Quite the scoop from Mark Gurman yesterday on what Apple is planning for major Siri improvements in 2026:
Apple Inc. is planning to pay about $1 billion a year for an ultrapowerful 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google that would help run its long-promised overhaul of the Siri voice assistant, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
There is a lot to unpack here and I have a lot of questions.
Late yesterday, Epic Games and Google announced a settlement of their Google Play Store litigation that, subject to court approval, would open Google’s storefront more widely than ever before.
Like Apple’s revisions to its store in response to the European Commission, Google’s settlement is complex, but here are some of the highlights, as reported by Sean Hollister for The Verge:
As I said, though, there’s a lot more to the proposed settlement that you can read in full in the PDF linked in The Verge’s story, and it’s subject to court approval, but it does seem to reflect significant concessions by Google.
What does this mean for Apple and its App Store skirmishes with regulators around the world? Nothing technically; however, contextually, if the settlement is implemented, it should add to the pressure on Apple to open the App Store more widely in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Nintendo fans in Japan have had a “My Nintendo” storefront app for everything Nintendo for five years. Now, it’s finally here for the rest of us, rechristened Nintendo Store for iOS and iPadOS. With the release of the Switch 2, the Nintendo eShop’s performance is much better than before, but it’s still not a great experience to navigate, which is why I was so excited to dive into the new app.
If you’ve ever shopped on Nintendo’s website, the new app will look familiar. The home tab is a mix of featured games, consoles, and accessories, a best sellers list, sales, and other collections. The app also includes tabs for:
When you’re ready to purchase something, the transaction happens in a Safari view controller rather than as an in-app purchase, and the process is smooth, especially if you already have a Nintendo account. The app also has extensive notification settings for everything from game releases and sales to check-in events and app updates, which can be individually turned on or off.
There’s nothing in the Nintendo Store app that you can’t find elsewhere on the web or eShop on the Switch. However, the experience of having it all available in a single app that you can use when you might not have your Switch nearby or want to navigate Nintendo’s website is a convenience I’m glad is now available.
The Nintendo Store app is available as a free download on the App Store for the iPhone and iPad. The Nintendo Store app is available on Android, too.
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, Federico and John look at the hype surrounding AI browsers to see if there’s any there there.
On AppStories+, Federico explains his experiments with lightning fast alternative AI models in Typing Mind.
This week, the big story is Retroid’s dual announcement of the Pocket 6 alongside the Pocket G2 and the ensuing drama. Then, the guys return to the Ayn Thor for Brendon and Federico’s first impressions.
This episode is sponsored by:
JSAUX – Your destination for Switch 2 and other handheld gaming accessories. Don’t miss JSAUX’s big Halloween sale:
On NPC XL, Brendon is grilled by John and Federico about the MCON mobile phone controller that looks like a PSP Go.
Today, Apple released version 26.1 of its full family of OSes. Every platform received attention, including the proverbial “bug fixes and feature enhancements,” but it was iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1 that received the most changes that are likely to be noticed by users.
Let’s start with iOS 26.1 because most of the changes to it are reflected in iPadOS, too. Probably the biggest news is a new setting that allows users to choose between Clear and Tinted versions of Apple’s signature Liquid Glass design. Many readers we’ve heard from like Liquid Glass or didn’t notice a substantial difference when they updated to iOS and iPadOS 26, but for some, the design change was a regression in readability. With iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26.1, users can opt for a Tinted version of Liquid Glass that reduces transparency, increasing the design’s opacity and enhancing contrast.
Liquid Glass is an opinionated design, so I’m a little surprised at this change. I like Liquid Glass in more places than I don’t, but given the readability issues some people experienced, this change is a good one. If you like Liquid Glass or barely noticed it to begin with, you’re fine. However, if it rubbed you the wrong way, check out the Liquid Glass setting in the Display & Brightness section of Settings, which has a helpful before-and-after preview of what the change looks like.
With iOS 26, Apple placed two big buttons onscreen when an alarm went off. One was for stop and the other snooze. That wasn’t a big deal for many of the alarms you set throughout the day, but when you’re waking up in the morning blurry-eyed, two big buttons stacked on top of each other weren’t ideal. For a lot of users, it was a toss-up whether stabbing at their iPhone through a morning haze would stop their alarm or snooze it.
With iOS and iPadOS 26.1, the ‘Stop’ button for an alarm set in the system Clock app now requires a slide to stop gesture, which echoes the Slide to Unlock gesture of the original iPhone. The more deliberate gesture is a good move on Apple’s part. I can’t imagine someone tapping and sliding their finger to stop an alarm by accident.
Apple has also refined Local Capture for the iPhone and iPad, which is great. Local capture allows you to record high-quality audio and video from an iPhone or iPad, while simultaneously on a video call using a service like Zoom. It’s a feature that podcasters wanted for many years, and although I was excited to find that Apple had listened to our annual requests with iOS and iPadOS 26, the implementation fell a little short because it didn’t allow for gain control, making it difficult to get a properly balanced recording with some microphones. Likewise, there was no option in the first iteration of the feature to pick where your recording was saved.
