Hello Windows Insiders,
Today we are releasing new Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds across Beta, Experimental and Release Preview. See your channel release notes here:
With the Apple Watch Series 12 now just two months away, we have created a recap of rumored new features, with some more likely than others.
Below, we have outlined everything rumored so far for the Apple Watch Series 12.
More Likely
New Chip After One-Year Hiatus
While the Apple Watch Series 11, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch SE 3 all contain the same S10 chip as the previous year's models, leaked Apple code showed the Apple Watch Series 12 will get a new chip. It is unclear if the chip will have S11 or S12 branding, but performance improvements are expected either way after a one-year hiatus.
Longer Battery Life
With the Apple Watch Series 12, Apple is focused on longer battery life, according to a known leaker on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Apple says the Series 11 lasts up to 24 hours on a single charge, or up to 38 hours in Low Power Mode.
Touch ID would likely be built into the Apple Watch's side button, enabling users to unlock the device with their fingerprint instead of a passcode.
Even though new Touch ID references were discovered in the code, there is no guarantee that Apple will move forward with this plan. One leaker has denied the rumor, and credible sources such as Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo have yet to mention Touch ID coming to the Apple Watch this year.
Band Sensors
Another sketchy rumor from a leaker known as Kosutami claimed that the Apple Watch Series 12 will have a band with at least one health sensor in it, which would be a first. Health sensors are built into the Apple Watch directly on all existing models.
Apple today provided developers with the fourth beta of an upcoming visionOS 27 update for testing purposes, with the beta coming two weeks after Apple released the third beta.
visionOS 27 can be installed by opening the Settings app, going to Software Updates, and opting into Beta Updates.
visionOS 27 introduces Siri AI, the smarter and more capable version of Siri that's similar in capability to chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. On the Vision Pro, Siri can answer questions about anything the wearer is looking at, and there's a new Siri orb that can be placed anywhere in wearer's virtual space.
Panorama photos can be turned into spatial environments, and there's a new Icelandic Thórsmörk environment that features dramatic mountains, valleys, and glaciers, along with the northern lights. Web Environment support allows developers to create 360-degree environments in Safari for a more native Vision Pro browsing experience.
App windows are now curved to provide a more immersive workspace, and Control Center has been reorganized to make system controls easier to find. Apple added a smaller widget size, and notifications automatically expand when the wearer looks at them.
The fourth developer beta of iOS 27 has references to an iPhone with two batteries, according to Macworld. New Battery Health strings include mentions of multiple internal batteries, instead of a single battery. MacRumors confirmed the mentions are in the beta.
"The batteries in this iPhone are performing as expected."
"The health of the batteries in this iPhone has significantly degraded. An Apple Authorized Service Provider can replace the batteries to restore full performance and capacity."
"The health of the batteries in this iPhone has significantly degraded, and one of the batteries could not be verified as a genuine Apple battery. An Apple Authorized Service Provider can replace the batteries to restore full performance and capacity."
All of the wording in the Settings app on current iPhone models references a single battery, so the plural phrasing is curious.
Macworld speculates the wording references the foldable "iPhone Ultra" Apple is working on. Prior rumors suggest the iPhone Ultra will use two battery cells with 1,921mAh and 2,962mAh capacities for a total of 4,883mAh. Foldable smartphones typically have two batteries, with one located in each half of the device. Apple is likely to use the same design.
The iOS 27 strings suggest the batteries in the iPhone Ultra could be serviceable separately, so a single failing cell could be swapped on its own. An option to replace a single degraded cell could lower repair costs.
Apple's iPhone Ultra is expected to debut this September alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models.
Apple today seeded the fourth beta of watchOS 27 to developers, with the update coming two weeks after the launch of the third beta.
The beta can be downloaded through the Watch app on the iPhone with a free developer account. The Apple Watch will need to be on the charger, connected to Wi-Fi, and have a battery level of 50 percent or above for new software to be installed. The beta is available for all Apple Watch models compatible with watchOS 27 except for the Apple Watch Ultra 3.
watchOS 27 gains Siri AI, the smarter, more capable version of Siri. Siri can hold back-and-forth conversations, plus it has access to general world knowledge and your personal data to answer questions and find information. Siri AI on Apple Watch requires an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, including the iPhone 15 Pro and later.
There's a new Dynamic app grid that highlights Siri suggested apps, and more intuitive Smart Stack Suggestions. You can find your parked car, see pinned messages, get noise alerts, and view identity and transit cards.
