2025-11-25 02:11:22
I love my iPad Pro, but, as you know, lately I’ve been wondering about what comes after iPadOS 26. We have much better multitasking now, and key workflow limitations such as file management, audio recording, and long-running background tasks have been addressed by Apple this year. But now that the user-facing system’s foundation has been “fixed”, what about the app ecosystem?
Over at Snazzy Labs, Quinn Nelson has been wondering the same, and I highly recommend watching his video:
Quinn makes a series of strong, cogent arguments with factual evidence that show how, despite multitasking and other iPadOS 26 improvements, using apps on an iPad Pro often falls short of what can be achieved with the same apps on a Mac. There is so much I could quote from this video, but I think his final thought sums it up best:
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.
I’m so happy that Apple seems to be taking iPadOS more seriously than ever this year. But now I can’t help but wonder if the iPad’s problems run deeper than windowing when it comes to getting serious work done on it.
2025-11-25 01:16:31
Last month, we featured 15 great examples of apps that have adopted Apple’s Liquid Glass design language and latest APIs. Today, the MacStories team is sharing nine more of our favorite updates that take advantage of Apple’s latest technologies.
We’ll have additional coverage in the weeks ahead, but for now, let’s dive into even more of the best OS 26 updates we’ve seen this fall.
John: I remember when Denim was first released. It was a great idea that filled a gap in Apple’s Music app, allowing users to create their own playlist covers. The designs you could make with that first version were nice, though fairly modest. But Denim is one of those indie developer stories that I love. Through relentless iteration, the app has evolved into something very special, being named an Apple Design Award finalist in the Delight and Fun category earlier this year.
With the OS 26 release cycle, Denim is all-in on Liquid Glass. We’ve covered a lot of great Liquid Glass implementations already, but Denim’s is extra special. The design is present in the app’s tab bar, where you’ll see the glass blob effect, but it’s also in the animations, like when you return from the cover picker to your playlists. Similar animations are on display when you tap the ‘+’ button to add a new cover or the ‘…’ button.
Denim’s Gallery interface is an excellent example of Liquid Glass used to display a collection of artwork. The view has a lot in common with apps like Music, but it does a better job of implementing the design without sacrificing legibility, thanks to its buttons’ frosted treatment.
Denim’s Liquid Glass update aside, if you haven’t tried the app in a while, it’s worth taking another look at. I get tired of the auto-generated playlist art in Music, and the alternative covers Apple added a couple of years ago are uninspired. In contrast, Denim offers a wide variety of styles with highly customizable artwork, fonts, and colors. The gallery is incredibly deep, allowing you to make some fantastic covers.
Denim, which is iPhone-only, is available on the App Store for $2.99/month, $9.99/year, or a one-time payment of $29.99.
Federico: 2025 has been the year that I’ve fully embraced Drafts as my Markdown text editor/notepad of choice, and that’s all thanks to AI. Let me explain: thanks to the advancements in coding for models like GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5, I’ve been able to turn Drafts into a highly personalized, extensible plain text editor that – unlike Obsidian – is natively integrated with Apple’s design language and latest platform features. That was never the case with Obsidian, which is an Electron app at its core and can’t match the pace of truly native apps for iOS and iPadOS. With Drafts, I get to have my cake and eat it too; I can “vibe-code” my own actions thanks to Claude, and I don’t have to give up on the nice perks that come with an application that is frequently updated for the latest Apple APIs.
Over the past two months, Drafts has received a series of notable updates for the 26 family of OSes. The app has been updated for Liquid Glass, which I think pairs well with Drafts’ UI, but more importantly, it’s also been optimized for iPadOS 26. That means full integration with the menu bar, multi-windowing, and keyboard shortcuts. Greg Pierce has done a solid job integrating with App Intents: Drafts actions can now be triggered from Control Center on the Mac and Apple Watch, and there’s a new ‘Show Capture’ action in Shortcuts that opens the app’s Capture window with the ability to pre-fill some text in it. Last but not least, Pierce also added support for the on-device Foundation model, which can be invoked from Drafts’ JavaScript-based scripting library to access tools that let you query drafts, create new ones, and more.
