Even though Steve Jobs could be demanding, Ron Johnson says he still managed to make Apple Stores “the most productive in the world.”

Ron Johnson joined Apple in 2000 and served as the company’s head of retail until 2011. During his time at Apple, Johnson says he employed unique strategies and helped make Apple Store locations the success they are today.

Speaking to WWD, Johnson also detailed his experiences working with Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and CEO at the time. Jobs often needed convincing, and Johnson periodically experienced pushback for his ideas.

Ron Johnson recounts that, for instance, Steve Jobs hated the idea of having retail locations in malls. Jobs apparently said malls were “full of crappy stores,” and absolutely hated stores with columns. Johnson eventually had to move a few retail locations to appease Jobs.

Even though Jobs was demanding, he recognized Johnson’s expertise in the retail industry. Over the years, the two built a lasting friendship and partnership.

In the wide-ranging interview which covered far more than just Apple, Johnson also recounts his most significant accomplishments, including Apple’s iconic cube-shaped Fifth Avenue store in New York.

Beating records in a glass cube

Johnson explained that for an Apple Store to become profitable, it needed to hit $15 million in volume. On its first night, the New York store generated $1 million in sales and made $350 million in a single year.

The stores routinely surpassed these figures. Every Apple Store location hit around $50 million annually by the time he left Apple in 2011.

“The stores were the most productive in the world, but it didn’t happen overnight,” he said.

“It took time to get there,” Johnson continued, “There was a lot of refinement, but we never gave up on our vision.”

That vision included a unique take on retail locations, which meant ensuring that customers could quickly learn about the products they intended to purchase.

In an era of poorly-maintained super-stores like CompUSA and Circuit City, and smaller venues like Apple Specialists who often didn’t have demo units, customers had a vastly improved experience at Apple Retail. In the new locations, those customers didn’t just get to see a new Mac or iPod; they were able to find out everything they could do with a new device, how it worked with existing accessories like cameras, printers, and so on.

Apple wanted them to know how they could use a Mac to burn CDs, upload and edit photos, and more. That’s why Apple retail locations have a Genius Bar.

Johnson says that Apple Store employees “[tried] to understand what you came to the store for, and solve that for you through a new product or help.”

Apple Stores were built around that idea, and Johnson had the freedom to create his vision and to pick the team who would make it happen. Still, any stores with columns had to be approved by Steve Jobs personally.

Johnson recounted how he informed Steve Jobs of his decision to leave Apple. Jobs was supportive, acknowledging Johnson’s love for the retail industry.

However, Johnson planned to leave Apple during a particularly difficult time for the company in 2011. Jobs had just found out that he only had six months to live.

Out of respect, Ron Johnson agreed to stay with Apple until Steve Jobs passed away. Johnson ultimately left Apple for JCPenney and eventually became CEO of the company, but his accomplishments at Apple have left a lasting mark.

Ron Johnson’s new book, written together with Zander Nethercutt, is set to debut on September 22. It is called “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius.”

Two weeks into the ban that caused Anthropic to pull its powerful cybersecurity-oriented models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from the market, the Trump administration is softening its stance.

It is now allowing Anthropic to make Mythos 5 available to more than 100 specific U.S. government agencies and companies, including allowing the non-American employees at those organizations to access to the model, both Semafor and Reuters report. This list also includes Anthropic’s own non-American employees, who were included in the original ban that forbade non-Americans from accessing the models.

“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown on Friday, according to the missive seen by Semafor.

Apparently, the administration did not address the release of Fable 5 in this directive. This is a version of Mythos 5 that was widely released a couple of days before the ban because it was said to have more protections. Both models were pulled after those guardrails were allegedly bypassed easily by security researchers. Anthropic did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Anthropic on Friday publicly acknowledged the progress in a post on X, writing: “Since June 12, we’ve been working closely with the US government to restore access to Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Today, the government notified us that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a set of US organizations that operate and defend critical infrastructure. We’re restoring access for these organizations quickly, and we’re continuing to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again.”

Apple’s latest 11th-generation iPad, priced at $299 on Prime Day (was $349), with its stunning 11-inch Liquid Retina display, provides a viewing experience that is just delightful to immerse yourself in, whether you’re learning about a new subject, binge-watching the latest series, or simply sketching some half-baked ideas that come to mind. The A16 processor in there is the true brains behind the operation, as it does all of the regular tasks like juggling numerous tabs, messing with the odd photo edit, and running educational programs with no problems. The battery life is also impressive, as you can get an entire day of pretty varied use out of it.

