2026-01-10 04:50:32
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Last week was the annual predictions episode! The gang reflected on their predictions from 2025 and then made their Guaranteed To Be Correct Predictions for 2026. No boring predictions here; we started at Pro predictions and went all the way to Pro Max.
Last week’s Cozy Zone had everyone discussing the tricky business of streaming music and how we actually get artists paid.
And this week, Matt needs some help figuring out what browser to use, Niléane has a new game show, and Chris challenges the gang to clean up their desk area.
On this week’s Cozy Zone, the gang discusses their tech white whales. If they had unlimited funds, what would they buy? A nice camera? A beefy computer? A whole company?!
This week, Federico and John share how they unwound during their holiday break, John has a report on CES 2026, Federico recommends Avatar: Fire and Ash, and John does a Parks and Rec rewatch and has a superhero movie deal for listeners.
How would you have done our challenges? How would you answer the question at the end of the show? Let us know!
For even more from the Comfort Zone crew, you can subscribe to Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is a weekly bonus episode of Comfort Zone where Matt, Niléane, and Chris invite listeners to join them in the Cozy Zone where they’ll cover extra topics, invent wilder challenges and games, and share all their great (and not so great) takes on tech. You can subscribe to Cozy Zone for $5 per month here or $50 per year here.
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MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.
If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees.
2026-01-07 23:38:32
It’s CES time again, which means another edition of our annual roundup of the most eye-catching gadgets seasoned with a helping of weird and wonderful tech. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that robots, AI, and TVs are some of the most prominent themes at CES in 2026, but there’s a lot more, so buckle in for a tour of what to expect from the gadget world in the coming months.
Viture encourages customers to both unleash and embrace The Beast. Source: Viture.
I first tried Xreal AR glasses shortly before the Vision Pro was released. The experience at the time wasn’t great, but you could see the potential for what has turned out to be one of the Vision Pro’s greatest strengths: working on a huge virtual display. There’s also a lot of potential for gaming.
It looks like the tech behind AR glasses is finally getting to a point where I may dip in again this year. Xreal updated and reduced the price of its entry-level 1S glasses, which will make the category accessible to more people.
The company also introduced the Neo dock, a 10,000 mAh battery that also serves as a hub for connecting a game console or other device to its AR glasses. Notably, the Neo is compatible with the Nintendo Switch 2, which caught my eye immediately.
For its part, Viture is releasing The Beast next month. The $549 AR glasses offer a 58-degree field of view, electrochromic tint with nine adjustment levels, and a built-in camera, and they weigh only 96 grams. Unfortunately, The Beast does not include built-in nearsightedness correction, so you may need prescription lenses, too.
The Rokid Style. Source: Rokid.
Rokid is going more Meta with the Style, a pair of glasses that supports prescription lenses and uses a built-in Qualcomm chip for AI and taking photos and videos with a 12MP camera. At $300, the glasses, which will be out in just under two weeks, are much more affordable than Xreal and Viture’s glasses, but they’re also serving a very different audience.
I’m not totally sold on AR glasses yet, but Xreal and Viture have made strides that have me intrigued again. Their functionality is limited, but there’s a lot to be said for a giant virtual screen that you can take with you.
The Aqara U400 lock. Source: Aqara.
Just like last year, Aqara is showing off a bunch of new smart home devices, including the U400, the first smart lock to feature Apple’s ultra-wideband functionality. With UWB built in, the $269.99 U400 will be able to sense when you approach your door from the outside and unlock it for you when you’re within six feet of the door. This is tech that I’ve been impatiently waiting for since I moved into our new house, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Aqara also showed off the FP400, an update to the company’s mmWave wired presence sensor; a thermostat that supports Wi-Fi, Thread, and Zigbee; the company’s first Matter-compatible camera, which looks like a rabbit; and the P100 Spatial Multi-State Sensor, a high-precision sensor with 9-axis sensing and built-in algorithms that can sense things like door openings, knocks, and more.
