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Most credible reporting on the Apple Watch Series 12 points in the same direction: a new chip, improved power efficiency, and a watch that looks almost identical to the one on your wrist right now. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says a major design shift is unlikely, and a semi-reliable leaker told Gizmodo this month that Apple has explicitly chosen to prioritize battery life over new hardware features this cycle.

Apple spotlighted four WWDC 2026 Distinguished Winners from this year's Swift Student Challenge on May 7, 2026, singling them out for a public preview ahead of its biggest developer conference of the year. The four are drawn from a group of 50 Distinguished Winners whose submissions Apple described as 'truly exceptional,' selected from 350 total winners representing 37 countries and regions.

Samsung has relisted the Galaxy Z Flip7 FE on its US storefront, with the 128GB model available again for $899.99 and the 256GB model listed at $999.99. SamMobile reported the restock in early May 2026, , after previously noting that the phone had largely vanished from Samsung's US store for months without any clear indication of whether it would come back. Samsung has not issued a public announcement about the return, and the current product page carries the same standing trade-in offer and...

Apple is reportedly building a way for iOS 27 users to choose third-party AI models for Apple Intelligence writing tasks. What the reporting doesn't settle is whether that choice would extend to the iOS 27 AI writing tools grammar checker, or only to the generative features like Compose and Rewrite. That distinction matters more than the headline suggests.

AT&T launched its tourist eSIM product today, and it immediately costs more than T-Mobile's competing offering, which entered the same market just days earlier. Whether that premium is justified hinges on one feature without publicly available independent performance testing.

iOS 26.5 appears to add a new "App Installation" setting for Brazilian iPhone users, visible today under Settings > Apps, designed to let them select a preferred app marketplace outside the App Store. Current reports show it listing only the App Store. The infrastructure for iOS 26.5 alternative app marketplaces in Brazil is in place; the actual alternatives are not.

Backend code discovered by developer Nicolás Alvarez and confirmed by MacRumors shows Apple is continuing to develop a feature that may let users generate custom Shortcuts actions using Apple Intelligence models. The code confirms active development, not a finished product. Apple has not confirmed the feature for release.

The iPhone 17 was the world's best-selling smartphone model in Q1 2026, taking 6% of global unit sales, according to Counterpoint Research's Global Handset Model Sales Tracker. Apple also took the next two model slots with the iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro, while the top 10 smartphones together accounted for 25% of global sales. Separately, Counterpoint said Apple led the global smartphone market by vendor shipments in Q1 2026, with 21% share and 5% year-over-year growth, as memory...

Walmart today launched six new Onn tablets, all running Android 16 out of the box, priced from $97 to $288 and available in stores and online now, according to 9to5Google. Six models at once, spanning children's devices to a stylus-equipped 13-inch flagship, is a broader push than anything the Onn line has attempted before.

Apple's 2025 Apple Design Award finalists were announced last June, and with WWDC 2026 opening this week, that list is worth reading carefully. Not as a prediction of Tuesday's announcements, but as the clearest public statement Apple makes about what it considers well-made software. The 2026 Apple Design Award finalists haven't been named yet. What follows is analysis of last year's pool, read against what's likely to surface at the conference this week.

Apple's foldable iPhone is failing its own durability tests. The hinge, not the display, is the problem and with mass production targeted for July, the engineering calendar is getting tight.

Extensive Pixel 11 specs leaked early May 2026 via the Mystic Leaks Telegram channel, with Android Authority reporting details across all four phones in the lineup. The core finding from this Pixel 11 Pro leak: a genuine internal upgrade wrapped in a chassis that will look nearly identical to what Google has shipped for the past two years. Whether that's a problem depends almost entirely on what Google charges for it, a number that has not leaked.

Samsung is offering a free Withings Body Smart scale with select full-price Galaxy Watch purchases in the U.S., but the fine print matters. The promotion applies to Galaxy Watch Ultra, Galaxy Watch8 Classic, Galaxy Watch8, and Galaxy Watch7 purchases made through Samsung.com or the Shop Samsung App from May 4 through July 19, 2026, while supplies last. Samsung lists the scale at $129.95 MSRP, but the offer excludes trade-ins and cannot be combined with other Samsung, carrier, retailer, coupon,...