Liquid Glass has been updated to improve legibility, and Workout Buddy works on the Apple Watch even when an iPhone isn't nearby. Workout Buddy also gains new metrics like progressive increases to distance, pace, or duration. Apple added a new all-in-one Find My app with support for Precision Finding, and there are performance optimizations that improve battery life.
Apple today provided developers with the fourth beta of macOS Golden Gate, with the update coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third beta.
Developers can download macOS Golden Gate by going to System Settings > General > Software Update. Beta Updates will need to be enabled, and a free developer account is required.
macOS Golden Gate includes multiple design improvements. Liquid Glass opacity has been improved to increase readability, there's a slider for controlling the level of transparency, and changes to shadowing make it easier to tell when a window is active. Apps now have uniform toolbars, edge-to-edge sidebars, and less rounded corners, plus there are fewer icons in menu bars.
Siri has been transformed into Siri AI, a chatbot-style assistant that combines general world knowledge, your personal data, and onscreen awareness to answer questions about anything and find information for you. Siri lives in Spotlight, and you can ask questions with the new Search or Ask interface.
There's also a Siri app where you can chat with Siri and view past conversations, and on newer Macs, you can set a custom voice for Siri with personalized pace and expressivity. Visual Intelligence is now on the Mac so Siri can answer questions about what's on your screen, and a Write with Siri feature lets Siri generate text or give feedback on your writing.
There are AI photo editing tools in the Photos app, AI tab organization in Safari, an option to use AI to automatically update weak passwords in the Passwords app, and a revamped Image Playground app that can generate photorealistic images.
Apple today seeded the fourth betas of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 to developers for testing purposes, with the update coming two weeks after Apple released the third betas.
Registered developers can download the betas from the Settings app on the iPhone or iPad by going to the General section and selecting Software Update.
iOS 27 introduces Apple's smarter version of Siri, Siri AI. Siri AI is a chatbot similar to ChatGPT, incorporating general world knowledge, personal data from apps like Messages and Mail, and onscreen awareness to answer questions and find information for you.
There are new Apple Intelligence features in apps like Photos, Safari, Shortcuts, Wallet, and Passwords, plus Apple added a standalone Siri app that houses Siri conversations. Write with Siri is available systemwide for generating text or offering feedback on your writing, and Visual Intelligence has been relocated to the Camera app with a new Siri mode.
Apple improved the look of Liquid Glass and added a slider for customizing transparency. There are multiple performance improvements to speed up iOS, so everything feels faster, even on older iPhones. Apps launch quicker, AirDrop transfers are faster, the keyboard pops up more quickly, and devices are better at transitioning between Wi-Fi and Cellular to keep you connected.
Apple today seeded the release candidate versions of upcoming iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 updates to developers for testing purposes, with the software coming a week after Apple seeded the fifth betas. The RCs represent the final version of the software that will be released soon should no additional bugs be found.
Registered developers can download the betas from the Settings app on the iPhone or iPad by going to the General section and selecting Software Update.
With iOS 27 set to launch in September, Apple is wrapping up work on iOS 26. According to Apple's release notes, the update includes security fixes and optimized the Spotlight index to prepare for iOS 27.
Apple today provided the release candidate version of an upcoming macOS Tahoe 26.6 update to developers for testing purposes, with the update coming a week after Apple seeded the fifth beta. The release candidate marks the final version of macOS Tahoe 26.6 that will be released to the public if no major bugs are found.
Developers can download the macOS Tahoe 26.6 update by opening up the System Settings app, selecting the General category, and then choosing Software Update. Beta Updates will need to be enabled, and a free developer account is required.
With macOS Golden Gate launching in just a couple months, Apple is likely focusing most of its attention on the new software. We are not expecting any major new features in macOS Tahoe 26.6.
Apple today seeded the fourth beta of tvOS 27 to developers for testing purposes, with the update coming two weeks after Apple released the third beta.
The beta can be downloaded and installed through the Settings app on the Apple TV. A free developer account is required.
tvOS 27 has few new features compared to the other 27 software updates, but it does add a redesigned Podcasts app, options for larger text, and a more responsive Control Center.
AirPlaying to an Apple TV from another Apple device is faster, and apps and animations are smoother. You can also now see AppleCare coverage details in the Settings app.
Apple today provided developers with the release candidate versions of upcoming watchOS 26.6, tvOS 26.6, and visionOS 26.6 betas for testing purposes. The software comes a week after Apple seeded the fifth betas. The RCs are the final version of the software that will be released to the public as long as no bugs are found during this final testing period.
The software updates are available through the Settings app on each device, and because these are developer betas, a free developer account is required.
