iOS 27’s Call Context feature is shaping up to be one of the most useful additions in Apple’s fall software update. The Phone app will automatically show confirmation codes, reservation details and other relevant info whenever you call a business.

The feature works by pulling information straight from your Mail app, saving you the hassle of digging through your inbox in the middle of a customer service call. And Apple processes all of this locally, without sending anything to the cloud or a third party.

July 27, 1955: Joanna Hoffman, who will join the original Macintosh and NeXT teams and become Steve Jobs’ first right-hand woman, is born in Poland.

Six months younger than Jobs, the marketing executive is one of the few people willing and able to stand up to the oftentimes fierce Apple co-founder during the first part of his career.

Remember usbliter8, the unpatchable iPhone exploit we told you about last month? Now, a lawsuit has gotten the whole thing offline, thanks to a court order.

Digital forensics firm Magnet Forensics says a former engineer stole its confidential iPhone-hacking research and gave it away to a rival company. That rival company — Paradigm Shift — then published the research as an original discovery. 

Apple’s plan to source memory chips from China could be running into serious trouble. Micron, the only major memory chip maker in the United States, is lobbying the White House to shut it down.

The clash pits Apple’s push for cheaper memory against fears of hollowing out America’s chip industry. And now, it’s up to the Trump administration to pick a side.

A year after debuting in the US, Apple is expanding AppleCare One to four more countries. This includes the UK, France, Germany and Australia.

With AppleCare One, you can protect multiple Apple devices through a single monthly subscription.

Apple will reportedly enter the smart glasses market in 2027, but the company is apparently worried the wearable will tarnish its reputation for protecting privacy. The cameras built into rival devices face criticism, and a new report describes Apple’s efforts to avoid the controversy.

Unfortunately, many of its options would block the feature that makes smart glasses most interesting to me.

July 26, 2005: Apple debuts the opaque white iBook G4, the last of its laptops to launch under the iBook name.

The portable computer adds Apple’s scrolling trackpad for the first time. It also incorporates Bluetooth 2.0 as a standard feature, and becomes the last Apple laptop with a PowerPC chip.

Persistent rumors leave little room for doubt that Apple will finally build a touchscreen into a MacBook, burt that’s only one of the significant changes we can look forward to. It could launch as early as this fall as the biggest revamp to macOS notebooks since 2020.

It’s important enough that there’s speculation the device could be the first MacBook Ultra, not simply another MacBook Pro version.

Here’s what the latest rumors say about the touchscreen MacBook.

July 25, 1989: Apple suffers a major setback in its copyright-infringement lawsuit against Microsoft for allegedly stealing the Mac’s “look and feel” to create Windows.

Apple sued Microsoft on 189 counts of copyright infringement relating to Windows 2.0.3. The judge overseeing the case throws out 179 of them. This paves the way for Microsoft’s dominance over Apple in the coming decade.

Rosetta Stone Sapphire builds on the language learning tool’s classic Dynamic Immersion method with a handful of modern upgrades.

New users can try Rosetta Stone’s latest tech to learn up to 25 languages with a one-year subscription to Sapphire for just $127.20 — a 20% discount off the regular price.

As a Mac user, Apple Mail seems like the obvious email client. It comes installed on every Mac, costs nothing and works with practically every email provider. Yet I prefer using Mimestream’s native macOS app to manage my email.

That’s not because Apple Mail is a bad app. The problem is that Apple Mail treats Gmail like any other email service. Mimestream doesn’t, and that makes all the difference.

Apple seems to be squeezing its display suppliers hard this year. The company is reportedly asking for approximately a 20% price cut on iPhone 18 Pro Max OLED panels, even though the screens are getting harder to make.

Apple’s per-panel costs usually go down with each new iPhone generation, but that’s a steeper drop than usual.

You can turn multiple Live Photos shot on your iPhone into a video. Simply select a group of Live Photos taken in a burst, and you can create a single, stitched-together video that you can save to your library and share on social media. It’s a much more accessible way to enjoy those little snippets of video. 

