No new members in June
ADAM ENGST 12 June 2025
Apple has released developer betas of macOS 26 Tahoe, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26, with public betas scheduled for July and final releases expected in September or October. Many people are eager to learn whether their current hardware will support the new operating systems or if they’ll need to consider upgrading to stay current. Overall, Apple has continued its strategy of dropping support for only a few older models and limiting some advanced features to devices capable of running them. For comparison with last year’s list, see “The Real System Requirements for Apple’s 2024 Operating Systems” (12 July 2024).
In recent years, when Apple previews its upcoming operating systems, it has provided detailed footnotes explaining compatibility for specific features; however, this year, those footnotes are few and far between. The paucity of clarification might be because most of the promoted features are compatible with all supported devices, or perhaps Apple isn’t discussing the features that would require such footnotes. For instance, external display support is reportedly still limited to iPads with an M-series chip, but that’s not mentioned anywhere.
The primary software requirement that remains surrounds Apple Intelligence, which is compatible with the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 models, iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPad and Mac models equipped with an M-series chip. That leaves out many older iPhones and iPads, as well as all Intel-based Macs. Live Translation, a major new feature, requires Apple Intelligence (see “Major Changes Coming in OS 26,” 9 June 2025).
First off, let’s address the Intel-sized gorilla in the room: Although macOS 26 will still run on some Intel-based Macs, it will be the last major version to do so. During its Platforms State of the Union presentation at WWDC, Apple announced that next year’s macOS 27 will run only on Macs with Apple silicon. Assuming Apple maintains its current policies, macOS 26 will continue to receive security updates for an additional 2 years, meaning that Intel-based Macs will lose security viability in 2028. In short, the writing is on the wall, but there’s no urgent reason to upgrade. An 8- or 9-year run for those Macs isn’t too shabby.
Apple also announced that macOS 27 will be the last version of macOS to include the full Rosetta translation environment, which enables Intel-based code to run on Macs with Apple silicon. Following that, the company will retain a limited set of Rosetta functionality to support older games.
(I recently encountered an unexpected need for Rosetta on my new 14-inch MacBook Pro: the Nisus File Converter app inside Nisus Writer Pro’s app package still uses Intel code and thus requires Rosetta. Since I use it purely from within a Nisus Writer Pro macro, it took me some time to figure out why the macro was failing. ChatGPT eventually gave me the clue I needed.)
Here is the list of Macs that can run macOS 26, which includes all Macs with Apple silicon and four Intel-based Macs:
This list clarifies that Apple has dropped support for these Intel-based models capable of running macOS 15 Sequoia:
The story is much simpler in the iPhone lineup. Compared to iOS 18, iOS 26 removes support for the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max from 2018, making the iPhone 11 from 2019 the oldest model still supported. Here are the compatible devices:
The new Lock Screen, which features a 3D effect and dynamically adjusts the time to fit around the Lock Screen photo, is compatible with only the iPhone 12 and later models.
Even better, iPadOS 26 drops only the 7th-generation iPad from the list of models that can run iPadOS 18. Note that Apple has changed its naming scheme for iPads to focus on the chip rather than the generation, which is why some models appear in multiple rows below. Supported models include:
Unsurprisingly, the new 3D Lock Screen also has restrictions in the iPad world, where it works on the M-series iPads and the iPad (A16), iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPad mini (6th generation).
The community has discovered a significant improvement: Stage Manager, which was previously limited to specific iPad models, now works on every iPad that supports iPadOS 26.
The best compatibility story comes with watchOS 26, which maintains the same list as watchOS 11. As always, an iPhone running iOS 26 is required.
The new wrist flick gesture in watchOS 26 requires either an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or an Apple Watch Ultra 2; it doesn’t work on the Apple Watch SE.
Although tvOS 26 runs on all Apple TV models dating back to the Apple TV HD from 2015 (formerly known as the 4th-generation Apple TV), two new features have more demanding requirements:
Since there has only been one model of the Vision Pro, there’s no concern about compatibility with visionOS 26.
Apple said exactly nothing (that I can find, anyway) about the HomePod during its WWDC keynote. MacRumors published a pre-event article mentioning a rumor that HomePod Software 26 would support all existing HomePods, but it provided no additional details.
Since the HomePod lacks a visual interface that could be impacted by Liquid Glass, and no current HomePods have the processing power to utilize Apple Intelligence, there’s probably not much for Apple to say. The bigger question is whether Apple is temporarily sidelining the HomePod while developing a more powerful device—possibly one with a screen—or if the company intends to let the HomePods gradually disappear.