With iOS and iPadOS 26.1, both issues have been addressed sooner than many of us expected, which is fantastic. Now, you can adjust gain and pick a save location for the files you record from Settings. It’s great to see Apple react so quickly to the feedback it received on this feature. The feature fell just short enough in its original implementation that I had decided not to rely on it unless I had no choice. However, although it’s not how I’m going to record most of the time, local recording now has sufficient settings that I will feel a lot more comfortable relying on it in the future.
I don’t know about you, but it’s not uncommon for me to accidentally activate my iPhone’s camera by inadvertently swiping left on my Lock Screen. For me, it’s a once-in-a-while thing, but if it happens to you a lot, you can now deactivate the gesture in Settings under the Camera section.
There are relatively minor changes to Photos, too. The interface elements for playing multiple selected images as a slideshow, marking them as favorites, or hiding them are now at the top of the Photo app’s three-dot “More” menu.
The iOS update includes a bunch of other small changes:
The lion’s share of changes to iOS are carried over to iPadOS 26.1, but there are a couple of revisions to the iPad’s OS that are unique to it.
First, Slide Over is back. Apple heard from a vocal group of iPad users who relied on Slide Over to get their work done and has added the feature back to the OS with a twist. The new Slide Over supports a single app tucked just offscreen with a little Picture-In-Picture style indicator along the edge of your iPad’s screen. Previously, you could switch between multiple apps using a dedicated Slide Over switcher interface. However, now, your Slide Over window can be resized to any size, which wasn’t possible before. Also, the single Slide Over app is a per-display restriction, meaning that if you use an external display with your iPad, you get a second Slide Over app.
Second, Apple has added some new menu items for managing window. There are now options to hide your current window, hide your other windows, and close all of your windows, all of which close gaps between how windows work on the iPad and Mac.
Like iOS and iPadOS 26.1, macOS Tahoe has gained a tinted version of Liquid Glass. If Apple is intent on preserving maximum transparency in Music and Photos, I may give the “tinted” version a try. I generally like Liquid Glass on the Mac, but it’s not perfect, and “tinted” mode may help.
Finally, AutoMix, the feature that uses Apple Intelligence to transition tracks of a playlist by matching their beats, now works with AirPlay. When I first tested this feature over the summer, I assumed AutoMix would work automatically with my Bluetooth speakers that I use at my desk, but that wasn’t the case. Now, however, whether you use AirPlay speakers or wired speakers, AutoMix will work.
Sadly, there’s not much to report about visionOS, watchOS, or tvOS. Each undoubtedly received under-the-hood improvements, but you’ll have to wait for substantive new features from them.
If there’s a theme surrounding the 26.1 updates to Apple’s OSes, it’s that the company is listening to its users. Tinted Liquid Glass, the return of Slide Over, and the updates to the very niche Local Capture feature are all great examples of Apple’s engineering teams turning around meaningful updates to its OSes based on feedback from users. That’s great to see, and a trend that I hope continues long into the future.
Today, Apple launched a web version of the App Store, with a twist. I’ll admit that this wasn’t on my “things Apple will do this fall” bingo card. I’ve wondered since the earliest days of the App Store why there wasn’t a web version and concluded long ago that it just wasn’t something Apple wanted to do. But here we are, so let’s take a look.
You’ll find the new web-based App Store at apps.apple.com, where you’ll be greeted by a sort of amalgam of the App Stores on each of Apple’s platforms. Along the left sidebar, you’ll find the same Today, Games, Apps, and Arcade tabs found in the native App Stores. This is where Categories reside, too. One big difference is that in the top-left corner, you’ll see what store you’re viewing, which defaults to the iPhone even if you’re on a different device. Click the drop-down label, and you can switch to another storefront.
An even bigger difference from the native App Stores is that you can’t buy anything on the web. That’s right: there’s no way to log into your Apple account to download or buy anything. It’s a browse-only experience.
The site looks great and is a fully responsive replica of the native App Store apps in just about every way, but in place of the usual ‘Get’ or ‘Buy’ buttons, there’s a ‘View’ button, which is replaced by a ‘Share’ button when you go to an app’s dedicated page. I really don’t get it. At least on the Mac, there’s a button to open an app in the Mac App Store, but the same isn’t true on the iPhone and iPad.
The website is a great amalgamation of the native App Stores, but it’s not really a store if you can’t download or buy anything.
Sure, you can always share an app to yourself on a device where you can buy it. But shouldn’t the point of a web store be to allow you to make purchases when you’re not on an Apple device or, for example, to buy a Mac app on your iPhone and have it waiting for you when you return to your Mac? I’ve literally checked the site multiple times because I can’t believe Apple built a storefront but left out the commerce part.
Look, the website is very nice and does a great job replicating the UI of the App Store, just like the web versions of Music, Maps, and iCloud do. I just wish I could buy something.
