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After briefly taking down its European education stores earlier today, Apple has officially launched its 2025 Back to School promotion across the continent.

Like in the U.S., this year’s offer includes a free pair of AirPods or other accessories with the purchase of a qualifying Mac or iPad through the Apple Store for Education website. Here are the details.

Synology is synonymous with NAS, or network-attached storage, and there’s good reason for that. The DiskStation line of products is reliable and robust with a great community that supports consumer and professional use cases. More recently, Synology has reached beyond traditional NAS solutions with BeeStation, a private and family cloud storage solution. I’ve recently been testing the BeeStation Plus, a somewhat less capable, but much more approachable, product, and the DiskStation DS925+, a traditional NAS with a familiar product name to us at 9to5. Both are great in their own way. Here’s how they perform and compare.

Earlier this week, Ruoming Pang, the executive who until recently led Apple’s AI models team, left the company to join Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL. Now, as reported by Bloomberg, we know just what it took to lure him away.

Apple has rolled out official support for Firefox in the latest update to its iCloud for Windows app, allowing users to autofill and access their iCloud Passwords directly in Mozilla’s browser for the first time.

A new M4 Vision Pro is reportedly launching later this year, and even though not a lot sounds like it’s changing, I’m cautiously hopeful that the most needed fix might be on the way.

Using 1Password to remember every username and password that accumulates is easily one of the best quality-of-life improvements you can make in your digital world. In addition to saving all your passwords and secure information, 9to5Mac readers can also try 1Password free for 14 days and take home a $20 credit as a Prime Day exclusive! 1Password is hands-down the best fix for fumbling with passwords because it’s private, cross-platform, and the absolute leader in password management features.

Busy day for AI-based browsing. Just as Reuters reported that OpenAI is just weeks away from releasing a browser, Perplexity, the company behind the famous AI-powered “answer engine,” launched Comet, its own take at what browsing looks like in the age of AI. Here’s what it looks like.

Google Chrome has long dominated the web browser space, despite many Apple users opting to stick with Safari. But a major new player is reportedly about to launch its own web browser: OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.

Apple made an interesting omission in yesterday’s chief operating officer transition announcement. Design, which previously reported to COO Jeff Williams, will soon report to CEO Tim Cook, but the press release stopped short of explaining where Williams’ other product responsibility will go when he leaves.

With iOS 26, Apple has made a key strategy shift: it’s no longer pre-announcing major new features that won’t be available for months to come.

Here’s why I think that’s a great decision by Apple, and why it could make for an exciting 12 months.

Last month, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo indicated that a cheaper model of Apple Vision Pro wasn’t due until late 2027. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has now corroborated that timeline in a new report that says the device, codenamed N100, will be both “lighter and cheaper”.

However, the device’s design has not yet been finalized. Work on the project is apparently expected to be finished in 2026, with a ramp up to a public launch in 2027.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports today that Apple is nearing a release of the first update to the Apple Vision Pro hardware. The new model will feature an M4 chip, offering a significant performance upgrade compared to the M2 chip found in the original Vision Pro.

Perhaps more importantly, the new Vision Pro will apparently include a redesigned strap. This will make the headset more comfortable to wear for longer periods of time.

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This year’s most unique iPhone model will be the iPhone 17 Air, a brand new entry to Apple’s lineup. And while prior reports indicated it would have a lot in common with the base iPhone 17, new rumors make it sound a lot closer to the Pro models than we thought.

One of the biggest holdouts for news junkies and sports fans on Bluesky is no more. Starting this week, users can get push notifications whenever a specific account posts, just like on X.

Rumors about what to expect from the iPhone 17 Air are heating up as we approach the September iPhone event. A new leak today suggests that the iPhone 17 Air will be available in four colors: black, silver, light gold, and light blue.

Meanwhile, a separate rumor sheds more light on which chip the iPhone 17 Air will use …

Nvidia, the US company specializing in high-performance GPU cards, has become the first ever company with a market capitalization of four trillion dollars. It is now the most valuable company in the world, ahead of Apple and Microsoft.

It’s a little over a year since the company overtook AAPL thanks to a spectacular rise in value that saw it go from being worth $2T to more than $3T in just four months …

In recent years, Apple developed a system codenamed Presto, which updates sealed iPhones wirelessly. This way, customers can unbox their new devices that are already running the latest version of iOS, no matter how long they’ve been sitting in stock.

Now, the company is working on something similar for the Mac.

A “click to cancel” law was last month passed in California, and now the FTC has ratified a federal rule designed to achieve the same goal. The idea of both is to force companies to make it as easy to cancel an online or app subscription as it is to sign up in the first place.

Update: Following a court challenge, the US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the rule. See update at the end …

Apple might be the next company to add a ChatGPT-style chatbot to its Support app, likely as a way to automatically handle cases covered in its documentation and hand off only the trickier ones to a human. All things considered, this is a good move.