This week, Samsung and Google announce some major AI improvements, while Apple plans a week of new product launches. 

While Apple waits, Samsung and Google crack on...

Samsung launched the Galaxy S26 this week, and it's made for a slightly uncomfortable read if you're an Apple fan. The headline feature is what Samsung's calling an agentic AI phone, which sounds like marketing fluff until you understand what it actually means. Rather than AI that waits for you to ask a question, this is AI that takes action on your behalf. Gemini reads your group chat, works out what everyone wants for dinner, opens the delivery app in the background, builds the cart, and waits for your final tap to confirm. Your phone's usable the whole time. It's genuinely impressive, and it's shipping to real people now.

The S26 is actually running three AI systems simultaneously. There's Google's Gemini handling those multi-step agentic tasks, Perplexity for web-based queries, and a heavily upgraded Bixby for on-device contextual assistance. Bixby's apparently got good enough at natural language that you can say your eyes hurt from looking at the screen and it'll open the brightness settings without you needing to tap anything. Whether all three systems working together feels seamless or chaotic in practice remains to be seen, but the ambition is clear.

Here's where it gets interesting for the Apple conversation. Back in January, Apple confirmed a deal with Google to use Gemini as the foundation for an overhauled Siri. So in a sense, Samsung is showing us a preview of where Siri is eventually headed. The difference is that Samsung has it now, and Apple doesn't. The revamped Siri was originally targeted for an iOS 26.4 update in March or April, but Bloomberg's been reporting that some features are slipping to May, or possibly as late as September. I've been trying out the 26.4 Developer Beta, and can confirm there's no sign of any Siri improvements. That's a meaningful gap, particularly when Samsung is out there actively demonstrating the same technology working on real handsets.

It's worth remembering that Apple has been here before. Siri launched in 2011 and was genuinely ahead of its time, only to spend the next decade being lapped by Google Assistant and others while Apple iterated slowly. The company knows that story, and it's clearly trying to avoid repeating it. The Google Gemini partnership is part of that, and the underlying ambition for what Apple wants Siri to become is genuinely exciting. It just keeps not being quite ready yet.

None of this means the iPhone is suddenly behind in any practical sense for most users. Apple's ecosystem advantages, its hardware quality, and its privacy approach remain real. But the AI assistant story is one area where Android's ahead right now, and Samsung's S26 launch has made that gap very visible. Apple will need the Gemini-powered Siri to arrive, and to arrive well, before too many people start to notice.

Your iPhone is WAY more capable

You search for something simple on your iPhone and twenty minutes later you're three videos deep, none of them quite right, and the one that looked promising was made in 2019 for a model you don't even own. It's exhausting. And it shouldn't be this hard.

Maybe you've had your iPhone for years and there's a nagging feeling you're missing something. Shortcuts you don't know. Features buried in menus you've never opened. Time being lost every day to tasks your iPhone could handle in seconds, if only someone would just show you clearly, once.

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Could the next 'Pro' device be for your living room? 

Something's brewing in Apple's living room. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple has a three-day stretch of announcements planned starting Monday 3rd March, with at least five products expected. One of those could well be a new Apple TV, and if the rumour mill's to be believed, it might arrive with a rather interesting new name. Nothing's confirmed until Apple says so, but the chatter is getting louder, so let's have a look at what people are expecting.

The name "Apple TV Pro" has been doing the rounds partly because Apple recently rebranded its Apple TV+ streaming service to just "Apple TV," which creates an obvious naming headache for the hardware box. A Pro suffix would neatly sort that out. It turns out that basic branding logic might be enough to make this happen, even before we get into whether the hardware actually earns the Pro label.

Which, honestly, is worth a quick thought. The Pro badge gets handed out pretty freely these days across Apple's lineup. MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone Pro, AirPods Pro. And now, potentially, a streaming box for watching telly on the sofa. I actually love that. There's something a bit funny about Apple's most productivity-signalling label landing on a device whose whole job is leisure and downtime. Not a complaint, just an observation.

So what might justify it? The most consistent rumour is an A17 Pro chip inside, the same one that debuted in the iPhone 15 Pro. That'd be a solid jump from the A15 in the current model, and it'd bring Apple Intelligence support plus the kind of processing muscle needed for console-quality gaming. Wi-Fi 7 and a new Apple-designed wireless chip are also expected, which should make it a more capable smart home hub and keep streaming rock solid. All speculation for now, but these are coming from sources that tend to know their stuff.

