More than 30,000 Python developers from around the world answered questions for the Python Software Foundation's annual survey — and PSF Fellow Michael Kennedy tells the Python community what they've learned in a new blog post. Some highlights: Most still use older Python versions despite benefits of newer releases... Many of us (15%) are running on the very latest released version of Python, but more likely than not, we're using a version a year old or older (83%). [Although less than 1% are using "Python 3.5 or lower".] The survey also indicates that many of us are using Docker and containers to execute our code, which makes this 83% or higher number even more surprising... You simply choose a newer runtime, and your code runs faster. CPython has been extremely good at backward compatibility. There's rarely significant effort involved in upgrading... [He calculates some cloud users are paying up to $420,000 and $5.6M more in compute costs.] If your company realizes you are burning an extra $0.4M-$5M a year because you haven't gotten around to spending the day it takes to upgrade, that'll be a tough conversation...

Rust is how we speed up Python now... The Python Language Summit of 2025 revealed that "Somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of all native code being uploaded to PyPI for new projects uses Rust", indicating that "people are choosing to start new projects using Rust". Looking into the survey results, we see that Rust usage grew from 27% to 33% for binary extensions to Python packages... [The blog post later advises Python developers to learn to read basic Rust, "not to replace Python, but to complement it," since Rust "is becoming increasingly important in the most significant portions of the Python ecosystem."]

PostgreSQL is the king of Python databases, and only it's growing, going from 43% to 49%. That's +14% year over year, which is remarkable for a 28-year-old open-source project... [E]very single database in the top six grew in usage year over year. This is likely another indicator that web development itself is growing again, as discussed above...

[N]early half of the respondents (49%) plan to try AI coding agents in the coming year. Program managers at major tech companies have stated that they almost cannot hire developers who don't embrace agentic AI. The productive delta between those using it and those who avoid it is simply too great (estimated at about 30% greater productivity with AI).
It's their eighth annual survey (conducted in collaboration with JetBrains last October and November). But even though Python is 34 years old, it's still evolving. "In just the past few months, we have seen two new high-performance typing tools released," notes the blog post. (The ty and Pyrefly typecheckers — both written in Rust.) And Python 3.14 will be the first version of Python to completely support free-threaded Python... Just last week, the steering council and core developers officially accepted this as a permanent part of the language and runtime... Developers and data scientists will have to think more carefully about threaded code with locks, race conditions, and the performance benefits that come with it. Package maintainers, especially those with native code extensions, may have to rewrite some of their code to support free-threaded Python so they themselves do not enter race conditions and deadlocks.

There is a massive upside to this as well. I'm currently writing this on the cheapest Apple Mac Mini M4. This computer comes with 10 CPU cores. That means until this change manifests in Python, the maximum performance I can get out of a single Python process is 10% of what my machine is actually capable of. Once free-threaded Python is fully part of the ecosystem, I should get much closer to maximum capacity with a standard Python program using threading and the async and await keywords.
Some other notable findings from the survey:

• Data science is now over half of all Python. This year, 51% of all surveyed Python developers are involved in data exploration and processing, with pandas and NumPy being the tools most commonly used for this.

• Exactly 50% of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience! And 39% have less than two years of experience with Python (even in hobbyist or educational settings)...

• "The survey tells us that one-third of devs contributed to open source. This manifests primarily as code and documentation/tutorial additions."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: LibreOffice 25.8 has landed, and while it packs in new features and speed improvements, the biggest headline is who just got left behind. If you are still running Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1, this is the end of the road. LibreOffice will not run on those systems anymore, and there are no workarounds. The suite has slammed the door shut.

For years, LibreOffice kept older Windows users afloat while Microsoft and other developers moved on. That lifeline is gone. Anyone stubbornly clinging to Windows 7 or 8 now has two choices: upgrade or stay stuck on outdated software. LibreOffice has made it clear that it will not carry dead platforms any further. And the cuts do not stop there. 32-bit Windows builds are on their way out, with deprecation already in place. On the Mac side, 25.8 is the last release that runs on macOS 10.15. Starting with LibreOffice 26.2, only macOS 11 and newer will be supported. In other words, if your computer is too old to run modern systems, LibreOffice is walking away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Margaret Boden, a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who used the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, died on July 18 in Brighton, England. She was 88. Her death, in a care home, was announced by the University of Sussex, where in the early 1970s she helped establish what is now known as the Center for Cognitive Science, bringing together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and philosophers to collaborate on studying the mind.

Polymathic, erudite and a trailblazer in a field dominated by men, Professor Boden produced a number of books -- most notably "The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms" (1990) and "Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science" (2006) -- that helped shape the philosophical conversation about human and artificial intelligence for decades. "What's unique about Maggie is that she's a philosopher who has informed, inspired and shaped science," Blay Whitby, a philosopher and ethicist, said on the BBC radio show "The Life Scientific" in 2014. "It's important I emphasize that, because many modern scientists say that philosophers have got nothing to tell them, and they'd be advised to look at the work and life of Maggie Boden."

