Apple put active noise cancellation on the $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case last month, and the price gap with the year-old AirPods Pro 3, priced at $179 (was $249) for early Prime Day, suddenly looked harder to defend. Shoppers who only wanted a little quiet on a train now have a cheaper open-ear option. People who sit with both pairs still reach for the Pro 3 when the room gets loud.
Keys vanish between couch cushions with a regularity that feels personal. Wallets slide into jacket pockets that later get hung in the wrong closet. Backpacks get set down at a coffee shop and stay there. AirTag 2, priced at $89 for the 4-pack (was $99), the second-generation tracker Apple released earlier this year, is built for those ordinary losses, and for the larger ones that start at an airport counter.
iFixit scored the AirPods 5 a 2 out of 10, a number that only looks small next to the perfect zeros every earlier pair earned, including the AirPods Pro 3. For ten years the buds left the factory sealed so completely that a dead cell meant a new pair. Apple moves something like 80 million sets a year, and most of them have ended as small pieces of trash once the batteries quit.
Apple Watch Ultra 3 arrived last year as the big titanium sports watch in the lineup, and a year later stores are clearing remaining stock around $699.97, roughly $100 under the original $799 starting price. That gap is the main reason the watch still makes sense in late 2026. Newer Ultra models exist, yet this one keeps the same 49mm case, the same flat sapphire face, and most of the tools that made the line useful for long days outside.
Action Retro just sat down with Pico Micro Mac v3, and the little board did the rare thing cheap retro kits keep promising. Power went in, a smiling Macintosh face appeared, and a real System desktop came up ready for a USB mouse. His video calls it a tiny 90s Macintosh. Software-wise it is closer to the 128K and Plus years. The charm is that the desktop is genuine, clickable, and running on a microcontroller you can cover with two fingers.
Battersea Power Station has loomed over the Thames since Giles Gilbert Scott finished the last of its brick towers in 1955, a coal plant so large it later sat empty for decades and still owes half its fame to the inflatable pig Pink Floyd parked between the chimneys for the 1977 Animals sleeve. Apple already keeps its its UK headquarters and a store inside the redeveloped complex. On September 28, 2026 the company adds Apple Music Hall, a 600-seat room built to stage a concert, lock a Spatial Audio mix, and send a multicamera feed around the world from the same night.
HTX Studio spent about two months turning a full work desk into a charger that finds a phone wherever you set it down and starts feeding it power. Apple showed that idea in 2017 as AirPower, a small mat that would charge a phone, Watch, and AirPods case without lining them up on a single coil. The pad never shipped. Apple cancelled it in 2019. The YouTube builder waited through nine promised “next years,” then built a version big enough to work on.
Beats finally put a price and a ship date on the over-ear headphone it has been teasing for months. Beats 360 costs $349.99, with preorders open today from Apple, Amazon, and other retailers in more than 100 countries, and units arriving in stores Thursday, September 24. Four core colors ship first: Black, Cloud, Pink, and Sky. Each pair arrives with matching Performance Knit ear and headband cushions, plus a woven ripstop case that lets the cups twist flat for travel even though the headband itself does not fold.
Apple’s smallest desktop computer reaches store shelves this week after early reviews that call the M6 model a fast, quiet machine that still fits in the palm of a hand. Reviewers who spent days with Mac Mini review units describe a familiar five-inch-square aluminum case that measures two inches tall and weighs about a pound and a half. That same compact shape from the last redesign lets the computer sit behind a monitor, tuck under a desk, or serve as an always-on box for light work and local AI tasks.
Fresh iPhone 17 and iPhone Air owners are already asking the same thing. If battery is the only reason to spend more, do the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max actually earn the upgrade. Tech Chap tried to answer that by running those two new Pros against last year’s 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and the thin iPhone Air until every phone died, then he ran the whole thing a second time with a Galaxy S26 Ultra in the mix.