In a sea of so-called “opinionated” text editors that often use that adjective as an excuse for their lack of features, Drafts has managed to keep its simplicity while unlocking incredible potential for power users. If you haven’t played around with Drafts in a while, its latest updates for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26 are a great opportunity to test the app again.
Drafts is available as a free download for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with the full feature set available as part of Drafts Pro for $1.99/month or $19.99/year.
Jonathan: There are many productivity apps that are – pardon the pun – focused on the Pomodoro method of working, and Focus is one of the best. The Pomodoro technique employs an interval-based approach as you alternate between 25-minute sessions of focused work and short breaks of around five minutes.
Where Focus has always shone is its simplified, clean UI, which lets users start a focus session with ease. Should you wish to add more complexity with specific tasks or custom timers, that is also easy to do. The latest update to Focus for all Apple platforms features several enhancements beyond its Liquid Glass redesign.
Firstly, Focus now integrates with the new alarms API, so users can be notified with full-screen alarms when it’s time to finish an interval. If you prefer classic notifications, you can still use them, but alarms work well for interval work, especially if you get distracted during a break. I’ve found it immensely valuable at times.
The new version also features insights powered by Apple Intelligence that give you an idea of recent activity achievements. It supports flexible windowing in iPadOS 26 and controls in watchOS 26 to kick off a session right from your Apple Watch, too.
Lastly, back to that Liquid Glass redesign: it’s very well done. Legibility is excellent, the flexible tab bar at the bottom of the screen works very well, and it all makes Focus even more enjoyable to use.
Focus is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. Using the app requires a $4.99/month or $39.99/year subscription.
Federico: If you’ve been following my coverage of AI on MacStories over the past year, and especially since the launch of the M5 iPad Pro, you know I strongly believe that Apple’s MLX framework is the future of local AI inference on Apple platforms. And if you want to dip your toes into the MLX waters without worrying about shell commands or other complicated setups, look no further than Locally AI, created by indie developer Adrien Grondin.
Locally AI is a highly polished, native app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that lets you chat with popular open-weights models such as Qwen 3, DeepSeek R1, and Granite 4.0 in addition to Apple’s built-in, proprietary Apple Intelligence Foundation model. The app comes with a built-in gallery of models downloadable in MLX format, with notes that tell you whether a specific model size may run slowly on your device based on its memory and CPU usage.
What I like most about Locally AI – besides how elegant it looks and how tastefully Liquid Glass has been implemented – is the extent to which it replicates the experience of a modern chatbot with Apple’s Foundation model and other third-party ones. You can enter a system prompt to personalize responses; you can use a vision model and attach images to conversations; there is a voice mode; as of yesterday, the app can even summarize and extract details from attached documents.
Experimenting with open models, particularly on iOS and iPadOS, can be a little daunting, especially if you’re not comfortable with picking the right version of a model. Locally AI is the most Apple-like take on making open-weights models easy to discover and intuitive to use that I’ve found on the App Store, and it’s one of the standout app debuts of 2025.
Locally AI is available for free on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
John: It’s been a big year for Longplay, the album-oriented Apple Music app from Adrian Schönig. In July, it debuted on the Mac with extensive automation support, including a long list of Shortcuts actions, AppleScript, an Alfred workflow, and integrations with last.fm, ListenBrainz, and even Anthropic’s Claude via MCP. It’s the sort of deep automation integration that I love because it doesn’t lock the app into one automation approach. Instead, users can build workflows that suit their needs and preferences.
The Mac version of Longplay is a separate one-time purchase from the version that runs on the iPhone and iPad, which got a beautiful Liquid Glass update that doesn’t suffer from the legibility issues found in Apple’s Music app. For an app that can manage huge Apple Music libraries, Longplay’s interface is incredibly simple and made all the more elegant by Liquid Glass.
Longplay has three primary views. Your home base is the collection of albums that appear in a mosaic-like layout, visually emphasizing the album that’s playing. Swipe left, and a small Liquid Glass indicator appears near the bottom of the screen showing the views available to either side of the album view. That left swipe takes you to your playback queue, which offers several ways to organize your listening session. Head back to the home view and swipe right to reveal sorting options and settings. It’s an incredibly smooth, natural interaction model that is enhanced by Liquid Glass’ fluid animations.
Liquid Glass is on full display across the top of Longplay’s main view, too. From here, you can search for an album or playlist or open a dropdown menu to switch between your Apple Music library and the collections you’ve created. The search bar is transparent but legible, and as you scroll, it disappears entirely, highlighting your music collection. Longplay also makes great use of modern context menus, tucking extensive controls and metadata out of the way while keeping them fully accessible.
Longplay is available on the App Store for $5.99. The Mac app is a separate $24.99 purchase.
Jonathan: Simple Scan developer Greg Pierce has decided not to redesign the whole app for Liquid Glass, but instead to focus on using Apple’s Foundation model to streamline the file-naming process. Liquid Glass elements like switches and buttons are included, as is Apple’s new scanning interface, but those aren’t the reasons you should upgrade.
Simple Scan now supports a workflow where, if you enter [[input]] in the File Name field of one of its custom destinations, the app will use the on-device Apple Intelligence model to offer file name suggestions based on the text in the document you’re scanning. You’re presented with many options to choose from, and you can tap them to add them to the file name.
Honestly, this sounds very basic to the point of not being worth it. However, in practice, it’s incredibly useful and just the sort of small, helpful feature AI should be offering everyone. One perfect scenario is if you have a stack of receipts you need to scan for business expenses. For each receipt, Simple Scan will present you with options to add the vendor, date, location, amount, and more to the file name, all with a simple tap. When you think about it in these kinds of use cases, you realize what a clever feature it really is.
Simple Scan can be downloaded for free on the iPhone and iPad. The full feature set is available with a Simple Scan Pro subscription, which costs $9.99/year or $29.99 as a one-time purchase.
Devon: Crunchy Bagel’s habit tracking app hit version 11 this fall with a plethora of new features and integrations. It incorporates Liquid Glass in its navigation buttons, which blend well with the app’s iconic design. The new material can be seen on the app’s main page in its new button for sorting and filtering tasks that defaults to a helpful Up Next view of the tasks that need attention the soonest. In a nice touch, the tint of the button changes to fit the user’s selected color theme.
The app also taps into iOS’ system-wide alarm integration, new in iOS 26. When you’re running a task with a timer, an alarm will go off to indicate the timer is complete. The alarm can even break through Focus modes the way the Clock app’s alarms always have, ensuring you don’t miss the alert.
Streaks incorporates Apple Intelligence’s on-device Foundation model with a clever new feature called Break It Down that’s available in each task’s settings. If you’re struggling with a particular task or considering how you could adjust it to better meet your goals, Break It Down can offer alternative and supplemental tasks that might help.
The update also includes the ability to import medications from the Health app (though it’s not currently possible to log medications from Streaks into Health) and customizable watchOS widgets.
Streaks is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro as a one-time $5.99 purchase from the App Store.
Devon: Tally, the counting app from Agile Tortoise, received a sizable update alongside iOS 26. Its implementation of Liquid Glass is tastefully done, with glassy buttons for navigation, a bottom-anchored search bar, and an info pane in the bottom-left corner of each set’s detail view that blends nicely with the counting elements. The app’s robust ‘…’ menu for each set also makes good use of the design system’s fluid nature to expose a good deal of functionality only when it’s needed.
I’m really happy to see Tally integrate a fascinating new feature in iOS 26 that has mostly gone under the radar: interactive snippets. Using the power of app intents, the app can display a miniature UI overlay that allows you to freely update a tally at any time. This functionality is available via the new ‘Show Tally’ Shortcuts action, and it’s a great example of what these snippets can do. I’d love to see more of these from Tally, as well as the ability to invoke them as controls in Control Center, on the Lock Screen, and with the Action button.
Other new features include the ability to sort tallies within sets by name or value and the option to pin tally sets to the top of the set list – perfect for keeping score for an ongoing game or logging a habit over time, a use case the app is increasingly catering to. The Apple Watch version incorporates Liquid Glass as well and is a great way to check and update tallies.
Tally is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It can be downloaded from the App Store for free, with the full feature set available as part of a Tally Pro subscription for $9.99/year or a one-time purchase of $29.99.
Federico: I’ve shared my love for the RSS client Unread many times over the years on MacStories, and the app has continued to get better in 2025 with the addition of features like website logins, which let you preemptively log into paywalled websites to save full-text articles in the app. Just like Drafts, Unread hides some terrific power-user options under a facade of minimalism that has no equal on the App Store these days.
Today, I want to specifically call out the app’s iPadOS 26 updates. A couple of months ago, developer John Brayton completely rethought the app’s keyboard shortcuts to account for the new ones Apple added to the system and, most importantly, the menu bar. Unread has fully embraced the menu bar in iPadOS 26, creating one of the richest implementations of this feature I’ve seen to date. In addition to managing feeds and subscriptions with new menu items and keyboard shortcuts, my favorite touch in Unread’s menu bar is the ‘Article’ menu, which lets you add direct integrations for specific apps (such as GoodLinks, Messages, and Readwise Reader) that will show up as colorful icons in the list. They can be assigned custom keyboard shortcuts too.
Unread may not be the greatest example of the Liquid Glass aesthetic (after all, the app is still heavily based on its own design language and take on context menus), but the work Brayton has done on the iPad deserves recognition and praise.
Unread can be downloaded for free on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Additions features are available as part of a $4.99/month or $29.99/year subscription.
2025-11-22 05:36:38
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, Federico and John kick off their holiday app and automation experimentation season a little earlier than usual with a mix of apps, automations, and services.
On AppStories+, they look ahead, considering the future of Shortcuts and automation.
Niléane is getting bold with laptop appendages, Chris is nostalgic about the iPad Pro, and everyone gets weird with text files.
This week’s Cozy Zone is a deep dive into 2012’s Les Misérables film.
This week, Federico and John explore tech nostalgia and the importance of tech history before picking a new TV series and music artist.
Sigmund and Devon discuss Devon’s new audiobook listening habit and what it’s taught him about adaptations. Then, they share gift ideas for the Apple TV fan in your life.
John and Federico consider the future of Shortcuts in light of the rapidly evolving automation landscape.
Visit AppStories.net to learn more about the extended, high bitrate audio version of AppStories that is delivered early each week and subscribe.
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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To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.
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.
2025-11-21 02:32:39
If you haven’t noticed, it’s not Friday, and Thanksgiving is still a week away. Yet here we are, talking about Black Friday deals. That’s because every year, Amazon pushes the start of its deals a little earlier.
This is far from the first article you’ll come across about Black Friday deals, and it won’t be the last. But what’s different about our approach to Black Friday is that we’re pickier than most sites.
When I sat down to consider Amazon’s Black Friday deals, I looked at a long list of factors, including:
What we’ve come up with is a list of a couple dozen excellent deals that will save you loads of money on everything from great holiday gifts to nerd staples like storage, networking gear, and upgrades to your computing setup.
Every time I write one of these roundups, I inevitably run across even more great deals after the story has been published. So in addition to this story, we’ll be posting deals on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.
Club MacStories Plus and Premier members will be sharing their Black Friday deal finds on Discord too. If you’re not a member, you can sign up here. The Discord server is just one of the many perks of joining the Club.
Finally, please note that the Amazon links in this article are affiliate links. If you follow one of our links and buy something, we make a small commission.
Some of Amazon’s best deals are on storage.
Storage is a staple of Black Friday, with excellent deals on hard drives and SSDs of all shapes and sizes. This year is no different. Whether your Mac’s drive is filling up and you need to offload some large files or you’re looking for a backup solution, now is the time to pull the trigger and get more storage.
I mention Samsung portable SSDs a lot on MacStories and the MacStories Deals accounts because I’ve used them for years and they’re reliable. Samsung’s fastest model – the T9 – is my favorite because it uses USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2, making it equally good for quick backups and working on large files externally.
Currently, both the 4TB Samsung T9 SSD and the 2TB model are on sale on Amazon, with the biggest discount on the 4TB model. You can save a little more with SanDisk’s 2TB external drive, but it runs at half the speed of the Samsung T9, so I recommend the T9. However, if you want to go really big with an SSD, SanDisk has Samsung beat with an 8TB model that, while expensive and half the speed of a Samsung T9, will be far faster than a mechanical hard drive for backing up a Mac with lots of internal storage. Samsung sadly does not offer an 8TB T9 drive.
