Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Comfort Zone

Matt made an app and brings a very, very unbiased take on it, Chris has solved some of his tech paper cuts, and Niléane probably won yet another challenge by bringing a really rad Apple TV remote.

MacStories Unwind

This week on Unwind, I make a Kuzu discovery that may amuse Italian listeners, we explore bars and aperitivo, and we share a music and TV show pick, along with a great deal.

Magic Rays of Light

Sigmund and Devon highlight the premiere of Apple Original Spanish-language comedy Love You To Death, break down the changes coming to MLS Season Pass this season, and recap immersive film Man vs. Beast.

Comfort Zone, Episode 35, ‘Switzerland is at the Top’ Show Notes

Weekly Topics

• Quick Reviews on the App Store
• Announcing Quick Reviews
• AirPods Max charging dock

Other Things Discussed

• Cheerwine
• Chris’s new USB-C cable
• Old Salt Apple TV remote
• New Salt Apple TV remote
• Matt’s TV
• GameTrack
• Linear

Follow the Hosts

• Chris on YouTube
• Matt on Birchtree
• Niléane on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Bluesky

MacStories Unwind, ‘Never Bored’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Unplugged

• Follow-Up:
  • Kuzu vs. Kudzu
• Bars, Coffee Shops, and Bottle Shops
  • Understanding Italian Coffee Culture
  • Aperitivo A Beginner’s Guide to a Italian Tradition Tuscany Now & More
  • Classic Aperol Spritz Recipe
  • A decent definition of a bottle shop

Picks

• Federico’s Pick:
  • Forgiving Spree by Slowly Slowly
• John’s Pick:
  • Prime Target on Apple TV+
  • Prime Target review – this stylish thriller is like Good Will Hunting meets The Bourne Identity

Unwind Deal

• Jack Ryan

MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.

Magic Rays of Light, Episode 155, ‘Love You to Death, MLS Season Pass Changes, and Immersive Bull-Riding’ Show Notes

Highlight

• Love You To Death

MLS Season Pass Returns

• Major League Soccer returns to MLS Season Pass on Apple TV
• MLS on Apple Music
• MLS on Apple Podcasts
• MLS on Apple Maps

Trailer Talk

• Goldie
• Surface — Season 2
• Berlin ER

Apple Original News

• PaleyFest LA 2025 featuring the Cast and Crew of Severance
• The Gorge - Den of Geek London Fan Screening
• Why Ben Stiller Made Severance (and Doesn’t Care about What Elon Says About Him) | On with Kara Swisher

Releases

• Kendrick Lamar’s Road to Halftime
• The Story of Kendrick Lamar
• Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show Event Page
• ‎Kendrick Lamar Artist Spotlight on Apple Fitness+
• Kendrick Lamar HUMBLE. Synth Riders Experience
• ‎PGA TOUR Pro Golf
• ‎Doodle Jump 2+
• ‎My Dear Farm+

Extras

• ‎The You You Are
• Adam Scott vs. Patricia Arquette | Hot Ones Versus
• Silo — Extending Worlds: Silos 17 & 18

Recap

• Deaf President Now!
• Man vs. Beast

TV App Highlights

• All We Imagine as Light
• September 5
• Piece by Piece
• Invincible
• Apple Cider Vinegar
• The Floor

Up Next

• Newtopia
• The White Lotus

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Subscribe to Magic Rays of Light on YouTube and follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on Mastodon or Bluesky

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Bluesky

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

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What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Busy day at Google today: the company rolled out version 2.0 of its Gemini AI assistant (previously announced in December) with a variety of new and updated models to more users. From the Google blog:

Today, we’re making the updated Gemini 2.0 Flash generally available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Developers can now build production applications with 2.0 Flash.

We’re also releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Pro, our best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts. It is available in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, and in the Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users.

We’re releasing a new model, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient model yet, in public preview in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.

Finally, 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental will be available to Gemini app users in the model dropdown on desktop and mobile.

Google’s reasoning model (which, similarly to DeepSeek-R1 or OpenAI’s o1/o3 family, can display its “chain of thought” and perform multi-step thinking about a user query) is currently ranked #1 in the popular Chatbot Arena LLM leaderboard. A separate blog post from Google also details the new pricing structure for third-party developers that want to integrate with the Gemini 2.0 API and confirms some of the features coming soon to both Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Pro, such as image and audio output. Notably, there is also a 2.0 Flash-Lite model that is even cheaper for developers, which I bet we’re going to see soon in utilities like Obsidian Web Clipper, composer fields of social media clients, and more.

As part of my ongoing evaluation of assistive AI tools, since Gemini’s initial rollout in December, I’ve been using it in place of ChatGPT, progressively replacing the latter. Today, after the general release of 2.0 Flash, I went ahead and finally swapped ChatGPT for Gemini in my iPhone’s dock.

This will probably need to be an in-depth article at some point, but my take so far is that although ChatGPT gets more media buzz and is the more mainstream product¹, I think Google is doing more fascinating work with a) their proprietary AI silicon and b) turning LLMs into actual products for personal and professional use that are integrated with their ecosystem. Gemini (rightfully) got a bad rap with its initial release last year, and while it still hallucinates responses (but all LLMs still do), its 2.0 models are more than good enough for the sort of search queries I was asking ChatGPT before. Plus, we pay for Google Workspace at MacStories, and I like that Gemini is directly integrated with the services we use on a daily basis, such as Drive and Gmail.

Most of all, I’m very intrigued by Gemini’s support for extensions, which turn conversations with a chatbot into actions that can be performed with other Google apps. For instance, I’ve been enjoying the ability to save research sessions to Google Keep by simply invoking the app and asking Gemini what I wanted to save. I’ve searched YouTube videos with it, looked up places in Google Maps, and – since I’ve been running a platform-agnostic home automation setup in my apartment that natively supports HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Home all at once – even controlled my lights with it. While custom GPTs in ChatGPT seem sort of abandonware now, Gemini’s app integrations are fully functional, integrated across the Google ecosystem, and expanding to third-party services as well.²

Even more impressively, today Google rolled out a preview of a reasoning version of Gemini 2.0 that can integrate with YouTube, Maps, and Search. The idea here is that Gemini can think longer about your request, display its thought process, then do something with apps. So I asked:

I want you to find the best YouTube videos with Oasis acoustic performances where Liam is the singer. Only consider performances dated 1994-1996 that took place in Europe. I am not interested in demos, lyrics videos, or other non-live performances. They have to be acoustic sets with Noel playing the guitar and Liam singing.

Surely enough, I was presented with some solid results. If Google can figure out how to integrate reasoning capabilities with advanced Gmail searches, that’s going to give services like Shortwave and Superhuman a run for their money. And that’s not to mention all the other apps in Google’s suite that could theoretically receive a similar treatment.

Bonehead playing the piano? Yes please.

However, the Gemini app falls short of ChatGPT and Claude in terms of iOS/iPadOS user experience in several key areas.

The app doesn’t support widgets (which Claude has), doesn’t offer any Shortcuts actions (both Claude and ChatGPT have them), doesn’t have a native iPad app (sigh), and I can’t figure out if there’s a deep link to quickly start a new chat on iOS. The photo picker is also bad in that it only lets you attach one image at a time, and the web app doesn’t support native PWA installation on iPhone and iPad.

Clearly, there’s a long road ahead for Google to make Gemini a great experience on Apple platforms. And yet, none of these missing features have been dealbreakers for me when Gemini is so fast and I can connect my conversations to the other Google services I already use. This is precisely why I remain convinced that a “Siri LLM” (“Siri Chat” as a product name, perhaps?) with support for conversations integrated and/or deep-linked to native iOS apps may be Apple’s greatest asset…in 2026.

Ultimately, I believe that, even though ChatGPT has captured the world’s attention, it is Gemini that will be the ecosystem to beat for Apple. It always comes down to iPhone versus Android after all. Only this time, Apple is the one playing catch-up.

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What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Tapestry (left) and Reeder.

Writing at The Verge following the release of The Iconfactory’s new app Tapestry, David Pierce perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the idea of “timeline apps” (a name that I’m totally going to steal, thanks David):

⁠⁠What I like even more, though, is the idea behind Tapestry. There’s actually a whole genre of apps like this one, which I’ve taken to calling “timeline apps.” So far, in addition to Tapestry, there’s Reeder, Unread, Feeeed, Surf, and a few others. They all have slightly different interface and feature ideas, but they all have the same basic premise: that pretty much everything on the internet is just feeds. And that you might want a better place to read them.⁠⁠
[…]
These apps can also take some getting used to. If you’re coming from an RSS reader, where everything has the same format — headline, image, intro, link — a timeline app will look hopelessly chaotic. If you’re coming from social, where everything moves impossibly fast and there’s more to see every time you pull to refresh, the timeline you curate is guaranteed to feel boring by comparison.⁠⁠

I have a somewhat peculiar stance on this new breed of timeline apps, and since I’ve never written about them on MacStories before, allow me to clarify and share some recent developments in my workflow while I’m at it.

I think both Tapestry and the new Reeder are exquisitely designed apps, for different reasons. I know that Tapestry’s colorful and opinionated design doesn’t work for everyone; personally, I dig the different colors for each connected service, am a big fan the ‘Mini’ layout, and appreciate the multiple font options available. Most of all, however, I love that Tapestry can be extended with custom connectors built with standard web technologies – JavaScript and JSON – so that anyone who produces anything on the web can be connected to Tapestry. (The fact that MacStories’ own JSON feed is a default recommended source in Tapestry is just icing on the cake.) And did you know that The Iconfactory also created a developer tool to make your own Tapestry connectors?

I like the new Reeder for different reasons. The app’s animations are classic Silvio Rizzi work – fluid and smooth like nothing else on iOS and iPadOS. In my experience, the app has maintained impeccable timeline sync, and just this week, it was updated with powerful new filtering capabilities, enabling the creation of saved searches for any source within the app. (More on this below.)

My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m using a social media app, I want to have access to its full feature set and be able to respond to people or interact with posts. I want to browse my custom Bluesky feeds or post a Mastodon poll if I want to. Instead, both Tapestry and Reeder act as glorified readers for those social timelines. And I understand that perhaps that’s exactly what some people want! But until these apps can tap into Mastodon and Bluesky (and/or their decentralized protocols) to support interactions in addition to reading, I’d rather just use the main social media apps (or clients like Ivory).¹ To an extent, the same applies for Reddit: if neither of these apps allow me to browse an entire subreddit or sort its posts by different criteria, what’s the point?