5. nutribullet Pro Personal Blender – $99.99 $49.99

The nutribullet Pro 900W is a highly effective personal blender which is fitted with a highly powerful motor that crushes hard ingredients such as frozen fruits, vegetables, and ice cubes without leaving any bits or pieces behind. Simply place your ingredients into the cup, screw on the blade tightly, push the button and you have yourself a highly nutritious beverage ready in no time. There is absolutely nothing to fuss about, all you have to do is just fill your cup with whatever you wish and go. Another advantage of having this appliance is its convenience since there is no need to take along a number of different containers and cups with you. Also, some extra cups and lids are provided in case you want to make a couple of smoothies right away without wasting your ingredients. Product page

4. QQH Triple Screen Laptop Monitor Extender – $249.99 $199.99

QQH’s triple screen laptop monitor extender hooks directly onto your laptop and instantly divides up your desktop area into three separate screens, helping you maintain one email open in one place, your references in another place, and working on the main screen without constantly switching windows or tabs. The portable screens can be folded flat for convenience during travel and hook up to your laptop using just a single USB-C cable that powers everything and sends out the video signal, making the installation process just a matter of clamping them together and connecting just one cable. All three screens offer sharp, vivid visuals that do not get affected by either ambient light inside or outdoors and the screens can also be tilted conveniently thanks to the adjustable stands/clamps. Product page.

3. 32GB Google TV Streamer 4K – $99.99 $71.24

Google’s TV Streamer 4K with 32GB storage turns any ordinary television into a fast-streaming device with the help of its dedicated processor. This device provides fast loading of programs and films and also recommends personalized programs to watch based on your preferences on the screen itself. The included voice remote enables users to search or control playback using their voice without having to type anything. The Google TV interface ensures that all apps are neatly arranged so that users do not have to struggle with navigation. Plus, the device supports HDR content with vivid colors and great details regardless of whether you are watching the latest releases or old classics. It only requires connection via Wi-Fi and Google account in order to be operational. Product page.

2. eufy Security 2K Video Doorbell E340 – $149.99 $99.99

Eufy’s Security 2K Video Doorbell E340 is simple to set up and use; before long, you’ll have a crystal-clear live video of your front door appearing on your phone as soon as someone arrives in 2K detail. It will record faces, parcels, and everything else even when it is dark, the lights are out, or whatever you want to call it. It features built-in intelligence that can distinguish between a person, a car, and a package, and it will only warn you when it detects something significant, rather than bombarding you with “random motion” alerts. Of course, you can have a two-way chat with whoever is at the door, as you simply use the app to communicate. Footage lands straight on the device or base station you must have, letting you to check up on what transpired at any time without having to pay monthly fees or maintain a cloud account. Product page.

1. DJI Mini 4K Drone Combo – $449 $293.55

DJI’s Mini 4K Drone Combo is small enough to fit in a backpack and takes off quickly after a simple setup. That means you may capture stunning 4K video footage of sunsets, family events, or your travels without having to deal with onerous rules or additional permits in most countries, which is a huge advantage. The built-in stabilization keeps your film stable even when the drone is dodging gusts of wind or following something, and the accompanying replacement batteries and charging device allow you to fly for a long time without having to wait for your batteries to recharge between shots. The automatic QuickShots mode allow you to accomplish a variety of fancy things like orbiting or rising shots with a single swipe in the app, so even if you’re absolutely new to this, you can get some very polished results straight away. Product page.

Long-horizon reasoning exposes a core weakness in AI agents: context windows fill up fast, and retrieval pipelines return noise instead of signal.

To solve this, researchers at the National University of Singapore developed MRAgent, a framework that abandons the static “retrieve-then-reason” approach. Instead, it uses a mechanism that allows an agent to dynamically develop its memory based on accumulating evidence. 

This multi-step memory reconstruction is integrated into the reasoning process of the large language model (LLM). While not the only framework in this space, MRAgent significantly reduces token consumption and runtime costs compared to other agentic memory management approaches.