Charles Martin | Feb 06, 2025
The four pre-set categories in Mail starting with iOS 18.2.
After updating to iOS 18.2 or later, the Mail app now categorizes incoming email into four broad categories. These are Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.
The idea to automatically categorize incoming emails has been kicking around Apple for years. The feature was originally intended to debut in iOS 13, but awaited further development of Apple's machine learning and Apple Intelligence features in order to ensure the work was all done on-device.
In our experience, the Primary category works very well. Email from people in our contacts, time-sensitive notifications, and email from other individuals rather than companies tend to be seen here.
Traditionally, Mail also shows the first line or two of a received email. If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, time-sensitive emails will be at the top, and some emails in the Primary category will now show short summaries of the content.
As before, you can tap on a given email to open it, or do a half-swipe to the left to choose options including deleting, flagging, or additional tools like forwarding and replying. You can also half-swipe to the right to set a reminder for a given email, or mark it unread.
In addition to Primary, the other categories are Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. In our experience, these categories need a bit of user training in order to reach their peak usefulness.
If your iPhone model supports Apple Intelligence, those other categories — apart from Primary — will group all email from a given sender by default. When you tap on a given email summary, the most recent message is shown.
You can also view all messages from a particular sender, if their emails are in any but the Primarycategory. Tap on the top or newest one and you get a digest page with the sender's details at the top.
That top section also includes an ellipses icon, which provides tools including Delete All.
This is once place where you can re-categorize an email, but you can also do that directly from the inbox. Do a half-swipe to the left on an email, tap the three buttons icon, and tap Categorize Sender.
Once you've moved an email to a specific category done this, all messages from that particular sender will be put into the new category instead.
Showing off the new categorization features of Apple Mail in iOS 18.2.
The Updates category is intended for messages from companies you've allowed to email you with their news updates, or from social sites like FaceBook, Bluesky, and X. At first, you may find yourself moving some messages that arrive here to other categories, but once that's done it works well.
The Promotions category is where mass emails go. Depending on how much of this type of mail you get, you may need to spend a few minutes marking mass emails from your community groups and clubs to go to other categories, but again Mail remembers your choices and files future emails correctly.
Though it can be very useful — after a bit of training — some users will prefer to not have the categorization feature on at all, preferring to weed through their incoming email themselves.
Apple has made it very simple to turn off the categorization feature. At the top of the iOS Mail app, there is a three-dots menu on the right. Tap it, and change from Categories to List View" and you're back to the way Mail worked previously.
In that menu, you can also opt to turn off Show Priority if your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence. When this is unchecked, urgent or time-sensitive emails will not rise to the top unless they happen to be the most recent messages.
Alternatively, you can quickly switch to the all mail category. Either tap on the currently-selected category, or swipe across the categories. This is best used when you want to keep the categorization, but temporarily need to see all your mail in the list view.
If you choose to leave the new Mail categorization feature on, you can fine-tune how it works via a section in Mail's preferences. To get there, openSettings, scroll down to Apps, tap on Mail, tap on Apple Intelligence & Siri, and turn on or off any options there.
You can also choose to turn off Apple Intelligence altogether if you want, assuming your iPhone model supports it. Apple Intelligence features only show up on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, or the iPhone 16 models or later.
To do so, open the Settings app, scroll down until you see an Apple Intelligence & Siri category, tap it, and turn off Apple Intelligence. You won't see this category at all if your iPhone does not support Apple Intelligence features.
Surveys taken early on in the Apple Intelligence rollout found that many users don't yet consider the suite of features to be that important to them. This is likely to change as further updates — including a much-improved Siri — roll out across 2025.
ADAM ENGST 28 May 2025
It’s no secret that Apple’s operating system version numbering has evolved organically. The company currently maintains seven operating systems with version numbers that begin with four different integers (macOS 15, iOS 18, watchOS 11, and visionOS 2), although they share so much underlying code that they tend to move together with decimal updates. That’s why I’ve started relying on shorthand in article titles like “Apple Releases iOS 18.5, macOS 15.5, and Other x.5 OS Updates” and tightening it even further to “OS x.5” in issue titles. Happily, the current numbering mess may soon be a thing of the past.
At Bloomberg, Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans to identify the next versions of all its operating systems by year rather than by version number. If his information is accurate, we’ll see macOS 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and so on, which should make it much easier for us to keep track and trivial to remember when each version was current.
The OS 26 updates are likely to be released toward the end of 2025, so these new version numbers will look ahead to the next year, much as automakers do with vehicle model years. Unsurprisingly, Apple declined to comment on Gurman’s report, which also claims that the new operating systems will share a user interface refresh.
