It’s that time of year—a new budget Pixel phone is about to hit virtual shelves. The Pixel 10a will be available on March 5, and pre-orders go live today. The 9a will still be on sale for a while, but the 10a will be headlining Google’s store. However, you might not notice unless you keep up with the Pixel numbering scheme. This year’s A-series Pixel is virtually identical to last year’s, both inside and out.

Last year’s Pixel 9a was a notable departure from the older design language, but Google made few changes for 2026. We liked that the Pixel 9a emphasized battery capacity and moved to a flat camera bump, and this time, it’s really flat. Google says the camera now sits totally flush with the back panel. This is probably the only change you’ll be able to identify visually.

Google also says the new Pixel will have a slightly upgraded screen. The resolution, size, and refresh rate are unchanged, but peak brightness has been bumped from 2,700 nits to 3,000 nits (the same as the base model Pixel 10). Plus, the cover glass has finally moved beyond Gorilla Glass 3 to Gorilla Glass 7i, which supposedly has improved scratch and drop protection.

Credit: Google

Google notes that more of the phone is constructed from recycled material, 100 percent for the aluminum frame and 81 percent for the plastic back. There’s also recycled gold, tungsten, cobalt, and copper inside, amounting to about 36 percent of the phone’s weight. The phone also continues to have a physical SIM slot, which was removed from the Pixel 10 series last year. The device’s USB-C 3.2 port can also charge slightly faster than the 9a (30 W versus 23 W), and wireless charging has gone from 7.5 W to 10 W. There are no Qi2 magnets inside, though.

Internally, the Pixel 10a is even more like its predecessor. Unlike past A-series phones, this one doesn’t have the latest Tensor chip—it’s sticking with the same Tensor G4 from the 9a. That’s a bummer, as the G5 was a bigger leap than most of Google’s chip upgrades. The company says it stuck with the G4 to “balance affordability and performance.”

In fairness, Google has managed to keep the price steady at $499. With components like RAM and storage in short supply this year, prices could rise for many device refreshes.

Why the sidegrade?

Google’s position is that the Pixel 10a still offers a good value despite the middling upgrades compared to last year’s phone. It keeps the Pixel camera experience (which is admittedly great) available at a lower price than the flagship phones. While you get better results with the more expensive Pixels, the 9a was still one of the mobile photography options in 2025. With identical camera hardware in 2026, we expect the 10a to be the same.

But why not make the Pixel 10a a bigger upgrade? Making a better phone theoretically means you sell more of them, right? There are a few possibilities.

By slowing the improvement of the A-series Pixels, Google is making the Pixel 10 look like a better option for buyers. Upgrading the processor and adding features like PixelSnap could make the 10a too appealing compared to the $800 Pixel 10—Google’s A-series phones have been regularly recommended over the flagships due to the lower price and similar capabilities. The Pixel 10’s camera is also less capable than the Pixel 9 was for that generation, making it that much more similar to the A-series.

Component prices are also a concern for 2026. While smartphone development cycles can easily range from 18 to 24 months, Google may have decided late in the game to stick with the Tensor G4 in this phone to offset the higher cost of storage and memory. Google has stressed that it wanted to keep the A-series at its traditional $499 price. As a major player in AI, an industry that is vacuuming up all those parts, Google may have had insight into the coming shortage before most.

Credit: Google

Whatever the reason, the Pixel 10a is looking like a very modest upgrade. If you still think it’s the right phone for you, Google will take your money starting today. The device is at the Google Store for $499 with 128GB of storage, and some carriers should begin offering the phone soon. The 256GB version runs $100 more. The Pixel 10a is available in Lavender, Fog, Obsidian, and the new Berry color.

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Posted Thursday 19 February 2026 at 5:43 am AEST (my time).

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If you're interested in going paperless, you probably think you need a scanner. It's true that hardware scanners make turning multipage documents into PDFs very simple. But most of us don't have easy access to a scanner.

What we do have are phones, and those phones have very good cameras. That's where scanning apps come in.

These apps allow you to take photos of each page of a paper document, crop out the edges of the photo and straighten everything, then combine those photos into a PDF file. A scanning app is handy, but there's a catch: a lot of the apps out there are a mess.

That's what makes FairScan stand out. It's an app for scanning documents using your Android phone that just ... scans documents. That's it.

FairScan creator Pierre-Yves Nicolas wrote in a blog post last year that he had previously tried several Android apps for scanning documents. "All of them exhibited behaviors that I certainly don't want," he says. These behaviors included obvious things like ads, hidden privacy violations, and shady practices such as storing your documents in the cloud—then using them to train AI—with only a tiny text prompt notifying you this is happening.

FairScan, which is both free and open source, doesn't do any of that. It scans.

To get started, simply install the app. And yes, it’s Android-only for now, but you can download it from the Google Play Store as well as F-Droid, the repository for open source Android apps.

Get the document you want to scan ready, placing it on a flat surface in a well-lit room. Then aim your camera at the first page. A green box will surround the page—adjust until it's surrounding the portion of the document you want to scan. Take the picture when you're ready.

If you have more pages you can click the plus button to add them; this allows you to repeat the process with the next page. You can do this as many times as you want, allowing you to scan a multipage document.

When you're ready, you can export the scanned pages to either a single PDF or multiple JPEG files.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind while scanning. First, lighting is going to matter a lot. You don't want the shadow of your phone to be in the image, so make sure your phone isn’t positioned between your light source and the document you’re scanning. I find the app works best in a room with diffuse lighting, whether that's multiple lights illuminating your work surface, or several windows letting in a great deal of natural sunlight. It's also worth trying to get the paper document as flat as possible, to avoid distortions.

This application is very simple. There are a few features I'd personally like to see added, including the ability to edit pages after taking the photo and some kind of optical character recognition (OCR) that would digitize your scanned text and make it searchable.

But the major pro of the software—that it does its job without bothering you—is the killer feature here. What does it say about the state of the technology ecosystem that I find this such a big deal? A lot, actually.

All of us are hoping to use our phones as a tool—a way to achieve a specific end. And it's easy to also think of the applications you can install as tools. The problem: Most people who make apps aren't in the tool business. They’re offering a nominally useful app in order to extract value from you in other ways—by serving you ads, forcing you into a subscription, or selling your personal data.

This isn't how tools have to work. If you buy a hammer, that hammer doesn't demand that you pay extra if you want to use it to close paint cans. It doesn't pepper you with notifications encouraging you to upgrade to HammerPro™️. You just have a hammer for doing all the hammer things. FairScan is like that, which makes it stand out in an increasingly enshittified field.

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Posted Wednesday 18 February 2026 at 6:26 am AEST (my time).

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When Google announced it had engineered AirDrop compatibility for its Pixel 10 phones late last year, the pessimists among us figured it would be a matter of days before Apple shut it down. But not only is it still working, Google has expanded the capability to the Pixel 9 series (minus the budget-oriented Pixel 9A).

As with Pixel 10 phones, owners of (almost all) Pixel 9 phones will be able to send and receive files a little more easily with Apple devices. Files sent from a Pixel to an iPhone, Mac, or iPad will appear as AirDrop transfers. On the Android side, files are handled through Quick Share. The receiving Apple device needs to be discoverable to anyone — you can set a ten-minute time limit on this — and the Pixel likewise needs to be discoverable to all or in receive mode. With that done, all that’s required is a tap to accept the transfer and you’re on your way to cross-platform-sharing-bliss.

That is, unless you’re the owner of a Pixel 9A — you’ll need to use plain Bluetooth or some other old-fashioned method. I asked Google why the 9A is excluded from AirDrop support, and communications manager Alex Moriconi said only that they’re “looking forward to improving the experience and expanding it to more Android devices over time.” So if you want to be glass half full about it, the 9A could still be included in a future update. In the meantime at least, I’m feeling pretty optimistic that this AirDrop compatibility is sticking around for the long-term.

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Posted Wednesday 18 February 2026 at 6:25 am AEST (my time).

