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Sound Designer Dallas Taylor on the Audio Enhancements to AirPods Pro 3→

Source: [Dallas Taylor](https://www.youtube.com/@dallastaylor.mp3).

Source: Dallas Taylor.

While the highlights of Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 reveal seemed to be the addition of heart rate sensors, increased battery life, and improved Active Noise Cancellation, Dallas Taylor on YouTube went a bit deeper on the actual listening experience.

Taylor is a sound designer and the host of the excellent Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast. (I can highly recommend this episode about the famous sounds of Apple and this one about the iconic sound of HBO.) He also runs a YouTube channel and was invited to Apple Park yesterday to try out the new AirPods Pro for himself.

He came away very impressed with the improved ANC, but what stood out to me was the significant upgrade in sound quality he mentioned, especially the bass. You can watch Taylor give his thoughts below, but it’s interesting to hear about a notable improvement in what people use AirPods for the most: listening to music.

You can follow all of our September 2025 Apple event coverage through our September 2025 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated September 2025 Apple event RSS feed.

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Jess Weatherbed Breaks Down Why Apple’s Crossbody Strap is a Great Idea→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

In the run-up to yesterday’s Apple Event, there were increasingly loud rumblings that Apple would introduce a crossbody strap or lanyard that could be attached to new iPhone cases.

What followed was a noticeable amount of confusion from those in the tech sphere as to why Apple was entering this market. Now that the Crossbody Strap has been released, Jess Weatherbed at The Verge has a great explainer on why crossbody straps are an increasingly popular trend and why Apple’s take on them is so good. (Spoiler: it’s magnets. It’s always magnets.)

This trend seems to be more popular in Europe and Asia, but it’s picking up steam in the United States, too. I personally see them all the time in London, both as fashion accessories and practical ways for people to carry their most important device. In fact, as a quick experiment, I counted almost 20 of them on my five-minute walk back from this morning’s school drop-off.

The Apple Crossbody Strap is available to order now and is only compatible with Apple’s cases for iPhone 17, Air, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max. For more on all the accessories Apple released this week, check out Niléane’s overview.

You can follow all of our September 2025 Apple event coverage through our September 2025 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated September 2025 Apple event RSS feed.

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The Clickwheel Games Preservation Project Completes Its Efforts to Preserve All 54 iPod Games→

Almost a year ago, Federico linked to a story on Ars Technica by Kyle Orland about efforts to preserve iPod games; now, the process has been completed. Yes, iPod games, not iPad. For a brief period of time in the late 2000s, Apple offered a selection of 54 iPod games for sale through the iTunes Store. The collection included titles from notable developers like Square Enix (Crystal Defenders and Song Summoner), Sega (Sonic the Hedgehog), and Namco (Pac-Man). Those games are long since gone, having been removed from the iTunes store in 2011, and are just one of many examples of a part of videogame history becoming inaccessible to fans and researchers due to neglect.

However, thanks to the efforts of the Clickwheel Games Preservation Project led by GitHub user Olsro, every iPod game has been preserved. As Orland explains:

[Olsro] lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project’s launch last October.

After that, though, things got tough:

Getting working access to the final unpreserved game, Real Soccer 2009, was “especially cursed,” Olsro tells Ars. “Multiple [people] came to me during this summer and all attempts failed until a new one from yesterday,” he said. “I even had a situation when someone had an iPod Nano 5G with a playable copy of Real Soccer, but the drive was appearing empty in the Windows Explorer. He tried recovery tools & the iPod NAND just corrupted itself, asking for recovery…”

Not only has the project preserved the entire library of games, but now, they’re available to anyone who still has a working iPod that supports them. Sonic on iPod will never be considered the definitive version of Sega’s classic, but if you ask me, it’s still worth preserving the memories of people like Reddit user Mahboishk for whom, “The iPod version of Sonic the Hedgehog was my introduction to the franchise as a kid, and it got me into speedrunning.” That 2000s version of Sonic is an important link in the story that has helped Sonic endure as a franchise from its ’90s origins to today. Now you too can try your hand at navigating the Green Hill Zone with a click wheel.

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Oasis Just Glitched the Algorithm→

Beautiful, poignant story by Steven Zeitchik, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, on the magic of going to an Oasis concert in 2025.

It would have been weird back in Oasis’ heyday to talk about a big stadium-rock show being uniquely “human” — what the hell else could it be? But after decades of music chosen by algorithm, of the spirit of listen-together radio fracturing into a million personalized streams, of social media and the politics that fuel it ordering acts into groups of the allowed and prohibited, of autotuning and overdubbing washing out raw instruments, of our current cultural era’s spell of phone-zombification, of the communal spaces of record stores disbanded as a mainstream notion of gathering, well, it’s not such a given anymore. Thousands of people convening under the sky to hear a few talented fellow humans break their backs with a bunch of instruments, that oldest of entertainment constructs, now also feels like a radical one.