The AirPods Max has been on the market since December 2020, costs $549, and carries no visible Apple logo anywhere on its exterior. For a company that treats brand identity as infrastructure, that absence has always stood out. A new AirPods Max designer interview finally explains it.

If you're wondering whether the Motorola Razr is waterproof, the short answer is no. That applies to every model in the lineup. The more useful question is whether your specific Razr is meaningfully water-resistant, and that depends entirely on which generation you own.

Grok Voice Mode is now available on Apple CarPlay, moving xAI's chatbot from a "coming soon" placeholder into Apple's in-car interface. MacRumors reported on May 8, 2026, that the feature lets CarPlay users ask Grok questions and make requests hands-free from the dashboard, while 9to5Mac reported that CarPlay now works with Grok alongside ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Before touching a single setting, open Settings > Battery > Battery usage and review the breakdown by both apps and system processes. A misbehaving app can consume more power than all the Google Pixel battery drain settings you're about to change, and no system tweak will fix that (Android Police reported this in early 2026). Check it after a full day of normal use, not right after charging.

A silicon wafer about a foot across yields roughly 500 A18-class chips. Without any rescue mechanism, Apple might recover only 200 usable dies from that wafer. The gap between those two numbers is where Apple chip binning lives, and it's where a significant slice of the product lineup is born.

Netflix began rolling out a redesigned mobile app on April 30, 2026 in nine countries, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, built around a new vertical video swipe feed called Clips. Netflix says the redesign is meant to capture more daytime viewing and help members discover titles faster, Variety reported. The company plans to roll out the update to the rest of the world "in the months to come."

Some Pixel Watch 2 owners are waking up to a message that shouldn't be there: "No recent data. Wear your watch to sleep." They wore it. The watch tracked them. It just won't show them anything.

The Delhi High Court told Apple on Saturday to hand over financial data to India's competition regulator while barring the regulator from issuing any final ruling before July 15. The order in the Apple antitrust case in India resolves nothing about whether Apple will ultimately face a penalty. It settles only the immediate procedural standoff, giving Apple's parallel constitutional challenge time to develop before the Competition Commission of India can act.

Google last week unveiled Noto 3D at The Android Show: I/O Edition, a ground-up rebuild of its entire Noto Color Emoji set into what the company's emoji lead Jennifer Daniel described on Instagram as "hand-modeled 3D emoji" that are "actually true 3D objects," according to Emojipedia. All roughly 4,000 designs were rebuilt by hand. Pixel phones get them first, with a broader rollout across Google products planned for later in 2026, per Google's announcement.

Apple has begun rolling out end-to-end encrypted RCS chats on iPhone in iOS 26.5, closing a major privacy gap in cross-platform messaging. The catch is compatibility. Updating your phone is not enough. For encryption to activate, the iPhone user must be running iOS 26.5 with a supported carrier, and the Android user must be using the latest version of Google Messages. Carrier support can still determine whether a given RCS conversation is encrypted, as reported by MacRumors. Support is not...

Fosi Audio is launching the MD3 MagDac on May 25 at $149.99, a portable DAC and headphone amplifier that snaps magnetically to the back of an iPhone rather than hanging from its USB-C port, adding both 3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced headphone outputs to a device that lost its headphone jack nearly a decade ago.

Samsung is now shipping a Device Care feature that can automatically put apps sending frequent ad notifications into deep sleep once the setting is enabled. Called "Block apps with excessive ads," it appeared in Samsung's Device Care update, version 13.8.80.7, 9to5Google reported on May 11, 2026. Samsung has not published a full device-eligibility list, and current reporting says the feature appears limited to the Galaxy S26 series for now and may depend on One UI 8.5.

In November 2025, Google shipped Gemini 3 with a new model, a refreshed app, and something quieter underneath both: for certain prompts, Gemini can move beyond a plain text reply and generate a custom user interface instead, according to Google's product blog. That shift is what the Gemini app redesign is actually about. The visual cleanup is real but secondary. The more consequential work is architectural.

Spotify's Prompted Playlist expanded to podcasts last month, and the podcast version puts something front and center that remains less clear on the music side: why each pick landed in your mix. Every episode or chapter in a podcast playlist comes with a short note explaining its connection to your prompt, your listening history, or the moment. The podcast rollout foregrounds those explanatory notes more clearly than the music-side experience Spotify has publicly described, though Spotify's...

