Enlarge / The RetroArch app installed in tvOS. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone's vibrant app and game library.

That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.

So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.

Enlarge (credit: VMware)

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware last year has led to widespread upheaval at the company, including layoffs, big changes to how it approaches software licensing, and general angst from customers and partners. Broadcom also discontinued the free-to-use version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor/ESXi earlier this year, forcing home users to find alternatives.

But today there's a bit of good news—for home users, at least. Broadcom is making VMware Fusion Pro 13 and VMWare Workstation Pro free for personal use.

Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro certainly aren't the only free-to-use virtualization products—VirtualBox has existed for years, and there are many indie projects that make use of Apple's virtualization frameworks for macOS. But VMware's products are a bit more polished and easier to learn than some of those alternatives, and VMware's file formats are also commonly used when redistributing virtual machines for retrocomputing purposes.

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  Lego Barad-dúr silently surveils a living room. [credit: Lego ]

Here's something for any Lord of the Rings fan with a tall, narrow space available on their tchotchkes shelf: Lego has announced a $460, 5,471-piece rendition of Barad-dûr, which viewers of the films will recognize as "that giant black tower with the flaming eye on top of it."

Sauron, Base Master of Treachery, will keep his Eye on you from atop the tower, which will actually glow thanks to a built-in light brick. The tower includes a minifig of Sauron himself, plus the Mouth of Sauron, Gollum, and a handful of Orcs.

The Lego Barad-dûr set will launch on June 1 for Lego Insiders and June 4 for everybody else. If you buy it between June 1 and June 7, you'll also get the "Fell Beast" bonus set, with pose-able wings and a Nazgûl minifig. It doesn't seem as though this bonus set will be sold separately, making it much harder to buy the nine Nazgûl you would need to make your collection story-accurate.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices.

The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now.

Cross-Platform Tracking Protection notifications alert users "if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with." Apple has already implemented protections to prevent AirTag stalking, and Cross-Platform Tracking Protection implements some of those same safeguards for devices paired to non-Apple phones.

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  The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air's 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn't even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air's base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

Enlarge / One of many human-created objects destroyed in Apple's "Crush!" ad for the iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

Earlier this week, Apple took the wraps off of a thoroughly leaked iPad Pro refresh with a 1 minute and 8 second ad spot wherein a gigantic hydraulic press comprehensively smushes a trumpet, an arcade cabinet, a record player, paint cans, a piano, a TV, sculptures, a bunch of emoji, and plenty of other tools that one might loosely categorize as "artistic implements."

At the end of the ad, the press lifts away to reveal a somewhat thinner, somewhat faster version of Apple's iPad Pro. The message of the ad, titled "Crush!" and still available via Apple's YouTube channel and CEO Tim Cook's Twitter account, is obvious: look at all of the things we've squeezed into this tablet!

"Just imagine all the things it'll be used to create," wrote Cook.

Enlarge / Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.

If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.

Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.

Enlarge / The new M4 iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

When Apple announced the Apple M4 chip during its iPad Pro event yesterday, it mentioned that the chip came with "up to" four high-performance CPU cores.

Those short, easily missable words always mean that there's a lower-end version of the chip coming that doesn't include that many CPU cores, and the tech specs page for the new iPad Pro has the full details: iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage use a version of the M4 with three high-performance CPU cores and six smaller efficiency cores. Only the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage have an M4 with all four high-performance CPU cores enabled.

The 256GB and 512GB models also ship with 8GB of RAM, where the 1TB and 2TB models come with 16GB of memory installed. Though these changes are clearly spelled out on the Tech Specs page, the actual configuration page for the iPad Pros in Apple's online store doesn't give any indication that upgrading storage also upgrades your CPU and RAM.

Enlarge / Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience.

iPad Airs: Bigger is better

But let's begin with the new Airs since there's a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the sixth-generation model) is mostly the same as the previous-generation A14 and M1 models, design-wise, with identical physical dimensions and weight. It's still the same slim-bezel design Apple introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro, just with a 60 Hz LCD display panel and Touch ID on the power button rather than Face ID.

So when Apple says the device has been "redesigned," the company is mainly referring to the fact that the webcam is now mounted on the long edge of the tablet rather than the short edge. This makes its positioning more laptop-y when it's docked to the Magic Keyboard or some other keyboard.

Enlarge / Apple's M4 chip in the new iPad Pro. It follows the M3 by just a few months. (credit: Apple)

In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today’s iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3.

Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.

As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware.