Here’s how it’s done.

Lil’ Finder Guy stands “barely an apple tall,” but the Apple mascot started as something even smaller: a sketch.

Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at Cupertino’s creative process, an Apple art director revealed early sketches and a prototype behind Lil’ Finder Guy in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. Although the post quickly disappeared, the images showed just how much craft went into a character built to sell a budget Mac.

Primate Labs released Geekbench 7, the first major update to its widely used cross-platform benchmarking suite in three years. The new version introduces redesigned CPU and GPU workloads intended to better reflect how modern applications use today’s hardware, with a greater emphasis on handling video and playing games.

Because the latest version uses a new scoring system, benchmark scores made with the new app can’t be compared with one made with Geekbench 6. So every device needs to be retested.

July 24, 2006: The world gets its first glimpse of Apple’s new wireless Mighty Mouse, a multibutton Bluetooth device with super-accurate laser tracking.

Photos of the accessory come to light through an Apple filing with the Federal Communications Commission. Apple will launch the device the very next day.

If you have a hard drive full of journal entries, blog posts or lecture notes that you’ve always thought could become a book, the Concepts of a Book AI Book Architect gives you a structured way to turn them into one.

And right now, this AI book-writing tool costs just $19.99 (regularly $49).

Out of the many dozens of options, which is the coolest Apple Watch face? Every time I see someone wearing an Apple Watch, I try to scope out which watch face they use. Nine times out of 10, they use either the Modular face or the Photo face (with a Sport band).

This is despite the Apple Watch offering dozens of watch faces, allowing for all kinds of customizability.

If you want to spice up and individualize your Apple Watch, here are the best and coolest faces. And in our video, I rank every watch face on a tier list.

Overwhelmingly positive first impressions of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 bode extremely well for Apple, which is prepping to launch a folding iPhone with a similar design.

People who went hands-on with the Z Fold8 after its Wednesday launch praise the device’s wide, compact form factor, which makes it easy to carry and improves the content consumption experience.

That’s great news for the upcoming folding iPhone, possibly called the iPhone Fold or the iPhone Ultra, which reportedly will arrive later this year.

July 23, 2012: Looking for the perfect spokesman for its new virtual assistant Siri, Apple turns to the director behind some of Hollywood’s most violent gangster movies. A new ad shows Martin Scorsese using Siri voice commands on his iPhone to juggle his busy schedule.

One in a string of celebrity-studded ads showcasing Apple’s recently released virtual assistant, it ranks among the best. However, it seriously oversells Siri’s skills.

A recent poll of Cult of Mac readers found very broad support for iPadOS, but a small group remains deeply dissatisfied with the iPad’s software. And while Apple certainly can’t make everyone happy, it could significantly shrink the number of complaints by adding one app. One very long-overdue app.

It’s time for Apple to finally do what developers have wanted for so many years: Bring Xcode to iPad.

Apple is already cooking up a MacBook Neo 2. The budget laptop’s successor is tipped to feature a faster chip and a healthy memory bump.

The upgrade would fix the biggest complaint about the current model.

Shopping for a new iPhone or Mac will apparently soon come with built-in AI help. Apple is working on a new shopping assistant for the Apple Store app that will use artificial intelligence to answer questions and guide purchases.

The question now is, are shoppers ready for that?

Built for job hunters looking to land a new position fast, DashResume can blast out ATS-friendly resumes, optimize applications for specific positions, and create unlimited cover letters.

This time-saving tool can give you a leg up on the competition, at a time when you need all the advantages you can get. Even better, this affordable resume maker gives you all those job-seeking tools for a one-time payment of just $39.99 (regularly $139).

Copy something, and the iOS 27 paste shortcut now pops up right above your keyboard, ready in a single tap.

The new shortcut shows a live preview of your clipboard, meaning you’ll always know exactly what you’re about to paste, whether it’s text, a link, or a photo.