The long-awaited launch of the new AI-powered Siri now looks much closer thanks to Apple’s partnership with Google. The company this week confirmed reports that many Siri features will be powered by Google’s Gemini models.

We already knew some of the features we could expect from AI Siri thanks to the announcements at WWDC 2024 and a now-deleted iPhone 16 ad – and the launch of Gemini Personal Intelligence has now effectively provided a working preview …

EU antitrust legislation forced Apple to allow third-party app stores for iPhone within the bloc, with MacPaw’s Setapp Mobile one of the first to take advantage of this.

The company has now announced that it is closing its iOS store, citing “still-evolving and complex terms.” Apple would likely argue that the EU is responsible for constantly moving goalposts without clearly specifying how it wants the company to respond …

The US was one of a number of countries to escape recent Spotify price increases, but that is now coming to an end.

The streaming music service increased the price of its premium plans in a large number of other countries late last year, while US pricing remained unchanged. Predictably, that was only a temporary respite …

Wikipedia is today celebrating its 25th birthday, but its long-term future has never been less certain due to a range of threats with the potential to become a perfect storm …

A new report on Apple’s partnership with Google to have Gemini power the new Siri appears to confirm speculation that the iPhone maker is paying around a billion dollars a year for the deal.

It also claims that ChatGPT provider OpenAI made a conscious decision to decline the opportunity to provide the intelligence behind Siri …

It’s been close to a decade since I first started being grumpy about subscription apps. I did acknowledge the benefits right from the start, including giving many developers a more sustainable income, but expressed my unease about where we were headed.

A few years later, I voiced doubts as to whether it was a sustainable business model. But the trend has continued to grow, with Apple Creator Studio the latest example …

At this point, I kind of have to feel sorry for Roblox. The company came under increasing criticism for failing to adequately protect children, and then courted even greater controversy when it started requiring children as young as nine years old to submit a video selfie for age verification.

The latest development in the saga is that the age verification process appears to be failing badly, with the company saying that you can’t expect everything to work on day one …

I still have affectionate feelings about the original Macintosh I owned back in 1984, and if you feel the same, you can now give your iPhone 17 Pro a nostalgic makeover …

The first M5-powered MacBook Pro launched in October of last year. Apple described the chip as offering “the next big leap in AI for the Mac.”

There was no update for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, however, and we are expecting this to happen soon – including M5 Pro and M5 Max options. Apple may now have hinted that the launch date for these will be January 28 …