There's no word on what's in the software as of yet. watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS often get few features in each new beta, with updates primarily focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements.
Four of Apple's retail stores in the U.S. are moving this month, although all of them will only be a short distance from their existing locations.
Apple Queens Center in Elmhurst, New York already moved to a temporary location in the shopping mall on Friday, July 17 while the existing store is remodeled. Apple did not indicate when the existing store will reopen.
Apple Renaissance at Colony Park in Ridgeland, Mississippi is moving to a new spot within the same shopping center on Friday, July 24 at 10 a.m. local time. Apple's new storefront will be located right in front of the Show Fountain.
Apple Briarwood in Ann Arbor, Michigan will be relocating to a new space at the mall on Friday, July 31 at 10 a.m. local time. The entrance to the new, larger store will be in front of The Lawn, a new outdoor space at the mall.
Apple Sports was updated today with support for additional soccer leagues in Asia and Europe, plus the ability to see formations across most soccer leagues. The update arrives just one day after the 2026 FIFA World Cup final between Argentina and Spain.
The new leagues available in the app:
Belgian Pro League (Belgium)
Superliga (Denmark)
Eredivisie (Netherlands)
J1 League (Japan)
Ekstraklasa (Poland)
Scottish Premiership (Scotland)
Swiss Super League (Switzerland)
In the latest version of the app, you can now view formations across most soccer leagues, making it easier to see the starting lineup for each match.
Apple Sports remains available on the iPhone only, with version 4.2 rolling out now.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's decision not to name its former design chief Jony Ive in its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI was likely a deliberate one, shaped in part by the company's relationship with Laurene Powell Jobs.
Apple's roughly 40-page complaint refers only to unnamed "former Apple leaders" rather than calling out Ive, even though he leads design on OpenAI's hardware lineup through his firm LoveFrom, built on the back of OpenAI's $6.5 billion acquisition of his startup io Products. The allegations instead center on former iPhone executive Tang Tan, now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, whom Apple accuses of coaching recruits to bypass security measures and bring Apple hardware into interviews for "show-and-tell" sessions.
In the latest "Power On" newsletter, Gurman notes that Apple's decision likely reflects, at least in part, a genuine absence of evidence against Ive, who is reportedly not closely involved in OpenAI's day-to-day recruiting or engineering. He argues, however, that the relationship between Powell Jobs and Ive was also a significant factor. The two are described as close friends, with Ive having delivered a tribute at Steve Jobs' memorial service in 2011. Powell Jobs was an investor in io Products and remains a supporter of LoveFrom. According to Gurman, naming Ive in the complaint risked straining Apple's relationship with a figure who continues to carry considerable influence within the company.
Gurman cites Apple's June Worldwide Developers Conference as an illustration of that influence, noting that Powell Jobs sat in the front row alongside CEO Tim Cook and his successor John Ternus. He characterizes her placement as a visible show of support for Apple's leadership transition.
Gurman further suggests that the optics of naming Ive directly would have worked against Apple. Tan, he notes, is not widely known outside the industry, whereas Ive spent decades as one of Apple's most recognizable figures. Naming him could have generated public sympathy for Ive and invited criticism that Apple's lawsuit was motivated as much by past grievances as by trade-secret concerns. The lawsuit comes as more than 400 former Apple employees are now reported to work at OpenAI, whose first hardware product is expected to be a portable smart speaker aimed at competing with the iPhone in the long term.
Apple's AirPods Max 2 have hit $449.00 on Amazon today, down from $549.00. This sale is available in four colors and it's the best price we've seen on the headphones since Prime Day.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Free delivery has the AirPods Max 2 arriving around July 25, but Prime members should see same-day delivery options in many locations. We haven't seen the AirPods Max 2 hit their all-time low price since June, so if you've been waiting for a solid deal, today's your chance to save on the headphones.
If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.
Deals Newsletter
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Apple's AirTag 2 is available for the all-time low price of $89.00 this week, down from $99.00. This sale is on the 4-Pack of the AirTag 2, and it's a match of the record low price we last tracked during Prime Day.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
The new AirTag is equipped with a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, enabling the Precision Finding feature to work up to 50% farther away from an item compared to the previous-generation model.
If you're on the hunt for more discounts, be sure to visit our Apple Deals roundup where we recap the best Apple-related bargains of the past week.
Deals Newsletter
Interested in hearing more about the best deals you can find in 2026? Sign up for our Deals Newsletter and we'll keep you updated so you don't miss the biggest deals of the season!
