There are some areas of life where I feel confident that I know what I’m doing. There are other areas where I know that I am far from an expert. Fixing things falls in the second category, so it is a good thing that I’m a lawyer, not a handyman. But thanks to a new app, maybe I can fake it. For over two decades, the folks behind the iFixit website have been helping people fix things. I sometimes link to a story on iFixit because they frequently post interesting videos and pictures in which they take apart new Apple products, providing some insight into how they work. But the company has guides and sells tools not only for fixing iPhones and Macs but also for fixing appliances, cars, power tools, medical devices, and more. I mention all of that today because, as reported by Boone Ashworth of Wired and Juli Clover of MacRumors, iFixit released a new iPhone app this week (App Store link). The app provides lots of great advice for fixing items, but perhaps most impressively, it has an AI-powered chatbot that is trained on iFixit’s vast knowledge base of how to fix things. Just explain what you are trying to fix—you can even take a picture of an item in question—and the AI offers helpful advice on what is wrong and what you can do. The service is free, but Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that a paid version is coming soon, which will add step-by-step voice guides. This app looks to be a great use of AI. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I like to use Apple Fitness+ to do workouts at home. I’ve seen some recent speculation about the future of the service, but I hope that Apple keeps it going, and there is new evidence that it will. This week, Apple announced that it is expanding Apple Fitness+ to 28 new markets around the world. What struck me as particularly interesting about that announcement is that Apple is now dubbing the instructors in Spanish, German, and Japanese, using AI to create a voice that is based on the actual voice of each of the 28 Fitness+ instructors. In theory, Apple could do this for any spoken language in the world.
- Many other companies are doing more with AI than Apple right now, but Adam Levine of Barron’s believes that Apple’s slow-and-steady approach to AI might turn out to be the best approach of all.
- One of the improvements to the Messages app in iOS 26 is the ability to screen unknown senders. It has vastly reduced the number of spam texts that bother me. I’ve noticed that, by default, it allows texts that seem to be time sensitive to come through, which I like, but I didn’t realize that you can toggle that on or off in the Settings app. Moreover, Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac recommends turning on “Personal” (which is turned off by default) so that unknown text messages will come through if they don’t seem to be from businesses or organizations. I’m going to try that for a while to see what I think.
- I frequently use the Shazam service on my iPhone all the time to identify a song—often a good song that I discover while watching something on TV. I’ve never paid much attention to the Shazam.com website, but now there is an interesting reason to do so. Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac reports that not only does the website reveal the top songs that drove Shazam activity within the past week, but it also identifies the popular segments—i.e., the moment in the song that led the most people to trigger Shazam in the first place to identify the song. It comes as no surprise that as I type this, a song featured during the last episode of the Apple TV show Pluribus is on the Top 10 list for the past week.
- Speaking of Shazam, did you know that you can have the app continuously recognize songs in the background for you? Ankur Thakur of iDownloadBlog explains how the Auto Shazam feature works.
- If you are thinking of getting an Apple Watch as a gift for the holidays, the Apple Watch Series 11 is currently selling on Amazon for an all-time low price of $299 for the 42mm version, and the 46mm version is only $30 more.
- If you want an external battery that can not only recharge your iPhone but also power a refrigerator, Juli Clover of MacRumors reviews the Anker Solix C1000 Gen 2 Portable Power Station. It is currently on sale for $371.45 on Amazon.
- This week, the American Film Institute announced the 2025 Top 10"outstanding television programs deemed culturally and artistically representative of this year’s most significant achievements in the art of the moving image,” and three shows from Apple TV are on the list: Pluribus, Severance, and The Studio. Those are all fantastic shows, and it is impressive that 30% of the list comes from Apple TV. Other shows on that Top 10 list that I loved include The Diplomat (Netflix), Andor (Disney), and The Pitt (HBO).
- Davis Snow of Cult of Mac reports that Apple TV also did well with Golden Globes nominations, including half of the Best Drama nominations (Severance, Slow Horses, and Pluribus)
- And finally, when Apple first announced that the iPhone 17 Pro would have a vapor chamber so that the processor could work faster without the device getting too hot, I linked to a video from Aldo of Know Art studios in which he showed how vapor chambers on smartphones work. Apple recently released its own video—and a rather dramatic one—to celebrate the vapor chamber. It is called Peak Performance: