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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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.
2025-11-19 03:19:55
Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).
As we head into the final weeks of 2025, Federico and I figured it would be a good time to update the MacStories Setups page. There’s an ebb and flow to the gear and apps we test each year, and as the fall OS update season fades into the past, it’s not unusual for one or both of us to take stock of our setup and make changes. That’s been very true for both of us this year, but in different ways.
Federico has been focused on simplifying his hardware setup and testing a long list of apps and services. In contrast, I’ve made fewer gear cuts, focusing more on strategic changes to the gadgets I use and settling on a core set of work apps.
The result is that Federico’s hardware setup changes have primarily been updates to his Apple and portable gaming gear. He made the transition from the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the iPhone Air, and couldn’t be happier with the result. He also replaced the M4 iPad Pro with the latest M5 model and moved from the AirPods 4 to the AirPods Pro 3.
Both of us ditched our previous Apple Vision Pro head strap solutions for the Apple Dual Knit Band, which has been a big upgrade. It’s comfortable, and having one dial to adjust both bands is both clever and far simpler than other solutions I’ve tried.
Ayn Thor.
Federico also added the Ayn Thor to his handheld gaming lineup. The Thor, which I also bought this fall, is a dual-screen OLED gaming handheld that runs Android. It’s perfect for emulating dual-screen systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but it has also been excellent for game streaming and testing the emerging world of emulating SteamOS on Android. If game tinkering is your thing and this sounds intriguing, we have two episodes of NPC: Next Portable Console that go in-depth on the Ayn Thor.
Among the many apps and services that Federico has settled on and that we’ve been covering this fall on AppStories are:
Yes, there’s a lot going on at my desk.
The story of my setup changes is a little different. I’ve also updated my iPhone, although I’ve stuck with the Pro Max, getting the Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max with 512GB of storage. Plus, I updated from the original Apple Watch Ultra to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and from the AirPods Pro 2 to the AirPods Pro 3. It’s been excellent to have two-day battery life with the Apple Watch Ultra again, and I love the better fit and sound I get from the AirPods Pro 3.
I’m also a huge fan of the Ayn Thor dual-screen Android handheld. I’ve tried so many handhelds since we started NPC: Next Portable Console, but nothing can beat the compact size and clamshell form factor of the Thor, which tops it all off with two gorgeous OLED screens. It’s the closest thing to a perfect gaming handheld I’ve tried.
Over the summer, I also started revisiting my smart home setup. This is a long-term project that I’ll write about more in the new year, but I’ve added several gadgets to my setup since our last update. The biggest addition is the Narwal Freo X10 Pro, which the company sent me for testing and I will write about soon. It’s a combo robot vacuum and mop that is light years ahead of the Roomba I bought several years ago in terms of its capabilities. I also wanted to highlight SwitchBot’s Smart Desk Fan, which I got at the end of the summer to help cool my office. The thing I appreciate most about it is that I can control it from the buttons on the fan itself, with a remote control, or with an automation that I created to turn the fan on when the indoor temperature crosses a certain threshold.
A closer look at the MOTU M4.
The other highlights of my setup update all revolve around audio. First, I got a MOTU M4 audio interface for recording podcasts and videos for a very specific reason: it’s the only USB-C-connected audio interface I could find that has an on/off switch. That way, I don’t need to stare at its LED lights all day, and unlike the Elgato Wave XLR interface it replaces, the M4 doesn’t needlessly generate heat.
For personal audio, I also recently picked up the Beats Studio Pro headphones when they were on sale. I love my AirPods Pro 3, but I’m not a fan of having them jammed in my ears for long stretches. With the Beats Studio Pro, I now have the option to work at my desk or do other things around the house without the AirPods Pro in my ears, and they have great battery life, too.
That’s it for our latest setups for now. Be sure to visit the Setups page for the full list of additions and to browse what hasn’t changed, too. It’s a battle-tested collection of recommended gear that has been years in the making, and it comes with a changelog, so you can also see what has changed in the years since we began Setups. Happy browsing!
2025-11-18 23:24:30
Following the comeback of Slide Over in iPadOS 26.1, Apple is continuing to iterate on iPadOS 26 multitasking by restoring functionalities that had been removed from the launch version of iPadOS 26.0 in September. Yesterday, in the third developer beta of iPadOS 26.2, the company brought back drag and drop gestures to put app windows directly in Split View and Slide Over without having to interact with additional menus. To understand how these old gestures work in the context of iPadOS 26, I recommend watching this video by Chris Lawley:
As you can see, the gestures are pretty much the same ones as iPadOS 18, but the interaction is slightly different insofar as the “pull indicator” for Slide Over (re-introduced in iPadOS 26.1) now serves two purposes. That indicator now acts both as a signal that you can drop a window to instantly tile it as one half of a Split View, and it’s also a drop target to enter Slide Over right away. The design is clever, if maybe a little too hard to discover…but that’s always been the case with multitasking gestures that aren’t exposed by a menu – which is exactly why Apple is now offering plenty of options in iPadOS 26 to discover different multitasking features in different menus.
I’m glad to see Apple quickly iterate on iPadOS 26 by finding ways to blend the old multitasking system with the platform’s new windowing engine. Based on the comments I received after publishing my iPadOS 26 review, enough people were missing the simplicity of Split View and Slide Over that I think Apple’s doing the right thing in making all these multitasking systems coexist with one another.
As I argued on last week’s episode of Connected, and as Myke and Jason also elaborated on this week’s episode of Upgrade, the problem with the iPad Pro now is that we have a great foundation with iPadOS 26 and very few third-party apps that take advantage of it beyond the usual names. I suspected as much months ago, when I explained why, in a world dominated by web apps, the iPad’s next problem was going to be its app ecosystem. The web services I use on a daily basis (Slack, Notion, Claude, Superhuman, Todoist – the list goes on) simply don’t make iPad apps of the same caliber as their desktop/web counterparts. So I find myself using Safari on the iPad to get my work done these days, but, for a variety of reasons and dozens of small papercuts, Safari for iPad simply isn’t as good as Safari on the Mac.
Given how the third-party app ecosystem story for iPad is outside of Apple’s control and how most companies aren’t incentivized to make excellent native iPad apps anymore, now that multitasking has been largely “fixed” in iPadOS 26.2, I hope Apple turns its attention to something they can control: making Safari for iPad truly desktop-class and not a baby version of Safari for Mac.
