Author: Press Room

I love my iMac. I’m a big fan of iPads. I own a HomePod. And I eventually came round to the Apple Watch and wear one every day. “Great,” said an imaginary person at Apple, “so how about a smart display that’s like we’ve mashed all those things together with a fork and made it run CarPlay apps?” At which point, frankly, I’m intrigued and baffled. But mostly baffled. Because HomeView is Apple’s latest new doohickey for the home – and it’s really weird. Rumours suggested the device would resemble an iMac G4, which, of course, is the best-looking Mac Apple ever made. That alone…

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but they’re far from friendly on the wallet. Thankfully, lab-grown diamonds offer more sparkle for your buck. They are almost identical to natural diamonds and come in different colours, carat weights and shapes, making them a great choice if you want a bigger stone for a ring or watch for a lower price tag. How lab-grown diamonds are made Lab diamonds have essentially the same chemical and physical composition as their natural counterparts, unlike cubic zirconias or any other sparkly alternatives.  To the naked eye, lab diamonds are identical to nature’s bling, although…

I’m in two minds about Apple’s HomeView. It’s a really interesting piece of kit – one that I’ll be writing more about shortly. It has a reasonable sense of focus and appears to do some things really well. But then there’s one aspect that barrels straight through ‘bad’, blazes past ‘yipes’ and ends up mired in the pit of despair named ‘just the worst’. No, not the price (although that feels… ambitious.) Instead, it’s the sheer audacity of Apple’s pricing when it comes to the two versions that you can buy. The standard HomeView is a multi-user smart display for controlling your home,…

I love my Apple TV. In fact, I love my Apple TVs, because my house has more than one. Those little black boxes are small and silent, and they make it a cinch to access the latest telly and music without wrestling with an interface so appalling you want to hurl the device into a ravine. Low bar, sure, but that’s the market. Still, there are now 299 reasons not to buy a new one, because the Apple TV 4K now costs a whopping $299/£299. Yes, you read that right. Apple’s streaming box now more or less sits in territory once…

I primarily own Apple devices. As such, I have an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and many other Cupertino devices. This list also includes an Apple TV. And yet, I can see the appeal of Roku streamers. In fact, I have a Roku Streaming Stick (primarily for testing) and find it excellent hardware. Google has spent years getting Google TV onto more televisions, and in August 2026 it gave its free Freeplay service an on-demand library for the first time. Apple still sells the Apple TV 4K as the premium box for people who want the best picture and the tightest iPhone…

OPINION: Apple’s vision for the HomeView smart home display isn’t what I wanted or expected it to be. I’m not a fan of the square display that looks like a big Apple Watch on a nightstand for one reason – it ignores the potential to be a video streaming device and that’s put me off buying one. I envisioned the HomeView as an iPad attached to a HomePod – that meant an App Store and access to the key video streaming apps – but in a tvOS-style interface that also offered a shortcut to the Home app, FaceTime, Podcasts, Apple,…

So Apple’s HomeView has been announced. And it raises one key question for me at home – will HomeView – in conjunction with a couple of HomePod minis and maybe a large HomePod – be good enough to replace Amazon’s Alexa in my home? Now, I should say that my home has five Amazon Alexa devices in regular use and I use them with some smart devices such as my Philips Hue setup. But I also regularly use the Apple Home app to work some other compatible devices such as HomeKit-compatible smart plugs, Nanoleaf lights and so on. Plus I…

Apple has just announced a new Apple TV 4K. It arrives alongside HomeView and Smart Home Collection, as part of what Apple calls its most connected Apple Home launch yet. The new box is built around Siri AI, a rebuilt version of Siri powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It also has a faster A19 chip and a new four-speaker surround sound option using HomePod. It can be pre-ordered today. It also costs US$299 / £299. That’s twice the starting price of the 2022 model, which launched at US$149 / £149. So the obvious question is whether it’s…

Apple has just revealed its second-gen HomePod Mini smart speaker, promising new Siri AI smarts, more impactful audio and a neat new Sound Glow interactive light show, all stuffed inside a familiar-looking spherical body. If you’re an iPhone household, it might finally be time to give that Amazon Echo the shove. At just 8.4cm tall the HomePod Mini 2 keeps its dinky stature and seamless, mesh-wrapped exterior. Even the power lead wears a colour-matched weave. Inside you’ll still find a single, full-range speaker driver, paired with passive radiators for bass extension, except Apple has added some “computational audio” tweaking to…

AI is evolving so quickly that it feels like there’s a new feature to discover every other day. And because I use ChatGPT so often, I’ve always felt like I know my way around it pretty well. But a few days ago, while editing an image, I stumbled across something I had no idea ChatGPT could do, and it totally caught me off guard. Related I built one ChatGPT prompt that works for absolutely any scenario This simple ChatGPT prompting structure works for any goal, big or small. I accidentally found ChatGPT’s better image editor Pointing out is so much…