When Apple unveiled the iPhone 13 back in 2021, it made a huge deal over a headline new feature, Cinematic mode. This is the video equivalent of Portrait mode, allowing you to select a focus point and blur the background.

Portrait mode has improved dramatically in successive generations, but the same cannot be said of Cinematic mode. The company appears to have completely lost interest in the feature, and although that’s understandable in one way, I would argue it’s a big mistake …

The most blatant security backdoor yet seen in an internet router has been found in a range of models sold under multiple brand names. A firmware implant phones home to cloud servers in China to ask for instructions, and can then be remotely controlled …

When Reddit significantly changed its user interface way back in 2018, there were widespread protests from those who preferred the original. The company has retained access to this at old.reddit.com, and last year promised this version would continue to exist for as long as people kept using it.

That promise may now be under some degree of threat as Reddit says that it “plans to make changes” to Old Reddit in order to protect against AI data scraping …

Even Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged that Vision Pro is a niche product. I’ve argued in the past that it’s an essential step along the way to a more affordable and consumer-friendly Apple Glasses product.

But it’s also worth noting that sometimes niche products can make a huge difference within specialist fields, and a new surgical study provides a very clear example of why it matters to patients and surgeons alike …

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman stirred things up a little with what was likely a deliberately teasingly-phrased tweet. Some took this to be a reference to a live iPhone keynote presentation instead of a pre-recorded one.

That seems unlikely, but there are a couple of reasons for suspecting that the live elements may be livelier this year …

I don’t use TikTok myself, but from all of the second-hand reports I see, it seems to have become a massive repository of terrible advice. This apparently now includes videos advising people to put their iPhones into the fridge when they become hot …

While claims of a $1,399 starting price for the iPhone 18 Pro may be exaggerated, there’s no doubt at all that we are going to see steep price increases for this year’s lineup.

Apple has already prepared the ground for the resulting sticker shock with the new Apple Upgrade program, and now T-Mobile is responding with the launch of a new 3-year payment plan …

One of the theories voiced about how a former Apple employee may have accessed confidential documents after leaving the company to join OpenAI has been dispelled by a court filing.

It has been suggested that access to the documents may have been inadvertent due to a seemingly messy iCloud arrangement for Apple employees – but the company says this is not the case …

Apple’s cautious entrance into the smart glasses field means that we have a reasonably good idea what to expect, and have been able to preview some of the capabilities through existing devices.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses have given me two years’ experience of the kind of capabilities we’re expecting from the first Apple Glasses model, and the Even Realities G2 are currently giving me a preview of what we can expect from a later model: smart glasses with a display …

Apple will today announce its earnings for its fiscal Q3 ending in June, with the usual Q&A with analysts following immediately afterwards. It follows the company briefly hitting a $5 trillion market cap before slipping back slightly.

Today will be the final earnings call with Tim Cook as CEO, and analysts aren’t expecting any surprises – but there will be one very big question …

Romance scams are one of the oldest cons in the online world, but they continue to pull in new victims all of the time. Joint research by four universities suggests that AI chatbots are now even better at carrying out these scams than humans, and that’s a pretty scary prospect …

Jony Ive and Sam Altman have been teasing an AI hardware device for a long time now, and it’s increasingly looking like that tease was premature. We’re still not expecting to see a launch until some point next year.

OpenAI continues to be exceedingly vague about what form its first hardware device might take, but an interview yesterday seems to point to something rather like a HomePad …

The ability to add a digital version of your driver’s license to your iPhone looks like it will be rolling out to a 15th US state before too long.

Apple currently lists 14 states where the capability is supported, alongside the territory of Puerto Rico, and backend assets now indicate another one will soon be added …

The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) estimates that online scams cost Americans almost $150 billion last year – seven times the amount reported to the FBI.

The organization says that the number of cyber scams is increasing dramatically, and that most victims never report their losses to law enforcement …

Warner Bros has announced that it is inflicting testing a new format on select iPhone users in the US: HBO Max Shorts. As if vertical video weren’t bad enough, the media giant has says that the clips are powered by an AI tool …

A prototype smart ring developed by engineers at the University of California appears to have cracked one of the holy grails of health wearables: non-invasive blood sugar measurement. The data is sent to a companion app on a paired iPhone.

While existing smart rings rely purely on biophysical data extracted from sensors like those embedded into the Apple Watch, this ring also tracks chemical biomarkers by analysing sweat …

Mention of a new Apple Card feature in iOS 27 brought to mind a banking app feature I recently had to enable after discovering it was not on by default.

This too relates to automatically recurring card payments, and it turned out not to work in the way we might expect it to …

The exact launch timings of the iPhone Ultra remain unclear as a new supply chain report says that Foxconn is making “final adjustments” to the manufacturing process. It follows an earlier report stating that mass production had begun.

Recent reports indicate that Apple will unveil the new folding iPhone at its September event, but that initial availability may be limited …

You’d think that it would be obvious that it’s a terrible idea to ask an AI chatbot for a medical consultation, but hundreds of millions of people do it every week.

In one near-death example now the subject of a lawsuit, ChatGPT advised a pastor to ignore symptoms of a pulmonary embolism – a condition with a mortality rate of 30%. In fact, the advice it offered very likely made things worse …

One of the reported reasons for Apple taking such a long time to introduce a folding iPhone is that the company was unhappy with the very visible crease and vulnerability of earlier generations of flexible screens.

Display partner Samsung finally solved this to Apple’s satisfaction, and the launch of the Korean company’s latest folding smartphone has now provided a preview of what we can expect from the iPhone Ultra display …