I’ll be shocked if this SwitchBot robot ships and, if it does, can do half of what they claim. Source: SwitchBot.
SwitchBot throws a lot at the wall every year at CES, and 2026 is no different. The company, best known for gizmos that press buttons and flip switches, is showing off:
UGREEN is expanding into the smart home this year, too, with indoor, outdoor, and doorbell cameras. There’s no word on the outdoor camera’s resolution, but the indoor models are 4K, as is the doorbell, and all of the cameras will work with UGREEN’s SynCare Smart Display D500 and store data locally using UGREEN NASync. The company hasn’t said which smart home technologies will be supported, nor has it announced pricing or availability. My guess is that these products are a long way off still but worth keeping an eye on.
Narwal introduced the Flow 2 robot vacuum and mop at CES this year, which adds a couple of 1080p cameras to the device. That’s good to see, and I’ll be interested to find out how well it works because, as I noted in my review of the Freo X10 Pro, one of its only downsides compared to my older Roomba is that because it relies on LiDAR, the Freo X10 Pro doesn’t see cords and cables as well.
8BitDo’s FlipPad. Source: 8BitDo.
As we recently predicted on NPC XL, we’ll see a lot more of AMD’s Strix Halo chips in gaming handhelds in the future. To date, the adoption has been limited because the chips run so hot that some manufacturers resorted to separate battery packs to manage heat.
However, with the new lower-end Ryzen AI Max Plus chips (the 392 has 12 cores, and the 388 has 8 cores), AMD is specifically targeting handhelds. Although they have fewer CPU cores, the chips have the same graphics compute units as the higher-end chip in my mini PC, which should allow them to push a lot of pixels, albeit in devices that will undoubtedly cost over $1,000.
NVIDIA also announced that its game streaming service, GeForce NOW, is coming to Linux and Fire TV. I can’t say I’m too excited about the Fire TV, but the service is built into my LG TV, which does give it a certain Netflix-like convenience of being connected to all my screens. But what’s really interesting is the Linux introduction. That strikes me as preparation for Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine. It wasn’t that long ago that NVIDIA added official GeForce NOW support for the Steam Deck, so it seems likely we’ll see the app on the Steam Machine too.
I’m also keen to try 8BitDo’s FlipPad iPhone controller accessory that attaches via USB-C and folds up to lay flat against your iPhone, looking a little like a Game Boy. There have been previous attempts at something similar to this with more in the works, all of which we’ve covered on NPC, but 8BitDo’s track record of producing good controllers makes me optimistic that this might be the best of the bunch for emulating old systems in portrait mode. Sadly, it won’t be out until this summer.
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Can you guess what this is? Source: Eli Health via The Verge.
I have to hand it to Dell. Computer monitors don’t usually make my weird and wonderful list, but a 52” 6K display that costs $2,900 fits the bill. My neck hurts just looking at the photos. It’s also a Thunderbolt hub and KVM switch. It doesn’t really have the kind of specs you’d expect from a gaming display, but you could always watch TV from your couch and then KVM over to a mini PC to show off your Excel skills, I suppose.
Agibot A2 Ultra: A Well-Dressed Bot. Source: Agibot.
There are robots all over CES this year, but Agibot’s can dance, so that’s the one I want. It also comes in two sizes in case you prefer hobbit-sized bots.
Mui Board is a plank of wood you can use to control your smart home. I like the natural wood look, but what am I supposed to do with this? Mount it on the wall with a dangling cord, as you can see from the photo in this story from The Verge, or leave a random piece of wood lying on the coffee table like a carpenter came by and left it behind? Knock on wood that this thing actually gets released someday after showing up at CES for the past seven years.
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Image via The Verge.
Do you remember the “nib nib” cat that chewed on your fingers, the headless cat pillow, or the pillow that breathed? Well, the company that brought you all of those CES classics is back with Baby FuFu, a faceless bear that blows air at babies. Like all of Yukai Engineering’s CES reveals, it’s vaguely creepy and seems designed to attract little fingers. My kids are too big, so maybe I’ll get one for Myke to test – you know, “for the content.”