The limits of passive retrieval in long-horizon tasks

In classic retrieval pipelines, documents are retrieved through vector search or graph traversal and passed on to an LLM for reasoning. This passive approach fails because it cannot combine reasoning with memory access, creating three major bottlenecks:

• These systems cannot revise their retrieval strategy mid-reasoning. If an agent fetches a document and discovers a crucial missing cue — a specific date or person — it has no way to issue a new query based on that finding.

• Fixed similarity scores and predefined graph expansions return surface-level matches that flood the LLM’s context window with irrelevant noise, degrading reasoning.

• Current systems rely heavily on pre-constructed structures such as top-k results and static relevance functions, limiting the flexibility required to scale across unpredictable, long-horizon user interactions.

The researchers argue that to overcome these limitations, developers must shift toward an “active and associative reconstruction process,” a concept inspired by cognitive neuroscience. 

Under this paradigm, memory recall unfolds sequentially rather than operating as a passive read-out of a static database. The system starts with small, specific triggers from the user’s prompt, such as a person’s name, an action, or a place. These initial hints point to connecting concepts or categories instead of massive blocks of text. 

By following these metadata stepping stones, the agent gathers small pieces of evidence one by one. It uses each new piece of information to guide its next step until it successfully pieces together the full, accurate story.

How MRAgent implements active memory reconstruction

Instead of viewing memory as a static database, MRAgent (Memory Reasoning Architecture for LLM Agents) treats it as an interactive environment. When processing a complex query, the agent uses the backbone LLM’s reasoning abilities to explore multiple candidate retrieval paths across a structured memory graph. 

At each step, the LLM evaluates the intermediate evidence it has gathered and uses it to iteratively optimize its search. It infers new search constraints, pursues the paths with the best information, and prunes irrelevant branches. This allows MRAgent to piece together deeply buried information without filling the LLM’s context with noise.

To make this active exploration computationally efficient and scalable, the framework organizes its database using a “Cue-Tag-Content” mechanism. This operates as a multi-layered associative graph with three node types:

• Cues: Fine-grained keywords, such as entities or contextual attributes extracted from user interactions.

• Content: The actual stored memory units. These are divided into multi-granular layers, such as episodic memory for concrete events and semantic memory for stable facts and user preferences.

• Tags: Semantic bridges that summarize the relational associations between specific Cues and Content.

This structure enables a highly efficient two-stage retrieval process. The LLM first navigates from Cues to candidate Tags. Because Tags explicitly expose the semantic relationships and structural associations of the data, the agent evaluates these short summaries to judge their relevance. The LLM identifies promising traversal paths and discards irrelevant branches before spending compute and prompt tokens to access the detailed, heavy memory contents.

For example, a user might ask an AI agent, “How did Nate use the prize money when he won his third video game tournament?”

• MRAgent first extracts fine-grained starting cues from the prompt, such as “Nate,” “video game tournament,” and “win.”

• The agent maps these initial cues to the memory graph and looks at the available associative Tags connected to them. The agent sees tags like “Tournament Victory” and “Tournament Participation.” Since it is only concerned with what the person did after they won the championship, MRAgent drops the tournament participation tag and pursues the victory tag.

• The agent retrieves the episodic content linked to the chosen Cue-Tag pair, retrieving three distinct memory episodes where Nate won a tournament.

• MRAgent looks at the three memories, decides one of them in particular is relevant to the query, and discards the other two.

• With this information, it updates its cues and starts another round of discovery and pruning. From the new episodic memory it has retrieved, the agent adds “tournament earnings” to its cues and uses that to traverse new tags and home in on new memories. It repeats this process until it gathers enough information to answer the query, which could be something like “Nate saved the money.”

MRAgent performance on industry benchmarks

MRAgent operates alongside several other frameworks addressing agentic memory building. Alternatives include A-MEM, a graph-based agentic memory framework, and MemoryOS, a hierarchical memory framework. Other persistent memory frameworks include LangMem and Mem0.

The researchers tested MRAgent on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval industry benchmarks. These test the abilities of agents to resolve queries on long-horizon tasks and conversations across dozens of sessions and hundreds of turns of dialogue. The backbone models used were Gemini 2.5 Flash and Claude Sonnet 4.5. The system was tested against standard RAG, A-MEM, MemoryOS, LangMem, and Mem0. 

MRAgent consistently outperformed every baseline across both models and all question types by a significant margin. 

