Parker Ortolani

Each year, Apple becomes more involved in the health and fitness industry. It’s become a major player with products like Apple Watch and AirPods and services like Fitness+ and Research. Currently, Apple has working out, mental health, women’s health, heart health, blood oxygen measurements, and even hearing covered. But they’re missing one very important component of the healthy life story, and that’s nutrition and cooking.

Apple has been releasing iOS software updates at an incredibly rapid pace. The betas just keep coming, both for developers and for public beta testers. But to enroll yourself in either program, you need to go through either Apple’s developer website or through Apple’s public beta website. It also requires the installation of a profile that switches the software update track your phone is on.

Twitter user Giulio Zompetti often shares first looks at old Apple product prototypes, and today, he’s shared some images of an Apple Watch prototype from early 2014. This prototype has an entirely different back crystal design with an alternative sensor layout.

YouTuber Otto Climan has turned a GameBoy Color into an Apple TV remote. Yup, you read that correctly. This incredibly cool project was posted about a month ago and shared earlier today by Gizmodo. It’s a really slick hack that takes advantage of the GameBoy Color’s IR sensor and button array.

With the introduction of iOS 14.4, Apple added new features for HomePod mini owners that make it easier to handoff music or podcast playback from your iPhone to it. Devices with the U1 chip have unique proximity functionality that cause your phone to vibrate and physically tell you when your phone gets close to a HomePod mini. It’s a great feature in theory, but it’s become incredibly annoying in practice.

Over the next few months we’ll be sharing concepts of each major Apple platform. Last month, we shared our concept for watchOS 8, and today we’re sharing the next one, in this case for macOS. It includes all new apps, improved privacy controls, clearer notifications, and more. But before I dove into designing this macOS concept, I wanted to figure out what Apple might call this year’s release.

Last week Apple introduced a new watch face for Apple Watch called “Unity” for celebrating Black History Month. The face uses the same colors as the Pan-African flag and changes with your movement. Today, they’ve updated Apple.com with official new “Unity” wallpapers available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Apple has introduced an all new “Black Unity” sport band to help celebrate Black History Month. Starting today, you can visit your local Apple store (if it’s open) or order one on Apple.com. We got our hands on the beautiful new band, and here’s what it looks like.

Earlier this week, Apple made standalone sets of AirPods Max ear cushions available for purchase. If you didn’t already know, AirPods Max ear cushions are magnetic, so they’re interchangeable both for repair and customization purposes. We got our hands on a set of green AirPods Max ear cushions, and here’s what they look like when you buy them on their own.

AdAdge has shared a new Apple Watch Series 6 ad focused on the ECG functionality. The ad shows a user taking an ECG in all kinds of environments, highlighting how you no longer need to make an appointment to go to the doctor to get one taken.

When Apple announced AirPods Max back in December, they also quietly added individual magnetic ear cushion sets to the Apple Store. Well, there’s good news for AirPods Max owners who want to customize their headphones. You can now order cushions in all 5 colors and mix and match them. AirPods Max Ear Cushions are priced at $69 so they certainly aren’t cheap. But then again, if you bought a pair of $550 headphones you can probably also afford these.

Almost six years after the introduction of tvOS, Apple’s design team has released their first-ever design tool kit for the platform. Apple’s tvOS design kit includes all of the components you’d expect from design templates to colors, materials, and more. These new tools should make it much easier for designers and developers to create mock ups and concepts for their apps.

England based designer Hector Simpson has created a beautiful set of new wallpapers for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS inspired by the classic blue wave designs that were a staple in early versions of Mac OS X. The set is called “Aquex” – clearly an homage to aqua. Simpson has designed a wide array of options that use color schemes from more recent versions of macOS as well. The best part, though, is that there are dynamic wallpapers that change throughout the day.

Earlier today, reports came out saying that Apple plans to include blood sugar measurements as a flagship feature of this year’s Apple Watch Series 7. Later this year, Apple Watch could gain the ability to measure an incredibly important health metric for millions of people. With blood sugar measurements, diabetics could use their watch to stay healthy without finger pricks. This, of course, is contingent on the watch measurements being accurate. Apple wouldn’t ship a feature like this if it wasn’t accurate though.

Apple has announced that longtime hardware executive Dan Riccio will be transitioning to a new role where he will continue to report directly to Tim Cook. Not much is clear about this new role, and its description is quite vague. They note that his new role will focus on a “new project,” and officially his title will be “vice president of engineering.” This new project could be anything from the long-rumored Apple Car or even Apple’s VR/AR hardware efforts.

Today, Twitter announced an all-new initiative for combating the massive amount of misinformation on the platform called Birdwatch. Birdwatch is a collection of new crowdsourcing tools designed to allow users to flag tweets as misleading and to “write notes that provide informative context.”

Nearly two months after macOS Big Sur’s public release, the Apple human interface team has finally released an updated Sketch library optimized for its top to bottom redesign. User interface designers and developers have been anxiously awaiting this new design kit for quite awhile.

Apple has updated Apple.com with an all-new gift guide for Valentine’s Day shoppers. The gift guide is interactive and lets you shop for specific types of people such as “lovers of photography” or “lovers of music.”

It’s no secret that the Apple TV Siri Remote is controversial. It’s a powerful remote that many believe is poorly designed. It’s not easy to use in the dark, and it has very few distinct buttons. Lots of folks turn to their iPhone or Apple Watch to use as an alternate remote. That’s in part because the user interface can change. So this had us wondering what a better stand-alone Apple TV remote could look like. Turns out, the solution was in front of us all along.

There are so many big and small ways that Apple can improve watchOS. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out part 1 of our watchOS 8 concept before you continue reading. The second half of our concept includes some smaller changes to the operating system that would be welcome quality of life improvements.