Benjamin Mayo

Regulation enforcement against Apple in the EU may be about to intensify. Under the Digital Markets Act rules, the company must notify the EU commission about services that reach the thresholds for so-called gatekeeper status, targeting big tech services with more than 45 million active users in Europe.

As it is obliged, Apple informed the EU that Apple Maps and Apple Ads meet that level. The commission now has 45 days to decide whether Maps and the company’s ad businesses are sufficiently monopolistic to warrant a step up in regulation.

Apple has launched its new holiday ad A Critter Carol, which features a misplaced iPhone 17 Pro being used by woodland critters to record themselves singing a Christmas carol.

Apple simultaneously released a making of video that shows how the company also used iPhones in the making of the film, as well as how all the hand-crafted puppetry was animated and brought to life.

I have an AirTag on my keychain to keep track of my keys, but obviously an AirTag is too big and bulky to fit inside a wallet. That’s what the SwitchBot Wallet Finder is for, currently discounted to just $9.99 for Black Friday, a rare 60% discount.

Disguised inside a thin, credit-card form factor, the SwitchBot Wallet Finder connects to the Find My app on your iPhone, so you can follow its location, and it even houses a speaker so you can make it beep to help you find your wallet when it inevitably gets lost somewhere in your home. Read on for my review …

The animal history documentary series Prehistoric Planet returns today on Apple TV with a new Ice Age installment. If you aren’t a subscriber, now is a great time with a 50% off Black Friday deal available right now.

With the series hailing from the makers of the recent live action Lion King remake, Prehistoric Planet uses the latest CGI techniques to depict photorealistic sequences of long-extinct creatures …

Update: The Anker Nano is 30% off right now on Amazon for Black Friday. Review below.

The iPhone Air has surprisingly good battery life for users with light-to-medium daily usage habits. But if you are going to be away from a charger for a long time, especially going travelling like on a plane, you’ll probably want to carry some extra juice with you.

Apple has made its custom MagSafe Battery for iPhone Air, that fits precisely beneath the camera plateau on the back of the phone. But another big competitor in this space is Anker, with the Anker Nano Power Bank in a similar size promising 5,000 mAH capacity at half the price of Apple’s offering. But how much extra battery life should you actually expect to get from these power banks, and which is best?

Apple TV is ramping up its promotion for the upcoming streaming launch of F1: The Movie on Apple TV, timed for the Las Vegas F1 weekend and the launch of a new 50% off for 6 months deal for Black Friday.

The Sphere dominates the Vegas strip, and Apple TV took advantage of the unique shape of the structure to show a depiction of Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes inside his APX GP racing helmet.

After macOS Tahoe launched, some intrepid developers noticed that Electron apps could cause the Mac’s rendering system to be overloaded due to an incompatibility with the way Electron apps were overriding the default window corner mask. Users would experience issues like stuttery scrolling when interacting with any app (including non-Electron ones), as long as an Electron app window was currently visible on the desktop.

Major Electron-based apps have subsequently released software updates to work around this bug, but this meant waiting for an update from the developer of each Electron app installed on your Mac. With the latest 26.2 betas, Apple has now fixed the incompatibility at a system-wide level.

Apple TV today revealed that Pluribus has become its most successful new drama series debut ever, topping the viewership set by Severance season two earlier in the year. Via Deadline, Apple says Vince Gilligan’s mysterious new show has captivated audiences and set a new viewership record for biggest global drama series launch for the streamer.

Pluribus was most popular in US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Germany, Mexico, India and France. New episodes of the show are rolling out each Friday, with episode four dropping in a couple of hours.

In September, Apple controversially cancelled the launch of new series The Savant, seemingly in the wake of the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk. The company said it looks forward to releasing the show at a later time, but two months on, there’s still no release date in sight. It’s listed as “coming at a later date” in the TV app.

Meanwhile, Apple TV has perhaps just repeated the same fiasco for a second time. The service was set to premiere French-language series The Hunt on December 3, having released a trailer earlier this month. But now, all references to The Hunt have been scrubbed, including removal of the press release from the Apple TV PR newsroom and the YouTube trailer is now marked private.

