In 2022, Apple began rolling out Tap to Pay on iPhone, a system that allows small business owners and other merchants to accept contactless payments on an iPhone, with no point-of-sale hardware required. The feature allows customers to pay by simply tapping their iPhone or Apple Watch, credit card or debit card, or other contactless payment option on the merchant's iPhone. Payment is securely completed using NFC, like Apple Pay.


Some of Apple's retail employees have been provided with iPhone 14 units, allowing customers to check out with Tap to Pay on iPhone at the company's stores. Apple has been gradually phasing out its previous Bluetooth credit card readers as part of this transition, and now the company apparently plans to go a step further.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today said Apple will be giving more retail employees newer iPhone 16 units to expand its in-store usage of Tap to Pay on iPhone.

"The tap-to-pay system in the iPhone 14 can sometimes be finicky and not support metal cards like American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve," he explained. "But Apple has found that the iPhone 16 does a better job and eliminates the need for store employees to carry around the specialized terminals."

iOS 27 builds upon Tap to Pay on iPhone with a new "Tap to Share" feature.
This article, "Apple Stores to Expand Use of 'Tap to Pay on iPhone'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Apple's M7 Ultra chip coming in 2028 is designed to support up to 1.5TB of unified memory, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. However, whether such a configuration is offered may depend on the state of the ongoing memory chip shortage.

In 2019, Apple released an Intel-based Mac Pro with up to 1.5TB RAM.
This article, "Apple's M7 Ultra Chip Designed to Match a 2019 Mac Pro Feat" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Two new Apple Pencil models are in development for release alongside next-generation iPad Pro models next year, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.


Specifically, he said new versions of the lower-end Apple Pencil with a USB-C port and the higher-end Apple Pencil Pro are in the works.

Apple is working to satisfy upcoming EU requirements related to making batteries more replaceable, leading Gurman to believe that the new Apple Pencil models could be equipped with "new battery systems." While that wording is vague, it seems to suggest that the next Apple Pencil models could have replaceable batteries.

No other details were provided, so we do not know of any potential design changes or other new features that are planned at this time.

The current Apple Pencil with a USB-C port was released in November 2023, while the Apple Pencil Pro followed in May 2024.
This article, "Two New Apple Pencils Reportedly Launching Next Year" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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The first public betas of iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, and more will be released this week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. This aligns with Apple's promised July timeframe.

If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, the key new feature is Siri AI, but there is a waitlist if you want to try it.
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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will be releasing a regular M6 chip, but it has no plans to offer higher-end M6 Pro and M6 Max chips. In his Power On newsletter today, he said the reason for this break in tradition is AI.


"Apple had been planning major neural-processing upgrades for the M7 family and ultimately decided those improvements were important enough to justify accelerating the next generation rather than completing the M6 lineup," he explained.

There won't be an M6 Ultra chip either, he said.

A new 14-inch MacBook Pro with a base M6 chip will be released later this year, and then Apple plans to move on to releasing the base M7 chip in the first half of 2027, M7 Pro and M7 Max chips in late 2027, and an M7 Ultra chip in 2028.

He said the M7 Ultra chip in particular "dramatically upgrades AI performance," and that it may power Apple Intelligence servers starting in 2029.

"AI is no longer just another feature Apple's chips need to support," said Gurman. "It is now shaping how those products are designed and when they are shipped."

The current M5 Pro and M5 Max chips launched in March, and Gurman still expects an M5 Ultra chip to debut in the Mac Studio as early as this year.

A summary:

• M5 chip: October 2025


• M5 Pro and M5 Max chips: March 2026


• M5 Ultra chip: Late 2026


• M6 chip: Late 2026


• M7 chip: First half of 2027


• M7 Pro and M7 Max chips: Second half of 2027


• M7 Ultra chip: 2028

This article, "Here's Why Apple is Reportedly Skipping M6 Pro and M6 Max Chips" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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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.

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.



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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This article, "AirPods Pro 3 Hit Best Price Since Prime Day at $199.99" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Apple's stores will be rolling out Back to School marketing materials this week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. This suggests that the offer will begin in the U.S. in the next few days.

Last year, college students and educational staff could receive a free accessory like AirPods 4 or an Apple Pencil Pro with the purchase of a qualifying Mac or iPad model. The Back to School offer is in addition to the discounted prices already available through Apple's education store year-round, but it will be a bittersweet situation this year given that Apple recently raised prices on all Macs and iPads.
This article, "Apple's 2026 Back to School Offer is Coming Soon" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Introduction

Recently, I've got a chance to try building Mozc (Most famous Japanese input method editor) with Bazel.

As you know, recently newer Bazel related packages were landed into debian/unstable. Then now I'm planning to update Mozc from 2.29.5160.102 to 3.33.6133.

Background story about Mozc and Debian

The upstream of Mozc had released 3.34.6239, but on Debian, we stick to Mozc 2.29.5160.102.