Android 17 Beta 3 introduced visible blur and frosted-glass effects in the widget picker and app launch transitions, while Android 17 Beta 4 has since arrived as Google's last scheduled beta. The broader direction became clearer in Android Canary 2605, which shows Google testing blur across more Pixel system UI surfaces, but the stable Android 17 scope is still not fully confirmed. What remains unclear is how much of the broader Canary blur treatment will reach the stable Android 17 release, a...

Some new Google accounts may now default to 5GB of free storage, with the full 15GB available after phone-number verification, as part of a test Google says it is running for new accounts in select regions. The change was first documented by 9to5Google through account-creation tests and Wayback Machine analysis, and Google later confirmed the test to Android Authority.

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition arrives on macOS via Steam on May 28, ported by Feral Interactive and requiring Apple Silicon. A Mac App Store version is planned for later in 2026, though no date or price has been set, the official Age of Empires site confirmed late last month. The release includes three bundled expansions alongside the base game.

CNET ran 33 smartphones through identical 30-minute charging sessions, scored each device on both wired and wireless performance, then averaged the two results into a single ranking. The iPhone 17 Pro came out on top as the fastest-charging smartphone overall. On a cable alone, Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra still beats it and understanding that distinction matters more than the headline.

Fortnite returned to iPhone in Japan in late April 2026, five months after Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the game would not return to iOS in Japan in 2025 under Apple's implementation of the country's mobile competition law. Epic made the Epic Games Store available for Japanese iPhone users with Fortnite and Rocket League Sideswipe as its initial iPhone titles, per Epic's announcement. The launch follows Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, which pushed Apple to allow alternative app...

Google has rolled out a QR code-based transfer method for Quick Share that lets any Android phone send files to an iPhone without requiring the recipient to install anything. The Android device generates a Quick Share QR code, the iPhone user scans it with the default Camera app, and the file downloads via a cloud link, Digital Trends reported today. Full rollout across all Android devices is expected within roughly a month, per Digital Trends.

Google shut down the third-party forum that hosted its smart home support community this week and launched a replacement on its own support domain. The Google Home and Nest Community migration transferred no login credentials, no earned status, and no previously published content, according to Android Authority. Everything on the old platform gets permanently deleted on June 30, 2026.

At MWC 2026, Motorola told attendees that pairing the Razr Fold with smart glasses produces Motorola described as a "full laptop experience." Engadget covered the demo in early March, calling it a setup that "turns your Razr Fold into a full-fledged laptop" during Motorola's demo. The claim is plausible. Both halves of the equation exist as real, functional hardware. But the hands-on reports don't establish one critical detail, and that gap determines whether the Razr Fold smart glasses laptop...

Apple and Intel are reportedly closing in on a deal that would have Intel manufacture some of Apple's Mac processors, CNBC reported last week. The news sent Intel shares up nearly 14% and Apple's up 2%, a market reaction that investors did not treat as routine supplier chatter.

Code buried in the latest Google Phone app beta suggests the Pixel Take a Message expansion could reach India and roughly 17 additional countries across Europe and Asia, Android Police reported this week, citing an Android Authority analysis. Google has not confirmed the rollout, the country list, or any launch timeline. Everything here flows from beta code, not an official announcement.

A Palo Alto security firm called Calif says it built what it describes as the first publicly disclosed Anthropic Mythos macOS exploit targeting Apple's M5 chip a kernel memory corruption attack used to escalate privileges and reach protected areas of a MacBook that should be inaccessible, potentially granting an attacker control of the machine, Engadget reported today, citing the Wall Street Journal. Apple told the Journal that security is its top priority and that it is taking the researchers'...

ChatGPT screen sharing on Android may be getting a less clunky alternative, and the possible replacement is worth understanding before it arrives. Code discovered this week inside version 1.2026.118 of ChatGPT's Android app points to a different method: instead of capturing your screen as video, the app would read visible text and interface elements directly, using Android's Accessibility API and Android's Bubbles feature, according to Android Authority.

Apple released macOS 26.5 recently and published its enterprise release notes. The macOS 26.5 enterprise fixes target failures at the core of managed Mac environments: post-update boot behavior, MDM enrollment continuity, network authentication, and endpoint security stability on M5 hardware.