But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not like me. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here because the web isn’t built like that.

So, while I still haven’t decided which of these two apps I’m going to use yet, I’ve found my own way to take advantage of timeline apps: I like to use them as specialized feeds for timelines that I don’t want to (or can’t) have in my RSS reader or add as lists to Mastodon/Bluesky.

For instance, I created a custom MacStories timeline in Tapestry with feeds for all kinds of places on the web where MacStories publishes content or social media posts. I love how Tapestry brings everything together in a unified, colorful timeline that I can use alongside my RSS and social apps to see all sorts of posts by our company.

The colors!

Reeder’s latest addition is also something I’m considering at the moment. The app can now create saved filters, which are based on multiple filtering conditions. These rules can be stacked to create custom views that aggregate specific subsets of posts from sources that, typically, would be their own silos. Want to create an “AI” feed that cuts through RSS, Bluesky, YouTube, and Reddit to find you the latest AI news or products by keyword? How about a filter to show only YouTube videos that mention Nintendo? All of this (and more) is possible with Reeder’s latest update, with an interface that…I’ll just let the screenshots speak for themselves.

Silvio Rizzi’s design taste never disappoints.

Which leads me back to my main point. I feel like thinking about this new generation of apps as social media clients would be wrong and shortsighted; it reduces the scope of what they’re trying to accomplish down to a mere copy of a social media timeline. Instead, I think Tapestry and Reeder are coming at this from two different angles (Tapestry with better developer tools; Reeder with superior user filters), but with the same larger ambition nonetheless: to embrace the open nature of the Web and move past closed platforms that feel increasingly archaic today.

The fact that I can make a timeline out of anything doesn’t mean that Tapestry or Reeder have to be my everything-timelines. It means that the modern web lets me choose what I want to see in these apps. I can’t help but feel that there’s something special about that we must protect.

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What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Apple Invites is now available on the App Store as a free download. The app, which Apple just announced, is iPhone-only and allows users to send and receive invitations to events – yes, invitations, invites is not a noun.

Here’s what the onboarding looks like:

The app can generate full-screen graphics for invitations to any sort of event. The invitations allow you to mix a combination of photos and AI-generated images that are combined with details about the event and the Memojis of the people you invite. There are multiple font choices, the option to add a playlist from Apple Music, and sections for draft invitations, upcoming events, events you’re hosting, those you’re attending, plus past and upcoming events. Invitees can send notes back to the sender too.

Here’s one Federico made for my imaginary birthday party:

I won’t be using the Image Playground integration.

Fortunately, you aren’t required to use Apple Intelligence to make your invitations, although it is notable that this is one of the first Apple apps we know of that is calling the Image Playground API directly. The app also has a wide variety of backgrounds and supports multiple frameworks and apps system-wide, like Photos, Contacts, Maps, Weather, Calendar, Music, and more.

Here are some more screenshots of the app and what it offers:

Anyone can receive and respond an invitation using the app, but only iCloud+ subscribers can send invitations. I won’t be using Apple Intelligence to generate images for invitations, but putting the Image Playground integration aside, the app looks nice and is a fun way to approach what is usually a chore of back and forth emails or text messages. You can download Invites from the App Store using this link.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Average scores from the 2024 Six Colors report card. Source: Six Colors.

For the past 10 years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an “Apple report card” – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2024 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has been published, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for the different categories here.

I’m grateful that Jason invited me to take part again and share my thoughts on Apple’s 2024. As you’ll see from my comments below, last year represented the end of an interesting transition period for me: after years of experiments, I settled on the iPad Pro as my main computer. Despite my personal enthusiasm, however, the overall iPad story remained frustrating with its peculiar mix of phenomenal M4 hardware and stagnant software. The iPhone lineup impressed me with its hardware (across all models), though I’m still wishing for that elusive foldable form factor. I was very surprised by the AirPods 4, and while Vision Pro initially showed incredible promise, I found myself not using it that much by the end of the year.

I’ve prepared the full text of my responses for the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

The Mac

4/5

Look, as we’ve established, I can now use my iPad Pro for everything I do and don’t need a Mac in my life. But I think Apple is doing an outstanding job with its Mac lineup, and I’m particularly envious of those who own the new Mac mini, which is small, powerful, and just exceedingly cute. I would give this category 5 stars; I don’t because Apple still insists on not making touchscreen Macs or more interesting and weird form factors.

The iPhone

4/5

It’s been an interesting year in iPhone land for me. After the September event, I purchased an iPhone 16 Pro Max, but my mind kept going to the iPhone 16 Plus. I was fascinated by its color, slimmer form factor, and more affordable overall package. I used the iPhone 16 Plus as my primary phone for two months and loved it, but then something happened: much to my surprise, I realized that I wasn’t taking as many pictures of my dogs, friends, and family as I used to with the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

That’s when it hit me. I thought I wouldn’t need all the features of a “pro” phone – and, honestly, since I’m not a professional cinematographer, I really don’t – but in the end, I was missing the 5x camera too much. In my experience with using a 16 Plus, I was able to confirm that, if I wanted, I could live without a ProMotion display. But it was the lack of a third, zoomed camera on the Plus model that ultimately got me. I rely on the 5x lens to take dozens of pictures of my dogs doing something funny or sleeping in a cute way every day, and its absence on the 16 Plus was preventing me from grabbing my phone out of my pocket to save new memories on a daily basis.

I’m glad I did this experiment because it also left me with a couple of additional thoughts about the iPhone line:

1. If Apple comes out with a completely redesigned, slimmer “iPhone 17 Air” later this year that doesn’t have a 5x camera, I’ll have to begrudgingly pass on it and stick with the 17 Pro Max instead.
2. Now more than ever, I truly, fundamentally want Apple to make a foldable phone that expands into a mini-tablet when opened. I don’t care how expensive Apple makes this device. I look at the latest Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and I’m very jealous of its form factor, but I also know that I wouldn’t be able to use Android as the OS for my phone.

If it weren’t for the lack of a foldable form factor in Apple’s iPhone lineup, I would give this category 5 stars. I hope we’ll see some changes on this front within the next couple of years.

The iPad

3/5

What can I say about the iPad that I haven’t already documented extensively? I love the iPad Pro’s hardware, and I find the M4 iPad Pro a miracle of hardware engineering with no equal in other similar products. In 2024, I chose to go all-in on the 11” iPad Pro as my one and only computer; in fact, since the MacPad stopped working a few weeks ago (RIP), I don’t even have a Mac anymore, but I can do everything I need to do on an iPad – that is, after a series of compromises that, unfortunately, continue to be the other side of the coin of the iPad experience.

Going into its 15th year (!), the iPad continues to be incredible hardware let down by a lackluster operating system that is neither as intuitive as iOS nor as advanced or flexible as macOS. The iPad is still stuck in the middle, which is exactly what I – and my fellow iPad users – have been saying for years now. I shouldn’t have to come up with expensive hardware-based workarounds to overcome the limitations of a platform that doesn’t want me to use my computer to its full extent. But, despite everything, I persist because no other tablet even comes close to the performance, thinness, and modularity of an iPad Pro.

Wearables

4/5

I love my new AirPods 4, and I find the combination of no in-ear tips and basic noise cancellation a fantastic balance of trade-offs and comfort. I didn’t rely on AirPods Pro’s advanced noise cancellation and other audio features that much, so switching to the “simpler” AirPods 4 when they were released was a no-brainer for me.

If we’re counting the Vision Pro in wearables, for as flawed as that product can be (it is, after all, a fancy developer kit with an almost non-existent third-party app ecosystem), I also think it’s an impressive showcase of what Apple can do with hardware and miniaturization if money is not a concern and engineers are free to build whatever they want. I don’t use the Vision Pro on a regular basis, but whenever I do, I’m reminded that visionOS is an exciting long-term prospect for what I hope will eventually be shrunk down to glasses.

That is, in fact, the reason why I’m not giving this category 5 stars. I really want to stop using my Meta Ray-Ban glasses, but Apple doesn’t have an alternative that I can purchase today – and worse, it sounds like their version may not be ready for quite some time still. It seems like Apple is, at this point, almost institutionally incapable of releasing a minimum viable product that doesn’t have to be a complete platform with an entire app ecosystem and a major marketing blitz. I just want Apple to make a pair of glasses that combine AirPods, Siri, and a basic camera. I don’t need Apple to make XR glasses that project a computer in front of my eyes today. And I wish the company would understand this – that they would see the interest in “simple” glasses that have speakers, a microphone, and a camera, and release that product this year. I hope they change their minds and can fast-track such a product rather than wait for visionOS to support that kind of form factor years from now.

Apple Watch

5/5

Vision Pro

3/5

Home

2/5

My entire apartment is wired to HomeKit, but I don’t love HomeKit because I’m tired of purchasing third-party hardware that doesn’t have the same degree of quality control that Apple typically brings to the table. I’m intrigued by the idea of Apple finally waking up and making a HomePod with a screen that could potentially serve as a flexible, interactive home hub. That’s a first step, and I hope it won’t disappoint. Seriously, though: I just would love for Apple to make routers again.

Apple TV

3/5

Services

2/5

I switched from Apple Music to Spotify last year, so the only Apple services we use in our household now are iCloud storage with family sharing and Apple TV+. I love Apple TV+, but they should make a native app for Android so that I can watch their TV shows on my Lenovo media tablet. As for iCloud, I use it for Shortcuts, app integrations, and basic iCloud Drive storage, but I don’t trust it for work-related assets because it’s so damn slow. For whatever reason, with Dropbox I can upload heavy video files in seconds thanks to my fiber connection, but with iCloud, I have to wait a full day for those assets to sync across devices. iCloud Drive needs more controls and tools for people who work with files and share them with other people.

Overall Reliability of Apple Hardware

5/5

I have never had an Apple product fail on me, hardware-wise, in the 16 years I’ve been covering the company. If there’s one area where Apple is leagues ahead of its competition, I think it’s hardware manufacturing and overall experience.