However, for enterprise developers, the most critical metric is often computational cost. In the LongMemEval tests, MRAgent slashed prompt token consumption to just 118k per sample. By comparison, A-Mem consumed 632k tokens, and LangMem burned through 3.26 million tokens per query. MRAgent also effectively halved the runtime compared to A-Mem, dropping from 1,122 seconds to 586 seconds.

What makes MRAgent efficient in practice is its on-demand behavior. Evaluating tags and pruning irrelevant paths before retrieval saves money and context space. Furthermore, the system autonomously evaluates its accumulated context and inherently knows when to stop searching, completely avoiding redundant data exploration.

Implementation and development catch

While MRAgent is highly effective, the Cue-Tag-Content structure needs to be prepared before the agent can query it. Developers must figure out how to architect the underlying memory database to enable the LLM to efficiently navigate associative items and prune irrelevant paths without exploding compute costs.

Fortunately, developers do not have to manually label or structure this data. The authors designed MRAgent with an automated distillation pipeline that uses LLMs to process raw interaction histories and automatically populate the memory graph. For a developer, the job is to implement and orchestrate this automated ingestion pipeline, rather than manually tag data.

You need to set up a background job or streaming pipeline that passes raw user interactions through prompt templates to extract this metadata before storing it in your graph database.

However, the authors emphasize that this is a lightweight construction phase and MRAgent intentionally keeps ingestion simple. 

The authors have released the code on GitHub.

Russian hackers were behind last year’s devastating cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, according to a New York Times investigation published Thursday. The breach, which began on 31 August 2025, shut down production across JLR’s factories for nearly six weeks and cost the British economy an estimated two and a half billion dollars, making it the most financially damaging cyberattack in UK history. Investigators have not determined whether the hackers were working directly for Vladimir Putin’s government, were independent criminals, or were operating with the government’s tacit approval.

Microsoft was tracking the Russian hacking group and alerted JLR to their identities, according to the Times. The FBI, Britain’s National Crime Agency, the National Cyber Security Centre, Google’s Mandiant unit, and Palo Alto Networks all contributed to the investigation, an unusually broad coalition that reflects the severity of the breach.

The attack originated with a vishing campaign weeks before the breach went public, in which attackers posing as internal staff tricked JLR employees into handing over login credentials. Armed with valid usernames and passwords, in some cases with administrator privileges, the hackers entered through normal authentication flows and moved laterally across JLR’s IT networks. Production lines ceased on 1 September, and staff were told to stay home.

The damage extended far beyond the factory floor. The UK’s Cyber Monitoring Centre estimated the total economic cost at one point nine billion pounds, with more than 5,000 organizations across JLR’s supply chain affected. The Bank of England later attributed a shortfall in GDP growth partly to the attack, noting that headline output had grown by just two tenths of a percent, less than it had projected.

The UK government responded with an emergency loan of one and a half billion pounds, roughly two billion dollars, to help restore JLR’s supply chain, an unprecedented intervention for a cyberattack. A group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters initially claimed responsibility on Telegram shortly after the breach, but the NYT investigation now points to a separate Russian operation.

In a rare twist, investigators found that the Russian group was not the only one inside JLR’s networks. A Jordanian hacker who went by the name Rey had also breached parts of the company’s infrastructure independently, according to the Times. The discovery of two unrelated intrusions in the same victim underscores a problem that multiple breach investigations have surfaced in recent years, as state-linked and criminal hackers increasingly converge on the same high-value targets.

The attribution arrives amid an intensifying pattern of Russian-linked cyber operations targeting Western and Ukrainian infrastructure, from credential-stealing campaigns against Ukrainian military targets to DDoS attacks across Europe. Dutch police seized 800 servers last month tied to a Kremlin-linked group that had been attacking European government websites from data centres in the Netherlands. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance warned last week that frontier AI will make these attacks faster and harder to stop, a prospect that makes JLR’s six-week shutdown look like a preview of what is coming.

Cyrus Audio will give visitors their first public opportunity to hear its forthcoming 80 PRE streaming preamplifier and 80 PWR power amplifier together at the North West Audio Show 2026. The pair will be demonstrated ahead of its official launch in the Doug Brady HiFi room at De Vere Cranage Estate in Cheshire on June 27 and 28. 

Cyrus has spent more than four decades building its reputation around compact half width components, so the 80 Series is not a subtle change of direction. It is the company’s first full width range, aimed at listeners who want the convenience of BluOS streaming, HDMI eARC, vinyl playback, balanced connections, and real Class A/B power without assembling a rack full of unrelated boxes. Cyrus first unveiled the 80 Series during High End Munich 2025, showing the new full-width components at Motorworld Munich.

