Kalley Huang, writing for The New York Times about apps written with the help of AI agents that are flooding the App Store:

But as with many things A.I., just because something is easy to build doesn’t mean people will use it. It is not clear if vibecoding is breathing new life into the App Store or just cluttering it.

Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about 560,000.

Now, Sensor Tower metrics should always be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t have direct access to Apple’s sales data, so they’re extrapolating from incomplete data that they collect themselves. That said, I think it’s fair to take their numbers as broadly representative of sales trends over time, and the story they tell, as reported by Huang, is interesting.

Based on Sensor Tower’s numbers, the total number of App Store releases peaked in 2016 at 890,000, hit a low of 420,000 in 2022, and this year, is on pace to pass 2016’s peak by a healthy margin. But app releases don’t equate to downloads, let alone sales. According to Huang’s reporting, downloads increased 3% in 2025 and 2% in the first half of 2026, far lower than the growth of new releases.

All of this tracks closely with what we’ve seen at MacStories. One subtle trend I’d add is that whereas for years most developers contacted us before they released an app, a lot of new developers are doing so after their apps are on the App Store. I suspect what I’m seeing is a new generation of developers learning the hard discoverability lessons of the App Store for the first time because when I check out these apps, they rarely have any App Store reviews.

The upshot of all these statistics and trends is App Store chaos of a magnitude that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s a little like the App Store gold rush of the early days, but without the gold. Discoverability has gone from bad to worse, and the supply of apps is off the charts compared to the demand. With download numbers barely creeping up, the flood of new apps is making selling on the App Store harder for everyone.

Yet, it’s exactly this sort of chaotic disruption that leads to exciting new apps. And, it’s tools like Codex and Claude Code that empower and democratize app development, allowing people who would never have built an app to see their ideas become a reality. Those are things I love to see.

There’s no doubt that the App Store is out of whack thanks to agent-assisted coding, but like any market it will find its equilibrium again. In the meantime, it’s never been a better time to be a fan of apps because while a lot of those record numbers are comprised of mediocre apps, there are hidden gems, and we’re on the hunt for them.

Claude Code’s Mac desktop app has added Apple simulator support, and although it’s billed as “iOS Simulator Support,” it actually works with any iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, or watchOS simulator you have installed.

The process of setting up a simulator is simple. A new button with an iPhone icon appears when you open an existing project. Click it and a new iPhone simulator pane opens to the right by default. However, clicking on the name of the simulator reveals a list of every available simulator. You can also run multiple simulators at once, but that immediately made my aging M1 Max Mac Studio start to chug a little.

Once you have the simulators that you want open, simply ask Claude Code to run and test your app, and it gets to work, building the app, installing it in the simulator, opening it, and poking around. I loaded up a simple word game I’ve been playing with, and after a few minutes, Claude Code found a UI bug while controlling the simulator. I asked it to fix the issue, which it did, then tested and committed. My testing has been limited, but so far it looks like a simple, effective loop.

It’s also worth noting that Claude Code is running the simulator directly inside the Claude app. This is not computer use, meaning windows aren’t going to be opening and getting in your way as you work on something else. All in all, the addition of the simulator, like the inclusion of an in-app sandboxed browser a couple of weeks ago, is a great update to Claude Code.

I test a lot of apps, so I have strong opinions about TestFlight. However I usually keep those opinions to myself because despite the fact that it’s critical to my work, TestFlight wasn’t built for app reviewers. Most people haven’t accumulated hundreds of active and inactive betas in the app like I have, and for them, TestFlight is probably fine. However, for me, TestFlight is a constant source of frustration.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I read a post by Zac Hall at 9to5Mac that a search field had been added to TestFlight. “Finally,” I thought to myself. I stopped what I was doing and updated the app immediately. After all, search was my number one request for TestFlight back in 2024.

That 2024 wishlist was published in the wake of a bad stretch the app had beginning in 2023. At the time, TestFlight was plagued by laggy performance if you were on a lot of betas. To Apple’s credit, they fixed the performance issues, though the issues have begun to creep back into recent releases. Still, the past couple of years as a TestFlight user have been fine despite all the ways the app could be made better for users.

When the TestFlight update finished installing, I eagerly opened it on my Mac and then my iPhone. Sure enough, there was the search field at long last. Lists practically beg for a search field, and finally someone at Apple added one, and to whoever built that feature, a huge thanks from me and the MacStories team.

Unfortunately, this story comes with one very big “but.” Previously, TestFlight betas were listed in reverse chronological order, which I liked. The newer beta releases were at the top of the list and the older ones that were on the verge of being replaced by an App Store release were at the bottom, along with expired betas, a list that I never really understood the purpose of.

Well, those expired betas are now scattered among the active TestFlight betas in an alphabetical list and it seems that the expired beta list has been expanded to include every single beta I’ve ever been a part of. I did a rough count and for me that’s nearly 800 app listings. As you can imagine, the active betas in that list are few and far between. Search helps, but scrolling is no longer an option.

I get that this is a very “me and a few of my friends” problem, and search does help, but it’s not enough. The active to inactive beta ratio is so bad that few iPhone screens include more than two or three active betas. So here’s my proposal:

• Add a toggle in TestFlight’s settings that hides inactive betas.

That’s it, that would make all the difference in the world. I’d love to have the reverse chronological ordering back, a performance tune-up, and the other things I wished for back in 2024, but I’ll live with hiding all the noise from my beta list.