The Apple Store today announced its Black Friday shopping event, which runs November 28 through December 1. Shoppers can get up to a $250 gift card when buying eligible Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch and more.

Apple’s gift card promotions don’t generally represent the best value for money. For instance, you can buy AirPods 4 on Amazon right now discounted more than the $25 gift card value Apple is offering in this promotion. Similarly, the 15-inch MacBook Air is discounted by $250 right now on Amazon, exceeding the $200 gift card Apple is offering … As always, for the best deals around, check out 9to5Toys.

Update: Cloudflare has said that believe they have now fixed the cause of the incidents, and normal service should resume.

A large number of apps and websites are currently taken entirely offline, or experiencing significant outages, due to an issue with the popular Cloudflare infrastructure network provider. The Cloudflare CDN powers the websites behind many high-profile apps, so any outage at Cloudflare has wide-reaching implications.

That includes social media site X (formerly Twitter), where users are currently unable to publish new posts or refresh their timelines. The problem appears to be impacting web users worldwide.

Speedtest.net’s owner Ookla has published a new report detailing Wi-Fi performance of iPhone 17 users in the wild. The data shows that the new iPhones gets significantly faster WiFi speeds compared to iPhone 16, showing the benefits of the new Apple-designed N1 chip.

The new N1 chip can be found in iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air. The new iPhone lineup achieves faster download and upload speeds in every region that Ookla tracks.

Apple TV might not have the ‘+’ in its name anymore, but they keep plussing up their offering and adding even more content to make the service better value for money. That means an Apple TV subscription is more appealing than ever.

As well as more originals, Apple is set to dramatically expand the live sports offering available on the service. Here’s what is coming to Apple TV in 2026.

A poignant new documentary film called Come See Me in the Good Light is now available to watch on the Apple TV subscription service. You can get a seven-day free trial for new sign-ups here.

This is the latest Apple TV movie that the company acquired from the Sundance film festival. It follows a poet, Andrea Gibson, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Gibson resolves to live the rest of her life to the fullest.

The base Apple TV service will be getting more live sports as standard from year. MLS Season Pass, currently a $79 per year additional charge for Apple TV members, will cease to exist as a separate service. Instead, all the content will be rolled into the base Apple TV subscription, starting next season.

That increases value for the Apple TV subscription (currently $12.99 per month in the US, or part of Apple One) and should help boost viewership for Major League Soccer.

Last night, The Information reported that Apple had delayed the iPhone Air 2 launch, from its original schedule of fall 2026. In a follow-up post, The Information reports the second-generation model is now aiming for a spring 2027 release, which would be alongside updates to the base model iPhone 18 (as Apple is shifting the release of that model to the spring going forward).

The reason for the delay is apparently Apple is redesigning the product to address customer complaints, most notably by adding a second camera lens to the back. However, it’s currently unclear if spring 2027 is an achievable deadline.

Apple has launched a limited edition accessory for the iPhone, called the iPhone Pocket. It evokes a modern day iPod sock, using a single 3D-knitted cloth to create a wearable pocket. The accessory was designed in collaboration with renowned designer Issey Miyake. The Pocket is kind of like a high-end version of the iPhone Crossbody Strap.

Unlike the 2004-era iPod Socks, the iPhone Pocket is not cheap. Available this Friday, the short strap Pocket will cost $149.95, and the long strap design will cost $229.95.

Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, returns to television with a highly-anticipated new series premiering on Apple TV today.

Pluribus is a new sci-fi drama starring Rhea Seehorn as the most miserable person in the world who must save the world from happiness. The first two episodes of season one are available to watch now.

After being delayed due to the regulatory uncertainty of rules surrounding the Digital Market Act, Apple has now confirmed that the flashy Live Translation feature for AirPods Pro and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation will be available in the European Union from next month.

The feature requires compatible AirPods paired to an iPhone capable of running Apple Intelligence, that is iPhone 15 Pro or newer. It will presumably debut in the EU as part of the iOS 26.2 update, which hit the developer beta channels today.