Valve is bringing Steam Link, its local network game-streaming app, to Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset, allowing Vision Pro users to play traditional games from their Steam library wirelessly from a nearby Mac or PC.

We say “traditional games” because it’s important to clarify that this does not stream VR games—only the sorts of games you would play on a traditional 2D display like a computer monitor or a TV. That said, this could lay some groundwork for VR games sometime in the future. But to be clear, Valve has not made any announcements about supporting SteamVR games on the Vision Pro.

There were previously Steam Link apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Users could sync controllers with those devices and play Steam games over the local network—not just games from other Apple devices, but also from Windows or Linux gaming PCs.

It has been possible to do this on the Vision Pro using third-party tools like ALVR, but this is a much more straightforward, tried-and-true path to the same destination.

If you want to try it, you can sign up via TestFlight, Apple’s platform for distributing pre-release apps before they are listed on the App Store. Valve says the current version of the app “allows streaming up to 4K resolutions, and allows you to dynamically adjust the curve of the display in panoramic mode.”

We complained about the Vision Pro’s limited ability to connect to external gaming and media devices or access mixed reality content outside Apple’s walled garden when we reviewed it at launch a couple of years ago. Since then, that situation has markedly improved, though it’s still not always as straightforward as it is on competing headsets.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/04/valve-brings-native-steam-link-app-to-apples-vision-pro/

“While Lenovo has improved somewhat with their compliance with French consumer law by providing more repair score PDFs on their website, we urge the company to resolve this multi-year issue,” this year’s report says.

PIRG’s report concluded that “laptops are pretty stagnant in terms of repairability” across many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US.

However, Proctor noted to Ars that consumers’ access to parts, tools, and information that vendors have has improved, but improvements around ease of disassembly “take longer to realize.”

He also praised vendors’ efforts to release more repairable designs, such as Apple’s MacBook Neo.

Phone repairability scores

Lenovo’s Motorola brand earned the best grade.

PIRG’s scores for phone manufacturers this year are based on the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL), a scoring system that the European Commission created in June 2025 for scoring smartphone and tablet repairability. It’s based on six factors:

• Disassembly depth
• Fasteners
• Tools
• Spare part availability
• Software updates
• Repair information

US PIRG used different criteria for this year’s report.

PIRG’s report said that Apple and Samsung scored so low under EPREL criteria partially because all of the phones scored are guaranteed to receive updates for five years and not longer.

PIRG noted that Apple made progress in phone repairability by moving away from parts pairing, which is when companies require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks in order to function, and through the introduction of the Repair Assistant. However, the report’s author lamented that third-party Face ID replacements still don’t work. The report adds:

Apple also extended its Activation Lock anti-theft feature to individual parts, which repair advocates warn will strand large numbers of perfectly functional components—locking them out of the repair ecosystem entirely.

Apple isn’t alone: parts pairing and software restrictions remain an industry-wide problem that consumers and independent technicians continue to face across manufacturers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/apple-has-the-lowest-grades-in-laptop-phone-repairability-analysis/

Ollama, a runtime system for operating large language models on a local computer, has introduced support for Apple’s open source MLX framework for machine learning. Additionally, Ollama says it has improved caching performance and now supports Nvidia’s NVFP4 format for model compression, making for much more efficient memory usage in certain models.

Combined, these developments promise significantly improved performance on Macs with Apple Silicon chips (M1 or later)—and the timing couldn’t be better, as local models are starting to gain steam in ways they haven’t before outside researcher and hobbyist communities.

The recent runaway success of OpenClaw—which raced its way to over 300,000 stars on GitHub, made headlines with experiments like Moltbook and became an obsession in China in particular—has many people experimenting with running models on their machines.

As developers get frustrated with rate limits and the high cost of top-tier subscriptions to tools like Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex, experimentation with local coding models has heated up. (Ollama also expanded Visual Studio Code integration recently.)

