Enlarge / Apple's M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's newest iPhones and Apple Watches don't come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn't get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple scheduled its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and released new iPhones in September and then launched the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes that the event will mainly focus on the first wave of Macs with M4 processors, following the standard M4's introduction in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As he has reported previously, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and "pro-level M4 chip options," presumably the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.

But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which hasn't gotten an M3 update at all and has been using the same basic external design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to the Apple TV than the current mini, but still uses an internal power supply so that owners won't have to wrangle a power brick. At least some of the current device's ports will be replaced by USB-C and/or Thunderbolt ports, something that MacRumors apparently confirmed earlier today when they found a reference to an "Apple silicon Mac mini (5 ports)" in an Apple software update (some of those ports are reportedly on the front of the device, a nice Mac Studio design upgrade that I'd like to see on a new Mac mini).

Enlarge / Illustration of a person who refuses to check their iPhone's messages until RCS is enabled on their MVNO carrier, out of respect for their Android-toting friends and family. (credit: Getty Images)

The future of inter-OS mobile messaging is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

With iOS 18, Apple has made it possible for non-Apple phones to message with iPhones through Rich Communication Services (RCS). This grants upgrades from standard SMS text messages, like read receipts, easier and higher-quality media sending, typing indicators, and emoji/response compatibility. More than that, it allows for messaging while on Wi-Fi without cellular services and makes group messages far less painful to navigate and leave. Notably, RCS messages between iPhones and non-iPhones will not be encrypted, like Apple's private iMessage service available exclusively between Apple devices.

iOS 18 makes these RCS upgrades possible, but certainly not guaranteed, at least as of today. Lots of people have already been enjoying cross-platform RCS messaging when texting with iOS 18 beta users. And iPhones on the big carriers' plans can now trade RCS with Android users. But some iPhone users, particularly on mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)—typically pre-paid services that do not own network hardware but resell major carrier access—do not have an RCS option available to them yet.

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Today is the official release date for the public versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia, and a scad of other Apple software updates, the foundation that Apple will use for Apple Intelligence and whatever other features it wants to add between now and next year's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. But for those who value stability and reliability over new features, you may not be excited to update to a new operating system with a version number ending in "0."

For those of you who prefer to wait for a couple of bugfix updates before installing new stuff, Apple is also releasing security-only updates for a bunch of its (now) last-generation operating systems today. The iOS 17.7, iPadOS 17.7, and macOS 14.7 updates are either available now or should be shortly, along with a security update for 2022's macOS 13 Ventura. An updated version of Safari 18 that runs on both macOS 13 and 14 should be available soon, though as of this writing is doesn't appear to be available yet.

Apple has historically been pretty good about providing security updates to older macOS releases—you can expect them for about two years after the operating system is replaced by a newer version. But for iOS and iPadOS, the company used to stop updating older versions entirely after releasing a new one. This changed back in 2021, when Apple decided to start providing some security-only updates to older iOS versions to help people who were worried about installing an all-new potentially buggy OS upgrade.

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The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as "the AI one" in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of "Apple Intelligence" features.

That's funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that's coming out today. A lot of it is coming "later this fall" in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won't be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won't be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.

But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia)

The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.

Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as "root vegetable"), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the '90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is "face with bags under eyes," whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they're implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.

Unicode 16.0 also adds support for seven new modern and historical scripts: the West African Garay alphabet; the Gurung Khema, Kirat Rai, Ol Onal, and Sunuwar scripts from Northeast India and Nepal; and historical Todhri and Tulu-Tigalari scripts from Albania and Southwest India, respectively.