Cyrus has never quite received the attention it deserves from North American listeners. That is not because the Cambridgeshire manufacturer lacks engineering chops or musical credibility. eCoustics has spent the past several years covering and reviewing Cyrus components, including the One HD, i7-XR, CDi-XR, 40 Series, and now the 80 Series, and the pattern has been rather consistent: thoughtfully engineered products with real sonic authority, strong phono stages, and a design language that has always been more distinctive than universally embraced.

In a market where Naim, Rega, Cambridge Audio, and Linn command far more dealer-floor oxygen, Cyrus has remained something of a cult favorite. The 80 PRE and 80 PWR may finally give the brand a more obvious path into larger North American systems and conversations.

Related Reviews:

Cyrus 80 PRE Brings Streaming, Vinyl and TV Into One Box

The 80 PRE is far more than a conventional line stage. Cyrus has built BluOS streaming directly into the preamplifier, along with an ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M DAC and support for lossless playback up to 24 bit/192 kHz. It is also Roon Ready, supports AirPlay 2 and MQA decoding, and uses a five inch color TFT display rather than the tiny windows and ancient button arrays that still plague more than a few upscale components. 

Connectivity is properly comprehensive. The 80 PRE includes four analog inputs, MM and MC phono inputs, two optical and two coaxial digital inputs, asynchronous USB B, HDMI eARC, balanced XLR input and output, plus both standard and balanced headphone outputs. That makes it a legitimate control center for a mixed system with a turntable, television, computer, streamer, and power amplifier all under one roof. 

For Cyrus, the larger chassis is the story. The company has finally given its engineers more physical space to work with, while still allowing the 80 Series to pair with its smaller 40 Series components. That means owners could use the 80 PRE with the 40 CD, 40 PPA phono stage, or TTP turntable rather than being forced into a single all or nothing ecosystem. 

Cyrus 80 PWR Adds 200 Watts of Class A/B Power

The matching 80 PWR is a Class A/B power amplifier rated at 200 watts in stereo mode and 300 watts when bridged for mono operation. It uses balanced XLR inputs and can be run as a stereo amplifier initially, with a second unit added later for a monoblock system. That is a sensible upgrade path for listeners with difficult loudspeakers or rooms that require more headroom than an integrated amplifier can comfortably provide. 

Cyrus has not yet published the usual deeper measurements that serious buyers will want to see, including the impedance at which those power ratings are measured, damping factor, distortion, and dynamic output into lower loads. The published specifications confirm the basic architecture and headline power, but not the full engineering autopsy. 

The Bottom Line

The 80 PRE and 80 PWR are significant because they represent Cyrus’s first serious full width separates platform, combining BluOS streaming, HDMI eARC, MM/MC phono, balanced connectivity, and Class A/B power in a system designed to grow with the owner.

What we still do not know is just as important: final pricing, release timing, 4 ohm output, distortion and damping figures, power supply details, and whether the new larger format delivers the authority Cyrus is promising. Cranage will reveal whether this is a proper Yorkshire pudding or merely a well dressed soufflé that collapses the moment the DALI speakers get demanding.

Demo System & Availability

Doug Brady HiFi will demonstrate the 80 PRE and 80 PWR with the Cyrus TTP turntable, Cyrus 40 Series phono preamplifier, and DALI Epikore 3 standmount loudspeakers in the Stephenson 2 room. The setup is clearly intended to show that Cyrus sees the 40 and 80 Series as complementary rather than competing ranges. 

Cyrus’s product pages currently list no pricing or formal retail date. UK retailer listings, however, show the 80 PRE at $5,995 (£4,499) and the 80 PWR at $5,295 (£3,999), with availability expected in August 2026. Those figures should be treated as dealer information until Cyrus confirms final pricing and availability market by market.

For more information: cyrusaudio.com

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Apple’s MacBook Pro is set to receive an overhaul, with a redesign, an an OLED touchscreen expected to be the key changes. Here’s what the rumor mill has to say about the device.

While AppleInsider readers have wanted a Mac with an OLED screen for years, actual claims of an OLED-equipped MacBook Pro date back to at least 2019. As for when such an upgrade might arrive, it depends on who you ask.

