With the iOS 27.2 Release Candidate now being tested by developers, the final version is just days away. Mark your calendars!
(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)
Seven years later, Apple Arcade hasn’t gone anywhere, and Apple itself hasn’t slowed its broader gaming efforts either. Between courting major publishers like Capcom to release their games on Mac to launching a proper gaming app, it’s clear that Apple still has its sights set on being a major player.
The latest example of that came this week as Apple launched an App Store event dubbed Indie Games Week. The week-long initiative saw Apple welcoming games like Vampire Crawlers to iOS and announcing an ambitious mobile version of No Man’s Sky. At the center of that push was Carson Oliver, the new head of App Store Worldwide following Phil Schiller’s sudden departure from the role this past August. The fact that one of his first acts in the role was spearheading an indie gaming showcase hints at where Oliver’s priorities might lie.
[…]
While Oliver sells the narrative with carefully worded precision, questions still linger around Apple’s wider gaming efforts. Continued investment in mixed reality gaming is uncertain given that Apple has reportedly cut down production of its Vision Pro headset due to underwhelming sales. And though Apple continues to court publishers and get games on iOS, we haven’t seen the full-throated support from major players like Capcom and Ubisoft in 2026 that was crucial to raising Apple’s gaming profile in 2023.
Previously:
Apple (video, Hacker News, MacRumors, Six Colors):
Apple today announced the next generation of Apple TV 4K, delivering its most immersive home theater experience yet. The new Apple TV 4K features Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence, transforming how users search for, discover, and enjoy their favorite movies and TV shows through a full-screen Siri AI experience. With built-in far-field microphones, Apple TV 4K also lets users talk to Siri completely hands-free.
[…]
The A19 chip in the new Apple TV 4K delivers up to 50 percent faster CPU performance and up to 2x faster GPU performance than the previous generation, for greater responsiveness, faster navigation, and smoother animations. The A19 chip also includes a new, dedicated AV1 decoder, enabling more efficient, high-quality streaming while using less bandwidth.
The new Siri Remote keeps its familiar design while adding Find My support with Precision Finding and an option to play a sound on the remote — making it far easier to locate.
The price is now $299. Apple TV doesn’t get updated very often, so if you need one I guess now is the time to buy.
But I’ve really soured on this product. The software design is worse than when I bought it. I just want a basic interface like the iTunes column browser. Instead, we get all this extra stuff so that the text I care about is secondary, truncated, and obscured. It seems designed to hide the content I want to see, and which I am in the middle of watching, while constantly promoting what Apple wants me to watch. The search has always been bad and is still bad. The main thing it’s supposed to do is play video, and lately that’s been failing, too. It either won’t play at all or it’ll play for a while, and then after a commercial break it will switch to a different episode.
I’m considering just getting a $40 Fire TV Stick to see whether things are any better over there. Maybe the privacy is worse, but I have to weigh that against the product actually working. We watch TV to relax in the evening, and instead I keep getting agitated that either it didn’t work at all or we had to go through hassles like logging in again or rebooting. I would miss the screensaver, though.
Previously:
Update (2026-10-14): Joe Rossignol:
Here are 11 changes coming with the new Apple TV[…]
Oh, yeah, one more thing: does the $300 Apple TV have a USB C port for UVC cams, for FaceTime/vidconf apps.
If not, why not? Really fucking stupid if it doesn’t, especially at that price. The chipset and OS HAVE the capability.
It does not.
1. There is nothing compelling here for existing owners.
2. The price is so high compared to Roku or Fire that it’s hard to justify telling friends to upgrade for the better experience.
Apple should probably, at the very least, have kept the existing 64GB box at a lower price point, and bundled in a year of Apple TV+, to work with market.
[…]
It’s about “WTF is Apple thinking? Who is this targeted at?” We have three products released today all of which look like flailing.
[…]
I’ve been on team Apple (customer and employee) since 1990. This is the first time (even including the Wired Pray cover days) that I feel genuinely worried that Apple is fumbling the future.
I don’t understand the direction the team working on the Apple TV has been given. I know people are excited by it, because they’ve been waiting to buy the best one, and cycle the old ones down to lesser TVs in their homes, but this update is going to be around next year and the year after so it’s worth thinking about it from that point of view. What will you get out of this when it isn’t just “new”? A microphone array? Chip bumps?
Asleep at the jog wheel.
