchmarks and developer guidance, unfortunately—that performance is still better on other, non-Apple systems. According to Crimson Desert’s creator Pearl Abyss, you’ll need an M2 Pro chip from 2023 at a minimum if you want to hit 60fps at a paltry 720p resolution. Windows users only need an Nvidia RTX 2080 for the same frame rate, at a higher 1080p resolution. That card was released all the way back in 2018. In other words, you’ll need a newer chip and the higher associated costs to get a lower resolution output on a Mac compared to a Windows PC. That makes for painful reading. Benchmarking from content creator Andrew Tsai, meanwhile, showed similarly disappointing results. Running Crimson Desert on a MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip saw average frame rates around 60fps on medium settings at 1440p, although that was using MetalFX Upscaling to increase the resolution up from 960p. Bear in mind that such a laptop will cost you a shocking $4,099 or more thanks to Apple’s recent price increases. After setting my personal gaming PC to a native 1440p resolution (not upscaled) and maximum settings in Crimson Desert, I got around 50fps, meaning it looked far better than the Mac with similar frame rates. To mirror the benchmarked MacBook Pro, I dropped my PC to medium settings and 900p upscaled resolution with the DLSS Balanced preset, at which point it got to around 110fps. That’s almost double the performance of the M5 Max MacBook Pro, despite my PC costing over $1,000 less. Do you want to pay more to run Baldur’s Gate 3 at half the frame rate? Larian Studios As long as you get incredibly worse performance on a Mac that costs a lot more, gamers are likely to stay away. And that will only discourage developers from releasing their products on Apple’s platforms. Better performance at every price point, relative to competing Windows computers, is therefore an important sticking point that Apple needs to address. What more can Apple do? We’re starting to see the fruits of Apple’s labor as more big-name developers bring their games to macOS. But clearly, more needs to be done. Until players no longer feel like they’re having to constrain their game library or stymie their performance by going with an Apple device, Mac gaming will always be at a disadvantage. Apple needs to continue working with developers to convince them to bring their games to macOS and to do it on day one, with no delay. At the same time, Apple must keep improving its hardware and software capabilities to ramp up gaming performance year over year. It’s not reasonable to expect people to pay over $4,000 to get middling gaming performance that’s half of a Windows PC that costs considerably less. Apple is working on these two approaches, and they’re starting to make a difference. But it’s far too soon to stop now. The newest MacBook Pro is powerful enough to play most of the games my PC can, but they’re just not available.Foundry Aside from that, Apple could do with making itself more visible to gamers. I’m not expecting it to be the marquee sponsor of The Game Awards, but teaming up with a big-name gaming brand for a range of exclusive products would raise its profile. Apple has already done this with Corsair (with the K65 Plus gaming keyboard) so we know it’s possible. Taking the same approach that Apple has done with Apple TV might also yield results. There, Apple has poured money into its own streaming service and secured prominent exclusives to tempt customers. The company made a half-hearted attempt to do something similar with Apple Arcade, but that never really felt like much of a priority, and these days it’s a sad shadow of its promised potential. Working with prominent development studios and publishers to launch Mac-exclusive games that people actually want to play is something I’d love to see. Mac gaming used to be a joke, especially in the bad old days of Intel chips’ integrated graphics. Things are looking brighter these days, but there’s clearly a long way to go before Mac gamers can stand shoulder to shoulder with their Windows counterparts. I’m hopeful that one day, this continued progress will mean I can finally ditch my Windows PC and go all-in on macOS. Right now, though, gaming is the one thing holding me back.