Apple OS Quality

4/5

Quality of Apple Apps

3/5

Developer Relations

1/5

Other Comments

I’m genuinely curious about what Apple is going to do with Apple Intelligence this year. Their first wave of previously announced AI features still hasn’t fully rolled out, and it’s fairly clear that the company is more or less two years behind its competitors in this space. While OpenAI is launching Tasks and Google is impressing the industry with their latest Gemini models and promising AI agents living in the browser, Apple is…letting you create cute emoji and terrible images that are so 2022, it hurts.

That being said, I believe that Apple is aware of the fact that they need to catch up – and fast – and I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re witnessing Apple being an underdog again and having to pull out all the stops to show the world that they can still be relevant in a post-AI society. The company, unlike many AI competitors, has a unique advantage: they make the computers we use and the operating systems they run on. I’m convinced that, long term, Apple’s main competitors won’t be OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta, but Google and Microsoft. The Apple Intelligence features we saw at WWDC last year made for a cute demo; I think 2025 is going to show us a glimpse of what Apple’s true vision for the future of computing and AI is.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Back in 2021, Silvio Rizzi, developer of the all-time great RSS client Reeder , released Mela, an app for importing, collecting, and sharing recipes. Right from the start, Mela stood out as a delightful take on the recipe app genre. Just like Reeder, it features a beautiful design and is a joy to browse and use. The app originally shipped with the ability to import recipes directly from the web, subscribe to RSS feeds, and even scan recipes found in physical cookbooks and magazines. Combining those features with its built-in tools for converting measurements and dynamically adjusting meal sizes, Mela truly cooked up the perfect recipe (pun intended) for becoming your one and only cooking app companion. You can check out John’s original review of the app on MacStories to learn more.

This month, Mela was updated to version 2.5 with several improvements, including an option to search for recipes on the web using a new native recipe search engine and the ability to import recipes from video descriptions on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, all of which have become popular platforms for discovering and sharing cooking ideas. This new version takes the app’s web scraping capabilities even further than before, and I was curious to see how it fared.

Let’s check it out.

First, I must say that I’ve been quite impressed by Mela’s interface for searching the web for recipes. The app offers several search engine options, including an extensive list of popular services like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and even Ecosia, but the highlight is definitely its new ‘Web Recipe Search’ option, which surfaces recipes from across various recipe sites.

To get started, head to Mela’s Browser tab and start searching for a recipe. If you use the default Web Recipe Search option, the results will be presented in a neat card layout that groups recipes by website and highlights them with a picture and a short excerpt extracted from the corresponding webpage. To take a closer look at a recipe, simply tap on its card, and the app will take you to the full webpage. You can then tap the floating ’Found Recipe’ button at the bottom of the screen to import it into Mela. As usual, before saving the recipe, the app will let you preview and customize it to adjust everything from portion sizes and units to the main recipe itself.

Searching for samosa recipes via Mela’s new Web Recipe Search.

I’ve found this new web search feature to be delightful. It’s a great addition to Mela’s ability to import recipes from the web. It lets you sort through dozens of options and save recipes without ever having to deal with the clutter that comes with regular Google search results, and it allows you to bypass cookie popups on most cooking websites entirely.

The other new feature in this update is the option to import a recipe by pasting a video URL from YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok into the app’s address bar. By scanning the description of a video containing a recipe, Mela is able to successfully figure out the quantity of each ingredient and even cooking steps. My main worry was that Mela would struggle outside of English-speaking videos, but to my surprise, the app seemed to work just as well with French-speaking videos from YouTube.

I successfully imported a cookie recipe from a French YouTube channel. Just like with other imports, Mela lets you easily adjust the number of portions and changes the ingredient quantities accordingly.

When it comes to recipes found on TikTok, I’ve had less luck. Mela seems less capable of identifying recipes from there, and it often would not let me import a recipe directly after pasting a TikTok URL into the address bar. On my first attempt at importing a rougail saucisses recipe (an excellent meal from La Réunion island; you should check it out), Mela did not offer the ‘Found Recipe’ button:

However, on my second attempt, with a different rougail saucisses recipe found on TikTok, the import was successful:

Clearly, by searching for recipes in French mixed in with some Reunionese Créole, I was stress-testing Mela’s ability to parse recipes from videos. Still, I would say seven out of ten attempts worked impressively well.

I’m not a great cook – in fact, I have a hard time enjoying the process at all – but over the years, I can attest that Mela has become one of my partner’s favorite apps to use on their iPhone. I can easily understand why they’ve come to love it for collecting recipes instead of relying on browser bookmarks and scanned documents scattered on their laptop’s hard drive. Mela has come a long way while maintaining its beautiful UI design, and with its ever-extending ability to import recipes from different mediums, it definitely stands out in its category.

Mela is available for free on the App Store for iOS and iPadOS. All the app’s features can be unlocked with a one-time $4.99 in-app purchase. The Mac version is available separately as a free download on the Mac App Store, where all of its features can be unlocked with a one-time $9.99 in-app purchase.

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Comfort Zone

Matt is unable to defend himself as he’s on the lamb, Chris is exploring that Mac life, and Niléane has some snazzy new headphones. Then Chris edited with AI to pretty good effect and Niléane tried using an AI search engine to much less success.

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Magic Rays of Light

Sigmund and Devon highlight the return of Mythic Quest for its fourth season on Apple TV+ and share their ideas for how Apple can improve gaming on Apple TV this year.

MacStories Unwind

This week, Federico and I do some regional grocery shopping, Federico pursues pasta perfection, plus a documentary and podcast recommendation.

Comfort Zone, Episode 34, ‘I’m the Pepper Daddy Now’ Show Notes

Weekly Topics

• Samson SR850 headphones
• SKÅDIS

Other Things Discussed

• Matt was on AppStories
• Samsung uses AI to invent…screen recording?
• focussedOS
• Dark Noise
• Hyperkey
• Raycast
• Text Snipper
• CleanShot X
• Pixel Perfect
• Final Cut Pro
• Riverside
• ChatGPT Search

Follow the Hosts

• Chris on YouTube
• Matt on Birchtree
• Niléane on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Bluesky

Magic Rays of Light, Episode 154, ‘Mythic Quest and Gaming on Apple TV in 2025’ Show Notes

Pre-Roll

• Apple Music: 100 Best Albums Book

Highlight

• Mythic Quest

Main Topic

• Netflix Games Seemingly Narrows Its Focus

Apple TV News

• Apple Announces the 2025 Black Unity Collection

Releases

• Super Bowl LIX
• Apple Music Live: Björk
• FireAid
• Man vs. Beast
• Vietnam: The War That Changed America

Extras

• Severance — Ben Stiller and Adam Scott Remember Their Past | Origin Story
• Severance — Opening Title Sequence: Season 2
• ‘Severance’ has a new credit sequence for Season 2. The animator explains it | LA Times
• Tim C.’s Orientation
• Severance — The Cast Breaks Down Fan Theories | Theoretically
• Severance — Lumon Management Program: Integrating New Team Members
• Be Mine Pill People

TV App Highlights

• Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
• Matlock
• You’re Cordially Invited
• Sing Sing
• Deaf President Now!
• Love, Brooklyn
• Twinless
• Hal & Harper
• Bubble & Squeak
• Sorry, Baby
• By Design

Up Next

• Royal Rumble
• Hollywood Squares

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Subscribe to Magic Rays of Light on YouTube and follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on Mastodon or Bluesky

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Bluesky

MacStories Unwind, ‘Pursuing Pasta Perfection’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Unplugged

• Shop the Pig: Grocery Store Names
  • Regional Grocery Stores
    • Piggly Wiggly
    • Food Lion
    • Harris Teeter
    • Publix
• Perfect Handmade High Hydration Pizza e Mortazza Recipe
• NaturaSi
• Cacio e Pepe e Corn Starch – Pixel Envy
  • The Perfect Cacio e Pepe Recipe, According to Science
• Kuzu
  • Kuzu Root Starch

Picks

• John’s Pick:
  • An Update on Our Family on Max
• Federico’s Pick:
  • Into the Aether
    • The ITA Patreon

MacStories Unwind+

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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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

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Apple’s Anhui, China store. Source: Apple.

Last quarter, Apple reported revenue of $94.9 billion, which was a 6% year-over-year gain.

Today, first-quarter 2025 earnings are out and Apple reported record revenue of $124.3 billion, a 4% year-over-year gain. The diluted earnings per share was $2.40 a 10% year-over-year gain.

Tim Cook had this to say:

Today Apple is reporting our best quarter ever, with revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent from a year ago. We were thrilled to bring customers our best-ever lineup of products and services during the holiday season. Through the power of Apple silicon, we’re unlocking new possibilities for our users with Apple Intelligence, which makes apps and experiences even better and more personal. And we’re excited that Apple Intelligence will be available in even more languages this April.

Going into today’s earnings call, Apple’s stock was downgraded by multiple analysts. Factors cited in the downgrades included weak sales in China, an expectation that Apple wouldn’t meet earnings expectations, and the the lack of any boost in iPhone sales from Apple Intelligence.

It’s possible that some of the most powerful Apple Intelligence features that have yet to debut will drive future sales of iPhones and other devices even further than last quarter. That’s not a bet I’d necessarily take, but irrespective of hardware sale accelleration, the volatility among the companies behind the leading artificial intelligence models may insure to Apple’s benefit as investors move their investments into stocks that are perceived as safer.

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AppStories

This week, for episode 420 Federico and John are joined by Matt Birchler, co-host of Comfort Zone and many other projects to talk about web apps, email, AI, and more.

On AppStories+, Matt, John, and Federico confess their tech secrets.

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NPC: Next Portable Console

It’s a packed episode with a post Switch 2 reveal vibe check and more on iPhone game controller innovation, plus John’s early impressions of the Ayn Odin2 Portal, Brendon’s review of the Miyoo Flip, and Federico’s long 2DS/3DS emulation journey.

AppStories, Episode 420, ‘Three Browsers Are Better Than One with Matt Birchler’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

AppStories+ Pre-Show

Visit AppStories.net to learn more about the extended, high bitrate audio version of AppStories that is delivered early each week and subscribe.