Leakers and analysts alike have had a lot to say about the future of the MacBook Pro, with claims of hardware changes, performance upgrades, and more. Some have even claimed Apple’s touchscreen laptop will be called the MacBook Ultra.

Here’s everything rumored for the next major MacBook Pro upgrade.

OLED MacBook Pro: Release date rumors

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, and software chief Craig Federighi echoed the sentiment in 2018, when he called touchscreen laptops “experiments.”

Apple is expected to introduce a redesigned MacBook Pro in either early 2027 or late 2026.

“We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do,” said Federighi in 2018. However, rumors of a touchscreen MacBook Pro surfaced the very next year.

Reports from May 2019 and August 2021 said Samsung was reportedly set to produce OLED MacBook Pro screens. In January 2020, an Apple patent revealed the company hadn’t ruled out the idea of a touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Since then, multiple sources have chimed in on the matter, all saying that an OLED MacBook Pro with a touchscreen was in development. Opinions on when it would be released, however, differed.

A November 2021 report from The Elec said the MacBook Pro would only gain an OLED panel in 2026. The same publication, however, said in July 2023 that the touchscreen MacBook Pro would actually be released in 2027 with an eighth-generation OLED panel.

Just days later, the same source went on to say that the MacBook Pro would actually be updated with a sixth-generation OLED panel in 2025. Then, in February 2024, they said the MacBook Pro with an OLED screen would actually arrive in 2027.

In January 2025 and February 2025, however, the same publication said the MacBook Pro would receive a hybrid OLED panel in 2026.

In February 2026, the same source claimed that mass production of MacBook Pro OLED panels would start in May 2026. In June 2026, however, The Elec then said that mass production would begin in July 2026, which contradicted a separate leaker, who said trial production had already started in January 2026.

The publication behind these claims has a mixed track record, and it has continued flip-flopping over the years, saying that the OLED MacBook would arrive in 2025, 2026, or 2027 at different points in time.

Apple is expected to replace the camera notch with a punch-hole design on the next-generation MacBook Pro.

In general, however, rumored release dates for the OLED MacBook have been all over the place. In January 2023, analyst Ming Chi Kuo said Apple would ship an “OLED MacBook by the end of 2024 at the earliest.”

2024 has obviously come and gone, but Kuo has continued to make claims about the OLED MacBook Pro. In September 2025, he said the device would arrive in late 2026.

Separately, in May 2024, Omdia analysts said the MacBook Pro with an OLED screen would actually arrive in 2026. This claim resurfaced in December 2024 and July 2025. In June 2026, the analyst firm said Apple’s touchscreen-equipped MacBook Pro could debut in July 2026, which seems unlikely.

Display analyst Ross Young said in April 2023 and October 2023 that the MacBook Pro would receive an OLED panel and touch screen in 2026.

Korean publication ET News claimed in January 2023 that Apple had ordered OLED panels for the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro, for devices expected to debut in 2026. This claim was reiterated a month later, and another Korean publication said the same thing in August 2025.

Meanwhile, in January 2023, a generally reliable leaker claimed the touchscreen-equipped MacBook Pro would arrive in 2025. However, by August 2025, their claim had changed to “late 2026 or early 2027.”

This alleged late 2026 through early 2027 release date was reiterated in November 2025 and January 2026 by the same source.

In February 2026, the leaker was more specific, saying that the OLED MacBook Pro would debut in late 2026. In April 2026, however, they claimed that the revamped MacBook Pro was more likely to arrive in 2027, due to an ongoing industry-wide memory shortage.

More recently, in June 2026, they suggested that Apple has abandoned its plans for M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, opting to focus on the AI-focused M7 line of Apple Silicon system-on-chips instead.

On June 26, 2026, they claimed Apple would use the current M5 Pro and M5 Max chips for its touchscreen MacBook Pro. The laptop is still expected to debut “between late 2026 and early 2027.”

Over the years, the same source listed 2025, 2026, and 2027 as release dates for the OLED-equipped MacBook Pro, so it’s still not entirely clear when the laptop will arrive.

As for verifiable information, AppleInsider learned in July 2025 that MacBook Pros bearing the device identifiers K114 and K116 were in development. The two laptops were tested with internal distributions of macOS Tahoe and were seemingly never intended to debut before macOS 26.5, as we learned in October 2025.