The public beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate is out today, and I’m sure many of you are wondering whether to take the plunge and give it a try in advance of its official fall release. That’s the question this preview is here to help answer. It’s not my final take on Golden Gate by any means; after all, I’ve only been using it for about a month, and there will be several more turns in the beta cycle between now and the public release. However, I’ve used Golden Gate long enough to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to install the public beta now.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to account for everyone’s unique Mac setups when considering Golden Gate’s stability, but it’s worth reiterating what I’ve said in past previews: modern Apple betas have been consistently stable. That’s to say, the risks of using the public beta are modest. It’s been years since I’ve had a critical app fail or lost data. I never go into beta season without a backup plan, though. If something goes terribly wrong, I have backups, backups of those backups, and alternate Macs I can switch to in the event of a disaster. I don’t expect to have to go to Plan B, but if you’re going to jump on the Beta Bus, you should have a Plan B, too.

Okay, you’ve been warned. Let’s get to the fun part.

Every year’s macOS update is a little different, but Golden Gate is more different than most. Instead of focusing on tentpole features and apps (with the exception of a new Siri app), macOS 27’s updates fall into three broad categories:

• refinements to Apple’s Liquid Glass design language,
• hundreds of system-level changes intended to improve your Mac’s performance, and
• Apple Intelligence, which includes the new Siri app as well as many other AI additions to existing system apps.

With so many past macOS updates focusing on system apps, it’s refreshing to see Apple take a more holistic system-level approach, which harkens back to how most people remember OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, during WWDC briefings, Apple representatives likened the Golden Gate update to Snow Leopard before anyone in the room even asked about it.

Snow Leopard is remembered as a release that focused on performance over features. The reality is that the update also introduced its fair share of new features, but many were less splashy from a user-facing standpoint. They were under-the-hood updates that made the Mac work better without users having to think about it much. In that sense, Golden Gate has a lot in common with Snow Leopard. Other than the brand new Siri app, you probably won’t notice that much is different when you first launch the new version. But over time, the changes will reveal themselves, adding up to a whole that – with few exceptions – is greater than the parts.

So let’s take a closer look at how Liquid Glass has evolved, the most significant system changes, and what it’s like to use Siri and other Apple Intelligence updates in Golden Gate’s public beta.

Design

Last year’s introduction of the Liquid Glass design language was divisive. I rather like it, and others don’t, but I expect the overwhelming majority of Mac users don’t have a strong opinion either way.

That said, I came away from macOS Tahoe feeling like its Liquid Glass implementation was unfinished, or at least unevenly applied, because it varied from app to app and even within apps. Examples included different transparency treatments within apps like Finder:

I use [Finder] with the tab bar visible most of the time, whether I’m using tabs or not. I also almost always use a list view in Finder. What I discovered when I turned off the tab bar and switched to an icon grid view was that the Finder toolbar and buttons became far more transparent. Dark file icons are more noticeable beneath the toolbar, and text becomes more of a distraction.

That sort of inconsistency has been fixed.

Another big inconsistency was how toolbars were handled from app to app. In some apps, like Photos, they were very transparent, making buttons difficult to see against picture thumbnails in some cases. Other apps, like Reminders, used a more frosted treatment that prevented text and icons under toolbars from competing with the toolbar’s icons and text as a user scrolled their task lists. That, too, has changed for the better.

But perhaps the single biggest change to Liquid Glass is a new slider in the Appearance section of System Settings that lets you dial in the intensity of the transparency. By default, the slider is set directly in the middle. Moving the slider to the left makes buttons and other elements more transparent, while moving it to the right reduces transparency in favor of a frosted look.

The slider is a welcome change that lets users decide how transparent UI elements are. It’s the right choice when some people love Liquid Glass, some can’t stand it, and most don’t care. The default setting works well for those who don’t care and will never think to look for the transparency slider, while those who do care can dial in the look they prefer. Me? I’m a full transparency guy, at least for now, so you’ll see a lot of that here and in my fall review.

Window sidebars have been changed in a big way, too. In Tahoe, they resembled a glass sheet sitting on top of the window. I liked the look, but if you had overlapping windows, it was sometimes possible to mistake a sidebar for a separate window, which could be confusing. With Golden Gate, sidebars extend to the edges of their windows so they look as though they’re built into the windows instead of sitting on top of them.

Apple also reversed course on another controversial Tahoe change: icons next to menu items. I use keyboard shortcuts so much that I barely noticed the icons next to every single menu item. Now, however, they’re once again used sparingly.

Mac app icons have been tweaked as well. Tahoe saw icons confined to the borders of a squircle, which is still a hotly debated topic. That hasn’t changed in Golden Gate. Instead, the glass effect that subtly distorted icon images has been dialed back, resulting in crisper looking icons.

There are other design changes, like deeper shadows to help distinguish windows from each other and more uniformly shaped window corners, that I’ll cover in the fall, but my early impressions of the changes have been positive. Everything feels more considered and consistent. Rather than feeling unfinished as it did in Tahoe, Liquid Glass now feels properly embedded into the fabric of the Mac.

System Changes

Nowhere is the Snow Leopard of it all more apparent than in the hundreds of little changes made to improve the day-to-day use of your Mac. I’m not going to catalog them all here, but I’ve used Golden Gate on two different Macs at this point, and based on my experiences so far, the changes are meaningful.

I installed Golden Gate on a MacBook Pro that I have on loan from Apple as soon as I got back from WWDC in early June. That laptop has an M4 Max chip and 128GB of memory, so it was already fast. But even on that Mac, I noticed differences when I installed Golden Gate.

Most apps launch faster, with fewer Dock bounces, which I appreciate, but the most noticeable performance improvement has been to Spotlight. I liked what Apple did with Spotlight in Tahoe a lot, but its responsiveness has been inconsistent. As a result, I switched back to Raycast not long before WWDC for launching apps, running shortcuts, and initiating other actions.

When I installed Golden Gate, I switched back to using Spotlight and was blown away by the difference. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the speed-up sticks long-term, but the early results have been impressive. Finding apps, files, folders, shortcuts, and clipboard items is lightning fast. Searching in Photos and Mail, which each got their own search tune-up, is very fast, too.

