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Shortly after increasing the lifetime version of the Plex Plan to $749.99, Plex has now introduced a new subscription, charging $249.99 for five years of streaming media from your Mac to your iPhone. Plex logo On July 1 , Plex significantly increased the cost of its Lifetime Plex Plan from $249.99 to a staggering $749.99 . While consumers will have missed the boat to get the old pricing, they can still spend $249.99 on something that's not quite as everlasting. Subscribers can sign up for a new five-year Plex Pass. The new option, offered alongside the monthly $6.99 and annual $69.99 subscriptions, gives users a lengthy period of usage without paying a regular subscription. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Apple is doing it again, it is coming late to the party. But it will eventually dominate AI because of how it thinks about users and about use cases where rivals consider only technical issues. Hopefully this is just a beta issue, but this Siri AI error comes up a lot. Even when testing the betas of Siri AI on the same or similar devices, everyone at AppleInsider is having different experiences. For instance, I found that in the first developer beta on both the Mac and the iPhone , Siri AI could be staggeringly irritating and sometimes no better than the old Siri. With the third developer beta of macOS Golden Gate , Siri AI would sometimes just abandon any request I make of it, but was always fine for everyone else. Across all of the betas, though, we are all finding that there are things Siri AI can do that are exceptional, and better than its rivals. Those irritations will surely be fixed before the public release, too. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
New Chinese regulatory certification filings appear to confirm the battery capacities of Apple's upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max models. According to new filings in China's C3 database, spotted by the leaker known as " Digital Chat Station " on Weibo, the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ is seemingly rated for 4,056mAh in China and 4,288mAh in the U.S., up modestly from the iPhone 17 Pro 's 3,988mAh and 4,252mAh. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max shows a bigger jump, rated for 5,391mAh in China and 5,567mAh in the U.S., compared with 4,823mAh and 5,088mAh on the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max, an increase of nearly 500mAh. ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ China China Difference U.S. U.S. Difference iPhone 16 Pro 3,582mAh +308mAh 3,582mAh +308mAh ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ 3,988mAh +406mAh 4,252mAh +670mAh ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ 4,056mAh +68mAh 4,288mAh +36mAh ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max China China Difference U.S. U.S. Difference ‌iPhone 16‌ Pro Max 4,685mAh +244mAh 4,685mAh +244mAh ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max 4,823mAh +138mAh 5,088mAh +403mAh ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max 5,391mAh +568mAh 5,567mAh +479mAh The devices in the filings are not directly named the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, but are highly likely to relate to these models. The China and U.S. capacities differ because Apple has continued to include a SIM tray on iPhones sold outside the United States, while U.S. models have been eSIM only since the iPhone 14 lineup. Without a physical tray taking up internal space, Apple can fit a slightly larger battery into the U.S. version of each device. The certification listings cover battery models S2232 and S2233 for the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and 2235L/2235 and 2236L/2236 for the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max, and also show rated energy figures of up to 21.751Wh and a 4.520V charge limit voltage, and list all four batteries as valid through May or June 2031. The numbers line up with Digital Chat Station's report from June , which gave identical figures for the ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌. In a separate post the same day, Digital Chat Station said supply chain information from months earlier had already pointed to the China model landing in the "5,000mAh" range , and suggested that a 5391mAh cell paired with the 2nm A20 Pro chip could deliver a noticeable battery life improvement. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ models are rumored to feature a smaller Dynamic Island , a variable aperture main camera , the C2 modem outside of the U.S. , and more. The ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max are expected to launch in September alongside Apple's first foldable iPhone. Related Roundup: iPhone 18 Pro This article, " iPhone 18 Pro Battery Capacities Revealed by Regulatory Filings " first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums
Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio have become the machines of choice for running AI agents, according to Doug Brooks, Apple's senior product manager of Apple silicon. Brooks made the claim while discussing Apple's chip strategy in a newly published interview with The Deep View conducted just prior to WWDC 2026 in June. Brooks says that the company has seen "incredible demand" for the two desktop Macs. When it comes to agentic workloads, "people often want a system that's under their control, isolated from their primary machine, and capable of running 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Brooks. "A Mac mini is an amazing system for that," he added. Many AI tools are also Mac-first or Mac-only, which Brooks says has helped cement the Mac's standing among developers, including those at frontier AI labs where Macs are said to be a common sight. The Apple executive also conceives of agentic AI as a whole-chip problem rather than a GPU one. "It's not just about the GPU crunching on an LLM anymore," he said. "It's about the whole chip contributing to different parts of the task, tool-calling, and the things that are happening around those workflows. It really plays to the strengths of Apple silicon." Brooks links Apple's position of strength in modern AI back to chip decisions made long before LLMs like ChatGPT arrived. He points to the Neural Engine, which is built for power-efficient matrix math, along with lesser-known neural accelerators inside the CPU that handle time-sensitive tasks like speech. Apple more recently added neural accelerators to the GPU, which has extended AI performance across the board from iPhone-class parts up to the Mac's largest silicon. Brooks ties that progress to Apple's design method, where a chip is built for a specific machine, and the hardware and software are developed in tandem. He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide what runs on-device and what gets sent to the cloud. He also singled out what he calls "transparent AI" on iPhone and iPad, referring to features scattered throughout the operating system and third-party apps that work quietly without announcing themselves as AI. Some of the examples he cited include Draw Things, an image generator that runs across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and SwingVision, which analyzes tennis and pickleball gameplay in real time using the iPhone's cameras. "The speed of AI development right now is just crazy," Brooks said. "I can't imagine where we're going to be a year from now, three months from now, or even a month from now," he added. You can read the full interview over on The Deep View website . Related Roundup: Mac mini Tag: Apple Silicon Buyer's Guide: Mac Mini (Caution) Related Forum: Mac mini This article, " Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future " first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums