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You might have noticed some reporting a few days ago that Android 17 was rolling out in beta form, but that didn’t happen. For reasons Google still has not explained, the release was canceled. Two days later, Android 17 is here for real. If you’ve got a recent Pixel device, you can try the latest version today, but don’t expect big changes just yet—there’s still a long way to go before release.

Google will probably have more to say about feature changes for Android 17 in the coming months, but this first wide release is aimed mostly at testing system and API changes. One of the biggest changes in the beta is expanded support for adaptive apps, which ensures that apps can scale to different screen sizes. That makes apps more usable on large-screen devices like tablets and foldables with multiple displays.

We first saw this last year in Android 16, but developers were permitted to opt out of support. The new adaptive app roadmap puts an end to that. Any app that targets Android 17 (API level 37) must support resizing and windowed multitasking. Apps can continue to target the older API for the time being, but Google filters apps from the Play Store if they don’t keep up.

Some improvements to media and camera support are also included in the first release. The updated API will allow apps to switch between camera sensors more smoothly rather than starting new activities each time. The system also has “professional-grade” support for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. That means more efficient video encoding and decoding capabilities in Android.

Google also says Android 17 Beta 1 debuts new performance optimizations with better management of system resources. The OS will use what Google calls generational garbage collection, featuring more frequent and less CPU-intensive removal of unneeded processes from memory.

In short, the first Android 17 beta is chock full of things that may interest developers and modders, but there’s little in the way of user-facing changes right now.

Android 17 release schedule

Google has made some notable changes to how it releases Android updates, and Android 17 continues the trend. Like last year, there will be two Android 17 releases in 2026. The first one, coming in Q2, will be the more significant of the two. It will include a raft of new APIs, behavioral changes, and feature updates. This split release setup was implemented to better align with when major OEMs release new devices, but Android 17 availability still focuses mainly on Pixels. Google’s phones receive immediate updates, but everyone else has to wait for OEMs to roll out updates over the following weeks or months.

At the end of the year, another version (you can think of it as Android 17.1 even though Google doesn’t give it a name) will become available on supported devices. This “minor SDK release” will include some API and feature changes, but Google doesn’t have any details at this time.

Credit: Google

Before we get to that, Google plans to launch a second beta release in March. The company says Beta 2 will include final APIs, allowing developers to complete testing and roll out updates. Developers will have “several months” to get that work done before the final version hits Pixels.

In 2025, Google also changed the way it updates the open source parts of Android. Rather than regular code dumps, Google now only updates the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) twice yearly, in the second and fourth quarters, when new versions are released. That makes it harder to know what to expect from upcoming versions of Android, but Google insists this is more efficient.

If you want to check out Android 17 today, you’ll need a Pixel device. It supports the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, Pixel 8, Pixel 9, and Pixel 10 generations. The Pixel tablet and original Pixel Fold are also included. Other phone makers may release beta builds in the weeks ahead, but it’s a Google-only event for now. You can opt in to get an OTA to Android 17 on the beta program website.

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Posted Saturday 14 February 2026 at 1:05 pm AEST (my time).

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According to WinFuture, the Xiaomi Tag, identified by the model number BHR08SPGL, was mistakenly listed by various European retailers for several days. Even Xiaomi's own shop pages in the United Kingdom and France featured initial listings, meaning a launch could be imminent.

In France, Xiaomi reportedly sets an official recommended retail price of €17.99 for a single tag, although some retailers already offer the device for under €15 ($17). For this price, customers receive a 7.2-millimeter-thick tag, crafted from plastic, which uses a CR2032 battery expected to last approximately one year before requiring replacement. Xiaomi is reportedly going to charge €59.99 (~$70) for a pack of four.

Based on the retailer listings found so far, the Xiaomi Tag connects using Bluetooth 5.4 and NFC. There is no mention of the previously widely reported support for Ultra-Wideband (UWB), suggesting this particular model might lack the precise tracking capabilities of UWB-equipped trackers. It appears available only in white.

Several hints regarding Xiaomi's tracking device have also been found in HyperOS code, the company's Android flavor. Earlier code suggested clear indications of UWB support, leading some to speculate Xiaomi might eventually offer a UWB-enabled version or that plans changed for this initial release.

According to rumors, this Bluetooth version of the Xiaomi Tag can integrate with both Apple's Find My and Google's Find My Device Network, allowing users to locate lost items on or in which the tracker is attached, regardless of whether they own an iOS or Android device.

Xiaomi's competitor, Apple, launched the AirTag 2 last month, retaining its $29 price for a single unit and $99 for a four-pack in the United States.

Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband (UWB) U2 chip, the same one found in the iPhone 17 lineup, powers the new AirTag, expanding its finding range by up to 50% farther than the original. It also features a speaker that is approximately 50% louder and introduces Precision Finding directly on compatible Apple Watch models, specifically Apple Watch Series 9 or later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later.

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Posted Friday 13 February 2026 at 6:27 am AEST (my time).

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The iPhone 18 Pro is expected to launch this year with several tech specs upgrades and improvements in the camera zoom. Apple hasn't made a mark on the AI front, but the company is working to add something equally important, if not better.

A new post from Weibo-based leaker Fixed Focus Digital details upcoming satellite-powered 5G internet support for the iPhone 18 Pro, adding fuel to old rumors. The leaker said Apple's C2 modem will support NR-NTN, enabling the iPhone 18 Pro to access the internet directly via low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

NR-NTN stands for New Radio Non-Terrestrial Networks, a technology that enables direct satellite-to-device 5G connectivity for smartphones and provides backhaul for carriers in areas where traditional cell towers are scarce. The leaker expects positive developments in this area, noting that Huawei tested its implementation of the technology at the end of last year.

This isn't the first time that rumors of 5G satellite internet for iPhone have surfaced. It was reported that Apple is working on several satellite connectivity features, including Satellite over 5G, which allows cell towers to utilize satellite infrastructure to increase coverage.

The iPhone-maker may allow users to send photos via the Messages app using satellite connectivity. It's developing a satellite framework for third-party apps and satellite-powered Apple Maps to operate without cellular or Wi-Fi access.

Apple is also trying to figure out how people can use their smartphones naturally with satellite connectivity, so they don't have to point their devices toward the sky to establish a connection. All of these expected updates will build on the existing features, such as Emergency SOS via Satellite.

Back in 2015, Apple had reportedly considered launching its own satellite service for iPhones and homes in collaboration with Boeing. While the internal talks didn't come to fruition, the iPhone does have direct-to-cell satellite coverage, but it's limited to text messages only.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 4:31 am AEST (my time).

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Almost exactly one year after launching the iPhone 16e, Apple is preparing to launch the 17e, according to Mark Gurman. The iPhone 17e will feature an upgraded A19 chip from the iPhone 17 lineup, plus MagSafe charging, and move Apple’s in-house cellular chips. Just as importantly, the company apparently plans to keep the price at $599, despite soaring RAM and storage prices.

Gurman says Apple is planning to pitch the iPhone 17e aggressively in emerging markets and to enterprises. He claims that, with almost no changes expected from the Pixel 10a and Samsung focused on the higher end of the market, Apple sees an opening.

We also expect Apple to launch an updated iPad and iPad Air around the same time, alongside the spec-bumped MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air with an M5 processor. The base-model iPad will be moving to an A18 chip, which means it will support Apple Intelligence, while the iPad Air will move to an M4 and switch to an OLED display.

Gurman says most of these launches should be expected by early March.

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Posted Monday 9 February 2026 at 3:46 am AEST (my time).

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Vivaldi 7.8 is now available for Android and iOS devices, bringing a stack of new and unique features for each platform. On Android, there are pinned tabs, privacy dashboard, support for third-party password managers, private search, and the option to disable pull-to-refresh. On iOS, we get swipe to switch tabs, the option to add search engines from any website, and swipe tabs away.

If you’ve used any modern browser on the desktop, you’ve likely right clicked it and pinned the tab to keep it in place away from the rest of your browser clutter. To pin tabs on mobile, you can just long-press any tab and select “Pin Tab” to lock it at the start of your Tab Bar. This feature could be most useful for those who have lots of tabs open and want to bring a bit more order to their browser.

