Apple dominates the Edge AI smartwatch market with 90% of shipments, a lead built on its 2023 S9 chip decision that competitors are still racing to match. While Edge AI adoption across the industry surged 70% year-over-year, rivals like Huawei and Qualcomm are only beginning to ship competitive alternatives.
Apple Watch dominates 90% of Edge AI-capable smartwatch shipments, leveraging its purpose-built S9 chip for on-device health monitoring. The real growth story isn’t Apple’s market share—it’s the explosive expansion of health applications like blood pressure monitoring and sleep apnea detection that are driving the entire category forward.
Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a lawsuit over selling iPhones with promised Siri features that didn’t exist yet. Eligible buyers of iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16 models, and iPhone 16e purchased between June 2024 and March 2025 could receive $25–$95 per device.
Apple’s meetings with PrismML reveal the company’s AI models fall short of its ambitions—a compression technique shrinking a 54GB model to 4GB while preserving quality could transform on-device AI capabilities. The startup’s breakthrough enables 27-billion-parameter models on iPhones, handling complex reasoning tasks currently impossible for smaller local models.
Apple met with PrismML, a startup running a 27-billion-parameter AI model on iPhone 17 Pro, suggesting the company’s current on-device architecture may be sacrificing performance. While Apple’s own model uses sparse architecture with only 1-4 billion active parameters, PrismML’s compressed Qwen model activates all 27 billion simultaneously—a fundamental difference in inference capability.
India’s removal of tariffs on smartphone components like wireless charging hardware and battery cells through 2029 gives Apple a major cost advantage for its expanding India supply chain. With a quarter of all iPhones now assembled in India—including the entire iPhone 17 lineup for the first time—the duty exemptions accelerate Apple’s long-term pivot away from China.
Apple grew Mac shipments by 10.1% in Q2 2026 while the global PC market shrank 4.9%, gaining market share to 9.9% despite raising prices. The MacBook Neo launch and strong buyer demand proved Mac users are less price-sensitive than Windows PC buyers facing the same memory supply crunch.
Apple has confirmed a multiyear partnership with Broadcom exceeding $30 billion to manufacture custom radio frequency components, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth chips in the U.S. The deal will produce over 15 billion American-made chips and create hundreds of jobs, marking Apple’s largest commitment under its American Manufacturing Program.
Apple’s next macOS will drop support for encrypted Mac OS Extended drives, the file system that predated APFS. Users with older encrypted external hard drives will need to back up and reformat before upgrading to macOS 28.
Apple is actively testing Chinese chipmaker CXMT’s memory through its supplier qualification process, seeking Washington’s guarantee that the company won’t face future blacklisting. Tim Cook is personally lobbying officials to approve CXMT-sourced chips for China-market devices, as the supplier’s rapid rise to become the world’s fourth-largest DRAM maker offers Apple crucial supply diversification amid tight global chip markets.