Mozc requires newer Bazel but we only had Bazel 4.2.3 at that time on Debian, so even though the upstream of Mozc switched from GYP to Bazel, we had patched Mozc with GYP based package.

We even did make an effort to restore build options that had been already removed. :-( And needed to migrate from GTK2 renderer to GTK3 renderer.

That is why the version of Mozc is diverged from upstream on Debian.

• 2.29.5160.102 (Now on Debian)
• 2.29.5268.102
• 2.29.5374.102
• 2.29.5544.102
• 2.30.5544.102
• 2.31.5712.102
• 2.31.5851.102
• 2.32.5994.102
• 3.33.6089
• 3.33.6133 (Target to upgrade for)
• 3.34.6239

How to switch from GYP to Bazel?

At first, we needed to decide what Mozc version to work with it.

Now latest version of Mozc is 3.34.x, but it requires Bazel 9.x. Please recall that Bazel 7.7.1 was introduced Debian/unstable. And more, newer dependency libraries are required.

You might feel that target version (3.33.6133) is too high from 2.29.5160.102, but if we upgrade to more older Mozc, it means that it requires to backport Mozc to older libabsl compatible codes and so on.

That is why Mozc 3.33.6133 was chosen.

Even once the target version has been decided, you can't let your guard down.

There are many technical tasks to solve.

• Revisit patch sets to apply
• Porting uim mozc patch and fix FTBFS
• Porting fcitx5 mozc patch and fix FTBFS
• Fix src/third_party vendoring
• Switch from GYP to Bazel build systems
• ...

At least, it will likely require several rounds of testing in the Debian experimental.

Conclusion

Currently, gbp buildpackge has succeeded finally on local machine, but need to tidy and cleanup stuffs.

I didn't know packaging with Bazel best practice yet, to remove many third party vendor/ bundles, I've found that it requires pile of patch to eliminate them.

In the current version of Debian, as a one of build system, further work — such as support from debhelper - will be needed.

I'll file working progress on #1085173

Following up on my previous post, I am releasing debvulns-exporter, a Prometheus exporter for tracking Debian system vulnerabilities. The underlying vulnerability analysis logic remains identical to the previously released MCP server and CLI utility.

At May First, we recently received (all within a single week) three different complaints about domain names that previously worked fine suddenly not resolving to our servers.

While that isn’t terribly uncommon, we discovered that in each case, the domain name’s authoritative name servers were pointing to our mail servers (a.mx.mayfirst.org, b.mx.mayfirst.org and c.mx.mayfirst.org) instead of our name servers (a.ns.mayfirst.org, b.ns.mayfirst.org and c.ns.mayfirst.org). The weird part: this mistaken configuration was happening at the registrar level, protected by each member’s own credentials that we don’t have access to.

Each affected member fixed their records to resolve the problem but also made very clear that they had not logged into their registrar in years, sugggesting that the DNS authoritative records in their registrar accounts spontaneously changed on their own. The first time was weird, the second time could possibly be a coincidence? But by the third time this happened, we started to panic. How could registrar records spontaneously change? All three domain names were registered with different companies - so it couldn’t be a single registrar problem? Are we going to get a flood of these complaints? What is going on!?!?

We did an inventory to see if this was happening with other domain names in use by our membership and that’s when we discovered just how hard it is for our mostly non-technical users to set a domain’s authoritative name servers. The error rate was less than 1% but still that was a lot of domain names with typos:

• raise your fist in the air with a.ns.mayfist.org!
• or just plain give up and hit the floor with a.ns.matfirst.org
• Or more commonly people added our name servers, but also left the default name servers in place.
• Also, one person added as their authoritative name servers: a.ns.mayfirst.org, b.ns.mayfirst.org, c.ns.mayfirst.org, a.mx.mayfirst.org, b.mx.mayfirst.org, c.mx.mayfirst.org, and even a.webproxy.mayfirst.org - in other words, all the domain names we tell you do to anything with.
• And lastly, I did find two more domains just pointing to a.mx.mayfirst.org, b.mx.mayfirst.org and c.mx.mayfirst.org.

That’s when it occurred to me: for years we have maintained an offsite server that provides both c.ns.mayfirst.org and c.mx.mayfirst.org. It hangs out in case something terrible happens to our main colo. The week before we started receiving these complaints, I separated these services, moving c.mx.mayfirst.org to a dedicated MX server. As a result, these two domain names stopped pointing to the same IP address. And that’s when the complaints started rolling in. In other words: the affected members set the incorrect name servers years ago, but because just one of the name servers resolved to an IP that happened to provide the correct authoritative lookup services, it went undeteced all this time.

So… mystery solved. Nobody’s authoritative registrar records “suddenly” changed. They were mis-configured for years but thanks to the amazing resilience of the DNS system, nobody noticed because just one working DNS server is all you need.