Zac Hall

The narrative for years has been that Spotify Wrapped, a look back at your music listening habits for the year, has left Apple Music members longing for a matching experience. Apple Music, of course, has been developing its Replay feature for nearly as long. Still, Spotify Wrapped has made vocal Apple Music subscribers jealous each December.

This year, however, a tide shift seems to have occurred for two reasons.

Apple hopes to bring its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features to China in 2025, but the company has reportedly clashed with its partner Baidu over technical and privacy issues.

It turns out that Apple’s outgoing CFO Luca Maestri won’t be the next CEO of car maker Stellantis — which was apparently a rumor in the automotive industry.

Simply Piano has long been a hit app in my household. My daughter never really showed interest in learning to play our keyboard until she came across Simply Piano on her iPad. I think it’s the first annual subscription I ever bought for her based on how much she was getting from it.

Now Simply Piano has brought the experience from the iPhone and iPad to augmented reality on Apple Vision Pro. The best part? You can play using Simply Piano with a virtual piano in your real environment without a physical keyboard for the first time.

Large language model AI has been a leap forward for me in how I use technology. So naturally, ChatGPT is something that my 7 and 11 year old kids are already familiar with, but there isn’t an AI that they interact with regularly. Enter Miko Mini, a fun and affordable AI bot that’s designed to create a safe and engaging environment for kids. The AI component is LLM powered so the bot is naturally conversational, and Miko has a host of content partners including Disney, Nickelodeon, and iHeartRadio. Read on for our impressions.

Even in its 10th year, Apple Pay is still reaching new markets. The latest, per Apple server sleuth @aaronp, is Uruguay.

Media outlet Semafor has publicized a lawsuit by a former ad tech employee at Apple who is suing the company for “physical, video electronic surveillance.” The story falls under the headline “Employee lawsuit accuses Apple of spying on its workers,” although the actual details are less tantalizing.

Tesla has officially announced and revealed its forthcoming app for Apple Watch, and it’s available now.

You may have noticed that cool mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse in Apple’s fun M4 Mac mini advert. It turns out that’s limited edition Corsair gaming hardware available exclusively from Apple. 9to5Mac recently got the chance to go hands-on with the K65 Plus keyboard and M75 Wireless mouse in Corsair’s Apple-exclusive white.

Apple Music, for me, is about much more than renting access to my favorite songs. The best case scenario for Apple Music, in my experience, is when it guides me to discovering my next favorite album or musician. After School Radio still does it for me, and access through Apple Podcasts is helpful for easily keeping up with the show.

More recently, it was just letting Apple Music recommend music after playing an album from my library. Within a matter of months, I went from first hearing this song on Apple Music while driving around to driving hours away to see the song played live.

Last night got a little wild… technologically speaking. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved bringing together my hobbies of playing guitar and doing stuff with computers. Nothing professional, just expressional. So when I was doing just that around 10:30 p.m., the technology stars aligned and I had a gadget epiphany.

The TL;DR is I’m having fun with computers!

There’s a pretty cool update for Messenger out today. Meta has introduced phone and video calling voicemail, similar to FaceTime. The Facebook calling service is also adding AI video backgrounds and integrating Siri.

Every great holiday gift guide deserves a punchy theme that captures your attention and inspires your gift giving season. My theme this year? Stuff I received to review but haven’t yet, and stuff I honestly use daily. What… the smart home gift guide idea was already taken. Seriously, though, I think this is my favorite list yet.

Vimeo recently launched its visionOS app that Apple announced during WWDC 2024. As part of bringing Vimeo to the Apple Vision Pro, filmmaker Jake Oleson has published a short film dubbed ‘currents’. If you can get your hands on an Apple Vision Pro, give the spatial short film a watch.

My favorite part? The cinematography style that resembles photographs coming to life to me. ‘currents’ is also an easy viewing with wonderful music and a thoughtful story. Do give it a watch on Vision Pro if you can.

Apple Pay is celebrating 10 years since launching, and a new video ad highlights something about Apple Pay that has been true since day one. Apple Pay makes it really easy to spend money on the internet.

Apple provides the App Store in every market possible, providing access to as much software as possible. However, part of that responsibility is abiding by local government rules. This means Apple regularly has to choose between delisting certain apps to avoid being forced to close the entire App Store in those markets.

We’re still awaiting that wacky pack of emoji characters previewed in May. And we probably won’t actually see the shovel and exhausted face appear next to the fingerprint and purple splat until iOS 18.4 next spring. But still, who doesn’t love a new glimpse at proposed emoji characters — even if they’re part of the 2025/2026 set?

Alright, let’s make some predictions. Aside from the iPhone, Services is Apple’s most successful product category. The company’s approach to modern artificial intelligence, combined with its acquisition history, hints at how Apple could unlock new revenue streams in 2025. Apple Intelligence has the potential to be the next major driver of Services revenue.

The team behind Halide is back with an update to their video capture app Kino. Version 1.2 introduces support for Camera Control on iPhone 16, high frame rate support tuned for iPhone 16 Pro, and a new app icon that’s less HAL 9000 and more film reel-inspired. The update also adds the ability to organize Grade presets — apparently a highly requested user feature.

For many, Apple’s new ultrawide Mac Virtual Display feature in visionOS 2.2 beta is the killer app on Apple Vision Pro. But you don’t need to be a Mac user to appreciate Apple Vision Pro and its role as an incredible mobile movie theater.

I’ve been splitting my time for the last two months between my home and my family’s place four hours away. At home, I have an Apple TV 4K attached to my wall-mounted 65-inch Micro LED 4K TV. At my family’s place, the largest TV is about 19-inches. It’s a charming place along a river in the woods and away from the city, but it’s not my living room.

Still, in both locations I’ve been using Apple Vision Pro and AirPods Pro 2 to watch movies and weekly TV shows that I’ve been following.

Move over, Siri. OpenAI is bringing its advanced voice feature for ChatGPT to the Mac and Windows starting today.