Apple developed two Mac Pro models in recent years that never made it to market, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
In his latest "Power On" newsletter, Gurman revealed that Apple internally developed two unreleased Mac Pro projects codenamed J170 and J190 before ultimately discontinuing the machine altogether.
As for new Mac Pro hardware, there were two additional models developed by Apple that never saw the light of day: J170 and J190. The former was a new Intel Corp. Mac Pro (yes, even when Apple was making its own silicon) to address certain uses. The latter was an M3 Ultra version that was supposed to launch alongside the M3 Ultra Mac Studio in early 2025.
J170 was apparently a new Intel-based Mac Pro, which is notable because Apple had already completed its transition to Apple silicon by the time the project was in active development. Gurman did not specify what "certain uses" the Intel model was meant to address, but its existence suggests Apple explored keeping an x86 option alive for specific professional workflows even years into the Apple silicon era.
J190, meanwhile, was said to be an M3 Ultra-equipped Mac Pro that was supposed to launch alongside the M3 Ultra Mac Studio in early 2025, but Apple shelved it before release. It would have paired the same chip found in that Mac Studio with the Mac Pro's unique-to-the-lineup PCIe expansion slots.
Neither model shipped, and Apple discontinued the Mac Pro entirely this year, ending its 20-year run. The Mac Pro had been left on the aging M2 Ultra chip from 2023 while the Mac Studio continued to receive refreshes, and it was priced roughly double that of a similarly configured Mac Studio despite offering essentially the same performance.
The J170 and J190 cancellations add to a growing list of shelved Mac Pro plans. Apple had also developed "Extreme" chip variants, processors with twice the CPU and GPU cores of Apple's Ultra chips, for a future Mac Pro before winding down those projects over cost and demand concerns.
Gurman said he does not expect Apple to bring back the Mac Pro "anytime soon — if ever." Apple is instead expected to refresh the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra chips as early as this fall.
Security firm Group-IB has identified a new piece of macOS malware in the wild that pressures users into surrendering their passwords via a barrage of fake system prompts.
Dubbed "ClickLock Stealer," the malware needs no exploits and no elevated privileges to work. Instead, the attack depends on the victim pasting a command into Terminal and running it. The command then executes a script, and everything else follows.
Group-IB did not directly observe how victims are lured into pasting the command, but based on the script's behavior, the firm believes it's served through a fake "ClickFix" page posing as a Cloudflare check or browser verification step. Such pages instruct visitors to copy a command and run it in Terminal as a supposed "verification requirement."
Once it's up and running, the script discreetly downloads several modules and shows a terminal-based loading animation mimicking a Cloudflare progress bar with browser verification. If a user declines the initial password dialog that appears, the malware starts locking system usage.
Specifically, the malware kills every visible app every 210 milliseconds while the password prompt remains on screen, and the rest of the desktop stays unusable until the victim gives in. Meanwhile, another loop suppresses macOS security notifications for roughly six hours.
If the user gives up and enters their password, a second, genuine macOS prompt is subsequently forced to the front, asking them to allow access to a Keychain item. Granting it hands over Chrome's "Safe Storage" AES key, which is what the browser uses to encrypt saved passwords and cookies.
With the login password and Chrome's encryption obtained, ClickLock then harvests browser credentials, Keychain data, password manager vaults, and any cryptocurrency wallets, and then sends it all to a Telegram bot. It also installs a hidden backdoor disguised as an iCloud process to give it continual access.
Group-IB says the campaign has been active since May 2026 and has targeted at least 100 victims across 33 countries. More than half of the victims were in Europe.
Apple has already updated macOS to try to defend against this class of attack before it can get underway. In macOS Tahoe 26.4, it added a warning that appears when the user attempts to paste a command into Terminal from a website, chat, or message, and blocks the paste until the user reviews it. (Opera browser also recently added a similar feature.)
In cases where macOS detects known malware, the paste is blocked outright with no override. Still, it should go without saying that no legitimate website will ever ask a user to paste a command into Terminal.
AI workloads are scaling faster than any single infrastructure approach can support — with more models, new agent-driven workloads and surging compute demand driving the need for greater specialization across the stack. To meet this need, Microsoft continues to evolve Azure’s infrastructure, including expanding its AI fleet with AMD’s most advanced AI and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions.
Our approach to AI infrastructure is designed to support the breadth of how AI systems are built and run. We closely work with industry innovators like AMD as well as our own purpose-built silicon and systems to provide customers with a comprehensive, open and heterogenous platform to achieve the best performance, cost and energy efficiency outcomes.