• YouTube
• TourBox Elite Plus
  • Also Mentioned:
    • Automation April The Loupedeck Live S Is a More Portable and Affordable Automation Control Panel for the Mac
    • First Look Logitech’s MX Creative Console Is Poised to Compete with Elgato’s Stream Deck Lineup
    • Getting Started with Shortcuts for Mac and the Stream Deck
    • TRMNL

Web Apps, AI, and the Future of App Stores

• Email
  • Superhuman
  • Shortwave
• Browsers
  • Zen
  • Arc
• How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI
• Matt’s Recent App Favorites
  • Cursor
  • Lottielab
  • Spline
• Quick Reviews
• Where to Find Matt Birchler
  • Comfort Zone podcast
  • Birchtree.me
  • A Better Computer

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, a video experiment, I have iPad Pro follow-up, and Federico has technical follow-up and a question for listeners about streaming videogames over Wi-Fi.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

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NPC, Episode 19, ‘Peas, a Rubber Band, and an iPad’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

iPhone Controller Innovation

• MCON’s Kickstarter Campaign
• 8BitDo’s Micro Controller Clip
• GamSir’s Unnamed Combo Controller and Battery Prototype
  • More on Wavelengths and MacStories
• The Bitmo Lab GAMEBABY

Ayn Odin2 Portal

• Website
• Retro Game Corps Review

Miyoo Flip

• On AliExpress
• Brendon’s review on Wavelengths
• Brendon’s video on YouTube

Federico’s 3DS Journey

• Microsoft Surface 2 Duo
• Steam Deck
  • EmuDeck
  • Emulation Station
• iPad Pro 4
• Lenovo Legion Y700 (2024 model), available only from China
  • Note: Brendon mentioned that it const $300, but that’s the 2023 model
  • Example of graphics quality
• Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3, which will be available worldwide soon
• Nintendo 2DS

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

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Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.

Let’s take a closer look.

Game Tracker on the Mac in dark mode.

I’ve tried a lot of videogame tracking apps, from ones that are designed specifically for videogames to those that are built into general-purpose media trackers. Depending on your needs, both approaches can work well, but the nature of videogames lends them to an app designed specifically for the medium. That’s because games carry a lot of important metadata that other types of media don’t, like the platforms a game is available on, the format, the gameplay modes, and more.

Each game includes a wealth of information.

Game Tracker takes advantage of the unique information available for videogames, which gives it an instant advantage over general-purpose media apps. Pulling from the Internet Game Database, Game Tracker includes each game’s description, release date, ratings, developer and publisher information, game modes, player perspectives, platforms, completion times, screenshots, artwork, and trailers. Plus, the app lets users add their own ratings, track their progress, make notes, and record games they’ve loaned to friends.

Sort options (left), filters (center), and advanced sorting (right).

Having all that data is useful by itself, but Game Tracker uses it far better than most apps I’ve tried. For example, there are five different ways to sort your games and 11 criteria for filtering them. Plus, Game Tracker allows you to build advanced sorting rules by combining multiple sorting criteria and to create elaborate saved searches by stacking filters. With so many ways to view your games, the built-in sorting and filtering features are often enough, but I appreciate that I can do a lot more than that, and I bet anyone with a big game collection will, too.

A couple of spaces I’ve created and a note pinned to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Game Tracker also allows you to add your own content to your collection, including the media format, progress, notes, tags, and the status of any games you’ve loaned out. You can create your own hand-curated lists of games, called spaces. For example, I created a Retro Games space to collect classic games I’m currently playing or playing soon. And you can bulk edit game data. From any collection view, pick “Select games” from the three-dot menu to select as many games as you’d like to edit.

There are many ways to browse your collection.

Where Game Tracker really shines, though, is in the way it uses all the information pulled from IGDB and added by users. From the app’s main view, you can browse your collection in a wide variety of ways. You can always view all of your games at once, but you can also browse based on progress, release status, formats, smart lists, platforms, genres, and more. From the app’s primary view, you can remove any of these browsing options you don’t want, reorder them, and collapse sections as well.

Three of the six layout options.

Another nice design touch is that you are not locked into one particular layout when viewing games in your collection. The app offers six different options, and each view in the app can be set to a different layout.

Tracking time played with timers and Game Tracker’s Stats view.

If you like to track the time you spend playing your game collection, you can do that, too. For any game you’ve marked as being currently played, you can start a timer to track your total time played and take notes alongside the timer that will show up in the Notes section for that game. You can mark the percentage of the game you’ve played as well.

The total time played and percentage played will all show up in the app’s Statistics section, which collects high-level data about how much you’ve played, the dates you’ve played, your playing streak, and more. It’s a lot of data, but it’s perfect for anyone who wants to keep track of their progress. Though I haven’t used this feature much yet, I plan to dip my toes in further to see if it helps me keep up with my playtime goals better. When you start a timer, it also starts a Live Activity, so you can track your progress from your Lock Screen or the Dynamic Island as you play.

Tracking playtime from my Home Screen (left) and some of Game Tracker’s many Shortcuts actions (middle and right).

Live Activities aren’t the only modern feature packed into Game Tracker. The app includes a deep set of widgets for tracking a game you’re currently playing, any other game in your collection, and your spaces. There’s a widget that will drop you into Game Tracker’s search feature to find games, too.

The app also offers deep integration with Shortcuts, with actions to find games based on a variety of criteria, add metadata to existing games in your collection, create spaces and tags, and open and retrieve game entries based on the app’s long list of metadata, to name just a handful of the many actions. There are 10 different Control Center widgets, which can also be added to your Lock Screen, to open the app to a specific area or search for a game.

Browsing similar games.

From an individual game’s view, you can select the three-dot menu button and pull up a list of similar games, too, which is great for discovery. However, I’d like to see a dedicated discovery section added to the app that’s populated with pre-built lists like New Releases and other categories for when I’m looking for inspiration on what to play next.

Finally, your collection syncs via iCloud across all platforms, backs up periodically, and can be exported in CSV or PDF formats with filters applied. I particularly like the simple export options, which make your data far more portable than in many other apps.

One thing Game Tracker doesn’t currently handle very well is unreleased games. I’ve added several games coming later this year that I want to play, and the app lists them as released now that it’s 2025. I also have a couple of games in my collection that don’t have a release date yet (I’m looking at you, Silksong), and those are given the release year of 1969, so Game Tracker assumes they came out decades ago. That makes managing upcoming games a little hard at the moment, but it’s also something I expect will get worked out in future updates, so it’s not a big deal.

Game Tracker is a lovely native way to manage your videogame colleciton.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to collect a lot of data about your hobbies and track things in your life, Game Tracker is perfect for you. It’s the kind of app that makes dipping in and out of a large collection of games easy because you’ll know which games are active and where you are in each. I love that you can leave yourself notes for the next time you resume a game, and the tagging feature lets me do things like remember which of my many retro handhelds I’m using for a particular game – a very NPC problem, I know. But even if you aren’t playing dozens of games across a pile of hardware, Game Tracker is one of the best ways to natively manage your videogame collection and playtime across multiple devices.

Game Tracker is available to download on the App Store. The free version allows you to track five games and create one space. With the Pro version, you can track an unlimited number of games and create as many spaces as you’d like for $1.49/month, $10.99/year, or a one-time purchase of $34.99.

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Starting them young. Source: Apple.

The drip, drip, drip of Apple Intelligence continues with iOS and iPadOS 18.3. There are still some big-ticket features announced at WWDC 2024 that are yet to come, but with today’s release, Apple keeps ticking items off its list.

The biggest change is one that is largely hidden from view. Starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence is turned on by default. That should result in greater adoption of the features, and it’s a good indicator that Apple is confident LLM hallucinations won’t come back to bite the company in its reputation. We’ll see about that last bit, but given the size of the iPhone market, Apple’s guardrails have held up reasonably well so far.

That said, Apple is walking back one feature a little. Notification summaries will no longer be applied to news apps, after some high-profile confabulations. Given that news apps typically send headlines, which are inherently summary in nature, I don’t think that’s a great loss, although the change is reportedly temporary. However, one change to notifications is not temporary: starting with iOS and iPadOS 18.3, summarized notifications appear in italics to help distinguish them from other notifications.

Visual Intelligence has been updated in iOS 18.3 as well. Accessed by pressing and holding the iPhone’s Camera Control, Visual Intelligence can now add events to your calendar, identify animals and plants, and get information about places around you, such as a store or restaurant’s hours.

The latest update also adds back a Calculator feature. When you tap the equals sign repeatedly, the Calculator app will apply the last-used operation each time.

Finally, Apple introduced its latest Black Unity Collection earlier today. The iPhone and iPad wallpapers are part of iOS and iPadOS 18.3, and the new Unity Rhythm watch face is included with watchOS 11.3.

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DeepSeek’s newfound popularity has made it impossible to log in as of the publication of this story.

And just like that, ChatGPT has been dethroned from its perch at the top of the App Store’s free app list, replaced by DeepSeek, another AI app. What’s interesting is that DeepSeek, which was developed by a Chinese startup, was reportedly created at a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT and other large language models developed in the US, which has tech stocks in turmoil.

Last week, DeepSeek revealed its latest LLM, which matches or outperforms OpenAI’s o1 model in some tests. That’s nothing new. AI companies have been one-upping each other for months. What’s different is that DeepSeek was reportedly built with a fraction of the hardware and at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s o1 and models like Anthropic’s Claude.

DeepSeek is also open source, potentially undermining the financial viability of U.S. and other for-profit companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing models that require a paid subscription. And, because it’s free, DeepSeek rocketed to the top of the App Store’s free app list, passing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been at or near the top of the list for months.

That has caused a stir in Silicon Valley. As VentureBeat’s Carl Franzen puts it:

The open-source availability of DeepSeek-R1, its high performance, and the fact that it seemingly “came out of nowhere” to challenge the former leader of generative AI, has sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and far beyond, based on my conversations with and readings of various engineers, thinkers and leaders. If not “everyone” is freaking out about it as my hyperbolic headline suggests, it’s certainly the talk of the town in tech and business circles.

Now, as DeepSeek is starting to look like the real deal, the stock market is causing competitors’ stocks to drop, including NVIDIA’s, which, according to the Financial Times, fell 13% at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.

If there’s one thing that has been a truism of the AI industry over the past couple of years, it’s that it moves very fast. Today’s leaders are tomorrow’s laggards. Will DeepSeek dethrone the U.S. AI companies? It’s far too early to know, but it certainly is beginning to look like there’s a new horse in the race.

