Enlarge / The iPhone 15 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple pushed out the public releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, macOS Sonoma 14.2, watchOS 10.2, and tvOS 17.2.

iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2's flagship feature is the new Journal app, which Apple teased when it first introduced iOS 17 earlier. The app mimics several existing popular journaling apps in the App Store from third-party developers but leverages data from your Photos, workouts, and other Apple apps to make journaling suggestions.

Other features include the ability to tap a "catch-up arrow" to scroll to the first missed message in a conversation in Messages, the ability to take spatial video photos for later viewing on Vision Pro, and several tweaks and additions to the Weather app.

Enlarge / macOS Mojave's wallpaper. (credit: Apple)

Valve Software's Steam gaming marketplace and app will drop support for macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave), according to a support page post . The change will go into effect on February 15, 2024.

What will happen exactly? Valve writes:

After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.

macOS 10.14 (dubbed Mojave by Apple) shipped more than five years ago, and time has a way of marching on, so this might not seem that momentous at first glance. But there's a reason it's particularly noteworthy as these things go: this change means the end of support for the last versions of macOS that could run 32-bit games.

Enlarge / The default desktop wallpaper for macOS 13 Ventura. (credit: Apple)

Apple’s new M3 Macs are starting to land on doorsteps today, and at least a few people are facing an odd problem: Their Macs are showing up with an old, outdated build of last year’s macOS 13.5 Ventura on them, and checking for updates isn’t giving them the opportunity to update to either the current version of Ventura (13.6) or the recently released macOS Sonoma (14.1).

Affected users have posted complaints on X , formerly Twitter, as well as places like the MacRumors forums . The unreleased build of Ventura appears to be build 22G80, where the officially released version from July of 2023 is build 22G74. So far the issue only seems to affect the basic M3 versions of the MacBook Pro and iMac and not the M3 Pro or M3 Max versions, suggesting that the M3 Macs were ready to go a few months before the more powerful versions.

So why did this happen, why can't these Macs update, and what can you do about it if you're affected?

Enlarge / Apple is introducing three M3 performance tiers at the same time. (credit: Apple)

NEW YORK—None of the new Macs that Apple is announcing at its "Scary Fast" product event today look very different from the ones they're replacing on the outside, but the inside is another story. This is the first batch of Macs to include Apple's next-generation M3-series chips, and unlike past years, Apple is introducing multiple M3 performance tiers all at the same time.

The M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max all share the same underlying CPU and GPU architectures, the same ones used in the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip. Also like the A17 Pro, all M3 chips are manufactured using a new 3 nm process from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Let's dive into everything we know about the M3 family's capabilities, plus the differences between each performance tier.

Meet the Apple M3 family

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  Apple prioritized comparisons to the M1 generation, which is more likely to be relevant for upgraders. But in context with the M2 numbers, M3 looks like a typical year-over-year upgrade. [credit: Apple ]

Apple says that the performance cores in any given M3 processor can run up to 30 percent faster than the M1's performance cores, and that the efficiency cores are up to 50 percent faster. Most of Apple's direct performance comparisons were to the M1 generation, which is useful insofar as M2 Mac owners aren't likely to want to spring for M3, but it has the added marketing benefit of making the performance increases sound larger than they are.

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  Apple leans into its event's spooky vibes with the new space black version of the MacBook Pro. [credit: Apple ]

NEW YORK—As expected , Apple has launched a newly refreshed lineup of 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros at its "Scary Fast" product event this evening, replacing not just the last-generation versions of those laptops but also the old 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The company is accomplishing that last goal by introducing a less-expensive $1,599 version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro that uses a regular M3 chip instead of the M3 Pro or M3 Max.

It isn't as fast, it starts with a skimpy 8GB of RAM of storage, it has one fewer Thunderbolt port (for a total of two), and it only supports a single external display. But at $1,599 , the M3 MacBook Pro is $400 cheaper than the M2 Pro/M3 Pro version of the laptop, and it still uses the larger high-refresh-rate ProMotion display, the contrast-boosting and bloom-reducing mini LED screen technology, the MagSafe connector, the 1080p camera, 512GB of storage in the base model, the speaker system, and a full-sized HDMI port. And while Apple quotes the same "up to 22 hours of battery life" for all of the new MacBook Pro models, in the real world, the M3 should give you a bit more runtime than the M3 Pro or Max.