Privacy Dashboard is another new feature in Vivaldi for Android. It allows you to see which trackers and ads Vivaldi has blocked while you browse. According to Vivaldi head Jon von Tetzchner, Privacy Dashboard isn’t “just a number, it’s a window into how much of the web is designed to follow you around. Every blocked tracker is one less company building a profile on your habits, your interests, your life.”

Over the years, web browsers have been adding their own password manager with sync, this essentially locks you into one browser across mobile and desktop. With this latest update, Vivaldi 7.8 on Android supports third-party password managers. In the settings, you can choose to use Vivaldi’s password manager or hand off login assistance to a third-party password manager. You can find these settings under “Autofill services” in the settings.

This update also brings two quieter features, first is the ability to select text and then search about it directly in private tabs. Second is the option to disable pull-to-refresh, while this feature can be handy, in some situations it can be incredibly annoying when the page decides to reload when you were just trying to scroll up, now Vivaldi Android users can switch it off.

Over on iOS, the company decided to focus on streamlining workflows. One of the new features, swipe to switch tabs, lets you swipe up or down on the address bar to just straight to the tab switcher. Vivaldi’s developers think this feels natural by meeting you where your thumb already is.

Another feature is the ability to long press on any search field and add it as a search engine in your browser. You could do this with a university library, documentation pages, niche databases, or search engine, giving you ultimate customization.

Finally, this version adds swipe away tabs. In the tab switcher, you can now close tabs with a quick swipe so that you don’t need to go hunting for tiny X buttons. Just swipe and it's gone.

Vivaldi 7.8 for Mobile is now available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 5:16 am AEST (my time).

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Google has taken the wraps off the Pixel 10A, the latest in its line of budget-friendly smartphones. A teaser shared on Wednesday shows off the new device in a powdery blue color, which will be available for preorder on February 18th.

Based on the teaser shared by Google, the Pixel 10A looks a lot like its 9A predecessor. It features two cameras inside a flat, oblong cutout on the rear of the device, and it looks like it comes with some similarly-sized bezels. Google didn’t share any more details about the device’s specifications, so we’ll likely have to wait a little longer to hear more.

We don’t know how much the Pixel 10A will cost, either, but one leak suggests that the pricing will remain unchanged in some regions, with options for 128GB and 256GB of storage. Google’s teaser also includes a link to sign up for emails to receive an “exclusive offer” on the Pixel 10A.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:27 am AEST (my time).

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iOS 26.3 and 26.4 Changes

iOS 26.3 is all about system utilities, regional regulatory updates, and privacy tweaks rather than any graphical overhaul. iOS 26.3 will include an iPhone to Android transfer tool and EU notification forwarding.

The most prominent addition is new iPhone-to-Android transfer feature. This feature enables users to transfer an iPhone alongside an Android smartphone and transfer photos, messages, notes, apps, and even a phone number wirelessly. This feature is available worldwide in the Settings app under General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Transfer to Android.

For users in the European Union, iOS 26.3 brings Notification Forwarding and proximity pairing for third-party accessories, just like with AirPods. This is in line with Apple’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act and is only available in supported regions.

Apple is also working on infrastructure for end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging. As of the second iOS 26.3 beta, system infrastructure shows support for encrypted RCS messaging, although carrier support is still needed before it can be used.

Other additions in iOS 26.3 include:

• A new Weather Wallpapers section on the Lock Screen.
• A new Limit Precise Location option that limits location data shared with mobile networks.
• Ongoing Background Security Improvements testing, which permit Apple to release some security-related updates without a full iOS version. The current test updates do not contain actual bug fixes.

Early indications for iOS 26.4

iOS 26.4 is likely to arrive later in the spring after a beta process that has not begun yet. A couple of features are already associated with this version, although not all of them will be available.

Apple and Google have announced a more personalized version of Siri, and iOS 26.4 will be the first version to introduce users to the underlying work. The new Siri will be able to understand personal context, on-screen awareness, and more advanced per-app actions. Some features demonstrated earlier may not be available until later versions.

Another feature that has been confirmed is the addition of new emoji support, which follows the latest standard from the Unicode Consortium. The new emoji will include a trombone, a treasure chest, an apple core, an orca, ballet dancers, and more. Apple has been adding new emoji in x.4 versions of iOS for a few releases now.

Other features that have been rumored to be in development include:

• AutoFill for credit card information stored in the Passwords app by Apple in third-party apps.
• The ability to create folders in the Freeform app.
• A new validation process that will verify device integrity when signing into Apple ID and iCloud.
• The addition of a “Precise Outdoor Location” feature for AirPods in the Find My app.
• Development of a new sports level in the Apple TV app, although no information is available yet.

Apple has not yet announced which of these features will be included in the initial iOS 26.4 release.

Apple's upcoming iOS 26.3 update brings new features and privacy settings

Users interested in the Android transfer feature or the new privacy options should wait for the final release of iOS 26.3 instead of using the beta version. Users following Siri updates or the new emojis should look forward to iOS 26.4 in the spring.

Some of the features mentioned for iOS 26.4 may be postponed or revised before they are released to the public.

Resources: 

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/03/ios-26-3-and-ios-26-4-features/

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:25 am AEST (my time).

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Renowned Chinese leaker Instant Digital has now shared additional details about the foldable iPhone’s design and how it may differentiate itself from other iPhones. Given the leaker’s strong track record with Apple products, this latest report could offer a fairly clear picture of what Apple’s first foldable iPhone could look like.

According to Instant Digital, the foldable iPhone’s volume buttons will be on the top right rather than the left. This suggests that Apple may be taking design cues from the iPad mini for its first foldable device.

Additionally, the Touch ID and Camera Control buttons remain on the right side of the device, leaving the left side completely free of any buttons. Instant Digital says this layout is due to the motherboard being located on the right side, as Apple wanted to avoid running cables across the display. This design choice could also free up internal space, potentially allowing Apple to use a larger battery—possibly the largest battery ever used in an iPhone.

The leaker also claims the front-facing camera will be housed in a single punch-hole cutout, potentially resulting in a smaller Dynamic Island. Interestingly, the foldable iPhone’s camera plateau is said to be arranged horizontally, accommodating the rear camera sensors, microphone, and flash. This design is reminiscent of the iPhone Air.

Instant Digital also notes that the foldable iPhone’s camera plateau will be entirely black and may not match the body color. He adds that the device is currently confirmed to launch in white, with Apple expected to offer two color options at release.

If these details are accurate, Apple’s first foldable iPhone could effectively be described as an iPhone mini that unfolds into an iPad mini–sized device. The phone is rumored to feature a 7.8-inch inner display and a 5.5-inch cover display.

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 5:02 am AEST (my time).

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The official announcement for AirTag 2 discussed several key upgrades, most of which are under the hood. For starters, it comes with updated Bluetooth and UWB (Ultra Wideband) chips for improved range and better Precision Finding.

Speaking of which, Precision Finding on AirTag 2 works with compatible Apple Watch models, including Apple Watch Series 9 (or later) or Apple Watch Ultra 2 (or later).

Another thing that makes AirTag 2 easier to find is the louder internal speaker. However, it's hard to get a sense of it from the specs sheet alone. A short video clip shared on X compares the new AirTag chime to the old one, and the new high-pitched chime feels considerably louder.

While the two generations are virtually identical in look and feel, you'll find differences when you see them in real life. An AirTag 2 teardown from DIY enthusiast Joseph Taylor sums up several of them.

AirTag 2 features updated retail packaging

The differences between AirTag 2 and AirTag 1 are visible right from their packaging. For instance, the four-pack AirTag 1 features a rectangular box with internal packaging that houses AirTags in layers and folds like a book. AirTag 2, on the other hand, comes in a taller box that houses all AirTags in a line.

Apple has updated the text on the AirTag 2 retail box to make it appear raised and glossy, unlike the plain text on the previous generation. It features a new latch mechanism for the internal packaging material. Moreover, the plastic packaging for the AirTag 2 unit differs from the previous generation, appearing more hazy and paper-like.

