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.
Apple is bringing a big audio upgrade to your living room. The company just pushed out the iOS 27.2 release candidate alongside several other device updates. Among these new changes, the latest tvOS 27 testing version quietly adds support for a four-speaker surround sound setup. Once this software goes public, you can connect multiple HomePod […]
The post Apple Prepares Four-Speaker Surround Sound for HomePod in tvOS 27.2 appeared first on The Mac Observer.
Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer):
tvOS 27 features a redesigned Podcasts app, options for larger text and customizable subtitles, and a more responsive Control Center. AirPlaying to an Apple TV from another Apple device is faster, apps open quicker, and animations are smoother.
tvOS 27 works on the 2nd and 3rd generation Apple TV 4K models, and it drops support for the Apple TV HD and the first-generation Apple TV 4K.
Previously:
Update (2026-09-23): Steven Aquino:
Back in late May, I wrote about tvOS 27’s support for larger text sizes. […] After installing tvOS 27 on my A15 Apple TV, I immediately made a beeline to Settings > Accessibility > Text Size and spent a few minutes playing around with the larger text setting. As you’d expect, the UI for it is exactly what you’d see on iOS or iPadOS: a horizontal slider with notched intervals, with text overhead showing the adjusted size.
[…]
In the TV app, for example, using large text has material effects on, say, show descriptions and metadata. This is helpful because I’ve always struggled to read this information without physically walking up to the TV screen itself. On the other hand, I’m guessing third-party developers need to support the new API; in my testing, apps like Netflix and Pluto TV don’t (yet?) support larger text.
As previously announced, Apple has today released 2026's major annual updates for its operating systems, including iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27.
Siri AI—a large language model-based and context-aware overhaul of the company's Siri voice and text assistant—is the flagship feature across all these releases except one (tvOS).
© Apple
Em meio ao evento “Surprise and shine”, a Apple confirmou que o iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 e tvOS 27 serão lançados na segunda-feira da semana que vem, no dia 14 de setembro.
Em beta desde junho, os sistemas 27 reúnem uma série de novos recursos para a Apple Intelligence, além da nova Siri AI — vale lembrar, essas funcionalidades podem não ser compatíveis com todos os dispositivos em que os sistemas 27 estão disponíveis.
Em matéria de iPhone, um diferencial relevante para as gerações mais antigas é a implementação de um novo scheduler de CPU 1Central processing unit, ou unidade central de processamento. para gerenciar melhor as demandas de cargas de trabalho em iPhones a partir do 11, algo já visto anteriormente nos modelos mais recentes — além, claro, de melhorias mais amplas, como na velocidade de envio de arquivos no AirDrop.
No caso do macOS, o maior destaque — além da otimização de desempenho — é o fim do suporte aos Macs com processadores Intel.
Junte-se a milhões de empresas que usam as versões premium de apps como Gmail, Agenda, Drive e Meet. Com o Gemini integrado ao Google Workspace, você escreve, resume e organiza em segundos — e tudo continua funcionando de qualquer lugar, com apps completos e intuitivos para iPhone, iPad e Mac. Comece hoje mesmo com 20% de desconto nos 6 primeiros meses!
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Zac Hall (July):
Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more. The new version, 4.3, introduces “a search field to quickly find apps.”
But when Apple implemented this change, they also changed the sort order of the list of apps you’re registered to test. Starting with this update, the list is sorted in alphabetical order. For as long as I can remember — perhaps dating back to when TestFlight was a third-party utility — the list was ordered by recency. The most recently updated app was at the top; the oldest at the bottom. Sorting by recency is really the only sort order that makes sense when you’re registered for dozens (or more) of apps. For me, trying to see if there is an update to a new app whose name starts with U now requires scrolling through over 100 items.
[…]
Also, if I consider the broader view, this really speaks to how much we’ve lost in terms of UI vocabulary. For decades, any list of items with names and dates could be sorted by name or date, ascending or descending, through the standard use of clickable headers at the top of every list. This was true for almost any such list in any app, on any platform — Mac, Windows, Unix, Amiga, whatever. This was just basic GUI stuff.
[…]
iOS in 2007 introduced a simplified UI vocabulary that omitted many of these baseline GUI features. That seemed like a reasonable trade-off for a device with a 3.5-inch display and fat fingers as the only input device. But then iOS became popular and Apple stopped bringing the richer UI vocabulary of the Mac to iOS[…]
And it starting bringing iOS limitations to the Mac.
It certainly shouldn’t have taken until July 2026 to be able to search in TestFlight, either. And being able to search, and see the results sorted alphabetically, shouldn’t mean you can no longer view the full list sorted by recency.
Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many others, still has his list sorted by recency.
John Gruber (September):
For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.
But there should still be more sort options.
Previously:
Update (2026-09-16): John Voorhees:
Returning to reverse chronological order may seem like a small thing, but it’s made a world of difference in keeping up with the apps I test.
Search was near the top of my list of TestFlight wishes for years, and its addition made a meaningful difference to the app’s usability. But I’ve had a lot of TestFlight wishes over the years that are scattered across multiple articles, so I thought I’d share what else I’d like Apple to tackle with TestFlight[…]
Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer):
No new features were found in tvOS 26.6 during the beta testing period, so it likely focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements.
Previously:
General:
Documentation:
Sessions:
Podcasts:
Previously:
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