GoKawiil
Tech News
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has begun sending media invites for an event in Los Angeles on October 28, moved from a previously reported date a day earlier. Expected announcements include the first touchscreen, OLED MacBook Pro models in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, an OLED iPad mini, and updated iMac and entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro models running Apple's M6 chip.
Apple added the 2017 12-inch MacBook, the 6th-generation iPad (Wi-Fi and cellular), and BeatsX earphones to its obsolete products list. This completes the obsolescence of the entire 12-inch MacBook lineup, since the 2015 and 2016 versions were already listed. Apple classifies products as obsolete once they've been off sale for seven or more years, meaning it will no longer repair or service them.
Apple has released the fourth developer beta of macOS 27.2 Golden Gate, resuming its weekly beta cadence after a two-week gap. The update's main feature is expanded Siri AI language support, adding French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish following the English-only launch with macOS 27.
Amazon is offering steep discounts on M5 Pro MacBook Pro configurations, including $600 off a 2TB 14-inch model and $500 off a 16-inch 24GB model. Both deals bring prices below Apple's pre-price-hike list prices from June. Other current deals include AirPods Pro 3 at $50 off, AirPods Max 2 at $120 off, the M6 Mac mini near $150 off, and a $199 clearance price on a Black Titanium Apple Watch Ultra 3.
Framework has refreshed its budget-oriented, repairable Laptop 12 with Intel's new Wildcat Lake processors, keeping the 2-in-1 convertible design, touchscreen with optional stylus, and multiple color options. The base model starts at $549 without RAM or storage, but a fully configured unit costs roughly $200-$300 more than rival laptops like Dell's updated XPS 13.
Framework has updated its budget-focused Laptop 12 with Intel's new Core Series 3 processors, offering configurations from a Core 3 304 chip with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD at $799 up to a Core 7 350 model with 32GB RAM at $1,549. Buyers can save $100 by choosing Fedora Linux instead of Windows, and pricing on all tiers has reportedly risen beyond the company's original targets.
Apple announced the HomeView, a 7-inch smart display with a speaker base and wall-mounted version both priced at $299, at a New York event. The device runs new software called HomeView rather than iOS or iPadOS, lacks an App Store, and instead offers a curated set of apps including FaceTime, Messages, Safari and some third-party apps like Spotify. Preorders are open now, with sales starting November 13.
A developer has released a free macOS app that converts Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 multimodal embedding model into a speech-to-text tool, transcribing an hour of audio in about 13 seconds on a base MacBook Air. The system keeps the original audio encoder untouched and instead trains a small 'reader' model to map audio slices into the text embedding space, matching them to the closest of roughly 229,000 English words, with a separate model adding punctuation. The app, EmbeddingGemma Transcribe, runs entirely on-device using the Mac's Neural Engine and currently has a word error rate of about 5%, compared with 2-3% for leading dedicated speech models.
Apple is preparing to launch a 14-inch MacBook Pro with its new M6 chip later this month, keeping the current design. The M6 adds a Dual 16-core Neural Engine for faster on-device AI processing, a 12-core CPU with a new three-tier core structure (super, performance, and efficiency cores), a 12-core GPU, and is built on a new 2nm manufacturing process that Apple says improves power efficiency.
Raspberry Pi OS, a lightweight Linux-based system, only consumes a few hundred megabytes of RAM at idle, far less than Windows or macOS. However, running everyday desktop programs like web browsers can still quickly exhaust the memory on a 1GB Raspberry Pi board, forcing it to swap data to storage and slow down.
Developer Max Rovensky released ShyGlass, a Mac menu-bar app that blurs the screen when a user wearing AirPods turns their head past a calibrated angle, using the same head-tracking motion data Apple applies for Spatial Audio. Users set a center position and an adjustable threshold (2° to 30°, default 15°) that triggers the blur effect, which fades away once the head returns to center. A demo video posted last month has drawn over 230,000 views on X.
Amazon is selling the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip, 24GB RAM and 2TB storage for $2,399, down from its $2,999 list price. The retailer is also offering discounts on AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Max 2, the M6 Mac mini, iPhone 18 Pro cases and the USB-C Apple Pencil.