And:

The Gallaghers seemed to be coming just in time, to remind us of what it was like before — to issue a gentle caveat, by the power of positive suggestion, that we should think twice before plunging further into the abyss. To warn that human-made art is fragile and too easily undone — in fact in their case for 16 years it was undone — by its embodiments acting too much like petty, well, humans. And the true feat, the band was saying triumphantly Sunday, is that there is a way to hold it together.

I make no secret of the fact that Oasis are my favorite band of all time which, very simply, defined my teenage years. They’re responsible for some of my most cherished memories with my friends, enjoying music together.

I was lucky enough to be able to see Oasis in London this summer. To be honest with you, we didn’t have great seats. But what I’ll remember from that night won’t necessarily be the view (eh) or the audio quality at Wembley (surprisingly great). I’ll remember the sheer joy of shouting Live Forever with Silvia next to me. I’ll remember doing the Poznan with Jeremy and two guys next to us who just went for it because Liam asked to hug the stranger next to you. I’ll remember the thrill of witnessing Oasis walk back on stage after 16 years with 80,000 other people feeling the same thing as me, right there and then.

This story by Zeitchik hit me not only because it’s Oasis, but because I’ve always believed in the power of music recommendations that come from other humans – not algorithms – who would like you to also enjoy something. And to do so together.

If only for two hours one summer night in a stadium, there’s beauty to losing your voice to music not delivered by an algorithm.

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Relay Launches Its 2025 Fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital→

Today, Relay kicked off its annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help combat childhood cancer. We’d love it if MacStories readers joined us in supporting this cause.

You can make a donation by visiting here.

As Stephen Hackett explains on 512 Pixels:

[St. Jude] is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer, and other life-threatening diseases. If that sounds expensive, it’s because it is, but the bill isn’t passed to the families of patients. At St. Jude, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.

Relay, which has raised over $4 million for St. Jude over the years, will be raising money through the end of September. Thanks in advance for checking out Relay’s fundraiser for St. Jude and to all who donate.

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Who Is Liquid Glass For?→

The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry had an interesting post over the weekend on Furbo.org that struck a chord with me. The post explores the ‘why’ surrounding Liquid Glass contrasting the upcoming iOS 26 changes with the transition from iOS 6 to iOS 7. That earlier change was driven by a need to make app design accessible to more people, which, as Hockenberry explains, seems different from the motivation behind Liquid Glass:

I’m unaware of anyone outside of Apple who’s thinking “we really need to have more fluid glass in our designs”. Of particular note during the introduction is how much time they spend showing off glass blocks and talking about the physical effect itself. While not addressing the most important question: “why do we need this?”

And I’m pretty sure the answer is “we don’t”. The answer is “Apple does.”

Hockenberry thinks the switch to Liquid Glass is being driven by unreleased hardware very much like the iOS 11 safe areas that were instituted before the iPhone X’s notch and Home indicator debuted. It’s a great theory that could easily have people facepalming in the not-too-distant future. I hope he’s right.

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Claude’s Chat History and App Integrations as a Form of Lock-In→

Earlier today, Anthropic announced that, similar to ChatGPT, Claude will be able to search and reference your previous chats with it. From their support document:

You can now prompt Claude to search through your previous conversations to find and reference relevant information in new chats. This feature helps you continue discussions seamlessly and retrieve context from past interactions without re-explaining everything.

If you’re wondering what Claude can actually search:

You can prompt Claude to search conversations within these boundaries:

  • All chats outside of projects.
  • Individual project conversations (searches are limited to within each specific project).

Conversation history is a powerful feature of modern LLMs, and although Anthropic hasn’t announced personalized context based on memory yet (a feature that not everybody likes), it seems like that’s the next shoe to drop. Chat search, memory with personalized context, larger context windows, and performance are the four key aspects I preferred in ChatGPT; Anthropic just addressed one of them, and a second may be launching soon.

As I’ve shared on Mastodon, despite the power and speed of GPT-5, I find myself gravitating more and more toward Claude (and specifically Opus 4.1) because of MCP and connectors. Claude works with the apps I already use and allows me to easily turn conversations into actions performed in Notion, Todoist, Spotify, or other apps that have an API that can talk to Claude. This is changing my workflow in two notable ways: I’m only using ChatGPT for “regular” web search queries (mostly via the Safari extension) and less for work because it doesn’t match Claude’s extensive MCP support with tools; and I’m prioritizing web apps that have well-supported web APIs that work with LLMs over local apps that don’t (Spotify vs. Apple Music, Todoist vs. Reminders, Notion vs. Notes, etc.). Chat search (and, again, I hope personalized context based on memory soon) further adds to this change in the apps I use.

