At multiple points over many years, Apple executives have taken great pains to point out that they think touchscreen Macs are a silly idea . But it remains one of those persistent Mac rumors that crops up over and over again every couple of years, from sources that are reliable enough that they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

Today’s contribution comes from supply chain analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, who usually has some insight into what Apple is testing and manufacturing. Kuo says that touchscreen MacBook Pros are “expected to enter mass production by late 2026,” and that the devices will also shift to using OLED display panels instead of the Mini LED panels on current-generation MacBook Pros.

Kuo says that Apple’s interest in touchscreen Macs comes from “long-term observation of iPad user behavior.” Apple’s tablet hardware launches in the last few years have also included keyboard and touchpad accessories, and this year’s iPadOS 26 update in particular has helped to blur the line between the touch-first iPad and the keyboard-and-pointer-first Mac. In other words, Apple has already acknowledged that both kinds of input can be useful when combined in the same device; taking that same jump on the Mac feels like a natural continuation of work Apple is already doing.

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China’s Internet regulator has banned the country’s biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the US.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia’s server suppliers, the people said.

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Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that carelessness and contributed to her untimely demise, according to a fascinating new book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon .

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a longtime Earhart fan. A documentary filmmaker and journalist, she first read about Earhart in a short biography distributed by Scholastic Books. "I got a little obsessed with her when I was younger," Shapiro told Ars. The fascination faded as she got older and launched her own career. But she rediscovered her passion for Earhart while writing her 2018 book, The Stowaway , about a young man who stowed away on Admiral Richard Byrd 's first voyage to Antarctica. The marketing mastermind behind the boy's journey and his subsequent (ghost-written) memoir was publisher George Palmer Putnam , Earhart's eventual husband.

The fact that Earhart started out as Putnam's mistress contradicted Shapiro's early squeaky-clean image of Earhart and drove her to delve deeper into the life of this extraordinary woman.  "I was less interested in how she died than how she lived," said Shapiro. "Was she a good pilot? Was she a good, kind person? Was this a real marriage? The mystery of Amelia Earhart is not how she died, but how she lived."

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iOS 26 became publicly available this week, ushering in a new OS naming system and the software’s most overhauled look since 2013 . It may take time to get used to the new "Liquid Glass" look, but it’s easier to appreciate the pared-down controls.

Beyond a glassy, bubbly new design, the update’s flashiest new features also include new Apple Intelligence AI integration that varies in usefulness, from fluffy new Genmoji abilities to a nifty live translation feature for Phones, Messages, and FaceTime.

New tech is often bogged down with AI-based features that prove to be overhyped , unreliable, or just not that useful. iOS 26 brings a little of each, so in this review, we’ll home in on the iOS updates that will benefit both mainstream and power users the most.

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A problem with the main engine on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL spacecraft will keep it from delivering 11,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station as scheduled on Wednesday.

In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, NASA said ground teams are evaluating backup plans that might still allow the Cygnus spacecraft to reach the space station, just not on schedule. The problem arose early Tuesday when the spacecraft's main engine shut down earlier than expected during two burns to boost the ship's orbit for its rendezvous with the ISS, according to NASA.

Officials didn't release any other details about the engine problem, but all other systems on the Cygnus XL spacecraft are performing as designed, NASA said. The agency said a new arrival date and time at the space station is "under review."

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TikTok will not shut down on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump inches nearer to closing a deal with China that will most likely see the app's majority ownership shift to US owners and US-based users shift to a new app.

On Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he has extended the deadline to December 16 for TikTok owner ByteDance to divest ownership to comply with a law designed to block China from spying on US users or manipulating TikTok's algorithm to influence Americans.

The president claimed that the extension allows time to finalize a deal that sources told The Wall Street Journal would shift 80 percent ownership to "an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz." Existing ByteDance investors will also join the consortium, including Susquehanna International, KKR, and General Atlantic, the WSJ reported.

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Congressional lawmakers are skeptical that the Boar's Head deli meat plant at the center of a deadly Listeria outbreak last year will be fit to reopen after recent inspections at three other Boar's Head facilities turned up similarly alarming sanitation problems—including mold, condensation on ceilings, overflowing trash, meat residue caked onto equipment and walls, and employees failing to wash their hands.

In a letter dated September 15 , Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and nine other Congress members noted reports that Boar's Head plans to reopen the Jarratt, Virginia, facility in the coming months . The plant—and particularly the liverwurst product made there—was determined to be the source of a Listeria outbreak that spanned May to September of last year, sickening at least 61 people across 19 states . Of those 61 people, 60 were hospitalized and 10 died. The company recalled more than 7 million pounds of meat .

Amid the outbreak, it came to light that inspectors with the US Department of Agriculture had found dozens of stomach-turning sanitation violations at the plant, including mold, condensation dripping on meats, insects, and puddles of blood .

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Although cars are much safer—for their occupants at least—than they used to be, that has come at a cost: added weight. The problem is exacerbated in electric vehicles and their heavy battery packs; rare is the EV we've driven that weighs less than 5,000 lbs (2,267 kg).

Hence my interest in the Altair Enlighten award, an annual prize for advances in lightweighting and sustainability given out by the AI company together with the Center for Automotive Research, which offers a look at some of the avenues automakers and suppliers are exploring to take some of the weight and carbon footprint out of tomorrow's new cars.

Lucid Motors has won in two separate categories. It takes the Sustainable Computing prize for speeding up new car development with a way for engineers to test iterated designs within their existing CAD environment rather than having to switch to a different tool. Lucid also won the Responsible AI prize for using AI to help predict crash testing well before the physical prototype stage—this let Lucid reduce the number of iterations it went through and the test waste and materials it used.

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Under new rules rolling out over the coming months, a small number of users will be required to leave some of their moderator posts so that they aren’t moderating more than five subreddits with 100,000 monthly visitors.

Reddit said the change only affects “0.1 percent of our active mods” and will help enable “diverse perspectives and experiences.” But mods whom Ars Technica spoke with have different views.

New limits on how many subreddits users can moderate

A recent post on the r/modnews subreddit announced plans for new restrictions on how many subreddits users can moderate. Those who currently don’t meet those restrictions will be asked to leave their post(s) or seek an exemption(s). Reddit hasn’t finalized the requirements for exemptions but says it’s working on them with moderators.

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