Building on our close collaboration with AMD, Microsoft is bringing AMD’s latest Helios AI platform and next-generation EPYC datacenter processors to Azure. These technologies will power three upcoming Azure offerings: HDv2 VMs for data processing, HXv2 VMs for electronic design automation (EDA) and ND MI455X v7 VMs for AI inference workloads.
Expanded infrastructure for inference, AI data systems and chip design
YouTube Video
Built for AI data systems — Azure HDv2
CPU infrastructure is essential to the performance and efficiency of modern AI systems. AI accelerators depend on high-density, power-efficient CPU compute to process data, coordinate workloads and keep pipelines running at scale. Without this, training jobs don’t have enough data to learn from, and agents don’t have enough capacity to perform tasks on behalf of customers. Azure HDv2 virtual machines are one of our latest offerings designed from the ground up to eliminate these bottlenecks and empower massive agentic workload adoption.
Co-designed with AMD, HDv2 VMs expand Azure’s portfolio of purpose-built solutions for the most demanding CPU workloads from AI customers, including data preparation, search, reinforcement learning and agent coordination at scale. Featuring nearly 500 physical 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPU cores, 4 terabytes of RAM, 32 terabytes of local NVMe storage and 400 Gb Azure Boost networking, HDv2 VMs are built for the workload needs of our most demanding AI customers.
Optimized for silicon design and technical computing — Azure HXv2
The AI era has created tremendous need and opportunity for firms developing the silicon products that power this infrastructure. For this reason, Azure HX virtual machines, launched in partnership with AMD in 2023 and featuring AMD’s unique 3D V-cache technology, have seen significant adoption among silicon design firms working to bring more capable and efficient AI silicon to market. Today, we are announcing the next step in our workload optimized journey for these customers, HXv2.
HXv2 virtual machines build on and extend the strengths of HX. They both continue the differentiation Azure offers for RTL simulation workloads by again employing 3D V-cache technology, while offering significant improvements to single threaded performance and memory. HXv2 VMs will feature 176 AMD 6th Gen EPYC CPU cores with a clock frequency of more than 5 GHz, 50% more addressable cache per core and VM sizes with nearly 2 or 4 terabytes of RAM, helping customers optimize their workloads to memory needs.
Azure HXv2 is also designed to support a broader range of technical computing workloads including scientific simulation, engineering analysis and other distributed memory applications. The significantly increased per VM and per core performance, and the inclusion of 800 Gb InfiniBand, enable large-scale MPI-based simulations and make HXv2 an ideal fit for a wide variety of HPC customers.
AMD, a leading HX-series customer, highlights this impact directly:
“Engineering teams are pushing the limits of simulation, chip design and scientific computing. At AMD, we experience those demands firsthand as we design future AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. Azure HX is an important platform for scaling complex EDA workloads, and we’re excited about Azure HXv2, which is designed to deliver even greater performance and scalability. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Microsoft as we help advance infrastructure for the world’s most demanding engineering and scientific workloads.”
— Mark Papermaster, Executive Vice President and CTO, AMD
The HXv2 also leverages Microsoft’s long-standing collaboration to optimize Synopsys AI-powered EDA solutions on Azure:
“As AI compute continues to push the limits of semiconductor design, our collaboration with Microsoft on the Azure HX-series demonstrates a shared vision for enabling customers to deliver next-generation AI systems with precision and scale in accelerated design cycles. These systems have enabled Synopsys customers to reliably and efficiently leverage cloud-based compute, extending EDA workloads beyond traditional infrastructure constraints so they can meet ambitious development schedules while maximizing design quality and delivering dramatic performance gains.”
— Shankar Krishnamoorthy, Chief Product Development Officer, Synopsys
Production-scale AI inference — ND MI455X v7
ND MI455X v7 is designed for the reasoning, search and agentic workloads behind modern AI services. Powered by the AMD Helios rackscale solution, it expands Azure’s infrastructure options for large-scale inference and is designed to deliver strong performance and efficiency for demanding AI workloads.
Together, these new capabilities expand Azure capabilities while giving customers more flexibility to choose the right compute for each unique AI workflow: from inference, to data systems, to chip design. Customer choice is a core design principle built directly into Microsoft Azure, and we’re excited to bring AMD’s most advanced innovations at production scale.
To learn more about Azure’s high-performance computing and AI infrastructure capabilities, visit Azure.com.
Scott Guthrie is responsible for a set of hyperscale cloud computing solutions and services including Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, generative AI solutions, data platforms and information and cybersecurity. These platforms and services help organizations across the globe solve urgent challenges — and transform for the future.
Apple appears to be testing a hidden popover interface for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta that surfaces Writing Tools and contextual actions whenever the user selects some text.