Professor Boden was not adept at using computers. "I can't cope with the damn things," she once said. "I have a Mac on my desk, and if anything goes wrong, it's an absolute nightmare." Nevertheless, she viewed computing as a way to help explain the mechanisms of human thought. To her, creativity wasn't divine or a result of eureka-like magic, but rather a process that could be modeled and even simulated by computers. "It's the computational concepts that help us to understand how it's possible for someone to come up with a new idea," Professor Boden said on "The Life Scientific." "Because, at first sight, it just seems completely impossible. God must have done it." Computer science, she went on, helps us "to understand what a generative system is, how it's possible to have a set of rules -- which may be a very, very short, briefly statable set of rules -- but which has the potential to generate infinitely many different structures." She identified three types of creativity -- combinational, exploratory and transformational -- by analyzing human and artificial intelligence.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned.

Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'"

In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.

The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."

IBM's legendary Model M keyboard was sturdy and solid. But "What would happen if you took the classic layout and look of the Model M and rebuilt it with modern mechanical guts?" asks long-time Slashdot reader uninet. Writing for the long-running tech blog Open for Business , they review a new wireless keyboard from Vortex that was clearly inspired by the Model M: The result is a unique keyboard with one foot in two different decades... Let's call it the Vortex M for simplicity's sake.

I first became aware of it on a Facebook ad and was immediately fascinated. It looked so close to the original Model M, I wondered if someone else had gotten access to an original mold and was trying Unicomp's game. No, they've just managed to copy the aesthetic to a nearly uncanny level... The Vortex M eschews the normal eye candy we expect on modern keyboards and attempts the closest duplication of IBM's staid early PC design sensibility I can imagine. Off-white, rugged and absolutely no frills of lighting. If you're looking for cutesy, forget it.

The keyboard's casing has the same highly textured plastic that looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who spent too many hours interacting with early PCs. Model M to a tee. The keycaps likewise look the part... The Vortex M looks like a Model M. Its build quality feels like a Model M. But one key press and it becomes clear this is a different beast. Underneath the Model M-styled skin, Vortex's keyboard is a very modern design — everything the Unicomp is not. For our test, Vortex provided a keyboard with Cherry MX Blues, the classic clicky option the company and I both thought would best match up against Model M's buckling springs...

Vortex's product configurator offers a variety of common and less common Cherry and Gateron options, if you want to get a different sort of feel in lieu of the clicky I tested. This is possible with an MX switch-style keyboard and impossible with buckling springs with their one option of bold clicky. Not only can this be done when ordering, but also later on, thanks to hot swap switches that allow changes without soldering. Following the modern premium board theme, Vortex paired high end switches with a gasket mount and foam padding. The combination provides a solid feeling, sound dampened typing experience. Ironically, though, for a keyboard that apes the design of perhaps the loudest keyboard on the market today, the Vortex M is (relatively) quiet even with the clicky Blues on tap...
The review's highlights:

• "The keyboard is exquisitely crafted to look like the IBM original... "

• "The Vortex M supports connecting to three different devices via Bluetooth, along with a 2.4 GHz receiver and a USB Type-C wired connection. "

• There's a full complement of media hot keys — "including an emoji key ala recent Macs. "

• "For repetitive tasks, the keyboard is programmable with macros... And unlike Unicomp's boards, Vortex's can switch between PC and Mac layouts with the press of a hotkey."

• The keyboard uses AA batteries rather than having a built-in rechargeable battery

The keyboard ultimately gave the reviewer some cognitive dissonance. "How am I typing on a Model M and not making a racket...?"

"Pricing varies based on options, but as tested, it clocked in at $154. That's the low end of the 'premium' market and this is an exceptional board for that price."

Apple reported its strongest quarterly revenue growth since 2021, with iPhone sales jumping 13% and total revenue up 10%. CEO Tim Cook also announced increased AI investments and hinted at future acquisitions to accelerate Apple's AI roadmap. CNBC reports: "It was an exceptional quarter by any measure," Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Steve Kovach. Cook said that about 1% of the company's 10 percentage points of revenue growth could be attributed to customers buying more products to get ahead of potential tariffs. The company's most important business remains the iPhone, which saw 13% growth on an annual basis during the quarter to $44.58 billion in sales. Cook said that iPhone revenue was strong because the iPhone 16 is more popular compared to the iPhone 15 devices on sale last year at the same time. Cook said iPhone 16 sales were up "strong double digits" versus its predecessor. Cook specifically highlighted popularity among current iPhone users upgrading to a new one.

