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Apple Music is one of the apps that got a noticeable Liquid Glass design overhaul in iOS 26, but Apple also added a useful new feature that streamlines song transitions.
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AMD's Advancing AI event Thursday focused on enterprise-class GPUs like its Instinct lineup. But it's a software platform you may not have heard of, called ROCm, that AMD depends upon just as much. AMD is releasing ROCm 7 today, which the company says can boost AI inferencing by three times through the software alone. And it's finally coming to Windows to battle Nvidia's CUDA supremacy.
Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) is AMD's open software stack for AI computing, with drivers and tools to run AI workloads. Remember the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 debacle of a few weeks back? Without a software driver, Nvidia's latest GPU was a lifeless hunk of silicon.
Early on, AMD was in the same pickle. Without the limitless coffers of companies like Nvidia, AMD made a choice: it would prioritize big businesses with ROCm and its enterprise GPUs instead of client PCs. Ramine Roane, corporate vice president of the AI solutions group, called that a "sore point:" "We focused ROCm on the cloud GPUs, but it wasn't always working on the endpoint — so we're fixing that."
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Apple's new macOS Tahoe is first defined by its "Liquid Glass" design aesthetic, a new universal design language, that I think hearkens back to Windows 10 and earlier versions of Windows operating systems. But beyond look and feel, there are practical elements, like the Spotlight search bar that understands what's on your Mac and taps into local intelligence to find what you want. There are also shortcuts or macros to help you complete tasks, and a phone application that looks as rich as what Microsoft offers. There's even a rudimentary Game Bar.
I much prefer Windows over macOS, and have used Windows and Android products for decades. Nonetheless, there have been a few times that I've been impressed with what Apple has accomplished—the Apple Watch integration with iOS, for example. There's a level of polish and integration here that I think Microsoft should pay attention to.
If I had to sum it up: What I use on a day-to-day basis on Windows feels like a rough draft. What Apple showed off at WWDC seems more like the final product.
Warm and rich
From day one of Windows 11, I wrote that Windows 11 felt like an unnecessary replacement for Windows 10. I've since changed my mind about that, in part because Microsof
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