SSDs are great, but even on sale, they’re more expensive than mechanical hard drives. If you don’t need the fastest speeds and can tuck your hard drive away somewhere the heat and noise won’t bother you, Amazon has a great deal on a 14TB Western Digital Elements hard drive. I’ve used Elements drives a lot over the past several years for archiving big projects and Time Machine backups, and I’ve been very happy with their performance. If you need a big drive, now is the time to pick one of these up; they’ve never been cheaper.
For starters, the Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is deeply discounted for Black Friday. I reviewed this outdoor HomeKit-compatible camera earlier this year and love it. From the feedback I’ve heard, MacStories readers seem to love the camera, too.
I also reviewed the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K this summer. Paired with Philips Hue lights, it’s remarkably capable, syncing the colors of your lights to whatever is on your TV. While it’s not a smart home essential, it is a lot of fun, and if you need a little push to pull the trigger on this sort of gadget, this discount is a great excuse.
On the more practical end of the spectrum, Philips Hue is also offering a great deal on its Go Smart Portable Table Lamp, which works plugged in or via its built-in battery. I’ve had my eye on this lamp for a while because it’s very portable and would add nice accent lighting when I’m working on my balcony in the evening or anywhere else with less-than-ideal lighting.
Finally, as I mentioned on the Setups video that Federico and I recently released, I love my new SwitchBot Smart Desk Fan. It oscillates left and right as well as up and down, and it has nine speed settings. Best of all, I can control it from the buttons on the front of the device, using the included remote control, or with Shortcuts because it works with HomeKit.
Amazon has great deals on Beats headphones.
Headphones are another Black Friday staple and make great holiday gifts. If you’re looking for a new set for yourself or someone else, here are three recommendations:
Now is a very good time to pick up a 13” M4 MacBook Air, a 15” M4 MacBook Air, or an iPad mini. Apple has several items on sale on Amazon, but these are the best in my opinion.
When it comes to accessories, here are some of my favorite deals, along with links to reviews I’ve done on MacStories:
The Insta360 Flow 2 Pro Creator iPhone gimbal is on sale on Amazon. I took this model’s predecessor with me to CES this year and loved it. This version has some nice incremental updates, and the bundle includes all the accessories you need for filming with your iPhone.
Logitech’s Flip Folio Keyboard Case, which I reviewed in June, is on sale too. It’s an iPad Pro case with a kickstand and a separate keyboard that attaches magnetically to the outside of the case. It’s an interesting design that’s well suited to people who only use a keyboard occasionally. Both the 11” model and the 13” model are on sale.
Logitech is also offering a great deal on the Combo Touch Keyboard Case for the 11” iPad Pro and the 13” iPad Pro. Like the Flip Folio, this case has a kickstand, but its keyboard is attached and includes a trackpad, too.
Logitech has gone all out with Amazon Black Friday deals, also discounting the Keys-to-Go 2 portable keyboard that I use with a variety of devices, including my iPad Pro, because it’s incredibly light and offers a good typing experience considering its slim design.
I have two picks in this category. The first is the GL.iNet GL-BE3600 (Slate 7) Portable Travel Router, which you’ll find in my section of the MacStories Setups page. That’s quite a mouthful for a tiny router that runs at very low power and does everything from extending a weak Wi-Fi network to creating a Wi-Fi network of its own by tethering to your iPhone. That versatility and the Slate 7’s support for Wi-Fi 7 make it a great device for anyone who works on a Mac or iPad on the go.
My second networking recommendation is the TRENDnet 8-port 2.5Gb Switch. Seeing the discount on this switch pains me because I paid a lot more for it when 2.5Gb switches were less common. I’ve been running mine for a few years, and it’s reliably delivered fast speeds to my desktop Mac 24/7.
That’s it for now. Be sure to follow MacStories Deals on Mastodon and Bluesky for more deal finds, and if you’re not a Club MacStories member, we’d love for you to consider joining. You’ll find more deals on our Discord and help support our work here at MacStories, too.
2025-11-21 01:30:03
The M5 iPad Pro.
The best kind of follow-up article isn’t one that clarifies a topic that someone got wrong (although I do love that, especially when that “someone” isn’t me); it’s one that provides more context to a story that was incomplete. My M5 iPad Pro review was an incomplete narrative. As you may recall, I was unable to test Apple’s promised claims of 3.5× improvements for local AI processing thanks to the new Neural Accelerators built into the M5’s GPU. It’s not that I didn’t believe Apple’s numbers. I simply couldn’t test them myself due to the early nature of the software and the timing of my embargo.