Most upgrades are on the inside

Tearing apart the second-generation AirTag reveals Apple spent most of its time redesigning the internals. A QR code and an "R" symbol appear printed on the plastic casing when the battery is removed.

The modder noted that the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) on the AirTag 2 appears noticeably thinner than that on the AirTag 1. Still, Apple's official tech specs reveal that the AirTag 2 is slightly heavier than the AirTag 1 (see table below).

Among various changes, Apple has installed a new speaker to make the second-generation AirTag 50% louder, added more test pads to the circuit board, and angled the battery connectors differently.

A possible anti-stalking measure is that Apple has made the speaker magnet harder to remove by gluing it more firmly, and the speaker coil on the new AirTag is slightly bigger than before.

AirTag 2 vs AirTag 2: Specs comparison

If you're in for the fine details, here is a comparison of the tech specs for the first and second generation AirTag:

One of the main selling points AirTag has since its launch is that you can swap its coin cell battery in a few seconds. While it's probably the most 'un-Apple' thing to see, it makes sense when you're dealing with an item tracker that needs to do its job with minimal downtime.

Overall, the early impressions of the AirTag 2 suggest it's an iterative update. It's a quick reminder of the "S" iPhones Apple used to have back in the day, when it upgraded the internals while keeping a similar overall design between consecutive versions.

Apple is trying to build a mini ecosystem for AirTag, powered by its massive Find My network of devices, and the ability to share your AirTag's location with friends and airlines to track lost luggage.

While it appears Apple didn't spend a dollar redesigning the exterior, at least the company could have settled for different color options. But again, Apple has to sell its FineWoven Key Ring, available in different colors but costlier than the AirTag itself.

What do you think about the new AirTag? Tell us in the comments.

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Posted Friday 30 January 2026 at 3:46 am AEST (my time).

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However, it's not all fairytale for users as iOS 26.3 Beta 3 comes with its share of bugs, specifically if you use your iPhone or iPad to take advantage of Apple's ecosystem and cross-device experience.

The company has acknowledged that several Continuity features are broken in iOS 26.3 Beta 3, affecting users of multiple models, including iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air.

The known issue is also affecting the M5 iPad Pro running iPadOS 26.3 Beta 3. Apple's official release notes mention that the following Continuity features have been affected:

• iPhone Mirroring
• AirPlay Mirroring to Apple TV 4K
• Using Continuity Camera wireless with a Mac or Apple TV 4K
• Sidecar from Mac to iPad Pro (M5)

All of these features are essential to Apple's Continuity suite, which has expanded over the years. iPhone Mirroring is one of the latest additions introduced with the iOS 18 update in 2024, alongside macOS Sequoia, and improved in iOS 26. It lets you mirror your iPhone screen wirelessly on a Mac and control the user interface with the trackpad and keyboard.

Similarly, the SideCar feature doubles up your iPad as an extended display for your Mac with touchscreen support. Your iPad can also mirror your Mac's display or serve as a tablet input device for drawing with Apple Pencil in Mac apps.

The Continuity Camera feature turns an iPhone into a wireless webcam for a Mac or Apple TV. Your Mac, using the same Apple ID and Wi-Fi network, can automatically recognize it when you bring your iPhone closer to it in landscape mode.

Not having Continuity Camera means you're limited to a Mac's built-in webcam for video calls, or you'll face disappointment on Apple TV. That said, Apple hasn't revealed on what is causing these features to break.

It remains to be seen whether these issues delay the public availability of iOS 26.3 and iPadOS 26.3. Neowin recommends avoiding installing the Beta 3 update if Continuity features are part of your daily workflow.

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Posted Thursday 29 January 2026 at 5:47 pm AEST (my time).

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A new post from Weibo leaker "Smart Pikachu" claims that Apple's variable aperture camera system for iPhone 18 Pro models is now in the sampling stage. In other words, Apple is testing iPhone 18 Pro camera prototypes with a variable aperture.

For the uninitiated, a variable aperture controls how much light reaches the camera sensor, enabling more depth-of-field options and other improvements. If it does end up on the iPhone 18 series this year, it would be new for iPhones but not an industry-first feature.

Samsung was the first to implement a variable aperture camera system in 2019 with the Galaxy S9 series. On a side note, there have been rumors that Samsung could bring back variable aperture with the Galaxy S26 Ultra.

In what is probably the first reported instance, the post further mentions (via MacRumors) that Apple is working on a "teleconverter" for the iPhone's camera, which is also "under evaluation." A teleconverter is typically used in DSLR cameras to increase the focal length and effective optical zoom.

However, a trade-off here is the loss of light, which Apple might compensate for with the variable aperture if it plans to keep both components. Apple often tests multiple prototypes to figure out what works best for the final model, and the official launch is still about eight months away.

Apple is expected to make upgrades on the front side as well, with under-display Face ID reserved for its flagship iPhones. Noted GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu recently summarized the expected tech specs for the iPhone 18 series in an investor note, corroborating claims of a variable aperture. Apple is said to include 12GB RAM and its C2 modem in the upcoming devices.

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Posted Thursday 29 January 2026 at 6:15 am AEST (my time).

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"With the limit precise location setting, you can limit some information that cellular networks may use to determine your location. Available on compatible iPhone and iPad models with supported carriers," Apple says in a newly published support document.

By supported, it means that the iOS 26's limit precise location feature currently works on iPhones and iPads with Apple's C-series cellular modems (C1 and C1X). The list of such devices currently includes a handful:

• iPhone Air
• iPhone 16e
• iPad Pro (M5) Wi-Fi + Cellular

Cellular networks can determine your device's location by identifying which cell towers it connects to. The privacy feature is designed to reduce the "precision of location data available to cellular networks."

The feature allows carriers to know a less-accurate location, such as the device's neighbourhood, rather than a street address. However, Apple assures that the feature doesn't interfere with sharing precise location data with emergency services during an emergency call.

You can turn the feature on or off in the Settings app. Go to Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data Options (Tap on one of your lines if you have more than one working SIM). Next, scroll down to find 'Limit Precise Location.' You might be asked to restart the device when you turn the setting on or off.

Apple says that limit precise location currently works with a small number of supported carriers in the US, UK, and other countries:

• United States: Boost Mobile
• United Kingdom: EE, BT
• Germany: Telekom
• Thailand: AIS, True

The latest iOS 26.3 beta has arrived alongside iOS 26.2.1, which brings support for Apple's first hardware product of 2026. In your free time, you can read about the 90+ products and services Apple launched in 2025.

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Posted Tuesday 27 January 2026 at 6:06 pm AEST (my time).

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In addition to the AirTag 2 support, Apple says that today's releases contain additional, albeit unknown bug fixes that are supposed to make your Apple devices run better.

The AirTag 2 costs the same as its predecessor from 2021 (Apple says that it is the most popular tracker in the world). It will set you back $29.99 for a single AirTag or $99.99 for a pack of four. For this money, you get the same coin-shaped device, but this time, it features the second-gen Ultrawideband chip (found in the iPhone 17 series), which increases the detection range by 50%. Also, Apple increased the speaker volume by 50%, making it easier for you to hear your AirTag upon detecting it.

In addition to the new AirTag, Apple today announced new Apple Watch bands to celebrate the upcoming Black History Month. This time, however, no new watch faces were added to watchOS to pair with the announced braided solo loop band.

In case you are not familiar with iOS 26, it supports iPhone 11 Series / SE 2 and newer. iPadOS 26 works on iPads with the A12 and newer processors, and watchOS 26 is compatible with Apple Watch Series 6 / SE2 and newer. You can update your device by heading to Settings > General > Software Update.

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Posted Tuesday 27 January 2026 at 1:32 pm AEST (my time).

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Together, these updates mark a clear change in Apple’s approach to artificial intelligence and how deeply it is willing to integrate advanced models into everyday features.

Siri 2.0 Focuses On Practical Intelligence

Siri 2.0 is expected to ship as part of iOS 26.4 in spring 2026. Rather than reinventing how users interact with Siri, this update concentrates on making the assistant more reliable, context-aware, and useful for daily tasks.