Plus, even though the MacBook Pro I’ve been using to test Golden Gate is already fast, it’s worth noting that I have roughly 3TB of data stored on it. That includes tens of thousands of photos, email messages, and texts, so even given the laptop’s speed, Spotlight’s performance is still impressive.

What’s been most impressive, though, is the difference Golden Gate has made to my M1 Max Mac Studio. It has a similar number of files and half the memory. Just before updating it to Golden Gate about a week ago, I was feeling the pain of Spotlight slowdowns. I was running macOS 26.5, and searching for an app in Spotlight often pulled up the iPhone version before the one installed on my Mac. Perhaps that’s related to the fact that my iPhone is running the iOS 27 beta, but even Mac-only apps would sometimes take five or six seconds to show up at the top of the list in Spotlight when I searched for them.

That’s completely changed with Golden Gate. I’ve used macOS 27 on my Mac Studio for a shorter period than the MacBook Pro, but the difference in speed has been a real eye-opener, making Spotlight searches nearly instant. It’s also worth noting that the initial indexing of my 3TB of data only took about a half of a work day to complete on the Mac Studio, which was faster than I expected, having watched my iPhone 17 Pro Max take days to index.

Also worth noting is that AirDrop is much, much faster now, too. I move images and other files between my iPhone, iPad, and Macs with AirDrop dozens of times each week. It’s a deeply embedded part of my workflow. Before installing Golden Gate, I rarely sent multiple items via AirDrop simultaneously because it could be very slow or even fail completely. Now, however, I’m retraining myself to send multiple screenshots and other files all at once because AirDrop is so much faster than before.

Launching apps and sending screenshots more quickly aren’t sexy new features that come with fancy screenshots I can share with you, but these are meaningful changes just the same. It remains to be seen how the improvements will hold up over time, but they’ve made a great first impression, so I’m optimistic. Changes that reduce friction are the kind of updates that help keep me focused on what I’m doing and get more done, which I consider a big win.

Those are the big-ticket system changes to the Mac, but of course, there are many other system-level changes coming, like better window positioning consistency when you use multiple displays, HDR UI elements and faster refresh rates for displays that support those features, resizable windows in the iPhone Mirroring app, full-resolution images in Shared Albums in Photos, and enhancements to Notes, Maps, Podcasts, and Messages. I’ll have more details on all of them in my fall review.

Apple Intelligence and the Siri App

The headline Apple Intelligence feature this year is the new Siri app, a dedicated chatbot-style interface that benefits from Apple’s AI collaboration with Google. Before I get into Siri, though, it’s worth noting that there’s more to Apple’s AI story this year than just the digital assistant. In fact, Apple Intelligence features have been sprinkled throughout the system:

• Finder uses AI to suggest file and folder names based on their content;
• Safari tabs can be automatically organized by topic;
• Weak passwords can be automatically updated in the Passwords app;
• Messages spawns little buttons that let you pull information out of a chat and into apps like Reminders and Calendar;
• Natural language descriptions can be used to create Calendar events; and
• Photos includes new AI-driven features like Spatial Reframing, Extend for expanding the borders of a photo, and improvements to the Clean Up tool.

Shortcuts has joined the fray, too, with the ability to build shortcuts simply by describing them. This is the sort of democratization of automation that I love. Building shortcuts has always been simpler than writing code, but it’s also had a steeper learning curve than most people were willing to deal with. You won’t be able to build a complex shortcut with natural language alone, but the reality is that even people who know how to make complex shortcuts use a lot of simple ones for day-to-day tasks, and for that, the new feature is fantastic.

I’m also a fan of the ability to build Safari extensions by describing them. I’ve made a couple, like one that generates a Markdown-formatted link list from selected tabs, and the process of building it was fast and effective.

I’ll have more to say about all of these features in the fall, but they’ve made good first impressions. In past macOS updates, some of the Apple Intelligence features have felt a little out of place and bolted on. I appreciate that these new features are woven more cleanly into their underlying apps. Maybe the era of self-consciously calling every feature AI is coming to an end and they’ll just be called features again. We’re probably not quite there yet, but one can hope.

As for Siri AI, which is surfaced in the new Siri app, Spotlight, context menus, and other locations, it’s worth keeping in mind that Apple has said it will launch later this year as a beta. The Siri AI features are also gated behind a waiting list, so don’t install the beta expecting to be able to use them right away, and even if you do get it, Siri AI is a beta of a beta.

As a result, Siri AI has more rough edges than other parts of Golden Gate. For example, it’s not uncommon for Siri requests to simply fail on one Mac but be correctly answered on another.

Other parts of Siri AI don’t work at all, like third-party app integrations since developers have to update their apps first. I can add tasks in Reminders, events in Calendar, and notes in Notes, but I haven’t had the chance to try a third-party Mac app that works with Siri AI yet. If you’re a developer working on Siri AI support, get in touch. I’ll be highlighting the best ones I try in the fall.

Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.

The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places. Ask Siri to give you the most recent article on any website, and it will be 2-3 weeks old. However, fetching current information instead of specific posts is more timely. When I asked whether Anthropic had made any announcements recently about Cowork, Siri correctly linked me to stories from two days prior.

Likewise, facts like sports scores and celebrity deaths seem to get updated more quickly. I’m writing this on July 9, and I saw a headline in Apple News this morning that singer Bonnie Tyler passed away yesterday. I asked Siri if she was still alive and was told that she was “as of June.” I asked again a couple of hours later, and Siri answered that her death was announced on July 9 – the same day I asked.