Version numbers based on years are nothing new in the software industry, but in the past, they often ran into problems when it came to shipping annual updates, making names feel outdated after a year or two. Adobe’s Illustrator 88 name (which was actually version 1.6) was a short-lived experiment, coming as it did between versions 1.1 and 2.0. Microsoft faced issues with the gaps between Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000 before transitioning to Windows Me and Windows XP. Eventually, Microsoft reverted to numbers with Windows 7, and now we’re at Windows 11. Apple dabbled with year numbers for the iWork and iLife bundles but stuck with standard version numbers for the individual apps.
Given Apple’s consistency in releasing major operating system versions every year since 2007 for iOS and 2012 for macOS, I doubt we would ever find ourselves in a situation where a major version remains current beyond its designated year. While annual numbering may not immediately benefit those of us who regularly need to reference older versions of Apple’s operating systems, it will gradually simplify locating each subsequent upgrade on the overall timeline. (And for those who bemoan the annual updates that long ago became a fact of life, remember that they’re largely designed to keep Apple products competitive and attract switchers, who account for over half of Apple’s hardware sales each quarter.)
If you’re curious, as I was, here’s how we got to where we are now:
We’ll see if this naming change comes to pass at WWDC in just a few weeks (see “WWDC 2025 Scheduled for June 9–13,” 25 March 2025). Fingers crossed!
Charles Martin | Jun 21, 2025
Project Indigo can help dramatically reduce smartphone-camera deficiences. Image credit: Adobe
A new initiative from Adobe aims to improve smartphone cameras and computational photography in general to give a more natural, SLR-like look to iPhone photography.
A new paper from Adobe Fellow Marc Levoy and Senior Scientist Florian Kainz discusses their latest project, which is embodied in a new Project Indigo app available for iPhones. In addition to what the inventors hope is a more "natural" look, the project aims for the highest image quality possible on a mobile device.
In the new research paper explaining the project, the pair detail their approach to achieving more authentic photo images. The app under-exposes more strongly than most camera apps, but also captures, aligns, and combines "more frames when producing each photo — up to 32 frames" in a single exposure.
"This means that our photos have fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows," Levoy and Kainz write — but also note that taking a photo with the app "may require slightly more patience after pressing the shutter button than you're used to ... but after a few seconds, you'll be rewarded with a better picture."
This approach results in less "smoothing" than in most smartphone camera apps, which better preserves natural textures. It also avoids what might be called "global tone mapping," where typically the brightest point in a smartphone photo is used to set the exposure for the entire photo.
This often results in very bright objects appearing correctly balanced, while anything darker than the brightest point is underexposed. This makes it more difficult to edit the image later to correct the underexposed portions, especially if the RAW image format wasn't used.
A further issue is the problem of zooming. Smartphones lack true optical zoom lenses, so when users "zoom in" on a subject, the camera now reads only the central portion of the sensor — further reducing image quality.
The Indigo camera app overcomes this issue by using a technique called "multi-frame super-resolution," quickly capturing multiple images of the scene at different resolutions and zoom levels in order to reduce noise.
An example of super-resolution correction of a distant subject. Image credit: Adobe
"We then combine these images to produce a single photo with more detail than is present in a single image," the authors say. "And because we've captured different viewpoints, the extra detail in our super-resolution photos is real, not [computationally] hallucinated."
The Indigo app also offers smartphone photographers a wealth of controls, designed specifically for smartphone photography. "We offer the obvious controls over focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance — the latter with separate control over temperature and tint, like Lightroom," the authors point out.
"But since each photo is the result of combining a burst of frames, Indigo also offers control over the number of frames in the burst," the developers say. "This gives photographers a way to trade off total capture time against noise level."
One additional future feature of the app offers an exciting new possibility for smartphone users. The Indigo developers want to be able to render the final look of the photo in real time in the viewfinder — a genuine "what you see is what you get" image.
For example, this would allow photographers to make a darker image by lowering the brightness of the preview rather than shortening exposure time. Conversely, you can make a brighter image by raising the shadows rather than increasing the exposure.
Indigo can also intelligently remove lighting reflections from lit subjects. Image credit: Adobe
Likewise, some advanced photographic techniques — such as removing lighting reflections from a lit subject that is under glass or plastic, for example — would be possible "in camera" using Indigo, the developers say.
The developers see Project Indigo as a set of technologies, currently used in a same-named app, as a platform of techniques "that may eventually be deployed in Adobe's flagship products, especially Lightroom." The app is available for free in the App Store.
