Apple Archive
So that is the whole pipeline exercised end-to-end. GrandSlam authenticates the Apple Account and obtains the IDS delegate. authenticateDS and id-register turn the Linux process into a registered Apple messaging identity. The Friends sequence attaches that identity to the existing accepted relationship. A missing-key SubscribeAndFetch makes the sharing device deliver its current P-224 key over APNs/IDS, inside a sender-verified P-256 NGM envelope. A second SearchParty fetch returns the encrypted report, and the P-224 key opens it locally. So yeah, in one sentence: authenticate to Apple’s private services, register the Linux machine as an IDS client, receive the existing Find My share key, and use it to fetch and decrypt a consented friend’s latest location. ↫ Zerotistic I wonder if it would be possible to build a proper third-party client for Apple’s Find My network like this, or if it would be trivial for the company to block it. I’m fairly sure quite a few people would love to be able to keep using Find My when moving away from Apple’s operating systems.
If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods. Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate. In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors AirPods are tiny. I’ve seen people use them at the gym. I’ve seen them on playgrounds. I’ve seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They’re used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this? All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley’s complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this? How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone – regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning – want even more cameras around them?
The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too. With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that. ↫ Marcin Wichary I have never spent this much reading about and pondering a technology seemingly nobody liked and that I never really used. I still think there’s merit to the idea of screen on a keyboard, but only if the screens are integrated into the individual keys (as some products have tried over the years). Of course, this would also be astronomically expensive, delicate, and virtually impossible to repair, so I’m not sure something like that can be reasonably made at an affordable price.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors According to Apple, this minor feature is going to cost Apple “significant engineering effort”; I’d estimate it’ll cost them about one to two golden statues.
Cameron Kaiser’s articles are always a right treat, and this one’s no different. It’s about running MkLinux on the Apple Workgroup Server, the regular Mac rebadged into a server product and predecessor to Apple’s first real server product, the Apple Network Server running AIX. The Workgroup Servers were originally marketed with Apple’s UNIX variant, A/UX, but with this operating system not surviving the transition to PowerPC processors, Apple started offering other options. A/UX ultimately didn’t survive the 1994 68K transition to PowerPC, but in 1996 Apple publicly offered another option: run Linux, using the Mach microkernel. Although MkLinux emerged after the 9150’s discontinuation, it’s still just an overgrown NuBus Power Mac, so between more RAM, a beefier CPU upgrade and various video cards, by the end of this article we ought to have a configuration that gives us the best of two worlds — classic MacOS and MkLinux — in one server. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I never really stopped to think that MkLinux really was, but it’s a lot more interesting than just an early Linux port to PowerPC Macs. In fact, it ran the monolithic Linux kernel as a userspace process on top of the Mach microkernel, which made it a valuable testing ground for Apple’s later XNU efforts. It’s wild that Apple had an official, blessed Linux operating system as early as the mid ’90s, even if its performance was apparently not particularly great – due to the overhead of running it atop Mach – and Jobs canned it as soon as he came back to the company.
EveryMac turned 30. On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched. Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years. ↫ EveryMac news item I thought OSNews was pretty unique with its founding in 1997, so it’s great to see another enthusiast’s website as old as ours. Amazing company to be in, too – EveryMac is an indispensable, tirelessly maintained, and stupidly accurate resource that I use countless times each year. Here’s to another 30 years.
Apple’s Swift has become the de-facto language for Apple’s own developers for a while now, and it seems that with the new operating system releases from the company unveiled during WWDC, Switch is now also being used in the kernel. Naturally I dropped what I was doing and went grepping through the iOS 27 kernelcache. Alas, nothing came of it. All is not lost though: I found the Embedded Swift runtime in macOS 27, sitting in com.apple.kec.pthread of all places. Then I went poking around the root filesystem and it turns out Apple gave the whole effort a name: KernelKit. Let’s dissect it. ↫ Josh Maine It’s still quite limited at this time, which makes sense – you don’t want to be too crazy with the core of the operating system that runs on god knows how many PCs, smartphones, and other devices. It’s also entirely contained within a few kexts as embedded runtimes, and the XNU kernel itself remains entirely C and C++.
