Zac Hall

Welcome to Neural. AI moves fast. We help you keep up. Last week we mentioned that American AI firms are seeing deep competition from DeepSeek R1 out of China. Today DeepSeek’s impact has reached Wall Street as NVIDIA stock drops 17%. Let’s take a closer look at DeepSeek, NVIDIA’s response, and the bigger picture for AI development.

Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble, announced plans to bring the e-ink smartwatch back to market. Why now? Migicovsky cites the lack of a similar smartwatch that meets his needs. In making the announcement, the Pebble founder turned re-founder took the opportunity to poke fun at Apple for still not allowing third-party watch faces to run on the Apple Watch.

Apple’s new M4 Mac mini looks pretty damn cool for a desktop computer. Still, these special edition retro beige and jet black versions with the classic Apple logo look awesome.

There’s a new software update available for Apple Watch Series 6 and later starting today. watchOS 11.3 is the latest version, bringing the new Unity Rhythm watch face to Apple Watch. Apple unveiled the new watch face alongside the 2025 Black Unity Sport Loop watch band this week.

Starting today, BenQ is opening pre-orders for its first 27-inch 5K Thunderbolt 4 Designer Monitor. Announced last fall, the BenQ PD2730S is a proper competitor to the $1600+ Apple Studio Display with the same pixels-per-inch range. I’ve been using the $1200 BenQ 27-inch 5K Thunderbolt 4 Designer Monitor with my M4 Mac mini for the last few weeks, and several things about it have been more impressive than the Studio Display.

Apple has released a new version of its Sports app for iPhone with three new features.

In honor of Black History Month, Apple has unveiled its 2025 Black Unity Collection of wallpapers, watch faces, and watch straps. This year’s set is “inspired by the rhythm of humanity,” according to Apple:

I absolutely love the new Camera Control button on iPhone 16, but the default settings aren’t for me. By default, I find it too slow to activate and too accident prone when taking photos. Fortunately, Apple gives you fairly granular control over Camera Control — even if the toggles are scattered around in the Settings app.

Apple Watch saves lives—the latest example is a dramatic rescue caught on video in Washington state. Rescuers credit the Apple Watch SOS feature for alerting and helping them locate a skier who fell 1,000 feet, preventing them from freezing to death.

Apple Intelligence has arrived, but Siri and Apple’s AI suite of features are nowhere near the level of rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and others — especially with the absence of an Apple chatbot. For that reason, the company has recruited an internal software veteran to help course correct the path for Apple’s AI efforts. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has the report:

Tim Cook has officially revealed his innie, Tim C., in the latest of many Severance promos for Apple TV+.

Welcome to Neural. AI moves fast. We help you keep up. In our inaugural edition, we’re exploring the start of the next frontier for OpenAI, Anthropic’s thoughtful solution to a common AI critique, and presidential AI executive order ping-pong. Let’s start making sense of the latest in AI news.

Need to lock down your new M4 Mac mini? Apple has added a new desktop accessory to its online store just for that purpose.

India remains Apple’s largest market opportunity after China. Growing the business in India, however, has always required a bit of compromise with the local government. In 2019, it was a small investment of $1 billion that helped unlock iPhone exports from India. More recently, India has pressured Apple to put its government-backed app store on the iPhone.

Ookla, the firm behind Speedtest, just published its semi-annual U.S. connectivity report covering the second half of 2024. One takeaway is that 5G performance is improving. However, this raises one key question: can anyone notice?

Apple Watch users regularly credit the device with helping save their life during health scares and emergency situations. For the founder of Whole Foods, however, it was insight gained from the Apple Watch that helped him improve his life.

I love my AirPods Pro 2, but I can’t say the same about every “intelligent” feature Apple has added over the years. If you want to roll with your AirPods Pro as straightforward as possible, these are the features to disable.

There’s a new app called “People” coming soon to the iPhone that looks promising. Like Cardhop and other Contacts app alternatives, People wants to modernize your address book with important context.

This is the pitch from indie developer Andrew Theis:

I’ve played guitar as a hobby since I was in junior high. While the instrument hasn’t changed, the tools I use to make it possible have — sort of. In addition to the built-in GarageBand app, these are the two must-have iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps I use for playing guitar for fun.