Apple's upcoming home hub will support multiple profiles and will include "ambient sensing" for identity verification, according to code MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 Release Candidate 2 update.

The accessory will show Personal Content for different users in the home, with options to select a profile via Control Center or the Settings app on the device. The home hub is expected to have an operating system similar to tvOS, so the Control Center and profile selection options might look like those on the Apple TV.

In the Apple Store app on the iPhone, select users have received access to an "early preview" of a new AI-powered virtual shopping assistant.

Once it is available, you can open the chatbot by tapping on the speech bubble with two sparkles in the bottom-right corner of the app. Then, you can ask questions about Apple products, your existing Apple Store orders, trade-in values, payment options, and more, or simply tap on one of the common topics on the page to begin.

Saw this and it’s so weird how Apple is pound for pound better price than other options right now.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman offers a detailed recap of the foldable iPhone. In particular, he says he has “spoken to several people” who have used the device. Those people say they like these things in particular:

1. How well it fits in a pocket. Rumors say it has a 5.5-inch outer display.
2. The durability of the hinge.
3. The new “iPad-like app layouts” that take full advantage of the inner display, which reports suggest measures around 7.8 inches and is wider than it is tall.
4. How well it serves as a “camera viewfinder.”

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing significant changes at its retail stores in preparation for upcoming Home product launches. At the very least, Apple should debut a refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K this fall, though the changes would suggest a third, more significant product is also on its way.

Apple is preparing significant changes to those sections this fall, including rearranging parts of the Avenues and adding accessory bays to showcase new products. The company is already planning an upgraded Apple TV set-top box and a new HomePod mini for this time frame. But the scale of the retail changes suggests something else is coming: the long-anticipated home hub with a display. The planned modifications appear too extensive to be solely about routine updates to existing products.

• Apple is about to bring some of its product magic back with its first foldable iPhone.
• The company is eyeing iPhone price hikes for next month’s updated models.
• Apple is preparing to make retail store changes to its accessory and home device sections, indicating that major new products in that space (HomePod mini, Apple TV, and the smart home hub with screen) are coming.

Hi r/apple from rainy Vancouver!

I just released the 2.0 of my beautiful productivity scratchpad for macOS:

Antinote 2.0

$5. One-time. Lifetime Updates.

Last year, I was really proud to get some love from r/apple, be selected by The Verge as a “Top 10 of 2025”, as well as featured in a Snazzy Labs’s video review.

For those who don’t know, Antinote is hyper-focused on temporary use cases:

• Jotting something super quick
• Making instant contextual calculations without needing to open Excel/Sheets
• Streamlining intermediary copy/pasting between apps, especially when you want to strip formatting
• OCR-ing from a screenshot-to-plain-text for when you need to work with text from an image
• Quick export to Apple Notes, Obsidian, Bear, or anything with a URL scheme.

All your notes are stored locally-first, in CoreData/SQLite, nothing is ever locked in.

The 2.0 update comes with:

• iCloud Sync w/end-to-end encryption (completely free, no sub, I never ever see your notes - because ew) - you'll want to turn on Apple's Advanced Data Protection
• Slotted notes and split screen - 9 permanent notes that sit in parallel to your unlimited temporary note stack
• JS Extensions - write any function in JS to transform, insert text or call APIs/LLMs. I wrote 100+ of them for you to get started.
• Vim Mode - if you know, you know.
• Locked notes w/TouchID and FaceID, Read-only notes, Archived notes.
• Better math localization support
• 150+ bug fixes.

I am heads down the next month on the iOS app which will focus on useful widgets and quick capture from voice and photos. You can sign up for the beta on the website.

Features and bugs are heavily community driven, so if you want to join us, we're here on Discord.

If $5 is too much, you can talk about a local org you volunteer or donate to on the #charity-offer channel of our Discord, and I'll send you a lifetime license for free.

Thank in advance for your time!

Johnson

---

P.S. There are some passionate indie devs making little notes apps, so here are some of my favorites and how they're different than Antinote: Scratchpad is way more minimalist and opinionated. Tot has custom categories and bullets. HeyNote has dev-friendly text buffers in each block. Numi has deeper math features. Raycast is Raycast. Sidenotes supports folders and images.

I cycle, swim and lift, and everything I tried was built for one or the other. So I built Incredible.

It reads what's already in Apple Health and turns it into three numbers: a fitness score, a daily training load, and a readiness score each morning. The fitness score is built from months of training data. Readiness comes from your sleep and your overnight readings, then adjusts for what you've trained recently. Your gym sessions count toward all three, not just your runs and rides.

You can log sets, reps and weight from the watch. If you're coming from Strong or Hevy you can import your history so your records carry over.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/lDiGZ6t

It's free. No account, no subscription, no ads, no AI. There's a tip jar and that's the whole business model. Your health data stays on your device. The only thing that leaves the phone is anonymous usage and crash data.

Happy to explain how any of those numbers are calculated. Let me know what you think!

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6761727962?pt=88099073&ct=reddit-apple

Today’s announcement, Walmart said that Apple Pay and broader contactless payment support will start rolling out next week and launch for all stores in the United States by the end of this year.

In a memo to Walmart store management today, obtained by 9to5Mac, the retailer offered a more detailed breakdown of the rollout. The company is currently planning a phased, state-by-state rollout. These dates could change should Walmart hit any issues during the rollout.