In short, the revamped OLED MacBook Pro will most likely debut in early 2027 or late 2026, depending on who you ask. In any case, though, there’s no doubt Apple has been researching the concept.

Apple’s touchscreen MacBook patents

Ideas for touchscreen Macs can be seen in Apple patents as far back as August 2010, and the company hasn’t abandoned associated research efforts.

A 2024 Apple patent with an illustration of a MacBook Pro equipped with a touchscreen. Image Credit: Apple.

An Apple patent, filed in 2023 and granted in September 2024, titled “Touch Sensing Utilizing Integrated Micro Circuitry,” featured an illustration of a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen.

The text, meanwhile, repeatedly refers to “an example personal computer that includes a trackpad and an integrated touch screen.” Another Apple patent from March 2024 detailed an all-glass MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, further suggesting the company has plans for a radical MacBook Pro redesign.

An Apple patent from August 2024 details a different approach, with multiple touchscreens across different areas of a MacBook Pro. An October 2020 patent, meanwhile, outlined how a traditional MacBook keyboard might be replaced with a deformable touchscreen.

Apple executives Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi said, in April 2021 and June 2025, respectively, that the company has no plans to merge the iPad and Mac. However, Apple’s own research suggests the Mac will become more iPad-like, thanks to the addition of a touchscreen.

OLED MacBook Pro: Display & hardware rumors

The cornerstone of the K114 and K116 MacBook Pro models is expected to be the addition of an OLED panel and touchscreen.

Apple’s OLED-equipped MacBook Pro will likely be powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

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With macOS Golden Gate offering support for touch-based input via Sidecar on iPad, a touchscreen Mac would make sense. In June 2026, a leaker with a mixed track record said that the touchscreen MacBook Pro is “100% confirmed,” which isn’t much of a surprise, given that all previous reporting mentioned a touchscreen.

According to an October 2025 rumor, Apple has developed a reinforced hinge meant to offset any display bounce when the MacBook Pro touchscreen is used. The same report also says that the updated MacBook Pro will feature a hole-punch design for the built-in camera, meaning it may not have a notch like the M5 models.

A hole-punch camera design would be a good hardware fit for the new-and-improved Siri AI. On iOS 27, Apple’s virtual assistant shows up as part of the Dynamic Island, so Apple might opt for a similar approach with the MacBook Pro.

While a touchscreen is sure to change the way users interact with their MacBook Pros, an OLED panel would significantly improve the visual experience. Relative to the LCD screen of the M5 MacBook Pro, an OLED panel offers an improved contrast ratio and better response time.

The difference between an OLED panel and an LCD screen is especially noticeable when viewing images and videos with the color black. Movie scenes with lots of darkness or shadows typically look better on an OLED screen, appearing black rather than the sort of blue-ish gray you’ll often find on LCD screens.

To be more specific, though, according to a July 2023 rumor, Apple will use an eighth-generation OLED panel with LTPO TFT technology.

LTPO TFT is short for Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistor. This display technology combines the benefits of both LTPS (Low-Temperature Polysilicon) TFT and IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) TFT technologies.

LTPO TFT would allow for improved power consumption and longer battery life on the MacBook Pro, compared to traditional TFT technologies. Samsung Display is expected to be the supplier for MacBook Pro OLED panels, per multiple sources.

The touchscreen MacBook Pro is expected to feature a reinforced hinge design.

As for what will power the OLED MacBook Pro, the device is expected to feature the current M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, per a rumor published on June 26, 2026. This means performance will be comparable to the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max variants of the MacBook Pro, which debuted in March 2026.

According to an earler to a June 2026 rumor from the same source, Apple has abandoned the development of M6 Pro and M6 Max chips. The second-generation touchscreen MacBook is, instead, expected to use Apple’s M7 Pro and M7 Max chips.

Apple still has plans for a base M6 chip, which is expected to feature a memory bandwidth of 200GB/s, up from 153GB/s on the base M5 chip. However, according to a November 2025 rumor, it will only be used in the base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro, which will use the existing M5 design without a touchscreen or OLED screen.

Our own findings suggest this will be the case as well. As AppleInsider pointed out in October 2025, the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro bears the identifier J806, while the OLED MacBook Pros are broadly known as K114 and K116.

While chip and performance upgrades are to be expected, Apple is also said to have been exploring another upgrade for the MacBook Pro. According to a February 2024 rumor, Apple at one point considered adding a proprietary cellular modem to the MacBook Pro.