Key improvements reported for Siri 2.0 include better handling of multi-step requests, improved understanding of follow-up questions, and the ability to remember prior interactions during a session. Siri is also expected to become more capable at locating files, pulling relevant information from apps, and helping users organize tasks like reminders and schedules more efficiently.

This version of Siri relies on external AI models while still running within Apple’s privacy-focused framework, acting as a transitional step rather than a full chatbot experience.

Siri 3.0 Brings A Chatbot-Style Experience

Siri 3.0, planned for iOS 27 later in 2026, represents a much larger shift. Internally codenamed “Campos,” this version is designed to behave more like modern AI chatbots, with continuous conversations, typed input support, and improved conversational memory.

Instead of responding to isolated commands, Siri 3.0 is expected to support longer, more natural interactions. Users should be able to reference earlier questions, refine requests mid-conversation, and get more detailed, generated responses rather than short command-based replies.

This update would place Siri much closer to competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini, both in capability and in how users interact with it.

A Phased Rollout Strategy

Apple appears to be deliberately splitting these changes across two releases. Siri 2.0 introduces smarter task handling without radically changing the interface, while Siri 3.0 delivers the more disruptive chatbot experience once the underlying systems are in place.

Siri 2.0 is expected in early 2026, while Siri 3.0 should debut alongside iOS 27, with more details likely to be shared at WWDC in June.

Why This Matters

For years, Siri has lagged behind competing assistants in flexibility and conversational ability. These updates suggest Apple is finally willing to rethink Siri’s role, moving it beyond a basic voice command tool into a more capable AI assistant that can adapt to how people actually work and communicate.

If Apple delivers on these plans, Siri’s evolution across iOS 26 and iOS 27 could be one of the most meaningful platform changes in years, especially for users who rely on the assistant daily.

Do you still use Siri daily? Yes/No?

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Posted Tuesday 27 January 2026 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

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Over the past few months, a steady stream of rumors and leaks has painted an increasingly clear picture of what Samsung has in store for its upcoming flagship devices. The Galaxy S26 series is shaping up to be one worth waiting for. Last year’s Galaxy S25 series was widely viewed as a modest refinement rather than a major leap forward, leaving many customers hoping for more substantial improvements this time around.

As a result, anticipation is high to see whether Samsung will deliver meaningful innovations with the Galaxy S26 phones. Here’s everything we know so far about Samsung’s upcoming flagship series.

When to expect the Galaxy S26 series

Samsung’s first Unpacked event of the year traditionally takes place in the first quarter. While the Galaxy S25 was released in early February last year, recent rumors suggest that the Galaxy S26 series will arrive in late February 2026.

According to a recent leak by Ice Universe, Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy S26 on February 25. The pre-sale period is reportedly scheduled from February 26 to March 4. Official pre-orders are said to run from March 5 to March 10, with the new devices hitting store shelves on March 11.

The Galaxy S26 series is expected to include three models: the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus, and S26 Ultra. As for the S26 Edge variant, there is still no confirmation on whether Samsung plans to launch the ultra-thin model, as last year’s Galaxy S25 Edge reportedly did not perform well in terms of sales.

A design overhaul might be down the road

Samsung has largely kept the design of its Galaxy S-series flagships consistent over the past few years. However, the Galaxy S26 series may receive a modest design refresh this year, potentially aligning more closely with the Galaxy Z Fold 7. The S26 lineup is expected to emphasize thinness and portability, following the design direction seen in Samsung’s latest foldable devices.

A video leaked by @OnLeaks on X shows an alleged Galaxy S26 Ultra dummy unit featuring a camera bump. The design closely resembles that of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and could indicate Samsung’s intention to unify the visual identity of its flagship smartphones. Additionally, images leaked by case manufacturer Thinborne suggest that the Ultra model may adopt more rounded corners.

As for the standard and Plus models, no major design departures are expected compared to their predecessors. The only anticipated changes are a slimmer profile and reduced weight.

Samsung Galaxy S26 rumored specs

This year’s Galaxy S26 is expected to feature a slightly larger 6.3-inch display. Peak brightness and refresh rate are said to reach 2,600 nits and 120Hz, respectively. The device is also rumored to be slimmer, measuring 6.9mm in thickness compared to the Galaxy S25’s 7.2mm profile.

On the hardware side, the Galaxy S26 is expected to be powered by either the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 or Samsung’s Exynos 2600, paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of internal storage. The device is also rumored to pack a larger 4,300mAh battery with support for 25W charging.

As for cameras, the rear setup is expected to include a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP ultra-wide lens, and a 10MP telephoto camera as the standard configuration. A 12MP front-facing camera is also here.

Galaxy S26 Plus rumored specs

With a potential Galaxy S26 Edge absence from this year’s lineup, the Galaxy S26 Plus could receive more market attention, although it may not bring major upgrades over its predecessor. The device is expected to feature a 6.7-inch QHD+ AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate.

The Galaxy S26 Plus is also expected to offer the same hardware options as the standard model, including the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 or Samsung’s Exynos 2600, paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of internal storage. Meanwhile, the device may not become any slimmer, retaining its 7.3mm thickness.

Powering the phone is a 4,900mAh battery with support for 45W charging. In terms of cameras, the Galaxy S26 Plus could feature a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP ultra-wide lens, a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and a 12MP front-facing camera.

Galaxy S26 Ultra rumored specs

The Galaxy S26 Ultra is the crown jewel of Samsung’s flagship lineup this year. The device is expected to feature the same 6.9-inch QHD+ AMOLED display found on last year’s model. However, the S26 Ultra could become slightly slimmer, measuring 7.9mm in thickness compared to the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 8.2mm profile.

The phone is also rumored to launch globally with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. RAM options are expected to include 12GB and 16GB, while internal storage choices may range from 256GB and 512GB to 1TB.

In terms of cameras, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is expected to feature a 200MP main sensor, a 50MP ultra-wide lens, a 10MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom, a 50MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom, and a 12MP front-facing camera. Powering the device could be a 5,200mAh battery with support for 60W charging.

It is worth noting that all Galaxy S26 models are expected to ship with One UI 8 based on Android 16.

What are your thoughts on Samsung’s upcoming flagships? Are you planning to upgrade this year? Let us know in the comments below.

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Posted Monday 26 January 2026 at 11:59 am AEST (my time).

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Last year, Nova Launcher founder and sole developer Kevin Barry announced he had left Branch Metrics, Nova’s parent company at the time — which followed an announcement from 2024 that nearly everyone working on the project had been laid off. But the launcher is getting new life: in a blog post on Tuesday, the Swedish company Instabridge, which makes an app that helps people connect to Wi-FI hotspots, announced it has acquired Nova Launcher.

“Nova is not shutting down,” according to Instabridge. “Our immediate focus is simple: keep Nova stable, compatible with modern Android, and actively maintained.” However, Instabridge says it’s “evaluating ad based options” for the free version of the launcher.” But the newest update for Nova Launcher has trackers for Facebook Ads and Google AdMob in its code and users on Reddit have already reported seeing ads, as reported by Android Authority.

If ads are added to the launcher, the paid experience, Nova Launcher Prime, will “remain ad free.”

Instabridge is also “actively evaluating” open sourcing Nova. When announcing his departure in September, Barry said that he had been “asked to stop working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing effort” even though former Branch CEO Alex Austin said publicly that “If Kevin were to ever leave, it’s contracted that the code will be open sourced and put in the hands of the community.”

“Open sourcing a product responsibly involves licensing, security, build tooling, contribution workflow, and trademark stewardship,” Instabridge says. “We do not have a decision to share yet, but we will be transparent once we do.

Barry tells The Verge he hasn’t yet been contacted by Instabridge about Nova Launcher and potentially open sourcing it. (Regarding the previous commitments from Branch, Barry says that “Contracts are complicated, but the statements and promises made to the community from Alex/Branch are straightforward and haven’t been honored.”) While he says that Instabridge is in a “difficult position,” he thinks that open sourcing Nova “has to be a component” of helping rebuild trust with the community:

It’s complicated to build, maintain and monetize a launcher. I’d love to see them develop Nova completely as a true open source project, but I also understand that might not fit their business. I think the community would be happy to see just a code drop of Nova 8.1 as open source.