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Source: Apple.

To honor Black History Month, which starts in February, Apple has released a new Black Unity Collection. Similar to 2024’s collection, the 2025 edition includes a Sport Loop band, iPhone and iPad wallpapers, and an Apple Watch face.

According to Apple’s press release:

Black creatives and allies at Apple collaborated on the design of the new collection. The collection, Unity Rhythm, weaves together the colors of the Pan-African flag: black, green, and red. The Black Unity Sport Loop is woven in a custom pattern of raised and recessed loops that creates a lenticular effect, revealing green on one side of each loop, and red on the other. When the band is worn, the colors appear dynamic, shifting from green to red as a user moves their wrist, and the color yellow appears in the transition, as if by magic.

The wallpapers spell the word “Unity,” which matches the pattern on the Watch face and colors of the Watch band. The Unity Rhythm watch face also includes a rhythmic chime on the hour and half-hour.

Source: Apple.

Apple is also supporting several organizations with grants, including the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans, Battersea Arts Centre in London, Music Forward Foundation in Los Angeles, Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and The National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop is available to order online today and will be in stores this week for $49. The Unity Rhythm watch face and wallpapers will be available in a future software update.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Comfort Zone

Matt has an announcement to make (and a cool app to talk about), Chris brought a bag of goodies, and Niléane brought a fun challenge around using our mice in interesting ways.

Magic Rays of Light

Sigmund and Devon highlight the premiere of Apple Original thriller Prime Target, share their perspectives on the conversation surrounding dark scenes in shows and films, and recap the gripping second season of Silo.

MacStories Unwind

This week, a neighborhood explosion, oats, root vegetables, and coffee, plus a classic sitcom, a unique videogame, and an action-packed movie.

Comfort Zone, Episode 33, ‘Put a Bumper Case on That Thing’ Show Notes

Weekly Topics

• Cursor
• Kobo Clara BW
• CalDigit TS4 Dock
• Tomtoc Shoulder Bag
• James Brand Folsom Pocket Knife

Other Things Discussed

• HelloQuitX
• Filter subscribed languages from individual persons you follow
• Federico is using Superhuman
• Quick Reviews coming to iOS
• Wii cursor
• Wii cursor demo GIF 1
• Wii cursor demo GIF 2
• Logitech MX Master 3S

Follow the Hosts

• Chris on YouTube
• Matt on Birchtree
• Niléane on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Bluesky

Magic Rays of Light, Episode 153, ‘Prime Target, Dark Scenes, and Silo’ Show Notes

Highlight

• Prime Target

Main Topic

• How Apple developed the world’s first end-to-end hearing health experience
• Apple’s secret testing rooms | Tyler Stalman
• Inside Apple’s Top Secret Audio & Video Labs for iPhone 16/16 Pro | Brian Tong

Apple TV News

• Plex Experience Preview
• ‎MoviePass Screening Room
• ‎Live Switcher Mobile

Trailer Talk

• Vietnam: The War That Changed America
• Love You To Death

Apple Original News

• M. Night Shyamalan Faces $81 Million Copyright Trial Over Apple TV+ Show ‘Servant’ | Variety
• The Truth About Emanuel

Releases

• Eva the Owlet
• Apple Music Live: Björk

Extras

• Ben Stiller and Adam Scott on Apple News In Conversation
• Severance — Inside the Grand Central Terminal Pop-Up
• Severance Balloon
• Severance — Season 1 Recap, Courtesy of Lumon
• Silo – Inside Solo’s Vault with Steve Zahn
• OK Go - A Stone Only Rolls Downhill
• PMI Behind the Scenes: The OK Go Project

Recap

• Silo

TV App Highlights

• Sonic the Hedgehog 3
• Gladiator II
• Nosferatu
• The Girl With the Needle
• Saturday Night
• Kobe: The Making of a Legend

Up Next

• Believe Me
• Whiskey on the Rocks
• The Wild Robot

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Subscribe to Magic Rays of Light on YouTube and follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on Mastodon or Bluesky

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Bluesky

MacStories Unwind, ‘Uncooked’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

MacStories Uncooked

• Coffee Overnight Oats
• Easy Overnight Oats

Picks

• Federico’s Picks:
  • Friends
    • Stream
    • Buy
  • 1000xRESIST
• John’s Pick:
  • Alien Romulus on Hulu

MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

AppStories

This week, Federico and John look ahead to WWDC and beyond to consider how Apple Intelligence could be used to change the way we use our iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

On AppStories+, Federico has grievances about the lack of Apple software compatibility on Android.

Ruminate

I brings the snack, Robb tries the BuJo life, and they both discuss web apps.

AppStories, Episode 419, ‘An Apple Intelligence Wish List’ Show Notes

AppStories+ Pre-Show

Visit AppStories.net to learn more about the extended, high bitrate audio version of AppStories that is delivered early each week and subscribe.

AppStories+ Pre-Show

• Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3
• Vivaldi browser
  • Vivaldi for iOS Updated with Colorful Themes and Ability to Force Dark Mode
• Obsidian Web Clipper Bookmarklet

Main Show

An Apple Intelligence Wish List

• A more conversational Siri
  • Apple Readies More Conversational LLM Siri in Bid to Rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT - Bloomberg
• Developer Tools
  • Cursor
• Pixelmator Team to Join Apple

Ruminate, Episode 201, ‘Big Bujo Boy’ Show Notes

• Soup You Can Suck On: Introducing Progresso Soup Drops, the Ultimate Cold and Flu Season Comfort
• Progresso is coming soon
• SHAQ-A-LICIOUS XL Gummies
• Lay’s All Dressed
• Bullet Journal
• The Bullet Journal Method
• Robb Knight has invited you to use Godspeed
• Superhuman
• Granola — The AI Notepad for meetings

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

I’ve been intrigued by the BANG!CASE ever since it was introduced by Bitmo Lab as a Kickstarter campaign about a year ago. The case includes a programmable button that can be used to automate actions using your iPhone’s accessibility features. However, because I don’t normally use a case with my iPhone, I never followed through on buying the BANG!CASE.

Fast forward to early January at CES when I visited the booth for JSAUX, an affiliate of Bitmo Lab. In addition to JSAUX’s portable displays and gaming accessories, the company was showing off the BANG!CASE and GAMEBABY. (More on that on NPC soon.)

It just so happens that since the holidays, I’ve continued my quest to refine how I collect and process information throughout my day. That’s led me to test a dozen or so apps, build new shortcuts, and explore other new setups. As a result, I was primed to give the BANG!CASE a try when Bitmo offered me a review unit at their booth, and I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks.

The case has a couple of minor drawbacks that I’ll get to, but by and large, it’s the most unique and useful case I’ve ever put on an iPhone. After enjoying my iPhone without a case for nearly two years, I’ve found that the utility of the BANG!CASE is significant enough that I’ve decided to keep using it, which I didn’t expect. So today, I thought I’d lay out why I like the BANG!CASE so much and how I’m using it.

At first blush, the BANG!CASE is an ordinary case made of a soft-touch plastic. It feels good to hold, includes a cutout for the Camera Control, and has hard clicky buttons that make pressing the iPhone’s standard buttons easy. However, aside from the case’s programmable button, the part of the BANG!CASE I like the most is the design of the back, which shows off its electronics and adds some character to my iPhone.

Aesthetics aside, what really sets the BANG!CASE apart is an extra button that sits midway between the side button and the Camera Control. Bitmo calls it the BANG!BUTTON, and it can be programmed to perform three different actions with a single-press, double-press, or long-press.

The BANG!BUTTON works via Bluetooth as an accessibility device, a very clever solution that has a couple of important implications worth keeping in mind. The first is that the BANG!CASE’s Bluetooth radio is powered by a rechargeable battery, not your iPhone. That means you’ll need to charge your case periodically. The case comes with a charging cable that has a USB-A plug on one end and a special connector on the other end that uses magnets and two pogo pin connectors. In my experience, the BANG!CASE doesn’t need to be charged often, but relying on a proprietary cable to do so isn’t ideal.

Setting up actions for the BANG!BUTTON.

The other somewhat fiddly implication of the BANG!CASE’s design is that you’ll need to dig fairly deep into iOS’s accessibility settings to set up the BANG!BUTTON’s actions. The first step is to hold the BANG!BUTTON until the light on the case is blinking to pair the case with your iPhone under Settings → Bluetooth. Once it’s paired, you can go to Settings → Accessibility → Touch → AssistiveTouch → Devices, where you’ll see your case listed. There, you can assign up to three actions, including a long list of system and accessibility actions, along with any shortcuts you’ve created in the Shortcuts app.

None of that is as bad as it may sound since it’s a one-time setup unless you decide to change the assigned actions. Also, I’ve been using the BANG!CASE for a couple of weeks and have yet to run out of battery, although I have topped it off a couple of times. That said, running out of juice would be a bummer because you’d lose the use of the BANG!BUTTON; having yet another thing to charge in my life isn’t great, either.

Still, I’ve enjoyed the BANG!CASE a lot – so much so that I’ve been using it daily since I got home from CES. You can get more out of Apple’s Action button using Shortcuts, as Federico has shared with his ActionMode shortcut for Club MacStories members, but it’s always nice to have more automation options, which is exactly what the BANG!CASE provides. Moreover, I find the Action button a little hard to reach on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, whereas the BANG!BUTTON is near the middle of the iPhone’s vertical side, making it easier to press.

For the time being, I’ve settled on the following for my Action and BANG!BUTTON setup:

• Action Button: I use Quick Capture for Obsidian to quickly save thoughts to a scratchpad note in my Obsidian vault.
• BANG!BUTTON Single Press: A single press of the BANG!BUTTON triggers a shortcut that starts a new recording in superwhisper, an app that uses OpenAI’s Whisper LLM to transcribe spoken audio.
• BANG!BUTTON Double Press: When I hit the BANG!BUTTON twice, it opens Control Center, giving me quick access to a variety of media playback, HomeKit, and other controls.
• BANG!BUTTON Long Press: I have several shortcuts for saving URLs from specific apps, but for those contexts I haven’t created an automation for, I copy the link and then long-press the BANG!BUTTON to save it as a task in Godspeed using its API.