Enlarge / Rather than going to beaches to catch Wigletts, some Pokémon Go players are trying to bring the beaches to themselves. (credit: Niantic)

Ah, Pokémon Go. The hottest mobile game of 2016 remains a potent force to this day, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from tens of millions of monthly active players.

Part of what keeps the game fresh is a continuous trickle of new Pokémon. The game began with just the original 151 monsters back in 2016 and has gradually caught up to the current generation of Switch games in bits and pieces over the last eight years. The game is currently in the process of adding monsters from Scarlet and Violet, and that's where this story begins.

Two of the latest additions to the Pokémon Go roster are Wiglett and Wugtrio, riffs on the designs of Diglett and Dugtrio, who live on beaches and look kind of like garden eels. Pokémon Go uses a biome system that restricts certain Pokémon to certain types of real-world terrain, like forests, mountains, and beaches. As aquatic Pokémon, Wiglett and Wugtrio show up in the beach biome.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

It's been a bad couple of years for Microsoft's security and privacy efforts. Misconfigured endpoints, rogue security certificates, and weak passwords have all caused or risked the exposure of sensitive data, and Microsoft has been criticized by security researchers, US lawmakers, and regulatory agencies for how it has responded to and disclosed these threats.

The most high-profile of these breaches involved a China-based hacking group named Storm-0558, which breached Microsoft's Azure service and collected data for over a month in mid-2023 before being discovered and driven out. After months of ambiguity, Microsoft disclosed that a series of security failures gave Storm-0558 access to an engineer's account, which allowed Storm-0558 to collect data from 25 of Microsoft's Azure customers, including US federal agencies.

In January, Microsoft disclosed that it had been breached again, this time by Russian state-sponsored hacking group Midnight Blizzard. The group was able "to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account" to gain access to Microsoft's systems for "as long as two months."

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is currently investigating a bug in its most recent batch of Windows 10 and Windows 11 updates that is preventing some VPN software from working properly. The company updated its list of known Windows issues to say that it has recreated the issue on its end and that it's currently working on a fix.

The VPN issue affects all currently supported versions of Windows: Windows 10 21H2 and 22H2; Windows 11 versions 21H2, 22H2, and 23H2; and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022.

Microsoft says the problem was caused by update KB5036893, which was initially released on April 9, 2024. The update makes "miscellaneous security improvements to internal OS functionality," among a few other minor changes. The company hasn't provided specific information on what's been broken or what needs fixing, noting only that PCs "might face VPN connection failures" after installing the update.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

If you've ever sent an iPhone in for repair, you might be familiar with the dance Apple asks you to do if your device still powers on: back up your data, then either erase the phone or disable the Find My feature so your phone can easily be serviced (or, if it's being exchanged for a new one, refurbished and resold). If you're also using the Stolen Device Protection and Security Delay feature introduced in iOS 17.3, this can be a pain, since you need to wait a full hour to turn Find My off after you make the request.

It looks like Apple is making some changes to that process in iOS 17.5, which is currently in beta testing. The update adds a new "repair state" mode that leaves the device functional while keeping both Find My and Activation Lock enabled. This means that iPhones swiped while in transit will still be trackable and that they'll still stay locked to your Apple ID so they can't easily be wiped and resold.

MacRumors has a good overview of the feature as it currently functions. You can set an iPhone to repair state mode by pulling it up in the Find My app and attempting to remove the device from your account while it’s still online and active. Rather than removing the device from your account, the app will offer to put it in the repair state instead; unlike when you try to disable Find My entirely, this doesn't trigger the one-hour Security Delay waiting period. If your phone is offline, Find My will offer to remove it from your account, as it currently does.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting in March with the release of iOS 17.4, iPhones in the European Union have been subject to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a batch of regulations that (among other things) forced Apple to support alternate app stores, app sideloading, and third-party browser engines in iOS for the first time. This week, EU regulators announced that they are also categorizing Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper," meaning that the iPad will soon be subject to the same regulations as the iPhone.

In a developer blog post released today, Apple said that it would comply with the EU's regulations "later this fall, as required." All changes that Apple has made to iOS on European iPhones to comply with the DMA will be implemented in the same way on the iPad, though it's not clear whether these changes will be brought to iPadOS 17 or if they'll just be a part of the upcoming iPacOS 18 update.

The EU began investigating whether iPadOS would qualify as a gatekeeper in September 2023, the same day it decided that iOS, the Safari browser, and the App Store were all gatekeepers.