 

I already completed the prep work for this. Cleaning the code, removing some dependencies, stripping API keys, etc. Branch legal approved it, and I’m sure Instabridge legal just reviewed everything for the acquisition. The heavy lifting is done. They just need to make a decision. The time to do it is also now. Nova 8.1 is already a bit dated, so users will be eager to see what they can do with Nova 9. But until they make an open source release of Nova, that is going to dominate the community discussion.

 

Even if Nova 9 remained closed source, this would show the community that Nova is in the right hands after all this uncertainty. It sounds like they’re confident in their vision for Nova, so open sourcing 8.1 wouldn’t be a threat. And it would go a really long way with the community.

Instabridge and Branch didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Update, January 20th: Added details from Kevin Barry.

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Posted Wednesday 21 January 2026 at 12:06 pm AEST (my time).

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Asus chairman Jonney Shih told Taiwan’s Inside that the company is done making phones for now, marking the end of its Zenfone and ROG Phone lines.

“Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future,” Shih reportedly said (translated with Google Translate). He didn’t entirely rule out a return though, instead saying the company is entering a state of “indefinite observation” of the market, and that it will “continue to take care of the brand’s mobile phone users.”

Asus’s own-brand phones haven’t been particularly exciting since the teeny-tiny Zenfone 10 in 2023, though its ROG Phone line has more or less been the gold standard for premium gaming phones. It only released two phones in 2025, the big but boring Zenfone 12 Ultra and the ROG Phone 9 FE. Neither came out in the US.

We’ve reached out to Asus for confirmation that it is exiting the smartphone market, but hadn’t heard back in time for publication.

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

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My friend Lilah is the crunchiest person I know.

She refuses to kill bugs and rats. She once made me try her homemade wine (disastrous). A few years ago, she quit her food-justice nonprofit job to live in a yurt, and after that she went to grad school and moved into an attic, where her roommates were squirrels. Against her will, she did own an iPhone for a time. She had no choice: A university administrator explicitly told her she couldn’t perform her studently duties without one. Two-factor authentication and all that.

But Lilah’s Lilah, so upon graduation, she gifted herself a dumbphone. And boy was that phone dumb. Designed for those weaning themselves off the real thing, it connected to Wi-Fi but not to the internet, and it certainly didn’t accommodate apps. Lilah now navigates the world smartphoneless. “I think my main reason for getting rid of it was that I felt like my brain was being consumed,” she recently told me.

Most of my fellow twentysomethings want to go dumb like Lilah. I’m familiar with and sympathetic to the urge: I waste hours a day, and lose hours of sleep, to the tyranny of the scroll. I’m trapped in a shame spiral for spending so much of my precious life watching videos of complete strangers until my eyes sting and my head aches. And, ideologically, I like the sound of withholding personal data from corporations, of not succumbing to ads every time I unlock my home screen.

But I haven’t gone dumb, and the reason is simple: I’m terrified! Ditching my smartphone would be completely disorienting. It would significantly reduce my overall competence. It’s deeply embarassing—it really makes me feel like a giant baby—but I am certain that my smartphone is a part of me. I mean that literally: The panic I feel when I lose sight of it is visceral, existential, as if pieces of my physical body are missing.

This thought is neither insane nor original. Back in 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced their “extended mind hypothesis,” the idea that external tools can extend, in an all but physical way, the biological brain. Checking the Notes app for your grocery list? Using Google Maps to get to a friend’s house? That's not just your phone at work, and it’s also not just your biological brain—it’s a single cognitive system composed of both. Since the age of 14, when I got my first iPhone, my mind has welcomed Apple’s increasingly powerful operating systems and, over the years, fused with them. My phone and I are now totally, completely enmeshed.

But is un-enmeshment a worthwhile pursuit? And is it, as dumbphone users seem to believe, even possible?

In 1985, the late psychologist Daniel Wegner published a theory about intimate human relationships called transactive memory. He argued that long-term couples store information in one another and that their collective pool functions as something of a joint memory card, a single “knowledge-acquiring, knowledge-holding, and knowledge-using system that is greater than the sum of its individual member systems.” This is uncannily—maybe humiliatingly—applicable to my relationship with my iPhone.

At the end of my senior year of high school, I went to the Apple store to replace my worn-out device with a new and improved one. In classic irresponsible-teenage fashion, I hadn’t backed up my data from recent months, so my photos from that school year disappeared. My memories of that period, it turned out, disappeared along with them—a road trip across the South, a friend’s dramatic breakup. I knew, intellectually, that these things had happened. But I had no real feeling for them, no specific images to trigger my recollection.

When one’s close partner leaves, Wegner and his coauthors write, “there will be entire realms of one's experience that merely slip away, unrecognized in their departure, and never to be retrieved again.” I’ve placed blind trust in my smartphone to hold and shape and reinforce my narrative of my past. I’ve unwittingly given myself permission to forget about the family trips and social milestones it has not preserved for me.

Clark and Chalmers, in their paper, reach a similar conclusion: “If we remove the external component,” they write, “the system’s behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain.” So it was just as I’d feared: I was most likely beyond help. My brain had spent its formative years, and continues to spend its adult life, making room for the functions of my phone. The enmeshment is in its late stages. At this point, it’s hard to understand how I could possibly benefit from going dumb.

Many of us find our reliance on smartphones—external devices that we can leave at a bar or accidentally drop in the toilet—worrisome. But Clark was quick to remind me, when we spoke this past summer, that our brains can break too. “You could have a mild stroke or something,” he said. That bleak reality led me to the (perhaps even bleaker) thought that my smartphone may actually be more reliable than my biological brain. I feel a sense of certainty that my brain will one day decline, that it may actually be in the process of doing so as I write this, but it feels unlikely that I’ll one day have to navigate life without a pocket-sized, internet-connected vessel. The quality of the smartphone is moving in the exact opposite direction as my brain—over my lifetime, the capacity of these devices will only grow.

The continued existence and availability of the smartphone, or of the devices that will one day replace them, is also more certain than that of a partner. Our partners leave the house every day to go to work; our partners might even leave us for good; and our partners will, without a doubt, die. My iPhone might shatter into a million pieces, but the software that makes my iPhone uniquely mine lives (in theory) forever. Clark assured me that my feeling of enmeshment is not just normal—it’s by design. Tech companies “have a vision of technologies as potentially mind-extended,” he said. “No doubt about that.”

As much as I’ve fantasized about going dumb, I’ve also fixated on its downsides, in part as an intellectual exercise, but mostly to justify my continued incessant smartphone use. For one, my relationships might suffer. Plans with friends are often made on the fly—would I be left out of those? Conversations frequently begin with a reference to something I’m expected to have encountered on social media, read in a group chat, flinched at in a New York Times alert. How would I keep up? I use an app to activate the laundry machines in my building’s basement—I’d have to start trekking to the laundromat!

It would also, more troublingly, reveal the true capacity of my naked brain. If we truly share a memory system with close, long-term companions, as Wegner argues, and if external tools are just as much a part of the human mind as is the brain, as Clark and Chalmers believe, then the transition from lifelong smartphone user to sudden dumbphone user would result in a profound blow to my mind’s operating system. If I get a dumbphone, I’ll have to face the rudimentary version of myself. And although the true capabilities of my bare-bones brain are a mystery to me, I do know that the change would be a downgrade—Wegner’s description of a breakup between close-knit cohabitating partners sounds similar to how one might describe dementia.

In their original paper, the tool Clark and Chalmers used to illustrate the extended mind was a notebook—they could not have foreseen the omnipresence or multifunctionality of the smartphone. The smartphone has usurped and consolidated power, and its sudden loss could have dire consequences. My next question to Clark was just that: Just how dire? Could it, in a way, be considered a cognitively disabling condition?

Well, yes, he said: “I think that as we move into a future in which the societal norm is very much a kind of mild cyborg of some kind, then to not be that would be to be effectively disabled within that society, or differently abled within the society.” “Interference with my phone,” he added, is “like giving me some brain damage.”