The new support is available in preview (in Ollama 0.19) and currently supports only one model—the 35 billion-parameter variant of Alibaba’s Qwen3.5. Hardware requirements are intense by normal users’ standards. Users need an Apple Silicon-equipped Mac, sure, but they also need at least 32GB of RAM, according to Ollama’s announcement.

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/03/running-local-models-on-macs-gets-faster-with-ollamas-mlx-support/

After more than a decade of flirting with the idea, Apple has finally discontinued the Mac Pro tower. The company confirmed to 9to5Mac that the latest Mac Pro iteration—an M2 Ultra model first released in mid-2023—would be its last, at least for the time being. There are no plans to make another Mac Pro.

The discontinuation of the Mac Pro should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Reporting from late last year suggested that the Mac Pro had been put “on the back burner,” but the desktop has clearly been in danger of falling off the stove since at least the mid-2010s, during the six-year period where the controversial cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro design languished without updates.

Apple briefly rededicated itself to its pro desktop in 2019 with a new design that hearkened back to more versatile, upgradeable, be-handled versions of the Power Mac and Mac Pro. But by the time it was updated again with M2 Ultra four years later, it was already clear that the idea of a huge and expandable Mac desktop was out of step with the Apple Silicon era. The desktop’s demise confirms that, at least in Apple’s estimation, the Mac Pro was trying to fill a niche that no longer exists.

The Mac Pro is survived by the M4 Max and M3 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio desktop, as well as by the M4 Pro Mac mini. It was preceded in death by the 27-inch iMac (2009–2020) and the iMac Pro (2017–2017).

The fourth quadrant

When Steve Jobs returned to lead Apple in 1997, one of his early initiatives was to streamline and refocus the Mac product family, which at that point had grown into a sprawling and poorly differentiated maze of Quadras, Performas, Power Macintoshes, and even third-party systems. The initial focus was a lineup of four computers to serve four market quadrants: a consumer laptop, a consumer desktop, a more powerful professional laptop, and a professional desktop.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-has-finally-discontinued-the-mac-pro-desktop-after-years-of-fitful-effort/

However, some British iPhone owners are concerned about potential security and privacy risks associated with the proliferation of age checks.

“Myself and everyone I know… are doing everything to bypass these over-reaching age checks,” said one Reddit user in a discussion about Apple’s update. “I definitely do not want to grant my OS permission to decide that I’m happy to share my proven age status, under any situation.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment about which services its new age checks will cover.

After upgrading to the latest version of iOS 26.4, iPhone owners in the UK will be presented with several options to prove their age, including checking the credit card stored in their digital wallet or taking a photo of their driving license or passport. Apple can also use the length of time that digital accounts have been active to confirm a customer’s age.

After installing the update, an on-screen notice tells users: “UK law requires you to confirm you are an adult to change content restrictions.”

Failure to complete the age check will limit which apps the user can access or download, though Apple’s support pages do not specify all of the affected services.

“Adults will have to confirm that they’re 18 or older to use certain services or features, or take certain actions on their account,” an Apple support page states.

Ofcom said it had “worked closely with Apple” and other services to protect users.

“This will build on the strong foundations of the Online Safety Act, from widespread age checks that keep young people away from harmful content, to blocking high-risk sites and stepping up action against child sexual abuse material,” the UK regulator said.

© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/apple-begins-age-checks-in-the-uk-with-latest-ios-update/

“Admitting to receiving an email is materially different from admitting to Musi’s conclusion from the email—that Apple knowingly relied on false evidence,” Lee wrote.

Musi’s law firm presented the theory as an undisputed fact. But the judge determined that an attorney conducting an objectively reasonable inquiry would not have found the allegation to be well-founded.

“Accordingly, the Court finds that Musi’s counsel violated Rule 11 because it was factually baseless to allege that Apple ‘admitted’ that evidence from the NMPA regarding Musi’s intellectual property infringement was false, or that Apple knew that the evidence was false,” Lee wrote.