Devices like the iPhone Air, iPhone 16e, iPhone 17e, and M5 iPad Pro already feature Apple-designed modems. A December 2024 report claimed Apple was exploring adding a second-generation cellular modem to the MacBook Pro, and that the upgrade would not occur before 2026.

As for what the OLED-equipped MacBook Pro might be called, an April 2025 rumor says Apple will choose “MacBook Ultra” as the marketing name. This would expand the “Ultra” branding used for the Apple Watch and top-tier Apple Silicon chips.

However, this might not happen anytime soon. Apple was similarly expected to unveil an iPhone Ultra back in 2023, though that never amounted to anything.

As of late June 2026, there are no significant rumors about the battery capacity, speaker count, ports, or color options of the touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Hardware elements aside, the revamped MacBook Pro will likely be quite expensive. In June 2026, Apple increased the starting price of the M5 Pro MacBook Pro to $2,499, and that of the M5 Max MacBook Pro to $4,099.

The touchscreen-equipped models will likely hit an even higher price. The current memory chip shortage isn’t expected to end in 2027, and at this point it’s not reasonable to expect it to end in 2028 either.

What to expect with the 2027 MacBook Pro

Overall, it looks as though the next-generation MacBook Pro will deliver the following improvements over the current M5 lineup:

• OLED screen with better contrast, faster response times
• Touchscreen and touch-compatible apps, features
• Dynamic Island
• Redesigned thinner chassis with a reinforced hinge

The touchscreen-enhanced MacBook Pro is expected to debut either in early 2027 or late 2026.

New Zealand and Belgium go head-to-head for the first time ever, in a crucial World Cup 2026 Group G fixture that’s a virtual knockout. The Red Devils guarantee progress with a win, while the All Whites will need other results to go their way.

Belgium may be overwhelming favorites against the 84th-ranked Kiwis, but they have blown tepid and cold so far, the goalless draw with Iran particularly dispiriting. Even their 1-1 draw against Egypt came courtesy of an own goal, sparked by Romelu Lukaku’s introduction. Yet the Napoli forward and Kevin De Bruyne looked off the pace against Iran and coach Rudi Garcia will need Arsenal’s Leandro Trossard on form to extend Belgium’s 15-match unbeaten streak with a necessary victory.

Ford has admitted that it had to rehire experienced engineers after its AI systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could swap in AI and still produce a high-quality product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, comes as Ford earned the top spot among mainstream brands in JD Power’s initial quality ranking for the first time in 16 years.

The problem was not that the AI was fundamentally broken, Poon explained, but that experienced workers left before they could transfer their institutional knowledge into the systems meant to replace them. Without decades of engineering judgment encoded in the training data, Ford’s automated tools amplified weak inputs rather than catching design flaws. The company rehired, newly hired, or promoted 350 experienced engineers to fill the gap.

Poon was vague about why those workers left, but the broader picture is not. Ford has shed roughly 5,300 salaried positions since its 2020 employment peak, part of a wider contraction across Detroit’s automakers that has eliminated more than 20,000 white-collar jobs. CEO Jim Farley has said publicly that AI “is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US,” a prediction his own company’s quality crisis now complicates.

The 350 returning engineers were tasked with mentoring junior staff, rebuilding the data pipelines that feed Ford’s AI training, and refining the automated systems they were originally supposed to be replaced by. Ford also created a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to catch edge cases and revalidate software changes late in development.

The turnaround was enough to push Ford to the top of JD Power’s 2026 initial quality study, which measures problems reported by owners in the first 90 days of ownership. Ford scored 152 problems per 100 vehicles, ahead of Nissan and Buick. The F-150, Mustang, and Super Duty each won best in segment for the second consecutive year.

The quality win does not erase a rougher track record. Ford has led US automakers in recalls this year, issuing 51 so far in 2026 covering more than 11 million vehicles, more than double the next-closest manufacturer. It also joins a growing list of companies discovering that removing human judgment from AI-driven workflows creates problems the technology cannot fix on its own.

The episode lands at a moment when AI companies and policymakers are scrambling to figure out what the transition means for workers. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft this week backed RAISE US, a $500 million nonprofit led by former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to retrain American workers for the AI economy. Ford’s experience suggests the harder problem is not retraining but knowing which workers you cannot afford to lose in the first place.