Ben Lovejoy

The Aqara Smart Lock U400 has been launched today at CES with support for the Home key feature in Apple Wallet. This means your door can automatically unlock as you approach it from the outside, with no user action required.

It uses ultra-wideband technology to detect someone carrying an iPhone or wearing an Apple Watch registered with the lock …

macOS Tahoe app icons came under fire late last year with commenters describing them as “terrible” and “objectively bad.” In our poll, 9to5Mac readers had exceedingly mixed views.

Software engineer Nikita Prokopov has now drawn attention to the icons used within menus and pointed out that they almost exactly mirror the approach which Apple’s Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines advised against back in 1992 …

Samsung has shown off a prototype of a new folding display, and it seems very likely that this is the one that will be used for the iPhone Fold.

Apple had reportedly waited until the company was able to produce a display without a visible crease, and this one looks to fit the bill perfectly. The crease looks completely invisible in a photo and almost so in a video …

Apple has been roundly criticized for falling behind in AI, and for its rather disastrous Apple Intelligence launch in which it was forced to admit it had promised things it couldn’t deliver.

The second criticism is valid, the first only partly so. But a new report suggests that Apple’s path to delivering on its AI promises may be a radical one: abandoning work on its own model. I do now think that’s absolutely the right thing to do …

As Apple itself recently noted, most new year’s resolutions don’t last very long. When it comes to daily gym visits and diets, so many people have given up by the second Friday in January that it has come to be known as Quitter’s Day.

But there are some steps you can take with your Apple devices that make it extremely easy to keep up new habits once you’ve done the simple prep …

Consumer reviews used to be one of the most reliable ways of assessing the quality of an app or a physical product. If you didn’t know any friends who’d tried it, the number of reviews and the average rating was a pretty good guide.

Sadly, however, that is no longer the case. Companies have become very adept at gaming the system, meaning that reviews are worth way less than they used to be. There are now six reasons you shouldn’t necessarily trust them, including one I only learned about today …

The Shure MV88 mic used to be the perfect microphone for any iPhone owner who wanted high quality recordings with maximum convenience. With a Lightning connector, it plugged directly into your iPhone.

The company inexplicably failed to update it for many years after Apple switched to USB-C, but has finally corrected this – and may solve a common problem seen on YouTube …

At least some of the camera sensors for the iPhone 18 Pro look set to be made in the USA, at a Samsung plant in Austin, Texas.

Production of advanced image sensors for Apple is expected to begin sometime around March, suggesting that they will be destined for the iPhone 18 Pro …

The effectiveness of the Apple Developer Academy training provided in Detroit has been called into question, alongside the value for money it offers.

A previously unreported funding breakdown shows that although Apple made the largest contribution to the program, more than half as much comes from Michigan taxpayers …

The version of Apple Intelligence released in China must pass a test to ensure that it does nothing to challenge official government propaganda.

It will be tested with 2,000 questions designed to elicit information censored within the country, and it must refuse to answer at least 95% of them …

Photos and video footage of a simple printed mock-up of an iPhone Fold gave us a decent sense of how the device might look if the most recent rumour about the aspect ratios is accurate. While the exterior display shape would be a radical departure, more 9to5Mac readers liked it than disliked it.

If you want to get an even better sense of how the device might feel, and have access to a 3D printer, you can create a physical mock-up using files provided online …

The Lowfree Flow84 is the latest episode in my on-again, off-again love affair with mechanical keyboards. I describe it as the mechanical keyboard Apple would make for a mix of good and bad reasons, but we’ll get to that! Update: There is a new version with touch sliders for volume and brightness – see the Pricing & conclusions section at the end.

It’s one of a relatively new breed of low-profile mechanical keyboards, something that would have seemed a contradiction in terms just a few years earlier …

We’ve so far been assuming that the iPhone Fold would have a familiar aspect ratio on the exterior display, opening out into an interior screen which is taller than it is wide.

However, a recent report suggested that the interior screen will be wider than it is tall, and some physical mockups give us an indication of how this might look …

Pirate site Anna’s Archive, which describes itself as “the largest truly open library in human history,” says that it has scraped 99.6% of all the music people listen to from Spotify.

It says the total data downloaded is a little under 300TB in size and that it will be making this available for torrenting …

The European Union has taken credit for new interoperability features in iOS 26.3. The bloc says that this will create a market for new innovative products and services.

The latest beta release has a strong focus on making iOS more open, including much better support for third-party smartwatches …

A leaker with a good track record says that suppliers are gearing up for iPhone 18 production as the company prepares for its new split-launch plan.

The new strategy will see the base model iPhone 18 go on sale earlier in the year, with production potentially underway by mid-February …

We’ve recently seen how ChatGPT was used to trick Mac users into installing MacStealer, and now a different tactic has been found to persuade users to install a version of MacSync Stealer.

The Mac remains a relatively difficult target for attackers thanks to Apple’s protections against the installation of malware. However, Mac malware is on the increase, and two recently-discovered tactics discovered by security researchers highlight the creative approaches some attackers are using …

Instagram long-form videos have previously been a possibility the company has ruled out, but its head Adam Mosseri now says that it might be that the platform needs it.

One thing he is promising is a way to allow users to “proactively shape content in their feeds,” although you shouldn’t hold your breath for this …

While Apple is currently lobbying against being given a legal responsibility for age verification when it comes to downloading apps, I think the company’s customers would very much benefit from it taking on this role.

Given the company’s track record in finding privacy-respecting approaches to personal data, I would like to see it go even further than the proposals we’ve seen to date …