So far, I’ve enjoyed this setup a lot. Having both text and voice capture just a single button press away has been perfect for saving tasks, ideas, and snippets of text. Thanks to superwhisper’s share sheet integration, it’s simple to send its transcriptions to a to-do, email, note-taking, or other app too.

The winter season is my time to try new things. I’ve burned through task managers, email services, automation and AI services, new audio and video hardware, Macs, and more. It’s an eclectic mix, but the apps and services that are sticking all have one thing in common: easy access no matter what the context is. The BANG!CASE offers that, giving me access to a larger set of button actions at my fingertips, which I’m loving so far. The iPhone is a great capture device, and it’s even better with the BANG!CASE.

The BANG!CASE is available from Bitmo Lab for $49.99.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

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Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Comfort Zone

In this very special episode, the gang makes their “Pro” and “Pro Max” predictions for tech in 2025 and oh my, does it get wild! Who’s best clued into the tech coming this year? Who is just wish-casting their way to third place? We’ll have to wait to find out.

NPC: Next Portable Console

On this special edition of NPC, Federico, John, and Brendon react to Nintendo’s video announcement about the Switch 2, dig through every detail of the video for clues, and consider how things are likely to play out in the coming months.

MacStories Unwind

This week, John judges Southerners’ handling of snow, Federico is a game streaming convert, and John has a new favorite series about the Troubles in Ireland. Plus, we found a great deal on a favorite sitcom.

Magic Rays of Light

Sigmund and Devon share their favorite announcements from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and recap the second season of Bad Sisters.

Comfort Zone, Episode 32, ‘The Opposite of Snow Leopard’ Show Notes

”## Weekly Topics
- Nothing, just 2025 predictions!

Other Things Discussed

• MacStories left Meta platforms
• Niléane’s reporting from last year about Meta’s moderation failings
• DLC podcast

Follow the Hosts

• Chris on YouTube
• Matt on Birchtree
• Niléane on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Bluesky”

NPC, Episode 18, ‘Nintendo Switch 2: Reactions and First Theories’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Nintendo Switch 2 Announcement Reactions

• Nintendo Switch 2 – First Look Trailer
• Nintendo Switch 2 Experience
• Nintendo Switch 2 has finally been announced, releasing 2025
• GameCube Keyboard Controller
  • GameCube Accessories

Magic Rays of Light, Episode 152, ‘CES 2025 and Bad Sisters’ Show Notes

Give to the Red Cross California Wildfires Response

Highlight

• Severance

Main Topic

• CES Is A Lot: A Gadget Roundup
• Hisense TriChroma LED TV
• LG G5
• Panasonic Z95B
• Apple Television could be the antidote for these disturbing TV trends | 9to5Mac
• VLC AI Subtitling
• Roborock Saros Z70
• Schlage Sense Pro
• Tapo AI Analysis
• Caséta Shades
• Aqara Presence Multi-Sensor FP300
• ThirdReality MK1 Magic Keyboard
• Laifen Wave Electric Toothbrush
• Willo® AutoFlo+ Fully Automated Kids Toothbrush
• MCON
• Belkin Stage PowerGrip
• Nékojita FuFu
• Soliddd Vision

Trailer Talk

• Prime Target
• Eva the Owlet — Season 2
• Mythic Quest Season 4
• Onside: Major League Soccer

Releases

• Word Wright in ‎Game Room

Recap

• Bad Sisters

TV App Highlights

• My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
• Red Rooms

Up Next

• Shot on iPhone 16 Pro | Chinese New Year - I Made a Mixtape for You
• Queer
• Shot on iPhone 16 Pro | Chinese New Year - Making of I Made a Mixtape for You

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Subscribe to Magic Rays of Light on YouTube and follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on Mastodon or Bluesky

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Bluesky

MacStories Unwind, ‘Trying to Reach All the Senses’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Unplugged Segment:
- The South and snow
- This video captures it well

Picks

• Federico’s Pick:
  • GeForce NOW
• John’s Pick:

• Say Nothing

  • Trailer
  • The book
    • Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
• MacStories Unwind Deal of the Week
  • How I Met Your Mother TV series bundle

MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

As with our other shows, there will always be an audio version of MacStories Unwind. The video version is there for those who prefer to get their podcasts from YouTube, and judging from our other shows, that’s a lot of you. But if video isn’t your thing, you won’t notice any difference in the audio version.

I should also mention that we offer an early, ad-free version of the show, which we call MacStories Unwind+, for all Club MacStories members. The plus version of the show comes out on Thursday afternoons U.S. time as one of the many Club perks we offer. It’s a great way to get a jump on your weekend plans by getting our media recommendations a day early and enjoying the other perks of the Club.

You can learn more about Club MacStories and the perks we offer, like weekly and monthly newsletters, podcast perks, special columns, a Discord community, and more, by visiting the Club Plans page. More than ever before, Club MacStories is what sustains MacStories. We’d love it if you’d join.

Join Club MacStories:

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Earlier today Nintendo announced the first official details about the Switch 2 console. There are still a lot of unknowns, but there are interesting details that can be gleaned from Nintendo’s video announcement. Join Federico, Brendon, and me for our reactions to the announcement and our theories about what is only hinted at by Nintendo in this special bonus episode of NPC: Next Portable Console, which is available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Sindre Sorhus has released more apps than most indie developers I’ve covered, and many are among my favorite utilities. I suspect that a big part of Sorhus’ success is the tight focus of most of those apps, which are designed to eliminate specific points of friction for users.

Sorhus’ latest utility is called Default Browser. It’s a Mac menu bar app that, as the name suggests, lets you change your Mac’s default browser on demand. Just head to the menu bar, and with a couple of clicks, you can switch between any browsers you have installed.

Switching default browsers can be simplified even further by setting a hotkey to reveal the app’s menu and then hitting the number associated with the desired browser. Alternatively, holding down Option as you click on a browser opens it without making it the default. Another nice touch is that, among the multiple menu bar icon options in the app’s settings, there’s an option to use the icon of the currently active default browser, a great reminder of which is active.

Default Browser includes several handy settings.

Default Browser works with Shortcuts, too, with actions to get and set your default browser programmatically with actions. That makes it easy to assign browsers to a device like a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for push-button convenience. As Sorhus suggests in the app’s documentation, combining Default Browser with an app like Shortery, which has shortcut triggers for Mac events like connecting to a Wi-Fi network or launching a particular app, opens up a wide array of possibilities as well.

Default Browser also offers a Focus filter, giving you the ability to associate a particular browser with a Focus mode. I don’t have Focus modes for contexts where using a different browser would be useful, but I can imagine it working well for separating web browsing at home from browsing at your workplace or school, for example.

I primarily use Safari, but I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Edge more, and I’m testing Surf, a browser fused with an AI assistant. I expect we’ll see many more browsers like Surf that aim to combine traditional search and web browsing with the best of what AI can do to organize and provide insights into data. That’s why I purchased Default Browser. The app is available directly from Sorhus for $4, and it makes it easy to quickly switch between browsers whether you’re testing them like me, you’re a developer testing code in different browsers, or you simply prefer certain browsers for certain tasks.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

When launched, Flashes could tap into growing consumer demand for alternatives to Big Tech’s social media monopoly. This trend has led to the adoption of open source, decentralized apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, among others, including the recently launched Pixelfed mobile apps, built on Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol. It’s also, in part, what’s fueling TikTok users’ shift to the Chinese app RedNote ahead of the U.S. TikTok ban — that is, U.S. users are signaling that they would rather use a foreign adversary’s app than return to Meta at this point.

The idea behind Flashes is fundamentally different from Instagram. Whereas Instagram is a standalone product that allows users to cross-post to Threads automatically, Flashes is being built on top of the same social graph as Bluesky. That means Flashes will act as a Bluesky filter focused on photo and video content instead of your entire Bluesky feed. It’s an interesting approach that sidesteps the messiness of cross-posting entirely and allows Vogelsang to focus Flashes’ feature set on photos and video.

I’m looking forward to giving Flashes a try. Instagram is more deeply embedded in many people’s lives than Threads, which makes it harder to replace. However, I’m glad to see Vogelsang and Pixelfed trying. There are enough people like us who are fed up with Meta’s policies that these sorts of alternatives may have a shot at gaining traction with users.

→ Source: techcrunch.com

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

AppStories

This week on AppStories, Federico and John predict what we’ll see from Apple in 2025. From agentic AI to App Intents and Siri, they explore what will shape the year ahead and the implications to users and developers.

This episode is sponsored by:

• Memberful – Easy-to-Use Reliable Membership Software

NPC: Next Portable Console

In the first NPC episode of 2025, Brendon and John recap their CES experience with Federico, highlighting AMD’s new Z2 chips, the SteamOS-powered Legion Go S, and more. Together, they explore the technologies and trends poised to define the next generation of portable consoles.

This episode is sponsored by:

Pika – Sign up today to start telling your story and use code NPC20 for 20% off your first year of Pika Pro

AppStories, Episode 418 ‘Apple Prophecies and Predictions for 2025’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Apple 2025 Predictions and Prophecies

Federico:

• There will be more agentic AI than ever
• Even more Chromium browsers with AI features
• Apple will acquire a smaller AI company like Mistral
• More smart glasses will be released as will custom community firmware for the Meta Ray-Bans
• Vision Pro apps will come to Android XR
• Game streaming apps will come to the iPhone
• Someone will try to get a Sony PS4 emulator approved by Apple app reviewers

John:

• A shakeout of AI apps
• App Intents adoption will be slow
• The Apple Watch will gain new sensors and Apple and Massimo will settle their blood oxygen dispute
• AI will continue to slow development of other OS features
• We’ll see more innovative game controllers for the iPhone

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, a video experiment, I have iPad Pro follow-up, and Federico has technical follow-up and a question for listeners about streaming videogames over Wi-Fi.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

NPC: Next Portable Console, Episode 17, ‘Unpacking CES 2025’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

Unpacking CES 2025

• More from Brendon and John on the MacStories YouTube channel
• AMD Announces the Z2 Chip
  • The new AMD Z2 chips are nice, ok, and weird
• Other Devices
  • Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) brings AMD Strix Halo to tablets
  • Up close with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 FE, an incredibly compact flagship video card
• Thunderbolt 5 and ASUS’s new XG Mobile eGPU
  • ASUS just announced the world’s first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU — the 2025 XG Mobile
• SteamOS News
  • GeForce NOW CES 2025 Steam Deck and Mixed-Reality Devices
  • Lenovo Legion Go S pre-orders are happening now at Best Buy Polygon
  • SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck
• Lenovo Legion Tab
  • Lenovo’s new Legion Tab is an 8.8 inch Android gaming tablet for $500 and up
  • GameSir X2S Controller
• Nitro Blaze 11
  • Hands-on with the Nitro Blaze 11, Acer’s massive new PC gaming handheld

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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

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Introducing 1Blocker 6, the most powerful version yet of the trusted Safari content blocker. Now available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, this update marks almost a decade of innovation and dedication to creating a better web experience.