Siri is also good at completing one or more actions as long as they fit within the defined set of App Intents schemas. “Remind me to walk the dog at 5:00 pm, add dinner with Jennifer at Mandalino’s to my calendar for Friday at 7:00 pm, and create a note that says ‘Hello World’” works reliably. In my early testing, Siri is also good at generating images comparable to what you’d get directly from Image Playground, creating and summarizing text, playing media like a requested podcast episode, and maintaining continuity when follow-up questions are asked.

Personal context generally works well, too. Siri can find old iMessages I’ve sent to people, it knows who my wife is and where I live, and it can find all sorts of information buried in Notes and other apps where Apple has done the work to expose that information. But like all AI systems, it sometimes makes things up. I asked Siri how old Federico is, and it looked at his entry in Contacts, which includes his birthday. The trouble is, I only included the month and day of Federico’s birthday, not the year, so Siri “guessed” that he’s 116 years old, which is off by a little. Siri also equates Reminders tasks that are assigned a time with Calendar events, which is odd.

When you dig deeper into Siri AI, you’ll discover that not all structured data on your Mac has been given the necessary makeover to work with it. A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript. Again, though, this is a beta, and there’s clearly more work to be done to take better advantage of what’s on your Mac.

Despite the limitations and rough edges, I expect that the new Siri app will be a hit. I’ve found Siri’s world knowledge answers to be a little superficial – similar to what Google’s AI Overviews produce. However, in-depth research isn’t the point, nor is it what people want or need most of the time. For information about current events, businesses, and other everyday questions, Siri is fine. Throw in the ability to manage tasks, calendar events, notes, and the other things people commonly do on their Macs and other devices, and it adds up to a greatly improved Siri experience.

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Overall, Golden Gate is shaping up to be an excellent release. As for whether you should give it a try, I think it’s worth it, especially if you have an older Apple silicon Mac that would benefit from the performance gains. I also think many people will get a lot out of most of the Apple Intelligence features right away. Plus, if you primarily use an app like ChatGPT or Claude to search for information and like the idea of occasionally dropping information into apps like Calendar and Reminders, you’ll get a lot out of Siri, too.

And of course, even if you want more out of Siri than it offers today, patience is in order. I set my expectations for Siri low after Tahoe, and while I would have preferred more from this beta release, I’m willing to wait it out a little. I’m optimistic that it will improve because if Apple is able to assemble a tool that can perform multiple actions across its own apps and those from third parties, users will have an elegant, simple, privacy-focused solution that will go a long way towards fulfilling what was demoed at WWDC in 2024. And that’s something worth waiting for.

I can’t recall the last time I was truly excited about a mouse. I primarily use a trackpad whether I’m at my desk or using a laptop. The trouble with a trackpad-only setup, though, is that I sometimes wind up with wrist and elbow pain. That’s why I keep a Logitech MX Master 4 mouse on my desk to balance out the stress on my arms.

But that only works if I’m at my desk. More and more, I’ve been turning to a MacBook Pro for working away from my desk at home or elsewhere. Those locations are always less ergonomic than sitting at my desk, causing wrist and elbow pain more quickly. Still, I’ve never made it a habit to bring a mouse with me, especially when I’m away from home, because it’s more than I want to carry – that is, until Logitech’s latest mouse, the Mobi Fold, came along.

The Logitech Mobi Fold is an impossibly small mouse that folds completely in half, reducing its footprint to about ⅓ the size of my iPhone 17 Pro Max and about twice its thickness. Unfolded, it’s close to the length of the MX Master 4 but narrower. The Mobi Fold is impressively full-featured, too, making it an excellent all-around travel mouse worth taking a closer look at.

I’ve been testing the Mobi Fold for about a month, and my favorite thing to do with it is fold it up, show it to someone, and ask them to guess what it is. No one has guessed correctly because a folding mouse just isn’t a thing most people have encountered before. Instead, the most common guess is that the Mobi Fold is a small battery for charging an iPhone, until I unfold it and the shape becomes more familiar.

The Mobi Fold is powered by a rechargeable battery that Logitech says lasts for up to 33 days (and up to 22 hours on a one-minute quick charge). The device also turns itself on and off automatically when unfolded and folded, which I love. Plus, the Mobi Fold can connect to up to three devices, and it supports both Bluetooth connections and Logitech’s Bolt dongle (sold separately).

The Mobi Fold’s surface is a soft-touch plastic that feels comfortable in your hand, and it has three buttons arrayed across the front. The middle button doubles as a trackpad, allowing you to drag a finger across its surface to scroll and perform gestures like a double tap for zooming in and out of a webpage.

By default, tapping the front of the middle button navigates forward, while tapping the back navigates back in a browser. However, as with other Logitech mice, you can program the Mobi Fold’s buttons and gestures to:

• perform different actions depending on the app you’re using,
• control system settings like brightness and volume,
• perform macro-like smart actions, and
• display the Logitech Actions Ring, a customizable set of actions that are overlayed on your work environment.

That’s a lot of customization for a diminutive mouse, which I appreciate. However, because the Mobi Fold is typically my “long work sessions at the coffee shop” mouse, I’ve found that all I really need is its traditional point-and-click functionality.

Ultimately, the Mobi Fold isn’t going to replace the MX Master 4 sitting on my desk, but it’s not meant to. I’ve fallen for the Mobi Fold just the same because its compact size and light weight make it a no-brainer to carry with me. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at just how comfortable the Mobi Fold is to use, unfolding into a sturdy, angular shape that feels good in hand, unlike, say, Apple’s shallower Magic Mouse.

As a result, I really can’t recommend the Mobi Fold enough for on-the-go use with a Mac laptop or iPad. The combination of features in such a small, portable package sets it apart from every other mouse I’ve used and makes it well worth its $79.99 price tag.

The Mobi Fold is available in Graphite, Lilac, Off White, and Sand colors, both directly from Logitech and from Amazon.

