At this meeting, held on the 31st October, we talked about recent Apple news including products with the new M5 chip and some more new OS features. Members also raised a number of other interesting topics.
M5 Products
We talked about the recently announced products with the new M5 chip:
- MacBook Pro M5
- iPad Pro M5
- 2025 Vision Pro
Mac Rumors have a useful article comparing the M4 and M5 chips.
More new OS features
Robert demonstrated some more features new to the 26 version OSes:
- The new “Windowed apps“ mode on iPad.
- Messages option to send low quality image previews so sent images appear more quickly.
- Visual Intelligence on screenshots (currently available on iPhone only, a model support Apple Intelligence is required).
- Set snooze duration on alarms in the Clock app.
Apple News
We discussed recent Apple-related news, including:
- The Affinity Apps (Photo, Publisher and Designer) are now integrated and available free on Mac. Thanks to Liz for highlighting this.
- iPhone 17 introduces Memory Integrity Enforcement for improved security.
- The Repair Assistance tool coming to macOS Tahoe.
- Free satellite service for iPhone 14 and 15 models extended to at least September 2026.
- Sealed 2001 iPod sells for over 40,000USD, a record.
- New remixes of the default iPhone “Reflection” ringtone added in iOS 26.
- Adobe launches their Premier video editor for iPhone and iPad. Surprisingly it’s free unless you need AI features.
- The Apple TV+ streaming service is being rebranded as Apple TV.
Member Topics
- Schedule messages in iMessage to send them at a later time. DavidB had highlighted this useful features (first introduced in iOS 18) before the meeting.
- DaveK recommended the free video player app Elmedia Video Player as an alternative to VLC with a simpler user interface.
- DaveK demonstrated that Reminders are now shown in Calendar and we found that you can also create reminders directly in Calendar if you wish.
- Elliot mentioned the option to multi-select and delete messages in Mail on iPhone and iPad.
- Ben mentioned Nvidia becoming the first company with a market capitalisation of over 5 trillion USD.