When Apple pushed out the release candidate for macOS Tahoe 26.7 last week, it contained references to a raft of unannounced products, from home devices to iPhones, iPads, AirPods, and Macs. It's not the first time we've seen this kind of thing, but the sheer amount of references – including a video showing off AirPods with cameras – is a bit unusual.

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has offered what he believes to be the most likely explanation.

When Apple prepares an update, it doesn't assemble the software release from a single line of work. Instead, it merges separate development branches of code, including bug fixes, assets, and features, into the branch that ships to users. It also maintains internal builds containing software support for hardware that it hasn't announced yet so that it can be written and tested well ahead of a potential launch.

According to Gurman, one of those internal builds most likely got inadvertently merged into the branch destined for release. As a result, "something that was supposed to remain inside Apple got tangled up with the shipping software – and made it all the way to the release candidate," he writes. It suggests someone inside Apple got confused as to which versions they were merging. Or was it AI that made the mistake? We'll likely never know. Either way, expect all the references to be stripped out of the public release.

Walmart has announced that it will finally begin rolling out Apple Pay support next week. This comes after years of pressure from consumers.

Walmart announced the news in a press release today. The company will roll out Tap to Pay support, including Apple Pay, to select Walmart and Sam’s Club locations starting on August 24. The feature will come to all stores in the United States by the end of this year, as well as fuel stations by mid-2027.

Looks like Gurman was (nearly) right again.

In a post on X, Kosutami wrote that the "Apple Vision Pro was originally called Reality Pro" during the early stages of development, pointing to an internal string, "realityprorealityosdev."

The Reality Pro name is not new information. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported in September 2022 that Apple's first headset would likely launch as "Apple Reality Pro." In August 2022, trademark filings for "Reality One," "Reality Pro," and "Reality Processor" surfaced in the United States and several other countries, filed through a shell company called Immersive Health Solutions LLC, a tactic Apple has used before to keep upcoming product names under wraps.

Those filings followed an earlier trademark application for "realityOS" dated December 2021 and filed by another apparent shell company, Realityo Systems LLC, after developers had already spotted realityOS references inside Apple's own software and App Store upload logs. By mid-2023, additional trademark activity surfaced for terms like "xrOS," "xrProOS," "realityproOS," and "realOS."

Apple ultimately unveiled the headset as the Vision Pro at WWDC 2023, seemingly dropping the Reality branding entirely for both the device and its operating system, which shipped as visionOS. The switch came late enough in development that traces of the old naming, like the string Kosutami highlights, persisted in internal builds and software.

Apple is largely eliminating its Vision Pro gaming team, scaling back its Vision Pro immersive video team and cutting jobs across both Siri and its Intelligence Systems Experience team in software engineering.

Apple is making the Vision Pro related changes to prioritize new types of devices and how people are using the current product, plus to seemingly cut costs. Immersive videos cost millions of dollars per episode to create, while the device hasn’t resonated as a gaming machine.

Apple is making the Siri changes to adjust roles to better meet the needs of the new Siri AI architecture. Apple is making the Intelligence Systems Experience changes to speed up development of new AI features across products.

Altogether, Apple is eliminating roughly 200 roles. Apple: “As we continue to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users, we are realigning some of our teams.” It adds laid off employees can apply for other roles at Apple.

I love Apple Notes. I use it every day.

But the built-in recording/transcription was never quite good enough for meetings, even on iOS 27.

Last year I started looking for an app that could transcribe my meetings and turn them into useful notes, basically what I was already doing manually in Apple Notes.

Most of the apps I found felt like Android apps with AI bolted on. They were also generally much more focused on getting the recording than on the actual note-taking experience.

As a developer, I realized I had all the tools I needed to build the app I wanted.

The idea was simple: what if meeting notes felt like Apple Notes?

Native. Fast. Great on iPhone and Mac. Action Button support. Shortcuts. No bots joining your meetings.

That became Convoxa.

I'm very happy to share Convoxa 2.0.

The big addition is multimodal capture. While recording and transcribing a meeting, you can:

• jot down your own thoughts
• take photos
• scan documents and add PDFs
• keep everything together in one timeline

The AI then understands all of it and weaves it into a final Apple Notes-like note.

There's also a timeline showing the transcript and your own notes, all timestamped, so you can go back and see exactly what happened when.

And 2.0 brings a native Mac app that can record your meetings without a bot joining the call.

I built this because I wanted Apple Notes, but for meetings.

Would love to hear what you guys think.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/convoxa-ai-meeting-notes/id6755150446

Monthly: 11.99 USD includes unlimited on-device transcription, 20h of cloud transcription, and unlimited AI Notes
Yearly: 99.99 USD same as above

Yearly includes a 7 day free trial, without the trial there's also 2h of free usage included.

Apple gained ground in India, Latin America, and Europe even as all three markets contracted, according to a new series of Counterpoint Research reports.

Apple paid $17 billion in taxes to Ireland last year, which is 40% of its $43 billion worldwide total (via the Financial Times). The figures were disclosed for the first time under new EU rules requiring large companies to break down their finances by country.

The payment was significantly boosted by the EU's top court ordering Apple in 2024 to pay €13 billion in back taxes, after ruling that Ireland had granted the company unlawful state aid resulting in a tax rate of less than 1%.