In addition to Kimi K2 (which I recently wrote about here) and GLM-4.6 (which will become an option on Cerebras in a few days, when I’ll play around with it), one of the more interesting open-source LLM releases out of China lately is MiniMax M2. This MoE model (230B parameters, 10B activated at any given time) claims to reach 90% of the performance of Sonnet 4.5…at 8% the cost. You can read more about the model here; Simon Willison blogged about it here; you can also test it with MLX on an Apple silicon Mac.
What I find especially interesting about M2 is that it’s the first model to support interleaved thinking steps in between responses and tool calls, which is something that Anthropic pioneered with Claude Sonnet 4 back in May. Here’s Skyler Miao, head of engineering at MiniMax, in a post on X (unfortunately, most of the open-source AI community is only active there):
As we work more closely with partners, we’ve been surprised how poorly community support interleaved thinking, which is crucial for long, complex agentic tasks. Sonnet 4 introduced it 5 months ago, but adoption is still limited.
We think it’s one of the most important features for agentic models: it makes great use of test-time compute.
The model can reason after each tool call, especially when tool outputs are unexpected. That’s often the hardest part of agentic jobs: you can’t predict what the env returns. With interleaved thinking, the model could reason after get tool outputs, and try to find out a better solution.
We’re now working with partners to enable interleaved thinking in M2 — and hopefully across all capable models.
I’ve been using Claude as my main “production” LLM for the past few months and, as I’ve shared before, I consider the fact that both Sonnet and Haiku think between steps an essential aspect of their agentic nature and integration with third-party apps.
That being said, I have been testing MiniMax M2 on TypingMind in addition to Kimi K2 for the past week and it is, indeed, impressive. I plugged MiniMax M2 into TypingMind using their Anthropic-compatible endpoint; out of the box, the model worked with interleaved thinking and the several plugins I’ve built for myself in TypingMind using Claude. I haven’t used M2 for any vibe-coding tasks yet, but for other research or tool-based queries (like adding notes to Notion and tasks to Todoist), M2 effectively felt like a version of Sonnet not made by Anthropic.
Right now, MiniMax M2 isn’t hosted on any of the fast inference providers; I’ve accessed it via the official MiniMax API endpoint, whose inference speed isn’t that different from Anthropic’s cloud. The possibility of MiniMax M2 on Cerebras or Groq is extremely fascinating, and I hope it’s in the cards for the near future.
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Niléane is experiencing the lowest lows with gaming, but Chris is full of joy. Meanwhile, the gang’s attempts to use local LLMs ranges from similar low lows to joy as well.
In the Cozy Zone, Niléane challenges the dads to a wild mini game of Internet football (⚽ football, not 🏈 football).
This week, John explains why Notion is finally working for him, after which he and Federico share new Apple TV series and videogame picks. Plus, two Unwind deal picks.
Sigmund and Devon discuss Apple TV+ rebranding as Apple TV, Apple’s exclusive deal with F1 in the U.S., and the possibility of Apple buying Warner Bros. Discovery.
Today, Apple announced its 2025 Q4 earnings, posting quarterly revenue of $102.5 billion, an 8% increase over the same quarter last year.
Apple CEO Tim Cook had this to say of the results:
Today, Apple is very proud to report a September quarter revenue record of $102.5 billion, including a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record for Services. In September, we were thrilled to launch our best iPhone lineup ever, including iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and iPhone Air. In addition, we launched the fantastic AirPods Pro 3 and the all-new Apple Watch lineup. When combined with the recently announced MacBook Pro and iPad Pro with the powerhouse M5 chip, we are excited to be sharing our most extraordinary lineup of products as we head into the holiday season.
As CFO Kevan Parekh noted in Apple’s press release, fiscal 2025 was a record year for revenue, coming in at $416 billion, which also represented a double-digit increase in earnings per share. Apple’s board of directors also approved a $0.26/share dividend for shareholders of record as of November 10, 2025, which will be paid on November 13.
The results beat analyst expectations, and the outlook for the company looks good with Cook telling CNBC that earnings in the next quarter should grow 10-12% over the same quarter the year prior. Cook attributed the growth outlook to the iPhone 17 line of mobile phones.
Here’s the breakdown of earnings by category versus estimates, according to CNBC:
- iPhone revenue: $49.03 billion vs. $50.19 billion estimated
- Mac revenue: $8.73 billion vs. $8.59 billion estimated
- iPad revenue: $6.95 billion vs. $6.98 billion estimated
- Other Products revenue: $9.01 billion vs. $8.49 billion estimated
- Services revenue: $28.75 billion vs. $28.17 billion estimated
According to CNBC, Apple’s gross margin exceeded expectations at 47.2%, too.
Despite multiple challenges from tariffs to antitrust suits to regulation, the continued popularity of the iPhone continues to drive Apple’s success. With the iPhone 17 line only available for a short part of the end of Q4 2025, it will be interesting to see if it continues to drive Q1 2026 earnings and whether Apple releases any new products that add to its earnings momentum.