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Apple exploring deals with two Chinese memory makers
Apple is considering two Chinese memory suppliers to reduce its reliance on existing partners, though the deal is far from guaranteed. (via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

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Skip the subscriptions — this bundle gives you lifetime access to 27 Mac apps for $30
Macworld TL;DR: A 27-App Lifetime Mac Bundle from enSili is on sale for $29.99 (reg. $390) This 27-App Lifetime Mac Bundle gives you lifetime access to 27 native Mac apps for just $29.99. No subscriptions, no renewal fees, just software that lives on your machine forever. The bundle comes from enSili, a Mac software company that’s been building apps since 2010. Every app is built specifically for macOS, so they run smoothly and feel right at home on your Mac. Free updates are included, so you’re not stuck with software that stops improving the second you buy it. The lineup covers a lot of ground, and it has something for every Mac user. Developers will appreciate tools like Regex Wizard and JSON Wizard for handling complex data, plus Web2Mac, which turns any website into its own dock app. For everyday productivity, AllClips tracks everything you’ve copied so you can pull it back up later, RenameMe lets you rename dozens of files at once, and Erazor makes sure sensitive files are permanently deleted. Creatives will find Color Hound, PhotoFoundry, and Watermarker+ useful, and writers get the clean, simple Markdown+. The Mac community is paying attention, with nearly 120K views and an 87.9% upvote ratio on Reddit’s r/macapps. Get the 27-App Lifetime Mac Bundle for $29.99 (reg. $390) The 27-App Lifetime Mac BundleSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Opera’s new Paste Protect feature blocks suspicious commands copied from websites
In an update rolling out today, Opera will now automatically block potentially malicious commands copied from websites to the clipboard. Here are the details.

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Macworld Podcast: How high can Apple’s prices go?
Macworld Last week, Apple drastically raised prices for the Mac and iPad. Apple is also expected to introduce new iPhones and other products later this year with higher prices than usual. We talk about this new development and how it affects you in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.  This is episode 990 with Michael Simon, David Price, and Roman Loyola. Watch episode 990 on YouTube Listen to episode 990 on Apple Podcasts

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Apple reportedly orders 10M foldable iPhone Ultra models, which could sell for around $2500
Apple plans to manufacture and sell around 10 million foldable iPhone Ultra models, according to a new report. That’s roughly a third more than the average build targets previously expected.

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Apple to ask court to halt Epic Games proceedings pending Supreme Court ruling
Apple and Epic Games have agreed to ask the court to temporarily postpone key deadlines in their long-running App Store dispute while Apple seeks to pause the proceedings until the Supreme Court rules on its appeal. Here are the details.

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Apple to ask court to halt Epic Games proceedings pending Supreme Court ruling
Apple and Epic Games have agreed to ask the court to temporarily postpone key deadlines in their long-running App Store dispute while Apple seeks to pause the proceedings until the Supreme Court rules on its appeal. Here are the details.

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Apple to ask court to halt Epic Games proceedings pending Supreme Court ruling
Apple and Epic Games have agreed to ask the court to temporarily postpone key deadlines in their long-running App Store dispute while Apple seeks to pause the proceedings until the Supreme Court rules on its appeal. Here are the details.

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Apple to ask court to halt Epic Games proceedings pending Supreme Court ruling
Apple and Epic Games have agreed to ask the court to temporarily postpone key deadlines in their long-running App Store dispute while Apple seeks to pause the proceedings until the Supreme Court rules on its appeal. Here are the details.

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Steve Jobs' Bicentennial check captures the birth of Apple and the PC revolution
A newly surfaced Steve Jobs-signed check is up for auction, linking the nation's milestone anniversary with the earliest days of the personal computer revolution.Image credit: RR AuctionRR Auction is currently running a Fine Autographs and Artifacts auction, full of signatures from American presidents, political figures, authors, kings, queens, scientists, engineers, innovators, and everyone in between. Among the famous names is Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and former CEO.It's hardly the first time Jobs-signed item has made it to the auction block, but this one comes with remarkable timing. The $10 payment to the People's Computer Company (PCC) is dated July 4, 1976, America's Bicentennial, just months after Apple was founded. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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A Tale of Two Modems
Cellular download speed and reception is nearly a solved problem for my needs. Battery life is not.

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9to5Mac Daily: July 1, 2026 – iOS 26.5.2 and Apple’s new update strategy
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. Sponsored by Backblaze: Backup you can rely on. Save 20% with code 9to5daily.

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