Let me offer an example. I like combining Claude’s web search abilities with Zapier tools that integrate with Spotify to make Claude create playlists for me based on album reviews or music roundups. A few weeks ago, I started the process of converting this Chorus article into a playlist, but I never finished the task since I was running into Zapier rate limits. This evening, I asked Claude if we ever worked on any playlists, it found the old chats and pointed out that one of them still needed to be completed. From there, it got to work again, picked up where it left off in Chorus’ article, and finished filling the playlist with the most popular songs that best represent the albums picked by Jason Tate and team. So not only could Claude find the chat, but it got back to work with tools based on the state of the old conversation.

Resuming a chat that was about creating a Spotify playlist (right). Sadly, Apple Music doesn't integrate with LLMs like this.

Resuming a chat that was about creating a Spotify playlist (right). Sadly, Apple Music doesn’t integrate with LLMs like this.

Even more impressively, after Claude was done finishing the playlist from an old chat, I asked it to take all the playlists created so far and append their links to my daily note in Notion; that also worked. From my phone, in a conversation that started as a search test for old chats and later grew into an agentic workflow that called tools for web search, Spotify, and Notion.

I find these use cases very interesting, and they’re the reason I struggle to incorporate ChatGPT into my everyday workflow beyond web searches. They’re also why I hesitate to use Apple apps right now, and I’m not sure Liquid Glass will be enough to win me back over.

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Building Tools with GPT-5→

Yesterday, Parker Ortolani wrote about several vibe coding projects he’s been working on and his experience with GPT-5:

The good news is that GPT-5 is simply amazing. Not only does it design beautiful user interfaces on its own without even needing guidance, it has also been infinitely more reliable. I couldn’t even count the number of times I have needed to work with the older models to troubleshoot errors that they created themselves. Thus far, GPT-5 has not caused a single build error in Xcode.

I’ve had a similar initial experience. Leading up to the release of GPT-5, I used Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to create a Python script that queries the Amazon Product Advertising API to check whether there are any good deals on a long list of products. I got it working, but it typically returned a list of 200-300 deals sorted by discount percentage.

Though those results were fine, a percentage discount only roughly correlates to whether something is a good deal. What I wanted was to rank the deals by assigning different weights to several factors and coming up with a composite score for each. Having reached my token limits with Claude, I went to GPT-o3 for help, and it failed, scrambling my script. A couple of days later, GPT-5 launched, so I gave that a try, and it got the script right on the very first try. Now, my script spits out a spreadsheet sorted by rank, making spotting the best deals a little easier than before.

In the days since, I’ve used GPT-5 to set up a synced Python environment across two Macs and begun the process of creating a series of Zapier automations to simplify other administrative tasks. These tasks are all very specific to MacStories and the work I do, so I’ve stuck with scripting them instead of building standalone apps. However, it’s great to hear about Ortolani’s experiences with creating interfaces for native and web apps. It opens up the possibility of creating tools for the rest of the MacStories team that would be easier to install and maintain than walking people through what I’ve done in Terminal.

This statement from Ortolani also resonated with me:

As much as I can understand what code is when I’m looking at it, I just can’t write it. Vibe coding has opened up a whole new world for me. I’ve spent more than a decade designing static concepts, but now I can make those concepts actually work. It changes everything for someone like me.

I can’t decide whether this is like being able to read a foreign language without knowing how to speak it or the other way around, but I completely understand where Ortolani is coming from. It’s helped me a lot to have a basic understanding of how code works, how apps are built, and – as Ortolani mentions – how to write a good prompt for the LLM you’re using.

What’s remarkable to me is that those few ingredients combined with GPT-5 have gone such a long way to eliminate the upfront time I need to get projects like these off the ground. Instead of spending days on research without knowing whether I could accomplish what I set out to do, I’ve been able to just get started and, like Ortolani, iterate quickly, wasting little time if I reach a dead end and, best of all, shortening the time until I have a result that makes my life a little easier.

Federico and I have said many times that LLMs are another form of automation and automation is just another form of coding. GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.1 are rapidly blurring the lines between both, making automation and coding more accessible than ever.

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Reuters Reports that Apple’s New EU Developer Terms May Avoid Further Penalties→

Reuters reports that Apple is on the brink of satisfying EU regulators with the changes the company has made to its developer program in the EU:

Apple’s changes to its App Store rules and fees will likely secure the green light from EU antitrust regulators, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, a move that would stave off potentially hefty daily fines for the iPhone maker.

Reuters estimates that those fines, which would be on top of the 500 million euro fine already levied against Apple, could be as much as 50 million euros per day.

No deal is finished until it’s formally announced, but if Reuters’ sources are correct, we should see an announcement from the European Commission in the coming weeks.

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