Of everything shown off at CES so far, I’m most immediately excited about Aqara’s U400 deadbolt lock. Based on Jennifer Pattison Tuohy’s hands-on story for The Verge, it sounds like a big improvement over older smart lock technology.
I’m also very interested in what handheld companies will do with AMD’s cheaper Strix Halo chipset. To date, Strix Halo handhelds have been too big and too expensive for my taste, and while I’m sure devices with the new chips will still carry a premium price, it should be a step in the right direction toward balancing size, power, and cost.
It’s good to have gadgets back. There was a long dry spell when everything was reduced to apps. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of apps, but gadgets are great, too, even when they’re mostly pie-in-the-sky vaporware or just plain weird. CES is just getting started. Tune into the next episode of MacStories Unwind for more of my finds.
2026-01-07 01:26:37
To ring in the new year, Apple has a great lineup of returning Apple TV shows and brand-new Apple Arcade games on the way, with everything kicking off later this week. Here are the highlights.
On January 8th, Apple will release four new games:
Sago Mini Jinja’s Garden: a family game that lets preschool-aged kids explore gardens, cook, and harvest ingredients in three distinct 3D areas.
Cozy Caravan: another family-friendly game where kids can create and play as an animal character, make meals, and enjoy activities like fishing and games, all while preparing for the Whizz Bang Fair.
Potion Punch 2+: a restaurant management simulator where you manage a variety of shops like the Potion Café or Enchantment Shop. The app features a fantasy theme filled with magic and monsters with an amusing storyline.
Then starting this Friday, a host of new Apple TV shows will begin to appear:
The International Emmy Award-winning Israeli spy thriller returns for its third season with Hugh Laurie, who joins the cast as a South African nuclear inspector. Created by Moshe Zonder, Dana Eden, and Maor Kohn, the series follows Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan) as she takes on dangerous missions deep inside Iran. After going rogue at the end of season two, Tamar fights to win back the Mossad’s support and survive, with the eight-episode season directed by Daniel Syrkin.
Add to your Calendar:
I loved season one of this series starring Idris Elba, who returns as corporate negotiator Sam Nelson in this real-time thriller. After saving a hijacked flight last season, Sam finds himself at the center of a new crisis on a Berlin underground train. The eight-episode season includes new cast members Toby Jones, Lisa Vicari, and Clare-Hope Ashitey, with returning stars Christine Adams, Max Beesley, and Archie Panjabi.
Add to your Calendar:
Source: Apple.
This multilingual drama features Fleur Geffrier and Tomohisa Yamashita, who reprise their roles as Camille and Issei. Created by Quoc Dang Tran and directed by Oded Ruskin, the French-Japanese series follows the pair as they investigate the origin of the world’s greatest wine.
Add to your Calendar:
Another personal favorite, Shrinking returns for a third season starring Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, who lead an ensemble cast. This season features appearances by Michael J. Fox and Jeff Daniels in an 11-episode season that also sees the return of Goldstein, Damon Wayans Jr., Wendie Malick, and Cobie Smulders as guest stars.
Add to your Calendar:
Source: Apple.
The colorful children’s series returns with the familiar characters Muno, Foofa, Plex, Brobee, and Toodee, plus new magician Kammy Kam, for more music-filled adventures. Created by Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, the series mixes early childhood milestones with play and popular music in a diverse visual and musical landscape.
Add to your Calendar:
Alright folks, that’s it for January. We’ll be back with a February update with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, The Last Thing He Told Me, and more before you know it.
2026-01-06 05:06:52
Nikita Prokopov writing on tonsky.me about macOS Tahoe’s menu icons:
In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.
But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.
And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.
It’s a brutal assessment of the sprinkling of iconography throughout Tahoe’s menu system that had me nodding along in agreement as I read it.