This might help explain why the people who opt into this cognitive state are in a very small minority: In the US, 98 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 own a smartphone. The number only drops a single percent for Americans ages 30 to 49. When enmeshment becomes the norm, where does that leave the un-enmeshed? Most of us are buying into minds that incorporate the smartphone, normalizing this coupled system. Much like someone with a cognitive impairment, dumbphone users are left disoriented by their outsider status. “It’s a real worry, the creation of a disempowered class,” Clark said. “Every time there’s a potential for something roughly like human enhancement, it has this flip side to it, which is, what happens to people that either don’t get it or reject it?”

Many smartphone owners hate—or at least claim to hate—their phones. The internet is full of desperate cries for help from people who “can’t STAND” them, call the devices “invasive,” complain that “everything is dependent on apps.”

But my friend Lilah’s post-iPhone era hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. When I texted her asking what about the dumbphone inconveniences her the most, she replied: “Im gonna text u on my computer when i get home bc long messages r one of them lol.” This particular difficulty—she later wrote to me in the familiar comfort of her Macbook’s iMessage app—often dissuades her from responding to messages altogether, which, she says, has made long-distance friendships nearly impossible to maintain. When she absolutely needs to reply to someone—say, her boss—she’s forced to “sit on the phone for nine minutes to text out my grammatically correct message.” She only sometimes receives group messages. And spontaneity is a bit tricky: “I'm not leaving work thinking, ‘Oh, I should go here,’” she told me during a phone call, “because I can’t. I actually don’t know how to get there, and it’s almost impossible for me to do that.”

And, if I’m being honest, Lilah’s life isn’t even genuinely “post-iPhone.” “I feel like I’m not full feet in,” she admitted, disappointedly. When we recently took a flight together, she flashed the digital boarding pass in her Apple Wallet to the TSA agent and was forced to reveal that she had brought an “emergency iPhone” with her on the trip. Turns out she still needs to own one—her teaching job requires her to use an app to clock in each day.

I’m still jealous of Lilah, though. Assuming her emergency iPhone is only whipped out for true emergencies, she doesn’t end her days having lost hours to Instagram or having accidentally spent a walk in the park browsing the internet. And the switch has come with some unexpected perks: “I’m paying attention to how the interstates connect,” she said, “which is actually kind of interesting and led me down some research into city development.” But Lilah was never as enmeshed as I believe myself to be. “I don’t think I’ve ever had the sense of safety or comfort,” she says of her relationship to her smartphone prior to going dumb.

Clark, to my surprise, expressed some opposition to the movement. “I think our self-expectations as a species have changed to take account of the technology, and that’s just as it should be,” he said. “I’m a little bit concerned about the move towards dumbphones, because I think it is generally a retrograde step.”

I take some comfort in that. For those of us so far gone, whose extended minds exist largely inside of devices that have distilled thousands of tools into one, the solution doesn’t feel clear-cut. I’ve spent my life integrating the iOS interface into my cognitive system—its impact is there to stay, whether I like it or not. My biological brain has grown like tree roots between the spaces in a pavement pattern. Simply removing the pavement would leave gaping holes in the root system. Any relief I’d feel would come with a cost, the satisfaction strictly ideological.

The term “phone addiction” has wiggled its way into the common vernacular and has become a near-universal self-diagnosis among my cohort. But that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m not addicted to my phone. I am my phone. Lilah said it best: It’s consumed my brain. “Phone enmeshment” feels more accurate. If I ditch the device, part of me will vanish with it. I’ll face the unextended version of myself. I’m not sure I care to meet her.

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

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A new investor note details a handful of tech specs for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone or iPhone Fold:

As 9to5Mac notes, Pu expects global smartphone shipments to drop by around 4% in 2026 due to the memory cost crisis. However, Apple is expected to stay immune to the decline and deliver a 2% year-over-year increase in 2026 while shipping over 250 million units.

Apple's inclusion of the N2 silicon, WMCM packaging, and 12GB LPDDR5 memory across the three models is in line with its AI roadmap, per the analyst. These powerups will allow Apple to process more advanced on-device AI workloads, including an upgraded Siri expected to roll out this year.

Only time will tell what Apple has in store for 2026, but several of these features have already been reported, including 12GB RAM and the C2 modem. Rumors around the iPhone 18 series are going in different directions, and Apple is said to follow a bi-annual launch schedule from this year.

At its September event, Apple is expected to unveil the foldable iPhone alongside the Pro models, while keeping the base iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and iPhone Air 2 for the following year.

A recent post from tipster Digital Chat Station leaked the alleged display specs for different iPhone 18 series models, corroborating rumors that the Pro models will be the first to get an under-display Face ID.

However, the post doesn't mention the foldable iPhone, which is rumored to ditch Face ID for a side-mounted Touch ID and do away with the SIM tray. The foldable iPhone is expected to launch anytime between 2026 and 2028, but Apple could save the new form factor for the iPhone's 20th anniversary.

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Posted Friday 16 January 2026 at 5:00 pm AEST (my time).

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Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple’s iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new update, these reports claim, was being installed at dramatically lower rates than past iOS updates. And while we can’t infer anything about why people might choose not to install iOS 26, the conclusion being jumped to is that iPhone users are simply desperate to avoid the redesigned Liquid Glass user interface.

The numbers do, in fact, look bad: Statcounter data for January suggests that the various versions of iOS 26 are running on just 16.6 percent of all devices, compared to around 70 percent for the various versions of iOS 18. The iOS 18.7 update alone—released at the same time as iOS 26.0 in September for people who wanted the security patches but weren’t ready to step up to a brand-new OS—appears to be running on nearly one-third of all iOS devices.

Those original reports were picked up and repeated because they tell a potentially interesting story of the “huge if true” variety: that users’ aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widespread that it’s actively keeping users away from the operating system. But after examining our own traffic numbers, as well as some technical changes made in iOS 26, it appears Statcounter’s data is dramatically undercounting the number of iOS 26 devices in the wild.

We’ve taken a high-level look at all iPhone traffic across all Condé Nast websites for October, November, and December of 2025 and compared it to traffic from October, November, and December of 2024. This data suggests that iOS 26 is being adopted more slowly than iOS 18 was the year before—roughly 76 percent of all iPhone pageviews came from devices running iOS 18 in December of 2024, compared to about 45 percent for iOS 26 in December of 2025.

That’s not as cataclysmic a dropoff as Statcounter’s data suggests, even before considering other mitigating factors—iOS 26 dropped support for 2018’s iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, for example, while iOS 18 ran on every iPhone that could run iOS 17.

But it’s still a much slower rate of adoption than we’re used to for most iOS versions, and it’s something to monitor as we get closer to iOS 27 and Apple’s first opportunity to make major changes to Liquid Glass. And to monitor it, it’s important to be able to measure it correctly. There have been behind-the-scenes changes to iOS 26 that appear to have thrown off Statcounter’s data collection—let’s talk about those, about what our own data shows, and about why you may want to upgrade to iOS 26 soon even if you don’t care for Liquid Glass.

User agent string changes in iOS 26

It turns out that telling an iOS 18 device from an iOS 26 device is harder than it ought to be, and that’s because of a change Apple made to Safari in iOS 26.

Web analytics software (and services like Statcounter) attempt to gather device data by looking at the browser’s user agent string, a short list of information about the hardware, operating system, browser, and browser engine. There are benign and useful reasons to collect this kind of data. If you’re a web developer fielding a ton of user complaints from people who are all using a specific browser or OS version, it can help you narrow down what the issue is and test a fix. You could also use the user agent string to decide whether to show the desktop or mobile version of your site to a user.

But if this information is too accurate or detailed, it can lead to “fingerprinting"—the ability for sites to identify a specific user or specific type of user from their user-agent string. Browser makers have taken steps, both together and separately, to reduce the amount of fingerprinting that is possible.

And occasionally, browsers will intentionally misrepresent their user agent string for compatibility reasons. For example, the default user agent string for Safari running on modern versions of iPadOS claims that the browser is running on top of macOS to make sites rendered on an iPad work more like sites rendered on a Mac. Apple froze the macOS version in Safari’s user agent string to 10.15.7 several years ago, partly to reduce fingerprinting and partly to resolve compatibility problems that some sites had when Apple put “macOS 11” in the user agent string after decades of macOS 10.

