The 2015 MacBook combines the speaker and the antenna into a single part — the speaktenna. It’s just one of the many ways Cupertino shrank their newest laptop to unprecedented proportions.
There’s been a lot of talk about the 2015 MacBook’s obsession with space saving: the lack of ports, the brand new battery technology, the soldered RAM. But the Speakertenna hasn’t been noticed, until a recent profile of Apple VP Phil Schiller on Mashable. The article points to the combined part as a prime example of how closely departments within Apple work together.
“We ended up with a group of antenna engineers who know more about speakers than any other antenna engineers and a group of speaker engineers who knew more about antenna design than just about anyone else in the world,” said John Ternus, vice president of Mac and iPad engineering for Apple.
Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, gave a rare extended interview for the piece – and comments on a number of things in the article. Notably he spoke directly about Apple getting into the laptop/tablet hybrid market – put simply, Apple doesn’t see a lot of potential.
“Based on all the data that I’ve been able to see, it is still incredibly small and niche and may not be growing to anything significant, Schiller said. “Time will tell.”
Schiller mentions that Mac sales are rising in a market where other computer vendors are losing customers.
“The trajectory has been a market where the majority of PC vendors are not doing well; they’re shrinking and we’re growing,” Schiller said.
There was also a rare confession that Apple isn’t perfect.
“No, of course not, of course not,” said Schiller. “And we don’t want to sound like we’re perfect. We never are, we always have to get better and always have to listen to where we’re not doing well.”
Other topics discussed include Apple’s relationship with its supply chain, the architecture of Apple’s soon-to-be-completed new “Spaceship” campus, and how it feels to Schiller like Macs make up a big chunk of the market. You can read it here.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).