Lee assessed the awarding of fees and costs in full against the Winston & Strawn law firm, rather than Musi, stating that “counsel is more directly responsible for the Rule 11 violation, and counsel asked the Court not to sanction Musi directly.” Musi is represented by Winston & Strawn lawyers Jennifer Golinveaux, Samantha Looker, and Jeff Wilkerson.

In another wrinkle, Musi asked for an award of attorneys’ fees for defending against Apple’s motion for sanctions. Lee called this request “audacious,” pointing out that “Musi is not the prevailing party, and Apple’s motion has substantial merit.” Moreover, while Lee found that some of the Musi allegations challenged by Apple were not violations of Rule 11, she concluded that each Musi allegation challenged by Apple “was on the verge of baselessness.”

We contacted Musi and its lawyers today and will update this article if we get a response.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/judge-upholds-apple-delisting-of-free-musi-app-that-streams-songs-from-youtube/

The MacBook Pro retains some key functional advantages over the Air. All Pro models have more ports, including native HDMI and SD card readers. They get somewhat larger, considerably nicer displays, with high-refresh-rate ProMotion and HDR support, a much higher maximum brightness, and a matte nano-texture display option. Even setting the M5 Pro and M5 Max aside, the basic M5 version can be quite a bit faster than the M5 Air for some workloads because it has a fan to keep it cool. Storage can go as high as 8TB, and RAM can go up to 128GB.

But what these things have in common is that they’re well above and beyond what most people, even many creative and technical professionals, are asking from their laptops. These days, the main reason to go with a MacBook Pro is that you affirmatively want one or more of those extra things. There are fewer reasons to be unwillingly upsold to a Pro because of one or two make-or-break features missing from the Air.

It’s also mostly pretty easy to describe the kind of user each MacBook is for, which is a huge improvement from the Mac’s mid-2010s nadir, when the aging non-Retina Air, the nice-but-underpowered 12-inch MacBook, and the too-expensive 13-inch MacBook Pro were all fighting over the same $1,000-to-$1,500-ish price band and all came with frustrating trade-offs and compromises.

Performance: Twice as fast as M1, mostly

The Apple Silicon era gave Apple’s baseline Macs a huge performance boost compared to the low-voltage Intel processors of MacBooks past. That performance also came with dramatically extended battery life. As long as you were running Apple Silicon or universal binaries rather than relying on Rosetta’s app translation, upgrading from an Intel Mac has always been pretty much all upside.

The upgrades since then have been strictly incremental, considered year-over-year. Each new generation of chip has brought some kind of low double-digit performance improvement over the prior generation, never enough to merit an upgrade all by itself. But they’ve stacked on top of each other year after year, and we’ve arrived at a point where the M5 Air is finally just about twice as fast as the M1 version.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/m5-macbook-air-review-still-the-best-macbook-for-almost-everybody/

Apple’s MacBook Neo is the company’s first serious effort to break into the sub-$1,000 laptop business, challenging midrange Windows laptops and Chromebooks with its $599 starting price and its focus on build quality rather than high-end performance.

One less-advertised change that may make the Neo more appealing to businesses, schools, and the accident-prone is that its internal design is a bit more modular and easier to repair than other modern MacBooks. That’s our takeaway after spending some time thumbing through the official MacBook Neo repair documentation that Apple published on its support site this week.

Replacements for pretty much any component in the Neo are simpler and involve fewer steps and tools than in the M5 MacBook Air. That includes the battery, which in the MacBook Air is attached to the chassis with multiple screws and adhesive strips but which in the Neo comes out relatively easily after you get some shielding and flex cables out of the way.

But the most significant change in the Neo is that the keyboard is its own separate component. For essentially all modern MacBooks, going back at least as far as the late-2000s unibody aluminum MacBook designs, the keyboard has been integrated into the top part of the laptop case and is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replace independently.