Spotted by a member of Reddit's r/MacOSBeta community, the floating icon appears at the top-left of the selected text, expanding when the pointer hovers over it to a compact popover of the tools and actions.
Currently, the popover offers the tools Rewrite, Proofread, "How does this sound?" and "Edit with Siri," plus options for creating key points and summarizing text. The contextual actions are based on the content selected, including things like adding contact details, composing a message or email, creating a calendar event, showing a location in Maps, and tracking flights or packages.
The Siri popover is disabled by default in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1. Beta testers found it can be switched on through a private feature flag, but the feature is clearly unfinished. Some of the actions don't respond, suggesting Apple is still building out the underlying functionality.
Adventurous beta users can try it with the following Terminal command, followed by a restart:
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
And to disable the interface, use this command followed by a restart:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
Note that the UI's behavior is inconsistent, and there's no guarantee the interface will make it to the final release of macOS 27 Golden Gate this fall.
DebConf26, the 27th annual
Debian Developer Conference, is taking place at
Santa Fe, Argentina from 20 to 25 July 2026.
Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at the Facultad
de Ingeniería en Ciencias Hídricas (Faculty of Engineering in Water Sciences),
one of the faculties that belong to the Universidad Nacional del Litoral
(National University of the Littoral), to participate and work in a
conference exclusively ran by volunteers.
Today the main conference starts with around 300 expected attendants and over
80 scheduled activities, including 45-minute and 20-minute talks, Bird of a
Feather ("BoF") team meetings, workshops, a job fair, as well as
a variety of other events.
The full schedule is updated each
day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees over the course of the
conference.
If you would like to engage remotely, you can follow the video streams
available from the DebConf26 website for the
events happening in the three main talk rooms: Aula Magna - FADU,
Aula Magna - FBCB and Aula 0.3 - FICH accessible from the DebConf26 homepage.
You can also join the conversations happening inside the talk rooms via the
OFTC IRC network in the
#debconf-fadu,
#debconf-fbcb,
and #debconf-fich3 channels.
Please also join us in the #debconf channel for
common discussions related to DebConf.
You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf26 provided by our
micronews service or the @debian profile on
your favorite social network.
DebConf is committed to a safe and welcoming environment for all participants.
Please see our Code of Conduct page
for more information on this.
Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf26,
particularly our Platinum Sponsors:
Infomaniak and
Proxmox.
This is the latest release of the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules and
their supporting scripts, which convert POD documentation to text and
*roff output.
The major change in this release is a workaround for a groff bug in the
1.24.0 release that breaks compatibility between the .IP and
.TP macros and misrenders .IP by removing all space between
the tag and the text. Ideally groff bugs should be fixed in groff, but
apparently this rendering bug was
introduced intentionally by the groff maintainer to force authors who
were using .IP with text tags to switch to .TP for correct
formatting, allowing future introduction of a semantic distinction between
the two macros. I didn't see a good alternative at this relatively late
date after the release other than changing Pod::Man accordingly.
This will at least work around this problem for Pod::Man users,
although it won't help with existing manual pages.
This release also works around another backwards-incompatible change to
groff that attempts to force the default enabling of hyphenation and full
justification after every occurrence of the .TH macro. The groff
upstream position is currently that the end user should be able to set
registers and strings to override the defaults of hyphenation and full
justification, but the man page author has no control over the defaults
for these settings. Pod::Man ignores the admonishment in groff_man(7) and
overrides these registers anyway to restore its long-standing historic
behavior of always using left justification and disabling hyphenation,
because there is currently no way to change the default without overriding
the new user preference. Should some mechanism be provided in the future,
I'll be happy to adopt it and thus honor user configuration as well.
New in this release is support for an encoding of none, which tells
Pod::Man and Pod::Text to do no character set encoding in their output and
leave the output in Perl's internal representation. This is useful in
combination with output_string() when the output will be used
internally by a Perl program.
Pod::Man also adopts CR as the default fixed-width font instead
of its long-standing default of CW, originally chosen for
compatibility with Solaris. This avoids warnings with newer groff at the
cost of breaking troff (not nroff) output on Solaris 10. I believe this
platform is now sufficiently old, and this use case sufficiently obscure,
that no one will miss it. Solaris 11 and later will render man pages
correctly with troff, and --fixed=CW will restore the previous
behavior.
This release also has a few other bug fixes, particularly for quoting
heuristics in C<> blocks, and various documentation improvements.
Apple is testing a new AI-powered "Live Notes" feature that can transcribe conversations between Genius Bar employees and customers at some of its stores, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The system is currently opt-in, meaning it is only active if both the employee and customer agree to use it.