All of this is to say: information derived from the user-agent string is only as accurate as the OSes and browsers that are reporting their user-agent strings. And in iOS 26, Apple decided to freeze the iOS version in Safari’s user agent string to version 18 in order to reduce fingerprinting (credit to developer and blogger Niels Leenheer, who both explained this change and confirmed with Apple engineer Karl Dubost why it was made).

Which explains why anyone looking at Statcounter’s data could draw incorrect conclusions about iOS 26 adoption: because most iOS users are running Safari, and because all Safari versions running on iOS 26 are claiming to be running on iOS 18.6 or 18.7 instead.

Only third-party browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are reporting an iOS version of 26 in their user agent strings, so what Statcounter is inadvertently measuring is the number of Chrome users who have updated to iOS 26, not the total number of users who have updated.

What our data says

There is a workaround for this, at least for iOS. Safari on iOS 26 will report an iOS version of 18.6 or 18.7, but it also reports a Safari version of 26.x. This isn’t as useful on macOS, where Safari 26 could be running on macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, or macOS 26 Tahoe. But on iOS, Safari 26 only runs on iOS 26, so it’s a useful proxy for identifying the operating system version.

For these stats, we’ve grouped together all devices claiming to run Safari 26 on an iPhone, regardless of whether the underlying iOS version is listed as 18.x or 26.x (some apps or third-party browsers using Apple’s built-in WebKit engine can still identify themselves as “Safari,” though Chrome, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox at least report their own user-agent strings). We’ve compared those numbers to all devices claiming to run Safari 18 on iPhones claiming to run iOS 18. This does screen out users running third-party browsers on iPhones, but Statcounter data suggests that the ratio of Safari to Chrome users on iOS hasn’t changed much over that period.

What’s interesting is that for October 2024 and October 2025—the first full month that iOS 18 and iOS 26 were available, respectively—adoption numbers don’t look all that different. About 25 percent of iPhone pageviews across all Condé Nast were served to devices running Safari on iOS 18, compared to 22 percent for iOS 26 the following year. That is a step down, but it suggests that early adopters weren’t repelled en masse by Liquid Glass or anything else about the operating system.

But the gap widens over the next two months, which does suggest that “normal” users aren’t in a rush to get the update. By December 2024, our data shows that 76 percent of iPhone Safari pageviews were going to iOS 18 devices, compared to just 45 percent for iOS 26 in December 2025.

Adoption of new iOS versions does plateau after a while. Adoption of iOS 18 hit 80 percent in January 2025, according to our data, and then rose more slowly afterward, peaking at around 91 percent in August 2025. Those stats are in the same ballpark as both Statcounter data (78 percent as of August 2025) and the last stats Apple has published (82 percent of all iPhones as of June 2025) for iOS 18. (We’ve asked the company if it has any updated internal stats to share and will update the article if we receive a response.)

We’ll see where iOS 26 eventually settles. If I’m Apple, I’m a bit less worried about slower adoption as long as iOS 26 eventually hits that same 80 to 90 percent range. But if usage settles significantly below that historical watermark, it could signal a more lasting negative response to the iOS 26 update that needs to be addressed in future versions.

Why it’s time to take the plunge, even if you don’t like Liquid Glass

Apple’s most recent security updates for iOS 18 are only available for phones that can’t run iOS 26 at all, like the

iPhone XR. That means it’s probably time to install iOS 26 even if you don’t like Liquid Glass.

Credit: Samuel Axon

However you feel about Liquid Glass, we’re getting to the point that upgrading is going to become necessary for people who want security patches and functional fixes for their phones.

For a short time after each new iOS version is released, Apple continues to provide security patches for the previous version of iOS, for people who would rather wait for early bugs in the new OS to be patched. The company started this practice in 2021, when it provided security patches for iOS 14 for a couple of months after the release of iOS 15. But those patches don’t last forever, and eventually devices that can upgrade to the new operating system will need to do it to stay patched.

Apple never formally announces when these security updates have stopped, but you can tell by looking at the company’s security updates page. The iOS 18.7, 18.7.1, and 18.7.2 updates all apply to the “iPhone XS and later.” But the iOS 18.7.3 update released on December 12, 2025, only applies to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. It’s a subtle difference, but it means that Apple is only continuing to patch iOS 18 on devices that can’t run iOS 26.

This is standard practice for iPhones and iPads, but it differs from the update model Apple uses for macOS—any Mac can continue to download and install security updates for macOS 14 Sonoma and macOS 15 Sequoia, regardless of whether they’re eligible for the macOS 26 Tahoe upgrade.

If you skipped the early versions of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 because of Liquid Glass, the good news is that Apple provided options to allow users to tone down the effect. The iOS 26.1 update added a “tinted” option for Liquid Glass, increasing the interface’s contrast and opacity to help with the legibility issues you’ll occasionally run into with the default settings. The company also added opacity controls for the lock screen clock in iOS 26.2. Personally, I also found it helpful to switch the Tabs view in the Safari settings from “Compact” to “Bottom” to make the browser look and act more like it did in its iOS 18-era iteration.

Those settings may feel like half-measures to hardcore Liquid Glass haters who just want Apple to revert to its previous design language. But if you’ve got a modern iPhone or iPad and you want to stay up to date and secure, those toggles (plus additional controls for motion and transparency in the Accessibility settings) may at least ease the transition for you.

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Posted Friday 16 January 2026 at 12:05 pm AEST (my time).

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As spotted by Leo on X, Google is testing agentic capabilities and Gemini integration for Chrome on Android.

This claim is based on new references spotted on Chromium, which is the source code of Chrome.

"Binary size is increased because this change brings in a lot of code to support Chrome Glic, which will be enabled in Chrome Android in the near future," an engineer working for Google explained in a Chromium post.

While it doesn't tell us how Gemini will be integrated into Chrome for Android, it suggests that the feature is indeed being considered.

For those unaware, "Glic" is the codename of Gemini in Chrome.

How does Google plan to integrate Gemini into Chrome for Android

I wouldn't be surprised if the integration is similar to Copilot in Edge for Android.

For example, you might see a floating button to summarize the website using Gemini or ask a follow-up question.

On desktop, Gemini uses the content of open tabs to provide contextual help, such as summarizing pages and comparing information.

It's worth noting that Gemini in Chrome desktop is not widely available. If you've access, you can open Gemini on a desktop using Alt + G on Windows and Ctrl + G on Mac.

It's unclear when Gemini will begin rolling out in Chrome for Android, but we're expecting an official announcement soon.

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Posted Thursday 15 January 2026 at 6:42 pm AEST (my time).

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The company announced that you can now tweak your Instagram algorithm by choosing which topics you want to see and which ones you don't. It looks like the closest thing to one of the requests from our Instagram features wishlist.

The feature called "Your Algorithm" is starting with Reels, but the topics you choose will reflect across your feed and Explore tab in the future. Instagram has been testing Your Algorithm for a while now, following CEO Adam Mosseri's announcement of the feature in September last year.

You can start tweaking your Instagram algorithm from the Reels user interface. Open any Reel in the app, and you'll find a new button (with lines and hearts) to access the Your Algorithm page. Here you'll find AI-summarized tags to pick "What you want to see more of" and "What you want to see less of."

You can tap on the "Add" button to enter the topics manually. At the top of the page, Instagram will also mention what topics you're currently exploring. The topics you pick will also appear in the bottom left corner of the Reels interface above your handle name.

Your Algorithm is rolling out to users in most countries and regions where Instagram is available; however, it's currently limited to English. The feature builds on Instagram's existing efforts to give users some control over their content, such as resetting their Instagram algorithm for a fresh start.

However, it may not be out of the blue as its parent Meta runs into legal troubles time and again. A Dutch privacy group sued Meta last year for failing to give users the choice to permanently opt out of its algorithmic feeds.

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Posted Wednesday 14 January 2026 at 5:51 pm AEST (my time).

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