Apple refers to this big, unified component as the “top case,” and anyone who has ever had to pay to repair one out of warranty can attest to how expensive they are. For the old M1 MacBook Air, a top case from Apple’s first-party self-service parts store will run you about $220 after you send the old defective part back to Apple. For the 14-inch MacBook Pro, Apple will only sell you a top case replacement along with a battery, which costs a whopping $440 after you send the old component back to the company.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/more-modular-design-makes-macbook-neo-easier-to-fix-than-other-apple-laptops/

If you’re interested in a slightly wider-ranging review of the new MacBook Pros, I’ll point you toward reviews of the M1, M3, and M4 generation models, as well as the one for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with the standard M5 (now $100 more expensive than it was before, but with 1TB of base storage instead of 512GB).

Apple is using the same external design for these laptops that it has been using since 2021—it’s aging pretty well, and we still mostly like it, especially compared to late-Intel-era MacBook Pros. There’s just not much else to say about the design that hasn’t been said.

M5 Max benchmarks

In our testing, the fully enabled M5 Max’s single-core performance is about 10 percent higher than the fully enabled version of the M4 Max in last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. The multi-core performance improvements are more variable (Cinebench R23, which shows a 30 percent improvement, seems to be an outlier), but most tests also show a modest 10 or 12 percent improvement.

Graphics performance improvements are slightly more robust, measuring between 20 and 35 percent depending on the test. Apple suggests you may see more uplift on GPU compute workloads that can leverage the neural accelerator Apple has built into each M5-family GPU core.

The jump from the M4 Max to the M5 Max isn’t quite as large, expressed as a percentage, as it has been for the last couple generations; both M3 Max and M4 Max were big leaps from what had come before. But assuming you’re upgrading from an M1 or M2-based Pro, you’ll still be taking a big leap. Fears that stepping down from 12 of Apple’s best-performing CPU cores (in M4 Max) to just six of the best-performing cores are also a bit overblown, based on these results.

Compared to the basic M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5 Max’s single-core performance is roughly the same, which is in keeping with how Apple usually does things—stepping up to higher-end chips gets you better multi-core and graphics performance, but Apple doesn’t push the clock speeds upward on the individual cores the way that Intel or AMD do with their higher-end processors.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/testing-apples-2026-16-inch-macbook-pro-m5-max-and-its-new-performance-cores/

Coruna is also notable for its use by three distinct hacking groups. Google first detected its use in February of last year in an operation conducted by a “customer of a surveillance vendor.” The vulnerability exploited, tracked as CVE-2025-23222, had been patched 13 months earlier. In July 2025, a “suspected Russian espionage group” exploited CVE-2023-43000 in attacks planted on websites that were frequented by Ukrainian targets. Last December, when it was used by a “financially motivated threat actor from China,” Google was able to retrieve the complete exploit kit.

“How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for ‘second hand’ zero-day exploits,” Google wrote. “Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.”

Google researchers went on to write:

We retrieved all the obfuscated exploits, including ending payloads. Upon further analysis, we noticed an instance where the actor deployed the debug version of the exploit kit, leaving in the clear all of the exploits, including their internal code names. That’s when we learned that the exploit kit was likely named Coruna internally. In total, we collected a few hundred samples covering a total of five full iOS exploit chains. The exploit kit is able to target various iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023).

The 23 exploits, along with the code names and other information, are:

CISA is adding only three of the CVEs to its catalog. They are:

• CVE-2021-30952 Apple Multiple Products Integer Overflow or Wraparound Vulnerability
• CVE-2023-41974 Apple iOS and iPadOS Use-After-Free Vulnerability
• CVE-2023-43000 Apple Multiple products Use-After-Free Vulnerability

CISA is directing agencies to “apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable… guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.” The agency went on to warn: “These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise.”

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/03/cisa-adds-3-ios-flaws-to-its-catalog-of-known-exploited-vulnerabilities/