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A tech writer who skipped many Apple Watch generations upgraded from the Series 10 to the Series 12, despite near-identical design, citing improved heart-rate monitoring, a new 'Readiness' app, faster performance, and a redesigned Health app. The reviewer says the device now rivals third-party wearables like WHOOP, which charges a $239/year subscription.
Bitchat, Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth-based offline messaging app, has been removed from Apple's and Google's app stores in India after the government invoked Section 69A of the IT Act. Apple's takedown notice, shared by Dorsey, said the app remains available outside India but that access via TestFlight is also blocked there, and Bitchat's website appears inaccessible across Indian ISPs. The move follows an earlier July order directing GitHub to remove Bitchat's code repositories.
Meta's Muse AI app reached the top of app store charts, with reporting attributing its momentum to Alexandr Wang's involvement at the company. Wang's approach reportedly caused friction among some Meta staff even as the app gained traction.
Home Widget, a third-party iOS app for building custom HomeKit control panels, released version 1.10 with a new camera mosaic feature that shows every HomeKit camera in one scrollable view from a single widget tap. The update also adds direct thermostat control and whole-room lighting adjustments from widget tiles, plus a Control Center option to jump straight to the camera mosaic or a specific camera.
A free, open-source macOS utility called Magic Switch has been released on GitHub, allowing users to share an Apple Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, or Mouse across two Macs. The tool avoids the usual requirement of an Apple ID or manually re-pairing devices over USB when switching machines.
A 9to5Mac writer has been using an iPad mini, loaded with the same apps and layout as their iPhone, to simulate the experience of Apple's rumored foldable iPhone Duo. The experiment relies on an iPhone Wi-Fi hotspot for connectivity and notes that the Duo's rumored 7.6-inch interior display is only slightly smaller than the iPad mini's 8.3-inch screen. Colleague Ryan Christoffel's reporting on the Duo's screen size was cited as the basis for the comparison.
Amazon is selling JBL's Soundgear Sense open-ear true wireless earbuds for $83, a 50% cut from their $165 list price. The earbuds use JBL's OpenSound air-conduction design, offer up to 6 hours of battery life (24 hours with the case), Bluetooth 5.3, multipoint pairing, and an IP54 rating for sweat and dust resistance.
Linkind has released the Smart Light Stick, a smart bulb that screws into a standard E26 socket and uses 160 LEDs split across 50 individually controllable color zones to mimic a flickering campfire. The bulb also functions as a standard bright light, reaching up to 850 lumens with a 310-degree beam angle, and is controlled through the AiDot app for flame size, color blend, and flicker speed.
Researchers at the Objective-See Foundation found a now-patched vulnerability in the macOS ChatGPT app that could have let an attacker take over the app on a victim's machine, exposing chat logs and linked data such as browser sessions. OpenAI confirmed the flaw and fix in a September 25 system change log entry and said it is working to speed up its security practices.
Singapore's Government Technology Agency is piloting FirstDate, a dating service limited to public officers aged 21-35. Rather than offering a browsable feed of profiles, it gives each participant one suggested match per cycle, generated via the Gale-Shapley stable-matching algorithm, along with a compatibility score and brief notes; both parties have 72 hours to accept before contact details are shared.
WileAI released a Pi extension, @wileai/pi-codex-connector, that lets any Pi-compatible model access connectors already linked to a user's ChatGPT/Codex account, such as GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Linear and Figma. The extension launches a Codex app-server session with no model attached and exposes just three tools—codex_connectors, codex_connector_schema and codex_connector_call—so a Pi model can discover and invoke Codex connector tools without loading all their schemas directly. Write actions can be set to ask for confirmation, run automatically, or be blocked entirely via the PI_CODEX_CONNECTORS_WRITES setting.
Apple Arcade added five games to its subscription library, which now exceeds 200 titles. The lineup includes Pusheen's Place, a new exclusive life-sim game, alongside ad-free, purchase-free Arcade versions of Terraria+, Touchgrind BMX 2+, and River City Survivors, plus one additional title.