For ten years, 1Blocker has been your companion in eliminating distracting ads, intrusive trackers, and annoying pop-ups. With version 6, the indie-developed app has released a compelling new design and reengineered architecture, paving the way for even more powerful innovations.

The app’s native design delivers a cleaner look, faster performance, and easier navigation. Enhanced blocking rules improve accuracy, while new granular filters let you customize your web experience like never before.

Download 1Blocker 6 for free to enjoy one free filter, with no restrictions on features or customization. Choose the filter that matters most to you and experience advanced functionality without limits.

Upgrade to 1Blocker Premium to unlock unlimited filters and enjoy the convenience of automatic, scheduled filter updates in the background. Plus, MacStories readers can get one month of 1Blocker’s Premium features for free, which is sharable with up to five family members. Don’t delay, though, this offer is only available until January 20, 2025. Use the code MACSTORIES or this link to take advantage of this great limited-time offer today.

Don’t wait, download 1Blocker 6 and discover the benefits of a cleaner, faster and more private web experience today.

Our thanks to 1Blocker for sponsoring MacStoris this week.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

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Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Comfort Zone

Niléane is out, so Chris and Matt are left to fend on their own. Chris steals like an artist and Matt defends a new purchase.

Ruminate

Some snack reviews from the festive period, Robb was on another podcast, and John is on his way to CES.

Sponsored by Pika: Use code RUMINATE20 for 20% off your first year of Pika Pro

Magic Rays of Light

Sigmund and Devon share one Apple TV wish each for 2025 and recap season two of Shrinking. Devon also reviews Sigmund’s Christmas gift to him, A Real Pain.

MacStories Unwind

This week, John fills in Federico about pod people, creepy robots, light masks, AI BBQ, and other weird and wonderful sights from CES 2025.

Comfort Zone, Episode 31: OLED Dreams and Studio Display Realities Show Notes

Weekly Topics

• LG 32”” UltraGear 4K OLED monitor

Other Things Discussed

• Cortex Episode 162
• HabitKit
• Foodnoms
• Matt’s video on the LG monitor (retina discussion starts at the 3 minute mark)
• What is retina?
• Retina calculator
• Pixels per degree calculator
• Matt’s dock setup 1
• Matt’s dock setup 2
• Matt’s dock setup 3
• Matt’s dock setup 4
• MacWhisper

Follow the Hosts

• Chris on YouTube
• Matt on Birchtree
• Niléane on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Mastodon
• Comfort Zone on Bluesky

Ruminate, Episode 200 - Gingerbread Is Having a Resurgence Show Notes

Clear Ketchup

Oreo Gingerbread Cookie Sandwich Biscuits 154g | Sainsbury’s

The Facts About Your Favorite Foods and Beverages (U.S.) | Lay’s Potato Chips - Nashville Hot Chicken Flavored - 7.75 oz

Conduit #91: Robb Knight made this for himself, and maybe you too. - Relay FM

How long since Robb watched Mean Girls?

EmojiStorm

CES 2025: What to Expect from NPC and MacStories - MacStories

Atari’s striking new Gamestation Go handheld features some really unusual hardware features | Eurogamer.net

MCON: The Switchblade of Mobile Controllers | By Ohsnap by Dale Backus — Kickstarter

Bionic #73: Live from CES, “How is your CES?” - Relay FM

Shrinking and Apple TV in 2025 Show Notes

Here To Help | Apple

Pre-Roll

• PrismXR Carina D1 Charging Dock for Apple Vision Pro
• Belkin Travel Bag for Apple Vision Pro 
• Apple Vision Pro All-Metal Stand

Apple TV News

• HDMI 2.2 announced with 96Gbps bandwidth for 4K480, 8K, 16K, more | FlatPanelsHD
• Theater 2.0
• Apple Fitness+ Announces Strava Integration, New Workout Programs, and More
• Nikki Glaser Opening Monologue | 82nd Annual Golden Globes

Releases

• Adventure: Ice Dive
• ‎Skate City: New York
• ‎Gears & Goo
• ‎Three Kingdoms HEROES
• Final Fantasy+
• ‎Trials of Mana+
• ‎Rodeo Stampede+
• ‎It’s Literally Just Mowing+

Extras

• Critics Choice Awards
• Malala Yousafzai on Apple News In Conversation
• Bad Sisters — Extending Worlds: The Forty Foot and Ireland Coast
• Slow Horses — Jackson Lamb Arrives Unannounced | Scene Read
• Blitz — Reconstructing the Blitz | Production Design
• Fly Me to the Moon – Lance Vespertine Explains It All
• Fly Me to the Moon — Jim Rash Reacts to Out of this World Pick Up Lines
• Another Take with Channing Tatum & Scarlett Johansson | Colin Jost Cameo Scene
• Hugh Howey and Graham Yost Reddit AMA
• The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott
• Wicked Director Jon M. Chu Makes Movie Magic with Apple Vision Pro

Recap

• Shrinking

TV App Highlights

• Flow
• The Traitors

Up Next

• Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
• A Real Pain
• Squid Game
• What If…?

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Subscribe to Magic Rays of Light on YouTube and follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on X, Mastodon, or Bluesky

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Bluesky

MacStories Unwind, ‘Weird CES’ Show Notes

Links and Show Notes

• Cute and Creepy Robots
  • Mirumi
  • Ropet
  • Mirokaï
• Pod People
  • Infrared saunas
  • Full-body massage chairs
• Light Mask and Facial Recognition Mask
  • Light Mask
  • Facial Recognition Mask
• AI BBQ
• Holograms
  • Example

MacStories Unwind+

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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, Ruminate, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console 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.

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

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Just over two years ago, MacStories left Twitter behind. We left when Elon Musk began dismantling the company’s trust and safety infrastructure, allowing hateful speech and harassment on the platform. Meta is now doing the same thing with Threads and Instagram, so we’re leaving them behind, too.

We were initially optimistic about Threads because of its support for federation and interoperability with Mastodon. The relatively young service has never done as much as it should to protect its users from hateful content, as Niléane documented last year. Yet as bad as it already was for LGBT people and others, things took a much darker turn this week when Meta announced a series of new policies that significantly scaled back moderation on Threads and Instagram.

Meta has abandoned its relationships with third-party fact-checking organizations in favor of a “community notes” approach similar to X. The company has also eliminated filters it had in place to protect users from a wide variety of harmful speech. As Casey Newton reported yesterday, the internal Meta documents that implement these new policies now allow for posts like:

“There’s no such thing as trans children.”
“God created two genders, ‘transgender’ people are not a real thing.”
“This whole nonbinary thing is made up. Those people don’t exist, they’re just in need of some therapy.”
“A trans woman isn’t a woman, it’s a pathetic confused man.”
“A trans person isn’t a he or she, it’s an it.”

Newton also reports:

So in addition to being able to call gay people insane on Facebook, you can now also say that gay people don’t belong in the military, or that trans people shouldn’t be able to use the bathroom of their choice, or blame COVID-19 on Chinese people, according to this round-up in Wired. (You can also now call women household objects and property, per CNN.) The company also (why not?!) removed a sentence from its policy explaining that hateful speech can “promote offline violence.”

For more on Meta’s new policies and their impact, we encourage MacStories readers to read both of Casey Newton’s excellent Platformer articles linked above.

This is ugly, dehumanizing stuff that has no place on the Internet or anywhere else and runs counter to everything we believe in at MacStories. We believe that platforms should protect all of their users from harm and harassment. Technology should bring people together not divide and dehumanize them, which is why we’re finished with Threads and Instagram.

I’d like to think other media companies will join us in taking similar action, but we understand why many won’t. Meta’s social networks drive a significant amount of traffic to websites like MacStories, and walking away from that isn’t easy in an economy where media companies are under a lot of financial pressure. We’ll be okay thanks to the support of our readers who subscribe to Club MacStories, but many others don’t have that, which is why it’s important for individuals to do what they can to help too.

We know that in times like these, it’s often hard to know what to do because we’ve felt that way ourselves. One way you can help is to make a donation to groups that are working to support the rights of LGBT people who increasingly find themselves threatened by the actions of companies, governments, and others. With Niléane’s assistance, we have identified organizations you can donate in the U.S., E.U., and U.K. that are working to protect the rights of LGBT people:

• U.S.: The Trevor Project
• E.U.: TGEU
• U.K.: Mermaids

Thanks to all of you who donate. The world of tech is not immune from the troubles facing our world, but with your help, we can make MacStories a bright spot on the tech landscape where people feel safe and welcome.

– Federico and John

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Source: Razer.

Yesterday, Brendon and I wandered into a ballroom where Razer was showing off its latest hardware. We weren’t expecting much beyond super-powerful gaming laptops (✅) and lots of RGB lights (also ✅). However, just as our guided booth tour was ending, we asked about an iPhone, iPad mini, and Windows PC setup on a nearby table, which it turns out was a demo of Razer’s new PC Remote Play app.

There are a lot of ways to stream games from a Windows PC to iPhones, iPads, and other devices, but Razer PC Remote Play looks like it could be one of the easiest and nicest of the bunch. What was impressive about the demo was that Razer’s app automatically adjusts to the device to which you’re streaming, matching its screen’s refresh rate and aspect ratio. That ensures you’ll get the most out of the device to which you’re streaming, and you won’t see letterboxing or pillarboxing, which is caused by a mismatch between the aspect ratio of your PC remote device. According to a Reddit user who says they are a Product Developer for Razer PC Remote Play, the app is built on the open source Moonlight/Sunshine projects, with the goal of simplifying setup and configuration.