There’s no denying the inconsistencies in icon choices, their lack of legibility, and the overall clutter added to menus. Yet at the same time, I can’t say I’ve been terribly bothered by them either. That’s probably because I use keyboard shortcuts and launchers so much, rarely relying on the Mac’s menu system. At the same time, though, part of me wonders whether those tiny icons are at least partially what drove me to buy a bigger monitor recently. I don’t think so, but maybe?
In any event, if you care about design, Prokopov’s detailed and well-illustrated analysis of Tahoe’s menu icons is well worth your time.
2026-01-06 03:56:41
Source: Apple.
Last year, Apple announced a partnership with cable company Spectrum and the Los Angeles Lakers to stream select games in Apple Immersive Video on Vision Pro. Today, the company announced the schedule and availability of the games, which will be offered via Spectrum Front Row starting this Friday.
These are the dates the games will be streamed live in Immersive Video:
In the press release, Apple revealed details of what viewers can expect from the broadcasts:
Spectrum Front Row in Apple Immersive is directed and produced for Vision Pro with a feed of up to 150 Mbps and seven unique viewing angles: the scorer’s table, the area beneath each basket, a high-and-wide view of the arena, the player tunnel, the broadcast booth, and a roaming courtside perspective for interviews and commentary. The broadcast team features Emmy Award-winning play-by-play commentator Mark Rogondino and three-time NBA champion and former Lakers forward Danny Green as an analyst.
Spectrum SportsNet subscribers in the Lakers regional broadcast territory (Southern California, Hawaii, and parts of southern Nevada) can watch immersive games live via the Spectrum SportsNet app or the NBA app. Viewers in other U.S. markets will have access to highlights and full-game replays later, beginning this Sunday, for free via the NBA app or in the SportsNet app with a subscription.
The games will be available in some international markets as well. Users in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea will have access to live immersive games in the NBA app, while users in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UAE, and the UK will be able to watch replays up to 24 hours after each game has ended.
The Vision Pro’s potential for offering viewers the thrill of attending sports events has been a part of the product’s story from the very beginning, with the company including sports footage in the first demos shown to attendees at WWDC 2023. And while we’ve seen highlight videos of various sporting events released publicly since then, this collaboration marks the first time Vision Pro users will be able to experience a full game in Immersive Video. This is also the first time the format will be used for live video rather than on-demand. It’s only a handful of games from one team, but this is a step forward for Immersive Video and the Vision Pro itself that I’m looking forward to experiencing myself this weekend.
2026-01-06 02:05:57
My iPad has been gathering dust. I bought it last May – an 11” M4 iPad Pro with 512GB of storage and a Magic Keyboard – mostly for writing, photo and video editing, and experimenting with Apple’s seemingly renewed focus on gaming.
On paper, it excels at all of these things.
While the M4 chip is overkill for the iPad’s possibility space, the ever-present specter of the shortcomings inherent in iPadOS tends to loom over more intensive tasks. There’s a clear disconnect between what Apple states the iPad is for in a post-iPadOS 26 world and what the hardware itself is allowed to do when constrained by software limitations. Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs explored this from multiple angles in a recent video that ended with a poignant sentiment:
There are still days that I reach for my $750 MacBook Air because my $2,000 iPad Pro can’t do what I need it to. Seldom is the reverse true.
As a person who also owns a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip stashed away inside, I’ve found the moments I choose my iPad to be few and far between. Despite the ease with which I could fit it into most of my small sling bags when I leave the house and the fact that it’s “good enough” at accomplishing most tasks I could throw at it, I still tend to pack the MacBook instead.
Just in case.
And for that reason, the iPad Pro with a chip built for high-effort, laptop-tier tasks is basically a typewriter for pieces like this.
The irony here is that for all of its shortcomings, the iPad also sports the best display I have at my disposal. A tandem OLED screen with HDR and a 120Hz refresh rate is nothing to sneeze at! For all intents and purposes, the iPad should be my go-to for gaming in many instances, like emulating certain consoles from the 1990s that fit its 4:3-adjacent aspect ratio or game streaming with HDR enabled.