Update (2026-10-16): Andrew Orr:
According to Apple’s footnotes, Precision Finding requires an iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, or iPhone 17 or later, excluding the iPhone 17e. Compatible iPhones must run the latest version of iOS, and availability varies by region.
The restriction is particularly notable because the iPhone 15 lineup and most iPhone 16 models already feature Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip. Those iPhones support expanded Precision Finding with the AirTag 2, but they can’t use the new Siri Remote’s Precision Finding feature.
I’m sure the graphics and CPU improvements matter for gaming, but the only mention of gaming in Apple’s own Newsroom announcement is this sentence: “With Apple Fitness+, the living room becomes a workout studio, while Apple Arcade and the App Store’s library of games turn it into a home arcade.” I wish it were otherwise, but gaming is such an afterthought on Apple TV that it only garnered the second half of a sentence that started with Fitness+, a service that has only been in the news this year because Mark Gurman says Apple laid off part of the team.
[…]
The elephant in the room, though, is price.
You can pre-order a 128 GB fourth-generation Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi and gigabit Ethernet for $299, and it ships on 13 November 2026. In comparison, the third-generation model started at $129 for 64 GB with Wi-Fi and $149 for 128 GB with added Ethernet. In June, Apple raised those prices to $199 and $249 (see “Apple Raises Prices for Many Products,” 26 June 2026). Apple eliminated the lower-capacity option, so now we have only the higher-end model at twice its initial price.
For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.
When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.
[…]
I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”
I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market!
Update (2026-10-19): John Gruber:
Inflation adjusted, a $69 Apple TV box today would cost a little under $99. Even if we only consider the $99 price in 2015 dollars, that’s about $137 in today’s dollars. Round that up to $150 and it would still be half the price of the only Apple TV hardware Apple now sells: this week’s new 4th-gen Apple TV 4K.
The new Siri Remote, with precision Find My support (and a speaker), is compatible with all prior generations of Apple TV 4K. So if you just want the new remote you can just buy the new remote. But it costs $59, which is almost as much as an entire Apple TV (with remote, of course) did in 2015.
I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it.
I was ready to buy three new Apple TVs at the previous price point. At the new price point, I’ve bought zero 🤷♂️
John Siracusa says that pause/resume has been broken for him—in Apple’s own TV.app—and that he had to force-quit it several times.
A ideia de rodar o iOS em um smartphone Android parece absurda, mas se tornou realidade com o projeto Hackios.
A proposta é do usuário do GitHub ios-sweet, que substituiu o kernel Linux dos smartphones Android pelo XNU, desenvolvido pela Apple para iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS e visionOS.
Quando o dispositivo Android é inicializado, o sistema reconhece o celular como um iPhone X — dispositivo que foi escolhido por não ter o código de autenticação de ponteiros (Pointer Authentication Code, ou PAC), assim como o Redmi Note 10 Pro, da Xiaomi, usado na adaptação inicial.
Já circulam vídeos do sistema adaptado ao Redmi Note 12 Pro, ainda com dificuldades notáveis de desempenho:
https://t.co/U7ACt150n2 pic.twitter.com/iBF8iOJ0Xg
— Makr (@makrotasuss) October 20, 2026
Embora o código do iOS permaneça fechado, o XNU do macOS foi liberado pela Apple. Pelos indícios nos documentos incluídos nos arquivos do projeto, o iOS foi adaptado com o auxílio de inteligência artificial (IA).
Depois de ligado, o celular carrega uma imagem intermediária no bootloader, que inicia o XNU em uma partição formatada para simular o armazenamento do iPhone X, com uma cópia do iOS 16.7 — a versão mais recente do sistema disponibilizada ao aparelho.
Alguns apps nativos são carregados junto com a Tela de Início, e os toques e gestos para alternar entre eles (além dos botões de volume e de liga/desliga) são reconhecidos, mas o celular não consegue ativar as câmeras, o som e a GPU 1Graphics processing unit, ou unidade de processamento gráfico., nem usar dados móveis, Bluetooth e Wi-Fi.
Além do Redmi Note 10 Pro, a adaptação já tem versões para o Redmi Note 12 Pro e o LG V60, enquanto outros aparelhos (como OnePlus 7T, Redmi 5 Plus e Galaxy S23 Ultra) foram listados, mas ainda não têm versões disponíveis para download.
Para quem tem um aparelho compatível e quiser se aventurar, vale conferir o site do projeto, que disponibiliza o download na página do desenvolvedor no GitHub.
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