Pricing is where it gets a bit awkward. The current Apple TV 4K already starts at £149, which is a hard sell when most modern TVs stream perfectly well on their own and a Fire Stick costs about a quarter of that. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested a sub-$100 target, but with the rumoured hardware upgrades, a lot of people think a Pro model would actually sit above the current price rather than below it. If that's the case, Apple's going to need to make a convincing case for what you're actually getting. Apple Intelligence, proper gaming, and a smarter role as the hub of your home could build that argument, but it needs to land clearly.

It's also just interesting to think about where the Apple TV box sits in the bigger picture. For a long time it was famously treated as a hobby project inside Apple, which always felt like a bit of a waste given that the living room's one of the few screens Apple doesn't actually make. But with Apple TV+ now genuinely competitive as a streaming service, and with Apple pushing harder into smart home territory, that little black box suddenly has a lot more to do. Done right, it could become a proper living room platform rather than a nice-to-have accessory.

We won't know anything for certain until Apple makes it official, and that could be as soon as next week. If you're thinking about picking up the current Apple TV 4K, I'd genuinely hold off for now. It's been unchanged since 2022, and something better's almost certainly just around the corner.

Three VERY different MacBooks are coming...

We're at a genuinely unusual moment for the Mac. Within the space of a few months, Apple looks set to release three MacBooks that couldn't be more different from each other in terms of who they're for and what they're trying to do. Two of them are expected as soon as next week. The third is the most interesting of the lot, and it's coming later in the year.

Let's start with the one most of us are probably watching. Updated MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are widely expected to be announced as part of Apple's three-day product launch stretch starting Monday 3rd March. These are going to be seriously capable machines, especially for anyone doing heavy video editing, 3D work, or anything else that genuinely pushes a laptop to its limits. The performance gains over the current M4 Pro and Max models will be real and meaningful. But if you're hoping for a dramatic visual change, you'll be waiting a while longer. Same design, same notch, same form factor. This is very much a what's-inside update, and for the professionals it's aimed at, that's probably exactly what they want.

The more surprising announcement expected that same week is something Apple's never really done before: a genuinely affordable MacBook. Rumours point to a starting price somewhere between $599 and $799, which would make it significantly cheaper than the MacBook Air and put it in direct competition with Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops for the first time. It's reportedly going to be powered by an iPhone chip rather than an M-series processor, which keeps costs down without sacrificing the things most everyday users actually need. The design is said to be a compact aluminium build, likely around 13 inches, and it could come in a range of playful colours including yellow, green, and blue, which would make it the most colourful Mac since the iBook G3 days. That detail alone tells you who this is for. Apple's clearly looking at the education market, first-time laptop buyers, and anyone who's always wanted a Mac but couldn't quite justify the price. It's essentially Apple doing what it did with the iPhone SE, but for the Mac: a lower entry point into the ecosystem that still feels unmistakably Apple. And once someone's in that ecosystem, the services revenue tends to follow.

Then there's the third MacBook, and this is the one that's genuinely got people talking. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported just yesterday on what's expected to be the most significant MacBook Pro redesign in years, due later in 2026, likely around October or November. These M6 Pro and M6 Max models would be the first Macs ever to feature a touchscreen display, along with OLED panels and a Dynamic Island replacing the current notch. Apple's been firmly against touchscreen Macs for years, so this would be quite the about-turn. According to the reports, the approach is thoughtful rather than gimmicky. Touch wouldn't replace the keyboard and trackpad, it'd sit alongside them, with macOS adapting depending on how you're interacting with it. Tap a menu and it expands into a larger, finger-friendly version. Use the trackpad instead and everything behaves exactly as you'd expect. The Dynamic Island, built around a smaller hole-punch camera cutout, would bring the same kind of glanceable live information to your Mac screen that iPhone users have come to love.

As always, none of this is confirmed until Apple makes it official. But taken together, these three machines paint a pretty clear picture of where Apple wants to take the Mac. A powerhouse for professionals, an accessible entry point for new users, and a reimagined flagship that could change what we expect from a laptop. Quite the year ahead.

Tip of the week

Did you know, in the Weather app on your iPhone, you can view a map with the current and upcoming weather conditions? For the location that you would like to do this for, simply tap the map button in the bottom left corner, then choose from either 1 hour or 12 hour preview. Tap the play button to view an animation of the upcoming weather changes. 

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