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 Apple and Nike are at it again. But this time, their collaboration doesn't involve Apple Watch bands or a shoe-tracking iPod. Instead, the companies are launching a new color option for Beats' fitness-focused earphones. Meet the Powerbeats Pro 2 - Nike Special Edition.
"This isn't just a new colorway," Beats CMI Chris Thorne wrote in a press release. "It's a collision of two brands that de?ne performance, culture and sports — the attributes of today's athlete."
Okay, cool, but marketing-speak aside, this is, in fact, just a new colorway. However, depending on your taste, it might be one you're into. Nike's "Volt" palette takes center stage, with its love-it-or-hate-it electric yellow-green motif. The two companies share logo duties, with the Beats "b" on the left bud and Nike's swoosh on the right. Meanwhile, the charging case takes you to Speckle City, looking like something Jackson Pollock flung a can of leftover shoe paint onto.
Apple / NikeOtherwise, these are the same Powerbeats Pro 2 earphones that launched last year. You get heart-rate tracking, decent ANC and Spatial Audio. You can revisit Billy Steele's review
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Apple has started providing small security updates to iOS, iPadOS and macOS devices. These are dubbed Background Security Improvements that will offer minor system updates between the larger software updates. According to the company, these are meant to "deliver lightweight security releases for components such as the Safari browser, WebKit framework stack, and other system libraries that benefit from smaller, ongoing security patches between software updates."
These updates should download in the background, as the name implies, although the device will need to be restarted to complete the process. In practice, we found that applying a Background Security Improvement was faster than a typical software update from Apple. On an iPhone, the restart was more of a power cycle taking under a minute compared with the 5 to 10 minutes a standard update takes a device out of commission.
The inaugural Background Security Improvement was released today with a patch for WebKit. These updates will be supported and enabled on devices running iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1 and macOS 26.1. Details can be reviewed under the Privacy & Security section of the Settings menu.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apple-releases-its-first-background-security-improvement-for-macos-ios-and-ipados-214052311.html?src=rss
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You can sum up the gamer response to NVIDIA's DLSS 5 announcement with the ever-relevant Fallout 4 meme: "Everyone disliked that." Across social media and Reddit last night, I couldn't find anyone who's genuinely positive about the potential for DLSS 5, which uses AI to add "photorealistic" lighting and materials to in-game models and environments. Instead, it's mostly complaints about the feature being another avenue for AI slop. And you know what? I agree.
It's not unusual to see gamers being reflexively angry about new technology on the internet, especially when it's being pitched by NVIDIA as the "biggest breakthrough in computer graphics" since its RTX 20-series GPUs arrived in 2018 with real-time ray tracing. There was plenty of suspicion around DLSS's original AI upscaling model, as well as the "fake" frames generated by later iterations. But the few demos we've seen of DLSS 5 basically look like "yassified" AI filters for popular games.
Leon and Grace from Resident Evil: Requiem have more distinct facial and hair detail, but they look a bit too slick. There are more wrinkles o
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