"The transcript is then added to the employee's iPad as part of the record of the repair session," he said. "The goal is to save workers time and let them focus more on the customer, rather than taking notes throughout the appointment." This article, "Apple Testing New 'Live Notes' Feature at Genius Bar" first appeared on MacRumors.com
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Smaller, community-oriented, open source solutions
News: Haiku ports the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor, GNOME OS makes it easier to test experimental features, FreeBSD removes the last of the GPL code from its base
Questions and answers: Installing software when the root filesystem is full
Released....
Apple once developed "M2 Extreme" and "M3 Extreme" chips for the Mac Pro, but it decided not to release them, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He first reported on this topic in 2022, and he touched on it again in his Power On newsletter today.
"Extreme" chips would have had twice as many CPU and GPU cores as Apple's "Ultra" chips.
"The idea was to offer twice as many graphics and main processing cores as that chip," he said. "In the past, I've called this proposed processor the 'Extreme' chip, which to me is the most sensible Apple marketing name for something above Ultra."
Apple decided not to release the chips due to concerns over higher production costs and limited demand for the Mac Pro, according to Gurman.
Apple's retail store at the Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, Michigan will be relocating to a new space at the mall on Friday, July 31 at 10 a.m. local time, according to a notice on the store's page.
The entrance to the all-new, larger store will be in front of The Lawn, a new outdoor space at the mall.
Amazon today has the AirPods Pro 3 available for $199.99, down from $249.00. This is the best price we've seen on the AirPods Pro 3 since Prime Day ended last month, coming in around $20 higher when compared to that all-time low price, and it's accompanied by a solid deal on the AirPods 4.
Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
This model of the AirPods Pro launched in September 2025 and has 2x better Active Noise Cancellation than the previous generation, better audio quality, a revised fit that's meant to improve comfort and stability, Live Translation for in-person conversations, and heart rate sensing for workouts.
You can also get the AirPods 4 for $99.00, down from $129.00. This is a second-best price on the AirPods 4, which is the base model without Active Noise Cancellation. Amazon provides a July 24 estimated delivery date for free shipping, with faster delivery options for Prime members.
Additionally, you can get the AirPods 4 with ANC on sale for $144.99 right now on Amazon, down from $179.00. Similar to the base model, we haven't tracked a record low price on the AirPods 4 with ANC in months, making today's deal a solid second-best option for anyone shopping for AirPods this summer.
Head to our full Deals Roundup to get caught up with all of the latest deals and discounts that we've been tracking over the past week.
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ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit errors and detect double-bit errors in messages with 2^R-R-1 bits of data. For PC use that means if you want to protect 32bits of data you need R=6 and with 64bits you need R=7. The standard for DDR4 and similar RAM is 72 bits of data width on the bus and Hamming codes to correct single bit errors and detect double bit errors for 65bits of data. The computers we use have 64bits of data so that allows an extra bit that could be an extra parity, I don’t know what if anything is done with this extra bit.
RDIMM vs UDIMM
One point of confusion in such things is the difference between Registered memory AKA RDIMMs [2] and regular PC/laptop memory which is often referred to as UDIMMs. The “register” is just a buffer which due to complex issues that aren’t relevant to this post means that DIMMs can be larger and you can have more DIMMs in a system but latency may be slightly worse. It is technically quite possible to create RDIMMs without ECC (64bits wide instead of 72) but I have never seen a system that used such RAM.
I have used more than a few systems with ECC UDIMMs and I recommend avoiding them if convenient as ECC UDIMMs are expensive on the second hand market while ECC RDIMMs can get very cheap. There are servers with ECC RDIMMs that are very unsuitable for home use (such as dual-CPU 1RU servers which are very noisy) so once they are past the 5 year tax write-off period the server chassis gets sent to ewaste and the RAM goes on the second hand market, the glut of RAM without systems to use it forces the price down.
For the systems most commonly seen there are RDIMM systems with ECC and UDIMM systems without ECC.
Chipkill
If every bit in RAM was independent of every other bit then the basic Hamming code would solve most problems. However multiple bits in the same chip may be affected by the same problem, or one chip on the DIMM might entirely fail. With every RDIMM having 18 or 36 DRAM chips there are 2 or 4 bits per chip. On DIMMs with 36 DRAM chips one chip could fail and have the errors reliably detected with a Hamming code. On DIMMs with 18 DRAM chips one failed chip can’t necessarily be detected with Hamming codes. IBM trademarked the term ChipKill for ECC systems which can cope with a single DRAM chip failing [3]. This is referred to as “Advanced ECC” on Dell and HP servers which require an even number of DIMMs. If anyone knows what coding method is used for “ChipKill” type systems then please let me know.
