Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It’s free!
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Apple Is Quietly Rebuilding Every Mac It Sells
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,
Look at Apple's Mac lineup today, then picture the whole thing swapped out. That is roughly the plan. According to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is getting ready to refresh every single Mac it sells over the next two years, from the cheapest MacBook Air to the Mac Studio sitting under a video editor's desk. Not a spec bump here and a new color there. The entire family, top to bottom.
It is worth saying up front that this is a report, not an Apple announcement, so treat the dates and details as the best current read on Apple's plans rather than a promise. But the shape of it is easy to understand, and it tells you something about where Apple thinks the Mac is going. The short version: people are buying Macs again, a lot of them to run demanding AI work locally, and Apple wants a lineup that can meet that moment. Mac sales are reportedly on track to climb for a third year running.
Click to continue reading Apple Is Quietly Rebuilding Every Mac It Sells
Advertisement
The Next Mac Mini Might Put a Newer Chip in the Cheaper Model
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,
Picture buying the entry-level Mac mini and walking out with a newer chip than the person next to you who paid more. That is the small, strange promise tucked inside the latest report about Apple's tiniest desktop.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is testing a next-generation Mac mini that pairs two chips from two different families: a fresh M6 in the base model, and last year's M5 Pro in the step-up configuration. None of this is official. There's no price, no spec sheet, and no release date attached yet. But if it holds up, it means the cheaper mini would run Apple's newest silicon while the pricier one leans on a chip that's technically a generation behind.
Click to continue reading The Next Mac Mini Might Put a Newer Chip in the Cheaper Model
Apple Upgrade Subscription Sounds Great, Until You See What It Leaves Out
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial,
Apple has a plan for the fact that its gear keeps getting more expensive: let you pay for it a little at a time. Next week the company rolls out Apple Upgrade, a monthly subscription that turns a big one-time hit into a manageable line item on your card. It sounds great. Then you read the fine print, and the catch lands on exactly the people the whole thing was supposed to help.
Here is the setup. Apple's prices have crept up lately, driven in large part by the cost of the memory that all this AI ambition demands, and more increases are expected this fall alongside new iPhone and Apple Watch models. There are even new "Ultra" tiers on the way, an iPhone Ultra and a MacBook Ultra, for people who want to spend more than they already were. Spreading that cost over monthly payments is a genuinely sensible idea. Financing a phone is nothing new, but having Apple do it directly, at the register and online, makes the sticker shock easier to swallow.
Click to continue reading Apple Upgrade Subscription Sounds Great, Until You See What It Leaves Out
Apple’s Cheapest MacBook Is Getting Two Upgrades, and One of Them Actually Matters
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,
The cheapest Mac Apple makes is also the one worth watching. The MacBook Neo showed up earlier this year as a $599 laptop, an almost suspiciously low price for something with an Apple logo on the lid, and it quietly became the machine people started recommending to friends who just need a computer that works. Now, only a few months in, the rumor mill is already sketching out the sequel. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, it comes down to two upgrades.
Those two: a new A19 Pro chip in place of the current A18 Pro, and 12GB of RAM instead of 8GB. Gurman also expects a fresh set of colors to join the current Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. None of this is official yet, so hold it loosely. But it fits the pattern of a company that likes to firm up a good idea once it knows the idea actually works.
Apple Just Won AI (and It’s Not Even Close) (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Videos, Artificial Intelligence,
Apple may have just won consumer AI by being last, and here is the twist that makes it interesting: it did it without having the smartest model. ChatGPT is more powerful. Claude is better at complex reasoning. Apple even leaned on the tech behind Google's Gemini to help train its own models, and after promising a revolutionary Siri back in 2024 and then failing to ship most of it, Apple had every reason to be the company nobody trusted with AI. But while everyone was writing them off, they quietly rebuilt the Siri that had been broken for 15 years, and after spending time with the beta, I think that changes the whole equation.
Click to continue reading Apple Just Won AI (and It’s Not Even Close) (Video)
Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
Every so often Apple ships a feature before it's ready to admit the feature exists. That's what's happening in the macOS 27 beta right now: there's a redesigned, floating Siri interface sitting inside the software, fully built enough to poke at, but switched off so nobody trips over it. If you're the kind of person who reads release notes for fun, you can flip it on yourself with one Terminal command.
Here's the pitch. You select some text, a little icon pops up at the top-left of your selection, and hovering over it opens a compact popover full of things to do with those words. Rewrite. Proofread. "How does this sound?" Summarize into key points. "Edit with Siri." It's Writing Tools and Siri's smarts collapsed into one small, contextual menu that follows your cursor instead of making you dig through a menu bar. The idea is genuinely good. The execution, at least today, is a work in progress.
Click to continue reading Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On
Apple’s Mac Pro Was Supposed to Bury the Mac Studio. It Blinked Instead.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,
Here is the version of the Mac Pro you never got to buy: a tower with a chip so big it would have carried twice the processing cores and twice the graphics cores of the beefiest Ultra chip Apple sells. A machine built to make the Mac Studio look like a warm-up act. Apple designed it, plotted its launch, and then quietly walked away.
That is the picture painted by a new report from Bloomberg's Power On, and it lands with a little extra sting because Apple killed off the Mac Pro entirely back in March. So this is not a story about what is coming. It is a story about the monster desktop that got as far as the drawing board and then lost an argument to a smaller, cheaper box sitting right next to it.
Click to continue reading Apple’s Mac Pro Was Supposed to Bury the Mac Studio. It Blinked Instead.
The iPad mini Is Finally Getting the One Upgrade That Actually Matters
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds, Rumors,
The iPad mini has always been the tablet you actually hold. Not the one you prop on a stand to type an email, but the one you read on in bed, thumb through on the train, or hand to a kid in the back seat. And for two years it has been coasting on the same screen it has had since forever. That is about to change.
Apple is reportedly planning to ship a new iPad mini this October, and for once the update is not just a spec bump. This is the mini's biggest overhaul in roughly five years, and the headline feature is the one thing that matters most on a device you stare at from six inches away: the display.
Click to continue reading The iPad mini Is Finally Getting the One Upgrade That Actually Matters
Apple Tests Recording Genius Bar Visits with AI, and It’s Called Live Notes
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
You know the Genius Bar dance. You explain your problem, the person across the table nods and types, and you spend half the appointment wondering how much of what you just said actually made it into the notes. Apple has an idea about that, and it involves a microphone.
The company is quietly testing something called Live Notes, an AI system that records your support session, transcribes it, and writes a summary the employee can save to Apple's internal files. That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports the pilot is running at a handful of retail stores right now. The pitch is simple: let the Genius actually look at you and fix your phone instead of hammering out notes while you talk.
Apple’s iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate Public Betas Are Here, and Siri Is Finally the Reason to Care
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
For two years, the pitch for a smarter Siri has been a promise about the future. This week the future finally showed up in a form you can actually install: Apple has released the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, which means the overhauled, do-more-for-you Siri is no longer a keynote demo. It is a thing you can put on your phone tonight and argue with over dinner.
If you have been waiting to test-drive Apple's big AI year before committing, this is the moment. The public betas landed after about a month of developer testing, the full release is still coming this fall, and there is a very Apple twist to the timing: the company also kicked off its annual Back to School promotion the same week, so the software you are curious about and the hardware you might buy to run it are both on the table at once.