It’s July, and Apple TV and Apple Arcade have an interesting lineup, including four games that debuted last week, the return of Silo, one of my favorite Apple TV series, Lucky, a limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and The Dink, a pickleball movie that looks like a lot of fun.

Apple Arcade

Apple Arcade debuted four games last week.

Dungeon Clawler+

The game I’m most curious about this month is Stray Fawn Studio’s Dungeon Clawler+, which Apple says “combines the strategic depth of a roguelike deckbuilder with the unpredictability of an arcade claw machine.” The hook is that instead of drawing cards, you use a claw to grab weapons, shields, and other items that affect your next move.

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Creatures of the Deep+

Creatures of the Deep+ is a single-player fishing adventure that pairs fishing with exploration and mystery. Your job is to embark on the open seas, catch fish, and learn the secrets that lie beneath the waves.

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Pocket City 2+

If you’ve ever played a classic Sim City game, you’ll have a feel for Pocket City 2+. You play as the city’s mayor and are charged with building and maintaining your city, which you can explore on foot as you build.

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Draw It+

Draw It+ challenges players to draw things based on prompts under time pressure. It’s a single-player family-friendly game that can be passed around at a party or played solo, while honing your doodling skills.

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Apple TV Shows and Movies

Silo – Season 3

I only just started Silo, season 2, prompted in part by the release of season 3 last Friday. It’s a fantastic dystopian mystery starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson and created by Graham Yost. If you like a good post-apocalyptic brain teaser, be sure to check the new season.

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Trying, Season Five (July 8, 2026)

This week the acclaimed British comedy Trying returns for a fifth season. Starring and executive produced by Esther Smith and Rafe Spall, the series is a lighthearted look at the ups and downs of family life.

Add to Your Calendar:

• iCal
• Google Calendar

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Lucky (July 15, 2026)

Lucky is a limited series starring Anya Taylor-Joy based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Marissa Stapley. Taylor-Joy plays a young woman whose former life of crime comes back to haunt her, just as she thinks she’s escaped her past.

Add to Your Calendar:

• iCal
• Google Calendar

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The Dink (July 24, 2026)

The Dink is a comedy about a former tennis star played by Jake Johnson who has been reduced to coaching kids at a suburban country club. Johnson, who stars with an ensemble cast that includes Ed Harris, Ben Stiller, and Mary Steenburgen, discovers that he loves pickleball, which just may save the ailing country club.

Add to Your Calendar:

• iCal
• Google Calendar

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That’s it for July. I’m personally looking forward to moving on to season three of Silo once I finish season two and watching Lucky.

If you’re a Club MacStories Plus or Premier member, drop by the TV and Movies channel in Discord to chat about what you’re looking forward to from Apple TV this month, and be sure to listen to MacStories Unwind where we will undoubtedly cover these shows in the coming weeks.

When Fable 5 returned last week, I knew exactly what to throw at it. In February, I started a project out of frustration that likewise ended in frustration, so I put it on the shelf and waited. Five months later, Fable 5 was released, and I knew it was time to finish Editor, a single-view diffing tool for writers rather than developers.

At MacStories, we all write in Markdown, and we’ve used GitHub to share and sync changes among team members since 2015. GitHub is primarily a developer tool, but it’s a fast, reliable way to share our Markdown-formatted article files, too.

We use GitHub the most for the Club MacStories newsletters. Every week, Federico, Devon, Jonathan, and I work on sections for MacStories Weekly and save them to a GitHub repo. That allows any of us to sync the sections locally for reading, editing, and assembling the issue.

The trouble is that as great as Markdown text editors are to write and GitHub is for versioning and syncing, there isn’t a good way to view the changes someone has made to a document. I know because I’ve been looking for a solution for a long time. Some Markdown apps like iA Writer and Bear support versioning or backups, but I’ve yet to find a text editor that can visualize changes made by someone else based on a document’s Git history.

Of course, developers have many ways to track changes to code, including GitHub Desktop, Kaleidoscope, and Git Tower. Code is just text, so those apps can be used by writers, too. However, the process of writing and editing prose is fundamentally different from code. I’ve tried the apps above and others, and it’s just too hard to track changes in the formats development tools use.

We wouldn’t have stuck with GitHub as long as we have if it didn’t work, but that hasn’t made the friction of reviewing changes any less frustrating, especially on Fridays when we send MacStories Weekly. That’s when I had the idea for Editor. I was trying to parse some changes Devon had made to one of my stories with GitHub Desktop, and the friction finally got to me.

One obvious problem was the side-by-side document view many code diffing tools use. I wanted more detail than most diffing tools offer, but in a single, readable view, so I could skim through changes quickly.

Most agent-assisted projects benefit from some up-front research and planning. I knew what I wanted would sink or swim on the design, not the app’s underlying Markdown viewer, so I spent time researching systems for visualizing document edits.

That’s when I came across Upwelling, a multi-author project from Ink & Switch that describes itself as “an independent research lab exploring the future of tools for thought.” In their research paper, the authors described my exact problem:

Unfortunately, version control tools like Git, which are designed for software development, do not suit the needs of writers. Git cannot compare or merge files from WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word… and graphical user interfaces for Git are cluttered with complex concepts such as commit hashes and visualizations of non-linear branching and merging histories.

Ink & Switch’s solution, a prototype collaborative text editor, wasn’t what I wanted to build, but the research behind it was full of interesting ideas that helped me settle on several principles for what would become Editor:

• Document changes needed to be visible in a single view that carefully balanced highlighting changes with readability;
• A writer should be able to instantly switch from the marked-up version of their document to the clean original and edited final version;
• Changes needed to be categorized by filterable types like punctuation, word choice, capitalization, insertions, and deletions to reduce clutter in heavily edited documents;
• Change types would be color coded using a side rail system inspired by maps of London’s tube system;
• Navigating among individual edits needed to be done by simple j/k keyboard input; and
• Global document navigation should employ a mini-map of a document’s edit regions (a feature borrowed from developer IDEs like Xcode) to make it easy to jump from one area of a document to another.

