Benjamin Mayo

As reported by Bloomberg late on Friday, Apple has hired away Tesla’s former Autopilot software director Christopher Moore. Bloomberg says Moore will report to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla employee.

Apple has been not-so-quietly working on a self-driving electric car project for more than five years, codenamed Project Titan. The group has seen much leadership turnover with reports claiming Apple keeps shifting the goalposts on what it wants to achieve.

Apple is taking the PC world by storm with its first debut of Apple Silicon chips inside of Macs, taking what it learned from developing the iPhone and iPad A-series of chips and bringing that architecture to laptops and desktops.

Today, The Information said that Apple has no intent of slowing down and has plans for even faster second- and third-generation chips in the coming years.

Apple today released its newest big-budget original movie: Finch starring Tom Hanks is now available on Apple TV+.

Finch was originally planned for a theatrical release by Universal, however the coronavirus pandemic upset its schedule and the movie was sold to Apple as an exclusive. So, how do you watch the new Tom Hanks movie on Apple TV?

Apple today launched its first standalone original podcast series, entitled ‘Hooked’. Apple’s previous podcast releases have all been tied to Apple TV+ properties (such as The Line) or Apple News (Apple News Today). No such TV project has been announced — so far — for Hooked.

Hooked is a nine-part true crime podcast about the true story of Tony Hathaway, whose opioid addition led him down a career in bank robbery. The show is available for free inside of the Apple Podcasts app, or via this RSS feed to listen in any podcasts app.

Following the success of last year’s special entitled ‘Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special’, Apple and the artist are again partnering up. The company announced today a new holiday special ‘Mariah’s Christmas: The Magic Continues’ which will debut on Apple TV+ in December.

The 2021 special will showcase Mariah’s new Christmas single with Khalid and Kirk Franklin, entitled ‘Fall in Love at Christmas’.

The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are getting rave reviews, and for good reason: industry-leading performance, impressive battery life, beautifully rich displays, and the return of ports that make working professionals happy.

One of the big surprises at the Apple event announcement was the inclusion of 120Hz ProMotion on these laptops. Just like the smooth scrolling experiences on iPad Pro and the new iPhone 13 Pro series, Apple promised that the high refresh rate of the new display would make “tasks like scrolling through web pages super fluid.” Unfortunately, the availability of ProMotion in apps on macOS is currently sporadic and incomplete, leaving much to be desired.

Apple stock (AAPL) had a meteoric rise in the last couple of years, topping $2 trillion market cap just a year after becoming the first public company ever to hit $1 trillion. Post-pandemic, though, other huge big tech stocks have been catching up.

Today, Microsoft overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable public company, with a market cap of $2.45 trillion. The switch-up happened as Apple stock fell in response to its quarterly earnings results, where its financials came in weaker than expected, due to supply chain issues.

Apple is continuing to increase the availability of the Apple TV app in order to get more people watching its streaming service, Apple TV+. Today, on Comcast’s quarterly earnings call, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said it has agreed a deal with Apple to bring Apple TV+ to Comcast platforms.

This means the Apple TV app will soon be available on Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex, upcoming XClass TV sets, and the Sky Q cable box which is a major player in the United Kingdom market.

The efficiency of Apple Silicon allowed Apple to offer the same chip options across the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro, with the highest-end M1 Pro and M1 Max configs available for both sizes.

However, there is one small difference: High Power Mode is exclusive to the 16-inch model. The larger chassis 16-inch MacBook Pro chassis allows Apple to increase thermal envelope further, enabling the M1 Max to maximize its performance output.

The notch has been a big point of contention since the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro were announced. By increasing the height of the macOS menu bar to include the notch height, Apple’s hope is that in most use cases, the notch is easily ignored and does not interfere with content.

This has mostly turned out to be true. However, Apple has included a temporary workaround app launch mode that exists as a fallback in case users run into incompatibilities. This mode is available as a toggle in the Get Info panel, labelled ‘Scale to fit below built-in camera’.

Apple and Sony today announced that the Apple Music app is now available on PlayStation 5 consoles, joining the likes of Spotify as an official music service on the PlayStation system.

Apple Music is fully integrated into the PS5 with support for background music listening whilst gaming, 4K music videos, and access to the full Apple Music catalog.

The prolific Pixelmator team has today released the latest update to their flagship image and photo editor, Pixelmator Pro. This version brings full support for macOS Monterey, including a library of Shortcuts actions, and takes full advantage of the power of the latest M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in the new MacBook Pros.

There’s also a new Split Comparison view for comparing layer adjustments, a new Bokeh blur filter, and more enhancements.

The Nielsen TV ratings hold a prestigious place in at least measuring the popularity of traditional television watching. Whilst Nielsen is slightly less relevant when it comes to streaming, it does have widely-regarded streaming charts featuring Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video titles.

For the first time, Apple TV+ is now also being tracked by Nielsen and Ted Lasso made its debut as the fifth-most watched original series for the week of September 20-26, in the United States.

Following the impressive debuts of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro, we are now waiting for Apple to finish the transition from Intel -> ARM CPUs. Remaining Intel Macs include the 27-inch iMac, the higher-end Mac mini and the Mac Pro.

As we’ve seen with the new laptops, switching to Apple Silicon is also an opportunity for the company to give the products other upgrades. This morning, display analyst Ross Young tweeted that he expects Apple to launch a 27-inch iMac in the first quarter of 2022, featuring a mini-LED 120Hz display, just like the displays seen in the MacBook Pros unveiled this week.

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro were announced to much fanfare yesterday, with one of the hero features being the new Liquid Retina XDR display. In addition to larger physical size and smaller bezels, mini-LED high contrast ratio and 120Hz ProMotion refresh rates, the screens also feature increased native resolutions with higher pixel density.

This brings with it a new selection of scaled screen resolution options in System Preferences. Most notably, the high-end MacBook Pro once again features a native 2x resolution as standard…