Razer PC Remote Play is currently in beta and requires that you run Razer Cortex on your Windows PC and install the Razer PC Remote Play and Razer Nexus apps on your iPhone, iPad, or other devices. I haven’t had a chance to set this up yet because I don’t have a PC with me at CES, but judging from the iOS app I set up it looks as simple as opening Razer PC Remote Play, which detects if there is a PC on your network running Razer Cortex. Once paired, Razer says your PC games will show up in its Nexus game launcher app alongside your other games.

I’m excited to try Razer PC Remote Play myself. The Moonlight/Sunshine project is a great way to stream PC games, but it can take some fiddling to work well with any given setup. What Razer is promising is a simplified version that just works out of the box. We’ll see how well it works in practice, but the demo I saw was promising.

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CES kicked off Sunday evening with Unveiled, a press-only showcase of a subset of gadgets that I found a little underwhelming. It’s not that there hasn’t been interesting tech announced at the event, but it’s buried under strata of hype, over-the-top marketing, and a sea of buzzwords.

Most of all, though, every gadget is burdened with a fixation on artificial intelligence. I’ve seen a few interesting AI use cases so far, but most of what is described as AI simply isn’t. It’s just that in the speed-dating atmosphere between the press and gadget company PR, companies feel like they need an AI story in order to get attention. It also doesn’t help that gadgets are swallowed up by the cavernous, warehouse-sized spaces where they’re being shown off. The scale of CES (and Las Vegas for that matter) is huge and makes everything else seem small.

Still, there’s something undeniably fun about CES. Breathless announcements about answering your phone from your washer/dryer deserve the eye rolls they get, but the challenge is in the hunt to find the gems of CES. There is a signal underlying all the marketing noise, which is what Brendon and I will be on the lookout for today as the show floor opens for the first time. With so many products pre-announced, though, I thought I’d compile a roundup of what has caught my eye that I will be on the lookout for on the CES show floor.

LG UltraFine 6K Monitor

Source: CES.

The bezel-less design of this upcoming 32” 6K IPS display from LG is as striking as its specs. The display is also one of the first to be announced to support Thunderbolt 5, which could make it a great fit for the M4 Mac mini and MacBook Pro. Not all of the specs have been announced yet, but I’m hoping to learn more on the show floor.

Swippitt

Source: Swippitt.

On the surface, the Swippitt is intriguing. Using a combination of a dedicated iPhone battery case and a device that looks vaguely like a toaster, the Swippitt swaps the case’s spent battery packs with fresh ones when you insert your iPhone. The company says that it has a solution for changes in the design of future iPhones, which I hope is the case because otherwise, the Swippitt is an expensive short-term charging convenience.

A Robot Vacuum That Picks Up After You

Source: Roborock.

The Roborock Saros Z70 has a retractable robotic arm emerging from its center that Roborock says can pick up dirty laundry and other obstacles as it vacuums – as long as they weigh less than 300 grams. This strikes me as a good idea that will be hard to pull off in practice, so I’m looking forward to seeing a demo.

OWC’s Fiber Optic USB-4 Cable

If you’ve heard Federico talk about the King Kable he uses to connect an eGPU to his Legion Go, this announcement from OWC will sound familiar. In fact, OWC’s cable, which comes in lengths up to 4.5 meters, looks a lot like a rebranded King Kable with its identical design and connectors. Whether or not that’s correct, it’s great to see longer USB-4 cables becoming easier to find.

A Better-Looking Smart Lock

Source: Schlage

I’ve held off on buying a smart home lock for a couple of years now because I didn’t like the look of any of the models that reportedly work well; I also wanted a lock that would work hands-free. The Schlage Sense Pro that was announced at CES looks like it might be what I’ve been looking for. It’s a simple rounded rectangle with no buttons or other adornments, which I like a lot. It also supports Matter-over-Thread and ultra wideband for hands-free use.

Anker Solar-Powered Beach Umbrella

Source: Anker

According to TechCrunch, Anker is releasing a solar-powered beach umbrella later this year that can deliver 80W of power. There aren’t a lot of other details about the device yet, but I could see this finding its way onto Federico’s summertime shopping list.

Weird CES

As always, I’m on the lookout for weird and wonderful gadgets too. Here are a couple of early contenders I’ll be looking to find on the CES floor:

Acer Nitro Blaze 11

Source: Acer.

Countless people have sent me this image of Acer’s new 11” Windows “portable” game console. It’s not the first 11” gaming tablet I’ve seen, but something about Acer’s promotional photo makes it seem especially huge. I desperately hope to get a picture of Brendon with this thing.

A Fluffy Robot Companion

Source: Yukai Engineering.

On the silly side is a fluffy little robot creature that hangs out on a purse interacting with people around it. Long-time readers of my CES roundups will know that I love “Weird CES,” and Yukai Engineering, the creator of the Mirumi creature, never disappoints, having debuted a headless cat pillow and a stuffed animal that nibbles on your fingers in previous years.

You can follow along with our CES coverage here on MacStories.net under the tag ‘CES 2025’ and this dedicated RSS feed. You’ll also find two playlists on our YouTube channel: ‘NPC @ CES’ for handheld gaming news and ‘MacStories @ CES’ for everything else.

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There aren’t that many details in NVIDIA’s announcement, but the gist of it is that Vision Pro users will be able to stream games by visiting the GeForce NOW website when a new version launches “later this month”.

Get immersed in a new dimension of big-screen gaming as GeForce NOW brings AAA titles to life on Apple Vision Pro spatial computers, Meta Quest 3 and 3S and Pico virtual- and mixed-reality headsets. Later this month, these supported devices will give members access to an extensive library of games to stream through GeForce NOW by opening the browser to play.geforcenow.com when the newest app update, version 2.0.70, starts rolling out later this month.

This is all NVIDIA said in their announcement, which isn’t much, but we can speculate on a few things based on the existing limitations of visionOS.

For starters, the current version of Safari on visionOS does not support adding PWAs to the visionOS Home Screen. Given that the existing version of GeForce NOW requires saving a web app to begin the setup process, this either means that a) NVIDIA knows a visionOS software update in January will add the ability to save web apps or b) GeForce NOW won’t require that additional step to start playing on visionOS. The latter option seems more likely.

Second, as we covered last year, there is a workaround to play with GeForce NOW on visionOS, and that is the Nexus⁺ app. I’ve been using the Nexus⁺ app on my Vision Pro to stream Indiana Jones and other games from the cloud, and while the resolution is good enough¹, what bothers me is the lack of HDR and Spatial Audio support (which should work with the Web Audio API in Safari for visionOS 2.0) in GeForce NOW when accessed from Nexus⁺’s built-in web browser.

The Nexus⁺ app supports ultra-wide aspect ratios, but HDR is nowhere to be found.

With all this in mind, I’m going to guess that, at a minimum, NVIDIA will support a PWA-free installation method in Safari for visionOS. I’m less optimistic about HDR and Spatial Audio, but as I gravitate more and more toward cloud streaming rather than local PC streaming², I’d be happily proven wrong here.

My only question is: with the App Store’s “new” rules, why isn’t NVIDIA making a native GeForce NOW app for Apple platforms?

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Source: Apple.

Apple has announced a slew of additions to its fitness subscription service, Apple Fitness+, including new workout programs for strength, yoga “peak poses”, breath meditation, and even training for pickleball. New editions of the Artist Spotlight series are also on the way featuring Janet Jackson, Coldplay, Bruno Mars, and Kendrick Lamar. Upcoming guests for the Time to Walk series have been revealed, too, and they include Steve Aoki, Lana Condor, Tiffany Haddish, Rita Ora, Daddy Yankee, and Maddie Ziegler. To kick off the latest season of Time to Walk, January 13 sees a new episode with Severance star Adam Scott, four days ahead of the show’s second season premiere on Apple TV+.

Adam Scott is coming to Time to Walk. Source: Apple.

However, along with a guest appearance by dancer Alex Wong in a special dance workout, the service’s most notable new feature is a collaboration with popular fitness tracking app Strava. Users can now share Fitness+ workouts directly to Strava, and the app will display richer details for workouts, including episode images, trainers’ names, and metrics. Additionally, Strava subscribers can take advantage of three free months of Fitness+ membership, and celebrated athletes from the Strava community will make guest appearances on the service later in the year.

Fitness+ workouts now feature rich details when shared to Strava. Source: Apple.

This collaboration is notable for several reasons. Apple rarely offers free trials of Fitness+ without the purchase of an Apple device. (You will still need an iPhone, iPad, or an Apple TV to use the service.) Fitness+ has also never featured trainers from a different training community before. Lastly, Strava made a decision in November of last year to restrict how third-party apps could access its data, angering a fair few users. It seemed to indicate that Strava was becoming a more closed platform, but this partnership lends evidence to the contrary.

It will be interesting to see if Strava announces more collaborations with services like Fitness+ and if Apple reaches out to other apps and services in this way. Fitness+ is a fantastic service that I use several times a week, but it can sometimes feel a little one-size-fits-all and closed off. A collaboration like this is a good sign that it might be about to evolve.

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Source: espresso Displays.

Late yesterday, espresso Displays announced the addition of a new portable display to its Pro lineup. The espresso 15 Pro joins the company’s 17 Pro, which was released last year. Highlights of the 15.6” display include a brighter 60Hz 4K screen and a new stand, along with features from the 17 Pro like touch sensitivity.

Source: espresso Displays.

The display, which is enclosed in an aluminum body with two USB-C ports, is capable of 550 nits of brightness over a single USB-C cable, a 100-nit improvement over the larger 17 Pro display. The new Stand+ will enable the screen to be elevated much higher, too, thanks to a clever design that can be folded up into a travel-friendly configuration.

The espresso 15 Pro will be shown off at CES starting tomorrow, where I’m hoping to spend some hands-on time with it. Although I haven’t seen the 15 Pro yet, I have tried the 17 Pro and espresso Display’s standard 1080p 15” portable display, which came with the same Stand+ as the 15 Pro model. Both displays are well-built, lightweight, and easy to use, making them great complements to a Mac, iPad, or even an iPhone for anyone who wants a second screen. I’m particularly interested in the 15 Pro, though, because despite its great resolution, the 17 Pro is a little bigger than I typically want to carry with me, and I expect the added brightness of the 15 Pro will be a nice addition, too.

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