A week or so ago, Apple announced a bunch of features for the App Store on iOS, including personalised recommendations based on your activity and usage of iOS. It turns out this includes a keylogger (taplogger?) in the App Store, which records every single tap you make, every single letter you enter, and a lot of other information. All of this information is unencrypted and sent to Apple. Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there’s no way to turn it off. They can even calculate your typing speed. ↫ Michael Tsai, quoting Mysk The provided screenshots of the data collected are terrifying, especially because the data is unencrypted, sent to Apple, and fully tied to your user account. Apple clearly wants a slice of that big, juicy advertising pie, and they, too, are discovering that the easiest and best way to serve targeted ads is to collect as much data as they can about you. Of course, this is something the entire internet (but not OSNews!) and several megacorporations are built on by now, but Apple has been incredibly sanctimonious about how it supposedly actually cares about user privacy, making this keylogger yet another case of Apple’s hypocrisy on full display. Of course, if you care about privacy, you’re entirely free to download your iOS applications from somewhere other than the App Store and install them yours… Oh, wait.
TrueType is a widely used vector font standard for rendering text in web pages, PDFs, operating systems, and applications. Familiar fonts like Helvetica, Garamond, and Monaco are all built on TrueType outlines. The format specifies a hinting interpreter intended to help outlines rasterize faithfully on low-resolution displays. Modern high-resolution displays enable beautiful typography from outlines alone, but TrueType fonts that need hinting to render legibly remain in use and we continue to support them. Font parsers process data from untrusted sources, making the TrueType hinting interpreter a security-critical attack surface. To make the format more resilient on Apple platforms, we rewrote its hinting interpreter from C to memory-safe Swift for the Fall 2025 releases. In addition to memory safety, we also improved performance: on average, our Swift interpreter runs 13% faster than the C interpreter it replaced. ↫ Scott Perry This article provides a deep dive into how, exactly they did that.
Apple recently announced its next crack at integrating “AI” into its operating systems, this time opting to simply whitelabel Google’s Gemini “AI” tools instead of developing its own LLM technology. Called “Siri AI”, Apple also stated it’s not coming to the EU, and the company stated that’s because the EU’s basic consumer protection legislation would give other “AI” tools “unprecedented access” to user data on users’ devices. The company made a big stink about this in the press. As anyone with basic pattern recognition skills already knew, this was a blatant, baldfaced lie. What really happened is that Apple asked the EU for an 18-month long exemption from the EU’s consumer protection and privacy legislation during which it would not have to comply with any legal privacy and interoperability requirements – just so it could roll out Siri “AI” before anyone else could offer a competing product for Apple users. Obviously, the EU wasn’t going to grant such an exemption. “The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU. “Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards,” Regnier said. “Instead of trying to find a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA – and this for at least 18 months. That’s not an option,” Regnier said. ↫ Inti Landauro and Foo Yun Chee at Reuters So what’s really going on here is that Apple wants to offer a set of whitelabeled Google Gemini tools on iOS and macOS in the EU, but because Apple is classified as a gatekeeper, it is legally obligated to offer interoperability options for competing “AI” tools. These options in turn need to adhere to the EU’s strict privacy regulations, so that competing “AI” tools can offer the same level of privacy that Apple’s own whitelabeled Google Gemini tools claim to offer. Apple didn’t want to offer these privacy-respecting interoperability options as required by law, so instead of following the law in the countries it wants to operate in, Apple asked to be placed above the law for at least 18 months, basically giving Siri “AI” a massive head-start over possible competitors so that it could entrench itself in the userbase. The EU saw right through Apple’s nonsense, and now called them out on their bullshit. Perhaps Apple has gotten so used to openly bribing Trump that they forgot other parts of the world don’t work that way. Whenever Apple and its PR attack dogs say anything about the EU, you can be assured they are lying. They have proven time and time again to basically never speak a single word of truth when it comes to its dealings in the EU. It’s almost pathological at this point, and what makes it doubly interesting is that Apple will not launch Siri “AI” in China either, for the very same regulatory reasons – yet all China got was a single footnote in a press release. I wonder why.
Apple’s developer conference started today, and as is tradition, this means it also announced coming updates to its operating systems lineup. macOS is probably one of the two major ones OSNews readers are interested in, so let’s start there: Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS’s performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year. macOS Golden Gate has some Liquid Glass design changes. For example, apps now have a unified toolbar at the top, and the sidebar now expands to the edge of the window. A new slider on macOS 27 lets you customize the opacity of Liquid Glass. ↫ Joe Rossignol at MacRumors Effectively, a ton of “Liquid Glass” features touted only a year ago are being changed and fixed, which should make using Liquid Glass less of a frustrating affair. Of course, there’s a whole slew of new “AI” stuff built entirely on top of Google’s Gemini, but luckily for us Europeans, we won’t be getting those features because EU privacy and consumer protection regulations are too strict. Apple, one of the world’s most valuable companies, seemingly cannot create “AI” features that comply with some basic consumer protection legislation. As for the other major platform, that’s iOS of course. At WWDC 2026 in Cupertino, Apple announced iOS 27, the next mobile operating system for compatible iPhones. The update focuses on tweaking and improving last year’s iOS 26, particularly in areas like app launch time, Liquid Glass design, and more. It does not offer a lot of major new features or upgrades, as Apple focused on polishing the experience. However, there are some new upgrades, such as reworked parental controls, new Siri AI, better search, and performance improvements. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin These new versions, as well as those of Apple’s other operating systems, will be available later this year.
Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts. Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM SIMMs for me to test, we can now try the “2.0” MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. ↫ Cameron Kaiser A great read, as always.
When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want. ↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews (quoting myself is weird) MacRumors’ Juli Clover, today: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested. Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors VR – what the Vision Pro is, whether Apple’s marketing likes to say it or not – has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn. The Vision Pro has neither. It was destined to be a flop from the start, as nobody wants to strap an uncomfortable computer to their face that does less than all of the other computers they already have, and what it does do, it does worse. I do wonder if this makes the Vision Pro the most expensive flop in human history. Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?
It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn’t impact most people, as it’s highly unlikely you’re using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apple’s Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable. It’s important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the line’s availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution. Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it’s trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that. If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the “Network” folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple’s legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups. ↫ TimeCapsuleSMB It’s compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although you’ll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that don’t and won’t work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4. This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users’ rights, by design.
I need to post about this because if I don’t, people will get mad. Cook will continue on as Apple CEO through the summer, with Ternus set to join Apple’s Board of Directors and take over as CEO on September 1, 2026. Cook is going to transition to chairman of the board at Apple, and he will “assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.” ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors This concludes OSNews’ coverage of Keeping Up With the Yacht Class, but rest assured, every other tech site will be milking this for weeks to come. You will still be worrying about how to pay for your next tank of gas.
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed. Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. ↫ Chance Miller at 9To5Mac If a Mac Pro falls in the back of the Apple Store and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Every modifier key starts simple and humble, with a specific task and a nice matching name. This never lasts. The tasks become larger and more convoluted, and the labels grow obsolete. Shift no longer shifts a carriage, Control doesn’t send control codes, Alt isn’t for alternate nerdy terminal functions. Fn is the newest popular modifier key, and it feels we’re speedrunning it through all the challenges without having learned any of the lessons. ↫ Marcin Wichary Grab a blanket, curl up on the couch with some coffee or tea, and enjoy.
Apple today announced the “MacBook Neo,” an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599. The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing. The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels. ↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors There’s no denying this is a great offering from Apple, and it’s going to sell really well, especially in the US. I can’t think of any other laptop on the market that offers this kind of complete package at such an attractive price point – on the Windows side, you’re going to get plastic laptops with worse displays, worse battery life, and, well, Windows. For education buyers, the price drops from $599 to $499, making it a no-brainer choice for families sending their kids off to high school or university. In the US, at least. Here in Europe, or at least in Sweden where I checked the price of the base model, it’s going for almost €800 ($930), at which point the cost-cutting measures Apple has taken are a bit harder to swallow. At that kind of price point, I’m not going to accept a mere 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a paltry 60Hz display. When I saw the announcement of this new MacBook earlier today, I wondered if this could be my way of finally getting a macOS review on OSNews after well over a decade, but at €800 for something I won’t be using after I’m done with the review? I can’t justify that. Regardless, you’re going to see tons of these in schools and in wrapping paper for the holiday season and birthdays, and at least at American pricing, it’s definitely a great deal.
Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. Despite being a fundamental part of every Apple app, there is little to none official documentation about this file format. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools. ↫ ordinal0 at dbg.re Not only did ordinal0 reverse-engineer the file format, they also developed their own unique custom parser and compiler for .car files that don’t require any of Apple’s tools.
If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance. Whether you’re working with images, audio, video or building software, we’ve enjoyed a new turn of speed since the M1 on day 1. While most attribute this to their Performance cores, as it goes with the name, much is in truth the result of the unsung Efficiency cores, and how they keep background tasks where they should be. ↫ Howard Oakley While both Intel and AMD are making gains on Apple, there’s simply no denying the reality that Apple’s M series of chips are leading the pack in mobile computing (the picture is different in desktops). There are probably hundreds of reasons why Apple has had this lead for so many years now, but the way macOS distributes background and foreground tasks across the two types of cores in M series chips is an important one. Still, I wonder how the various other processors that use power and efficiency cores fare in this regard. You’d think they would provide a similar level of benefit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the way Windows or Linux handles such cores and the distribution of tasks is simply not as optimised or strict as it is in macOS. Apple often vastly overstates the benefits of its “vertical integration”, but I think the tight coupling between macOS and Apple’s own processors is definitely a case where they’re being entirely truthful.
