We're just over one week away from Valentine's Day, which falls on Saturday, February 14 this year. Similar to years past, many third-party Apple resellers and accessory companies have opened up notable discounts on Apple products and accessories to coincide with the holiday. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running. Additionally, there are a few solid discounts on Apple products like AirPods, Apple Watch, and iPad. In this article you'll find deals from third-party retailers collected first, including special Valentine's Day themed sales from AT&T, ZAGG, Casely, and more. Valentine's Accessory Sales Best Buy…

Moltbot, a personal AI assistant being run on batches of Mac minis, got a lot of attention when creator Matt Schlicht effectively partnered with his own assistant to develop a social media platform for the bots. Known as Moltbook, it’s been colloquially referred to as Reddit for AI bots. Schlicht says he didn’t write a single line of the code himself, and it wasn’t long before it was being suggested that Moltbot agents were using the social network to plot an AI uprising … more…

Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman today announced the launch of Luffu (“loo-foo”), a new health app for families that will eventually expand to hardware devices too. Here are the details. more…

A new ad is out today for the Apple TV streaming service, and it focuses on the humans involved in making the shows and films, ranging from actors to production crews to makeup artists. The video shows a gallery of photos from the sets of various Apple TV shows, including The Studio, Severance, Pluribus, Ted Lasso, and others. "The humans of Apple TV," says Apple, succinctly. In a world where AI is increasingly prevalent, it would appear that Apple wants to remind everyone that its original content is still deeply human.Tags: Apple Ads, Apple TV ShowsThis article, "'Humans of Apple TV'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

After iPhone 17, we could see more advanced iPhone satellite features changing the connectivity game and going way beyond emergency uses. (via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Macworld Hopes for a more accurate and functional Siri voice assistant currently lean heavily on the short-term fix: Apple’s recently announced partnership with Google to use the latter’s Gemini tech to improve its own AI offerings. But in the longer term, a new research paper offers a method that could allow Apple to make Siri faster all by itself. The paper, Principled Coarse-Grained Acceptance for Speculative Decoding in Speech, was written by five researchers working for Apple and Tel-Aviv University and published late last month (via 9to5Mac). It proposes a new approach that could, in researchers’ words, “accelerate speech token generation while maintaining speech quality.” The key to speed, the researchers argue, is avoiding unnecessary strictness. “For speech LLMs that…