Well, I was finally able to test local AI performance with a pre-release version of MLX optimized for M5, and let me tell you: not only is the hype real, but the numbers I got from my extensive tests over the past two weeks actually exceed Apple’s claims.
This article won’t be long, and I’ll let the charts I recreated for the occasion speak for themselves. Essentially, as I suggested in my iPad Pro review, the M5’s improvements for local AI performance largely apply to prompt processing (the prefill stage, when an LLM needs to ingest the user’s prompt and load it into its context) and result in much, much shorter time to first token (TTFT) numbers. Since prompt processing with neural acceleration scales better with long prompts (where you can more easily measure the difference in latency between the M4 and M5), I focused on testing two different long prompt sizes: 10,000 and 16,000 tokens.
In my new tests based on an updated version of one of the published MLX samples, I used Qwen3-8B-4bit to measure the performance of local AI on my old M4 iPad Pro and new M5 iPad Pro. As you will see in the charts below, a prompt that took the M4 81 seconds to process was loaded by the M5 in 18 seconds – a 4.4× improvement in TTFT. The numbers become even more impressive with longer prompts: while it took the M4 118 seconds (nearly two minutes!) to start generating an answer for a 16,000-token prompt, the M5 did it…in 38 seconds.
But enough paragraphs about numbers! Let’s see some pretty charts instead.
The key stat in these comparisons.
As you can see, there are some improvements for token generation across the M4 and M5, but at 1.5× faster generation, they’re marginal. The star of the show for the M5 is prompt processing in the prefill stage: the Neural Accelerators vastly reduce the time needed by the M5 to process long prompts and start generating answers. The fact that this is happening on a consumer-grade tablet that is thin, lightweight, and fanless is all the more impressive.
In practice, this means a few things.
If you’re a developer of local AI apps for iPad, I highly recommend you start integrating with MLX and consider features that will take advantage of long prompts. RAG applications for cross-document search, LLM clients with “project” features that support system-level instructions, and local AI clients that integrate with MCP servers (MCP tools notoriously fill the context window of LLMs with instructions and tool descriptions) are the kinds of apps that will benefit from the M5’s faster prompt processing the most, especially at long contexts.
For users, although the iPad’s app ecosystem for local AI remains largely aspirational right now and behind the curve compared to macOS, there are early signs of iPad apps that will take advantage of the power of the M5. Apps like Locally AI, OfflineLLM, and Craft (which supports local, offline assistants on iOS and iPadOS) should, theoretically, be able to tap into the power of the M5 and provide considerable performance gains compared to the M4.
The M5 alone doesn’t change the fact that local AI is a niche, and local AI on iPadOS is a niche of a niche right now. However, the power is there, and as soon as the public version of MLX receives support for neural acceleration, we may start seeing a progressive buildup of AI tablet apps that can run offline – and inherently more private – LLMs with the kind of performance that was previously exclusive to desktops.
With this kind of power, it’d be a shame if no one took advantage of it. I hope some third-party iPad app developers will, and I’ll be along for the ride.
2025-11-19 22:03:45
Source: Apple.
Today, Apple announced the finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. The App Store Awards are Apple’s annual celebration of exceptional apps and games across 12 categories spanning the company’s platforms. It’s an excellent collection that includes solo developers, small indie teams, big companies, and many MacStories favorites.
Here’s the complete list of finalists.
It’s great to see all of these developers’ hard work recognized, and I was especially pleased to see long-time MacStories favorites like Acorn by Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, The Art of Fauna by Klemens Strasser, Camo Studio by Reincubate, and Structured by the Unorderly team, plus games like Is This Seat Taken?, Gears & Goo, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, DREDGE, and Prince of Persia: Lost Crown on the list.
As you can probably imagine, though, I’m partial to Detail’s inclusion as one of the iPad App of the Year finalists. My son Finn has worked on the app’s development team since graduating from college, and it’s fun to have an App Store Award finalist in the family.
Proud-dad bias aside, congratulations to all the finalists. It’s quite an honor to be recognized as one of the best among the millions of apps and games on the App Store.
