Welcome to 95 Mac Daily for Thursday, May 7th, 2026. I'm your host, Chance Miller. We are sponsored this week by Bitwarden.

Leading off today, last week, Ming Chi Kuo broke the news that OpenAI's hardware ambitions now include a smartphone to directly compete with the iPhone.

Now, a new update from Kuo suggests the company is moving forward at an even faster pace than anticipated to launch the first

OpenAI phone. Quo says that OpenAI is targeting mass production for as early as the first

half of 2027. He says that potential drivers for this motivation include supporting a year-end IPO,

so going public on the stock market, as well as increasing competition in the space of AI agent phones.

If mass production of the open-A-I phone can happen in the first half of 2027, then a public launch sometime in the fall would likely be the goal.

Launching a smartphone next year sounds extremely ambitious, especially for a company that has never made a hardware product before.

OpenAI has been working on hardware devices for a while, but the pivot to making a smartphone

is very recent. Previously, the company was said to be focusing on form factors that integrate

AI other than a smartphone, such as smart speakers. But OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, has been

hinting recently at the company's phone project, saying last week that he believes now is the right time to, quote, seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed, end quote.

And of course, OpenAI is working with Johnny Ive and his love from Design Studio for all of its hardware products, including this phone,

which only heightens the competition between OpenAI and Apple in the smartphone space.

In other news today, alongside iOS 26.5, Apple this week also released the release candidate or final beta of watchOS 26.5.

The update includes a new Pride Luminance watch face that we talked about

earlier this week, which as it turns out comes with a ton of different customization options.

You can choose between colors, dial shapes, styles, corner complications, and more.

Apple provides 11 preconfigured color combinations in total,

and you can also pick from over 70 colors, choosing any combination of one to 12 colors at a time.

In addition to that watch face, Apple says that watchOS 26.5 also fixes two bugs, one addressing messages and another addressing the workout app.

The company says it fixes an issue where messages on Apple Watch might use SMS instead of iMessage

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