But the idea of my iPad as a central gaming destination hadn’t occurred to me until recently. In theory, it should be possible to load the thing up with emulators and streaming services, plug in a controller and an HDMI cord to an external display, and suddenly have a surprisingly viable “video game console“ in an abstract sense. And yet, issues tend to bubble up again with the limitations and frustrations of iPadOS.
Take, for example, my streaming service of choice: Nvidia GeForce NOW. I pay for the Ultimate tier, which grants access to machines running the best graphics cards Nvidia has to offer, but using Safari on the iPad to access it prevents me from making use of this hardware. My options are very literally limited, with a max resolution of 1600 × 1200 available and no HDR output possible.
Nvidia GeForce NOW’s settings via Safari.
Enter CloudGear, a new browser built specifically for game streaming from multiple services on iPadOS and iOS. Its onboarding is slick, introducing you to its method for showing and hiding the browser’s features by double-tapping the screen with two fingers to bring up FPS monitoring and other helpful functions, like external display behavior.
Signing into GeForce NOW via CloudGear reveals a litany of new display options, with HDR enabled and resolution options all the way up to 5K. After dialing in the settings I was shooting for, I was off to the races playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows at max settings in no time flat – a significantly better experience than what’s possible on every other device I own.
CloudGear’s onboarding outlines features that are both broadly useful and super niche, depending on your personal setup.
Once I fiddled with the in-game HDR-specific options, I was floored. The iPad’s screen is unreal, and it’s hard to articulate how impressive it is without being able to display content that actually makes use of it – something that I suddenly realized wasn’t happening often enough! It’s a 1,600-nit reminder of the exceptional nature of this hardware and, simultaneously, an example of how Apple’s own software design is preventing it from being utilized.
Because while it’s lovely to finally have true external monitor support on iPadOS, the process of using it is bizarre. Plugging in a USB-C dongle with an HDMI cable to my 4K television does extend the iPad’s display out… but doesn’t reroute the audio. So when I go to open up CloudGear and jump into a videogame, I first need to bring up Control Center and tap a few unlabeled buttons to ensure my sound will be coming from the right place. And leaving Control Center open on the iPad’s internal display also prevents my controller inputs from working on the external display, so time is now being spent troubleshooting my suddenly inexplicably inoperable controller.
Once CloudGear is up and running, though, and once I’m cruising through the world of Hollow Knight: Silksong, ARC Raiders, or Dragon’s Dogma II, I’m once again blown away by how far game streaming has come. That the iPad is capable of tapping into and allowing me to access these games at a much higher fidelity and with much better frame rates than the devices I specifically purchased for playing video games is a marvel. There’s a world where the iPad Pro sits almost permanently docked under one’s television and serves as the primary way of playing video games in 2025. Between streaming and emulation, there’s a very strange, but not totally outlandish, case to be made for the iPad as your next video game console – that is, if it weren’t for the operating system’s own limitations making everything just a little bit more cumbersome than it should be.
The iPad Pro plugged into an Anker USB-C hub to provide wired internet, HDMI out, and power delivery makes for a truly console-like experience.
None of this is CloudGear’s fault, nor is it Nvidia’s. Both are fantastic at the services they provide. But this is just a small, strange collection of hoops that need to be jumped through to accomplish one facet of what the iPad can – theoretically – already do. Apps need to be created to give users options they should already have. Extrapolate this same experience to any other “professional” task you’d reasonably throw at your starting-at-$999-and-labeled-Pro device, and you start to see the nomenclature crumble. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder why the default experience on Safari is so limiting.
I’m aware that some people live perfectly productive lives working solely off their iPads, and I respect the hell out of it. In fact, I think this experience of using my iPad as a gaming hub for the past few days has opened my eyes to a whole collection of possibilities.
I wish I trusted Apple to make those possibilities a reality, but I sure am glad to find third-party developers picking up the slack.
