Amazon Prime Day 2026: Our Top Picks

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.

The Hue Festavia string lights.

The Hue Festavia string lights.

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.

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.

Podcast Rewind: A Sitcom Plea and Stories from WWDC

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

Comfort Zone

It’s another duo week as Matt is out there… destroying lives??? Despite that, Chris and Niléane talk about the DMA and cool stuff in the OS 27 betas, and Chris has some stories from WWDC.

On Cozy Zone, the gang goes through their next three apps they would install on their Macs, and it leads to some hard (and surprising) decisions.

MacStories Unwind

This week, Federico learns about Philadelphia and college mascots before making a sitcom plea. Meanwhile, John’s been listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s new album and buying concert tickets.

Read more

The Bear Team Releases Public Beta of Lettera, a New Mac Markdown Editor

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.

MacStories Setups Update: Batteries, Chargers, E-Ink Note-Taking, and Videogames

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.

I'm working on a research system for the reMarkable Paper Pure.

I’m working on a research system for the reMarkable Paper Pure.

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.

The Anbernic RG Rotate and [Logitech Mobi Fold mouse](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/mobi-fold-mouse?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Paid-Search&utm_campaign=DEPT_FY27_Q1_USA_LO_B2C_Always-on-PWS-Base-Plan_Google_CVR_na&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21340350467&gbraid=0AAAAADDQ2OzdDNcFdi-Lo_HheSldaUroA&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrs7RBhDuARIsAIVfBD3p1kWAwdT-HsVtSTAXi5ft1ed_eOnGUePe8JMa3SuTOHUGFkO6rKsaAsLjEALw_wcB), which is also featured on [the Setups page](https://www.macstories.net/setups/).

The Anbernic RG Rotate and Logitech Mobi Fold mouse, which is also featured on the Setups page.

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.

Apple Improves Screen Time for Parents, but There’s Room to Grow→

One of Apple’s tentpole features at WWDC was a ground-up makeover to Screen Time that’s designed to give parents more granular and reliable control over their kids’ device use. I got a demo of the changes while I was at Apple Park, and they’re extensive. That’s good because Screen Time has been broken in a variety of ways for a while and isn’t very flexible.

My first impressions of the changes have been positive, but it’s worth noting that I don’t use Screen Time myself and my kids are grown. Screen Time wasn’t even available when it would have been useful to my family.

However, I do remember well the days when my kids were little, and so I sympathize with Patrick Klepek who wants more. Klepek gives Apple credit for improvements in Screen Time’s UI, but wants more:

But to crystalize my requests to Apple for the future:
- A dedicated Screen Time app
- The ability to invoke Siri or other shortcut-like features to lock devices
- Granular control over extending screen time to accommodate specific requests

I’d add another request that one of the journalists made during our demo that made a lot of sense. Like me, he has three kids and wondered if he could set up a baseline set of Screen Time rules and then copy them to his other kids, making age-appropriate tweaks for each kid. Apple said that isn’t currently possible, but it’s the sort of practical, reality-based suggestion that the company should prioritize. Being a parent means a lot of things, but it shouldn’t mean being an IT manager too. For tools like Screen Time to be adopted, they need to be easy, flexible, and powerful. That’s a tough combination, but I hope it’s been made a priority internally at Apple that will result in ongoing improvements to Screen Time during this OS cycle and beyond.

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iPadOS Lets You Automate Window Placement with Shortcuts

MultiSwitcher for iPadOS.

MultiSwitcher for iPadOS.

Update: An earlier version of this article referred to this feature as having been introduced in iPadOS 27, but it was actually introduced in the iPadOS 26 cycle. I missed it. My apologies.

In iPadOS’ Shortcuts app, the existing ‘Open App’ action was recently updated with the ability to launch an app with a specific window placement parameter. This means you can now automate window positions on iPad by opening a bunch of apps and programmatically selecting where their windows be placed.

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Three Features Coming to Photos This Fall via Apple Intelligence→

Photo editing is getting some of the most interesting Apple Intelligence features this fall. At WWDC, Tyler Stalman interviewed Jon McCormack, Apple’s Vice President of Camera and Photos Software Engineering, and Della Huff, the company’s Senior Manager of Camera and Photos Product Marketing, in a video that covers Spatial Reframing, Extend, and an improved Clean Up tool, along with demos of each:

The interview goes into depth on each feature and how they’re enhanced by the integration with Apple’s improved Private Cloud Compute models, sharing nuggets like the fact that Spatial Reframing of photos is possible even if an image is taken with a single-lens iPhone and the fact that Apple includes metadata in generatively edited photos identifying the use of AI and will add SynthID watermarking, a technology developed by Google, to AI-edited photos later this year.

I’m not a fan of wholesale image generation, which is why I appreciate the thoughtful approach Apple is taking with these photo editing features. The changes are at the margins of the photo and identified as edited using AI.

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