Systems with advanced ECC also often have features like hot-spare for RAM and RAID-1 type functionality which is interesting but not something most people who read my blog will ever want to use.
The on-die ECC is not a replacement for regular ECC, it’s a mitigation for new problems introduced. My experience of memory errors is that the majority of repeatable errors (where a system would get an error with Memtest86+ or an ECC error report repeatedly) were DIMM seating issues, I could unplug and reinsert the DIMM in question and then the same tests would pass. Those errors would not be affected by on-die ECC.
One thing that concerns me is the possibility of on-die ECC interacting with ECC on the motherboard and reducing it’s effectiveness. I haven’t been able to find out enough about how this works to determine if that’s the case. My concern is that an error of 3+ bits that’s corrected with a basic Hamming code might be more likely to create an error condition that “Advanced ECC” can’t fix than the original error.
Currently the best published research on the effectiveness of ECC on RAM errors is the Google paper published in 2009 which is based on DDR and DDR2 RAM [5]. So I don’t expect that we will see published research about even DDR4 ECC any time soon. I presume that Google and the other cloud providers are still doing such research and providing the information to DRAM vendors under NDA so we have to just hope that the DRAM vendors do what’s required to make things work correctly and allow us to buy products based on that research.
DDR5 EC4 vs EC8
DDR5 supports 2*32bit “subchannels” instead of just supporting 64bit words [6]. For DDR5 ECC RAM there are variants EC4 which has 36bits of data per subchannel and EC8 which has 40 bits. EC8 allows Hamming codes on each subchannel indepdendently. I haven’t found a reference on how exactly EC4 works, it could be reading 64bits at a time (not taking advantage of the subchannels) to use Hamming codes or it could have 1 parity bit for each subchannel and just assume that there’s no need to check Hamming codes unless the subchannel parity fails. EC8 allows full Hamming code checks on 32bits of data and presumably ChipKill on 64bits.
It’s widely claimed that all DDR5 RDIMMs are EC8 and all DDR5 ECC UDIMMs are EC4. A quick search on ebay turned up adverts for EC4 and EC8 RDIMMs and links to apparently reliable sites confirming that some of the RDIMMs are EC4. There are reports of EC8 UDIMMs even though I couldn’t find any advertised. This seems to mirror the situation with DDR4 where non-ECC RDIMMs are apparently available somewhere and ECC UDIMMs are something I’ve used a few times but most people have never seen.
I then searched for information on what servers support. The Dell R760 server supports both EC4 and EC8 RDIMMs but you can’t have both in the same system.
The existence of EC4 DIMMs is wrong. They shouldn’t make substandard gear, the manufacturing price difference between 72 and 80 bit wide DIMMs isn’t going to be great and the end result is some systems with inadequate specs and extra difficulty in upgrading systems with more things to check for compatibility.
Some years ago I reported a BTRFS corruption issue on my desktop PC to the BTRFS developers and one of them stated that the corruption in question didn’t match any pattern expected from a BTRFS bug and recommended that I run Memtest86+. The memory test revealed that I was getting about one memory corruption per 5 hours so if I had used Firefox on that system any crashes probably wouldn’t have been regarded as hardware errors with RAM. Those errors caused filesystem corruption and some data loss, if I hadn’t been using BTRFS that could have gone unnoticed for years.
On another occasion I had a VM I was using for testing software I was developing that had some unexpected errors. After working on it for a day I had shared the errors with a mailing list of other developers who also spent some time investigating it. Eventually I began to suspect a hardware problem, I went on site and when I rebooted the system to run Memtest86+ it didn’t even boot as it had errors that stopped the BIOS from even working correctly. It was strange that the system was apparently working correctly and restarting the KVM VM resulted in the same errors happening in the same code and nothing else on the VM apparently having a problem. It turned out that the system had a motherboard problem that made all but one of the DIMM sockets unusable so I ended up sending it to e-waste. That wasted a day of my time and some hours of other people’s time. Presumably on other occasions developer time is wasted due to hardware errors and no-one even realises.
What Society Needs
We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.
We need to have greater knowledge of the benefits of ECC RAM among computer experts, people need to recommend that computers be purchased with ECC RAM whenever possible and that systems which can’t have ECC RAM (laptops and phones) shouldn’t be used for storing important data.
We need to avoid silly things like having so many variants of RAM to confuse people and make it needlessly difficult to get ECC RAM working.
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