With those choices made, I got busy in Claude Code and came up with a proof of concept quickly, but sadly, these were the days of Claude Opus 4.6, which wasn’t nearly as good at design as today’s models. What I wanted was possible, but what I had was a mess.

As it turns out, designing track changes that are accurate but readable is hard. For example, does changing “day” to “date” replace one word with the other or substitute one character (the “y”) for two others (“te”)? Despite putting clear parameters around what Editor should look like, I could tell Claude was stuck, so I called it quits and moved on.

However, I’d wanted something like Editor for far too long to simply give up. So I saved what I had to a GitHub repo and figured I’d take another run at it later.

Later turned out to be last week when Claude Fable 5 was re-released after a U.S. government shutdown of the model. Anthropic made the model available to its subscribers, with some restrictions, through July 7, which I made good use of.

A lot has changed in the six months since I put Editor on ice. Notably, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Design were released, and Claude became better at using a browser, all of which fit nicely with Editor’s relatively complex design.

Between Opus 4.8 and Claude Design, I expect I could have finished Editor without Fable 5, but with it, the only thing that slowed me down was my five-hour token limit. I repeatedly hit the limit in under an hour as Fable managed a swarm of subagents. What could have taken a few hours last Friday night spanned an evening and the next morning. The token gating slowed me down, but at the same time, I expect that using Opus 4.8 and Claude Design would have taken the entire weekend.

But it isn’t just speed that makes Fable 5 impressive; it’s the fact that it got Editor’s complex UI right the first time. Fable took a carefully planned but very broken prototype and turned it into a polished product that the whole MacStories team can use.

However, there’s a big difference between a web app running on my Mac mini server for personal use and something that can be shared. Fortunately, Editor also benefited from the internal tool foundation Federico has built over the past several months.

He originally built it to house Feedboard, his kanban-style RSS feed reader; Images, an update to our tool for uploading images to the MacStories CDN; and iOS Review Search, a semantic search tool for his iOS and iPadOS reviews. It’s a login-protected internal page built on web app hosting platform Vercel. I later contributed a tool that summarizes Apple Newsroom posts and simplifies uploading their promotional images to our server.

With a couple of those tools in hand as context for Fable, I asked Claude to get Editor ready for our internal tools page and passed it off to Federico with a separate set of specs and instructions he could point Claude at for deployment and the creation of a landing page. That introduced bugs that required some troubleshooting, which Federico handled in part using Cursor and it new iPhone app, but by that afternoon, Editor was ready for production. The entire process from old, broken prototype to production web app took less than 24 hours, and for a lot of that time we were either asleep or away from home.

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When you use agentic tools like Claude every day, it’s easy to forget how far they come so quickly. All you see are the flaws that still serve as roadblocks. What was different about using Fable 5 was that there were no roadblocks. It simply took a project that Opus 4.6 struggled with in February and made short work of it. It was a remarkable thing to see. And now, we have a tool that I’ve wanted since we started using GitHub for our writing in 2015.

Tomorrow, Fable will move to usage credits that are just too expensive for my tastes, given how fast the model burns tokens. Hopefully, it will trickle back into Anthropic’s subscription tiers in the future. Until then, though, I’ll continue knocking out prototypes, and if they’re too much for Opus, I’ll shelve them until a better model comes along. They always do.

Over at Snazzy Labs, Quinn Nelson has a great in-depth look at the changes coming to Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit with macOS 27 this fall. Paired with Metal 4, it’s a real leap over what’s possible today, and Nelson showcases the difference well.

Thanks to the upcoming update, Nelson was able to use CrossOver, a Windows-to-Mac compatibility layer that allows PC games to be played on a Mac, to spotlight some impressive numbers on games ranging from Red Dead Redemption to the recently released 007 First Light.

Not all games Nelson tried showed the same leap in performance, but that’s true on compatibility layers like Proton on the Steam Deck, too. What’s remarkable is that it’s all done in software and as Nelson points out, the advent of coding agents like Codex and Claude may help bring more PC games to Mac using the Game Porting Toolkit by reducing the porting costs.

Nelson also makes a pitch for an Apple gaming device. I agree with him that more than ever, the pieces, right down to a hardware-focused incoming CEO, are all there for such a device, and I remain optimistic. However, I’ve made the case for such a device for years now to no avail. Still, whether or not Apple builds gaming hardware itself, watch the full video above. It’s a fantastic view of how far the Mac has come as a potential gaming platform since the advent of Apple silicon.

Today, Apple released an update to its Creator Studio subscription with new features across many of the suite’s apps.

Pixelmator Pro now integrates more deeply with Creator Studio’s other apps. While working in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, you can open an image directly in Pixelmator Pro, edit it, and save the changes back to the source app’s document. On the Mac, Final Cut Pro can now send individual frames to Pixelmator Pro, making thumbnail creation simpler.

Final Cut Pro is also adding a set of Creator Themes with multiple aspect ratios, dynamic titles, and customizable backgrounds. Plus, users now have more control over the design of captions generated on-device using AI. On the Mac, Auto Mask lets you isolate certain parts of footage for editing, and Match Color reproduces colors more accurately.

For Logic Pro users, today’s update includes improvements to Chord ID, a new Producer Project from Khris Riddick-Tynes, a new sound pack, and an expansion of Beat Breaker.