Apple's Mac business grew the fastest of any of Apple's units during the June quarter, growing nearly 15% to $8.05 billion in revenue. Apple released updated MacBook Air laptops, its best-selling Mac, just before the quarter started. The company's services business, which includes the company's warranties, content subscriptions, licensing deals with Google, and iCloud continued to grow to $27.42 billion in the period, a 13% increase. Cook highlighted growth in the company's iCloud subscriptions and said App Store revenue grew "double digits" during the quarter.

The two tougher spots in Apple's report were iPad sales and the company's other products division, which it sometimes calls its wearables. It consists of Apple Watch, AirPods, and other accessories. Revenue for iPad was down 8% to $6.58 billion, despite the company launching a low-cost iPad in March. Apple's wearables unit declined 8.64% to $7.4 billion during the quarter. Apple also saw success in China during the quarter, with sales rising 4% on an annual basis to $15.37 billion. Apple reports its sales from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the same unit. It's a reversal from the past two quarters, where Apple's China sales declined 2% in Apple's second fiscal quarter and 11% in the first quarter. Cook said a Chinese subsidy for some devices helped Apple in the region. "The subsidy does apply to some of our products, and it clearly helps," Cook said.

Microsoft today launched Copilot Mode, an experimental feature that transforms Edge into an AI-powered browser experience. Available free for a limited time on Windows and Mac in markets where Copilot operates, the mode places AI at the center of web browsing through a single input interface combining chat, search, and navigation.

The feature enables Copilot to view content across all open browser tabs, handle voice commands, and assist with tasks like comparing websites. Future capabilities will include booking reservations and managing errands through natural language commands. Microsoft has not specified when the free trial ends, though the feature will likely require a Copilot Pro subscription afterward.

Mozilla will ship WebGPU support in Firefox 141 when the browser launches July 22, bringing graphics processing capabilities that Chrome users have had since 2023. The initial release supports Windows only, with Mac, Linux, and Android planned for the coming months.

WebGPU provides web content direct access to graphics processors for high-performance computation and rendering in games and complex 3D applications. Chrome gained WebGPU support with version 113 in 2023, while Safari 26 is expected to add the feature this fall. Firefox's implementation uses the WGPU Rust crate, which translates web requests into native commands for Direct3D 12, Metal, or Vulkan.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it's a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you're a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here's a list of key features and changes in this release:

- Vulkan backend replaces OpenGL (faster, smoother UI)
- Adaptive subdivision up to 14x faster with multithreading
- New Geometry Nodes: Camera Info, Instance Bounds
- GPU-accelerated compositor nodes with standardized inputs
- New Boolean solver: Manifold (cleaner, faster mesh operations)
- UV maps visible in Object Mode + improved selection behavior
- Grease Pencil render pass and Geometry Nodes integration
- Improved file import support: PLY, OBJ, STL, CSV, VDB
- Deprecations: Collada, Big Endian, legacy .blend, Intel Mac support
- Cycles OptiX now requires NVIDIA driver v535+
- New shader variants for add-on developers (POLYLINES_*, POINT_*)
~500 bug fixes across all major systems

Apple added the 2013 "Trash Can" Mac Pro to its vintage products list alongside the 2019 13-inch MacBook Air, 2019 iMac, 2018 iPad Pro models, and the 128GB iPhone 8. The cylindrical Mac Pro remained on sale until December 2019, when Apple replaced it with the redesigned "Cheese Grater" model.

Products typically reach vintage status five years after their last distribution date. The 2013 Mac Pro's radical cylindrical design prevented internal component upgrades and created thermal limitations that Apple acknowledged in 2017. "I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner," Apple hardware chief Craig Federighi said at the time.

Apple also moved several AirPort devices to its obsolete list, including the second-generation AirPort Express and AirPort Time Capsules. The 2013 Mac Pro's radical design created thermal limitations that Apple acknowledged in 2017.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant's lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows' user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.

This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support -- so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That's because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%. The shrinking Windows user base can be attributed to a combination of factors -- a major one being the global move toward a mobile-first world, where smartphones and tablets are increasingly replacing traditional PCs for everyday computing needs.

At the same time, Microsoft's strict hardware requirements for Windows 11 have alienated users with perfectly functional older machines, prompting some to stick with unsupported versions or abandon Windows entirely. Additionally, many users find Windows 11 less intuitive than its predecessor and are frustrated by Microsoft's push toward data collection and Apple-style design changes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999. "While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

The strings provided the crucial clue Brown needed. After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, he discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image." When found, the code would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data. Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The trick requires users to enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose "Erase Disk" from the Special menu, and type "secret ROM image" into the format dialog. "If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it," Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer's cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, ordered the agencies Wednesday to prepare a proposal for consideration of crypto as an asset for reserves when they assess risks in single-family home loans.

Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that "can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws" are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately. Pulte was sworn in as the head of FHFA in March. Public records show that as of January 2025, Pulte's spouse owned between $500,000 and $1 million of bitcoin and a similar amount of Solana's SOL token. [...]

The policy change is meant to encourage banks to expand how they gauge borrowers' creditworthiness, in hopes that more aspiring homebuyers can qualify for a home loan. It also recognizes that cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional investments, such as bonds and stocks. The agencies have to come up with their proposals "as soon as reasonably practical," according to the order. "This is a big win for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets are," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.

Currently, stock investments are treated as qualifying assets that count toward reserves that banks want borrowers to have. But assets that are more volatile, like individual stocks or crypto, may be discounted by lenders, Fairweather noted. "As long as lenders are appropriately discounting crypto based on volatility, it's fine that crypto investments count toward reserves," she said.

Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, added: "If Fannie and Freddie are going to accept cryptocurrency as collateral, that's a strong incentive for banks to shift their practices. Because people who might otherwise have to sell cryptocurrency to qualify -- and maybe that's a deal-breaker for them now -- under this new policy, they can qualify. It sort of expands the potential pool of eligible buyers."

Apple's iOS 26 introduces Recovery Assistant, a feature that allows users to restore malfunctioning iPhones without requiring a Mac or PC. The system automatically boots devices into Recovery mode when startup issues occur, displaying the message "This iPhone encountered an issue while starting."

Users can then initiate recovery through another Apple device like an iPad, which downloads and installs a newer iOS version onto the malfunctioning iPhone. Apple described Recovery Assistant as "a new way to recover your device if it doesn't start up normally" in release notes for the second iOS 26 beta.

Apple has quietly removed its day-old "The Parent Presentation" video from YouTube. From a report: The Parent Presentation is a customizable slideshow that explains why a Mac is a useful tool in college. [...] Students can customize the presentation slides, and then show it to their parents to convince them to buy them a Mac. In an accompanying YouTube video shared by Apple, comedian Martin Herlihy showed a group of high school students how to effectively use The Parent Presentation. Some users described the ad as "cringe" and "gross."

The first macOS Tahoe beta appears to drop support for legacy FireWire 400 and 800, making it impossible to sync or mount older iPods and external drives that rely on the standard. MacRumors reports: Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app. Of course, this could all end up being a false alarm. It is still early in the macOS Tahoe beta testing cycle, and FireWire support could return in a later beta version, or in time for the final release.

FireWire was primarily developed by Apple, but it was later standardized as IEEE 1394 and licensed for use in non-Apple devices. iPods started to transition from FireWire to USB for data transfer in 2003, so the standard is very outdated, but it would still be the end of an era if macOS Tahoe drops it. The last Mac with a FireWire port was released in 2012, so connecting older iPods and FireWire drives to newer Macs has long required the use of adapters.

Apple software chief Craig Federighi has ruled out bringing macOS to the iPad, amusingly using a kitchen utensil analogy to explain the company's design philosophy. "We don't want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork," Federighi said in an interview. "Someone said, 'If a spoon's great, a fork's great, then let's combine them into a single utensil, right?' It turns out it's not a good spoon and it's not a good fork. It's a bad idea. And so we don't want to build sporks."

The new version of iPadOS, which will ship to consumers later this year, features dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners and a menu bar that is accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement.

Some observers might consider the iPad Pro itself a "convertible" product that blurs the line between tablet and laptop, he said. However, the Mac and iPad serve distinct purposes, he asserted. "The Mac lets the iPad be iPad," he said adding that Apple's objective "has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job." Rather than full convergence, Federighi said the iPad "can be inspired by elements of the Mac" while remaining a separate platform. "I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that's happened a great deal."

Apple announced that macOS 26 "Tahoe" will be the final version to support Intel-based Macs, with future macOS releases running exclusively on Apple Silicon devices (that is, 2020 M1 models and newer). They will, however, continue to receive security updates for a few more years. 9to5Mac reports: In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non-Apple Silicon models of its lineup. macOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac mini for instance. But Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore macOS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years, however. Going forward, the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards, as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1. M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros followed in 2021.

At WWDC 2025, Apple announced a new dedicated Games app coming to Mac, iPhone, and iPad with features like leaderboards, matchmaking, and integration with Apple Arcade. Engadget's Jessica Conditt describes it as "a revamp of Game Center" that behaves "more like a modern gaming hub, a la Xbox or GOG Galaxy." From the report: You can see what your friends are playing and challenge them to specific feats in certain titles. The library tab will include every game you've ever downloaded from the App Store, allowing you to booth them up right there. On Mac, a Games app overlay makes communication tools, audio controls, Bluetooth connections and live battery levels accessible at any time.