Final Cut Camera for the iPhone and iPad has been updated with support for Clean HDMI Out, more flexible ProRes support, and disabling of digital zoom. Motion now supports vector graphics, and Compressor gains Vision Pro features, while Freeform gains shape creation, opening images in Pixelmator Pro, a Dark Mode, folders, and drawing on the Mac. Plus, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers each added a handful of new features.

Creator Studio debuted just six months ago, so it’s good to see it already being updated with meaningful features. Creator Studio costs $12.99/month or $129/year. More information is available in Apple’s press release here.

Apple raised the prices of Macs and other products across the board today. For entry-level Macs, the increases are mostly $100–$200. However, if you want a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio with lots of memory and storage, it’s going to cost you dearly. Prices were also raised on the iPad, Vision Pro, Apple TV, HomePods, and many items sold through Apple’s refurbished store.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but it’s painful just the same. Last week, Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that price increases were coming without getting into specifics. Apple was able to hold the line on prices for several months, even while smaller gadget and computer makers raised their prices or canceled products altogether.

What’s happening is simple macroeconomics. Demand for memory and storage is vastly outstripping supply, largely due to the insatiable appetite of data centers that power AI services. That demand shows no signs of waning, and supply isn’t as simple as turning a knob to 11. There just aren’t that many makers of memory chips and SSDs, and bringing new plants online to manufacture takes years and billions of dollars.

For now, the price of iPhones has been left alone. Some may see that as a silver lining, but I suspect all it means is that Apple has enough prebuilt inventory to get to September, when new iPhones are announced. Apple Watch and AirPods prices remain the same, too.

Could Apple have avoided this? I doubt it. The magnitude and speed of the price increases and the projected duration are beyond what any reasonable company could or would plan for.

That said, I do think the situation will get better with time, again because of macroeconomics. The increases may preserve Apple’s margins, but it’s going to reduce the number of customers who can afford its products. Margins only equate to profits if you have customers willing to pay for your product. So with time, if the data center demand slackens or new chip capacity comes online, prices will improve. Just don’t expect that anytime before 2027 or 2028 if current projections are to be believed.

Amazon Prime Day is earlier than ever this year, with lots of deals to be had on our favorite gadgets. As you may have seen, we updated our MacStories Setups page last week, and as it turns out, some of that gear is deeply discounted for Prime Day. Below, you’ll find links to those items, as well as other gadgets we recommend, all on sale now.

For even more deals, join Club MacStories+ or Premier to become a part of our Discord community, where members are sharing their favorite finds, too.

Home Automation

It’s been over a year since I reviewed Aqara’s excellent G5 Pro Outdoor Camera Hub, but it’s still my all-time favorite outdoor HomeKit camera and has been a big hit with readers, too. The camera comes in Wi-Fi and PoE versions and works with HomeKit Secure Video. Before I tried the G5 Pro, my experience with outdoor HomeKit cameras was very spotty, but ever since I mounted the G5 Pro above my front door, it’s been a fixture of my Setups gear collection.

You can also get a great deal on the Aqara Smart Home Hub M3 during Prime Day. It’s not required to run the G5 Pro Outdoor Camera, which is a hub itself, but for anyone with other smart home gear, it’s an excellent addition because it handles Zigbee 3.0 devices and acts as both a Thread border router and a Matter controller, all in one compact unit. Plus, because automations are saved to the device, they continue to run even if your Internet service fails.

To round out the Aqara picks, it’s worth mentioning its UWB Smart Lock U400. This is Aqara’s most advanced smart lock, which uses an Ultra Wideband chip to allow you to unlock your door by simply approaching it from the outside of the door. The lock also works with Home Key, NFC cards, your fingerprint, its own app, a number pad, and more. This smart lock hasn’t been out long, and this is the first time I’ve seen it on sale anywhere.

The ecobee Smart Video Doorbell Camera that I’ve used since I moved into my place in North Carolina is also on sale during Prime Day. I used to have a doorbell camera that overheated in the sun, but the ecobee has stood up like a champ in the direct sunlight all afternoon even as summer temperatures approach 100° F.

If you’re deep into the Hue lighting scene, the Play HDMI Sync Box 8K is a great way to sync your lighting to your entertainment system or computer display for gaming. I reviewed the Sync Box last year along with the Play Wall Washer lights that are also on sale for Prime Day and still part of my gaming setup.

Another MacStories Setups mainstay on sale for Prime Day is Hue’s Festavia string lights, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. The color of the lights can be adjusted in the Home app, and the Hue app lets you add animations to simulate a flickering candle or twinkling stars. I love how they look on my balcony.

It’s hot where I live, so fans make a big difference. I’ve been using the SwitchBot Smart Desk Fan for about six months in my office and love it. It works with HomeKit and can be automated to turn on and off based on triggers like your room’s temperature. There’s even a cloud-based API that you can use to write your own scripts to control the fan. It and the newer Smart Pedestal Fan are both on sale for Prime Day.

Schlage’s Encode Plus smart lock is one of the few HomeKit-compatible locks that features Apple’s Home Key integration, which enables tap to unlock with an iPhone or Apple Watch. With new UWB locks coming out, this well-reviewed lock is a bargain at its Prime Day price.

Apple Gear

Amazon has a refurbished version of the M4 15-inch MacBook Air in Starlight with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage on sale for Prime Day. The laptop is from the Amazon Renewed Store, which is generally reliable. And with rumors swirling that base prices of Apple hardware may increase later this month, this MacBook Air might look like an even better bargain in a few weeks, so it’s worth considering if you’re in the market for a new laptop. The 13-inch MacBook Air with an M3 chip, 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD is also deeply discounted for Prime Day.

I’m partial to the AirPods Pro 3, but Amazon has the AirPods 4 and AirPods Max 2 on sale, too. Either way, you’re getting great sound and noise cancellation. The Beats Studio Buds + are deeply discounted for Prime Day as well.

Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch SE 3 are also on sale. With summer in full swing, both offer a great way to track your outdoor activities and get notifications without having to pull out your iPhone.

Batteries and Chargers

Having a central hub to charge your gear is nice. I’ve had a 200W version of UGREEN’s hub for a few years now and plug things into it every day for overnight charging. For Prime Day, UGREEN’s even more powerful 300W charging hub is on sale. It features four USB-C ports and one USB-A port that can charge at up to 140W.

The Anker MagGo Slim Power Bank is about as slim as a 10,000mAh battery can get. It’s Qi2 certified, which means it will charge your iPhone at 15W, and it’s white, making it the perfect fit with an iPhone Air, too. If you’d prefer a similar battery but with a kickstand (and who doesn’t love a kickstand?), Anker has you covered with its MagGo Power Bank, also on sale for Prime Day.

To charge all your Apple devices overnight, I recommend the Belkin 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station that can handle an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods all at once. It’s Qi2 certified for 15W charging of your iPhone, and has everything charged up and ready to go as soon as you wake up in the morning.

Odds and Ends

I’m a fan of the Logitech MX Creative Console, a Stream Deck competitor with a nine-button programmable keypad and a separate pad with a dial, scroll wheel, and additional buttons. Both are perfect for automating workflows in specific apps or with macros and Shortcuts. I reviewed the MX Creative Console in 2024, and it’s still sitting on my desk.

The ASUS ProArt Display 32-inch 6K Professional Monitor is on sale for Prime Day, too. The display is bigger, significantly cheaper, and competitively spec’d compared to an Apple Studio Display.

I’ve tried lots of iPhone controllers over the years, and one of the most comfortable and versatile is GameSir’s G8, which can even accommodate an iPad mini. The G8 works with the iPhone 15 and above and is a great choice for summer vacations when you don’t want to bring along a dedicated gaming device.

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That’s it for now. As we spot more deals, we’ll post them on the MacStories Deals Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, as well as in the Club MacStories+ Discord community.

Today, the team behind note-taking app Bear announced the public beta of Lettera, a new Mac text editor, based on Panda, an earlier beta that was used to work out the Bear 2.0 text editing engine. That immediately caught my eye because I’ve been using Panda for months. In fact, it’s the default way I open Markdown files now.

What drew me to Panda was the automation work I’ve been doing with agents. I use the Superpowers plugin (which got an excellent 6.0 update this week) with both Codex and Claude Code, which generates plans, design documents, and specs as part of its process. Panda turned out to be a great way to read those documents because the Bear 2.0 UI is excellent, and with Panda, I could open any Markdown file as a standalone document that didn’t require importing it into Bear itself.

According to the Bear team’s post today, Lettera is designed to preserve Panda’s simple approach to Markdown files and extend it to the Mac’s file system:

Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace…

That way, Lettera can be used as your default Markdown editor no matter where Markdown files are saved, which is how I’ve been using Panda, or as a text editor with a dedicated folder of working files in iCloud, which is a departure from Bear, which hides the file system from users. Other features will be familiar to anyone who has used Bear before, including its excellent Markdown rendering, versioning, a table of contents sidebar, and support for multiple export formats.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of Lettera, but I was already a fan of the more limited Panda, so I expect Lettera to quickly become the text editor I use for any writing that isn’t an article like this one, for which I’m still using Obsidian, thanks to its extensive plugin catalog.

You can download the beta of Lettera from the Bear post announcing the app.

It’s beta season, which is as good an excuse as any to mix up our setups with new gadgets and apps. Between travel, preparing for our OS review research and writing sprint, and revisiting Apple system apps, the past few months have resulted in changes to our setups.

Summer travel means batteries to charge our gear and chargers to charge those batteries. It’s a trend that was clearly on our minds as Federico and I planned our trips to WWDC. Federico added a 20,100mAh Anker Prime Power Bank and an Anker Nano Power Bank, going both big and small for his long flight to California, while I added a beefy Belkin UltraCharge Pro battery with a 25,000mAh capacity and a Belkin USB-C 140W Y Cable. I also added a compact Belkin GaN 70W Charging Station for charging on my balcony over the summer and an Anker Nano Power Strip with Desk Clamp, which has been a great way to keep outlets and USB ports within reach but out of the way.

The remainder of our setups are an eclectic mix of gadgets. Federico fell in love with the Legion Go 2 all over again, swapped his iPhone Air for an iPhone 17 Pro, and added a pair of AirPods Max 2 to his gear.

The biggest change to my setup is my most recent: the reMarkable Paper Pure, an e-ink note-taking and reading tablet that I plan to review soon. Preorders just started shipping, and reMarkable sent me a review unit that I plan to incorporate into my research setup through a series of scripts and native apps. The apps will allow me to send articles, PDFs, writing drafts, and more to the Paper Pure and extract handwritten notes as text back into my research setup. It’s been a lot of fun to build and will be the subject of an upcoming Mac Hacks story for Club MacStories members.

On the fun side of things, I’ve been enjoying the Anbernic RG Rotate Android handheld a lot. It has a screen that rotates around one corner to reveal gaming controls. The device, which we covered in a couple of recent NPC episodes, has been a lot of fun to take with me everywhere I go for a quick fix of my favorite retro games. I also added the Mobapad M12 HD to my extensive collection of controllers. I only received the M12 HD a couple of days ago, but it was immediately more comfortable to use than the Switch 2 Joy-Con it replaces.

That’s a wrap for this installment of the Setups update. Be sure to keep an eye on the MacStories Deals Bluesky and Mastodon accounts. Amazon Prime Day is next week, and there are already some great deals on our favorite gear linked on the Setups page, so browse around and get in touch on social media if you have any questions about our setups.