Posts in stories

watchOS 26: The MacStories Review

Last year was my first covering the watchOS beat with version 11. It turned out to be a trial by fire, with the annual software update for the world’s most popular smartwatch proving to be both sizable and significant.

While controversy reigned over iOS, iPadOS, and macOS regarding new Apple Intelligence features, watchOS took an exit off of that highway to a more peaceful, focused road that contained real, tangible updates. There were long-requested customizations to Activity Rings, as well as added power and functionality in the Smart Stack. Brand new features like Training Load and the Vitals app started to hint that Apple was maybe, finally, getting serious about, well, serious athletes.

If I’m being honest, I expected more of the same this year. The watchOS team seemed to be on a roll. Unfortunately, that hasn’t come to pass with watchOS 26, which – unlike watchOS 11 with Apple Intelligence – has been brought along for the ride with this year’s big controversy: Liquid Glass.

Can watchOS 26 handle this big UI overhaul and still deliver some tangible additions in this, the year of the Apple Watch’s tenth anniversary? Let’s take a look.

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macOS 26 Tahoe: The MacStories Review

I’m going to cut to the chase – I like macOS 26 Tahoe a lot. No, it’s not perfect, and yes, I wish Apple had done even more, but that’s the case every year.

What I love about Tahoe is its balance. It’s not the sort of thing you can draw up a set of specs or a table of pros and cons for. It just feels right.

The heart of why Tahoe works is that it meets users where they are better than the typical annual release. If you’ve been using macOS for years and prefer to follow a beaten path through its features, you can. You may stumble across a new feature now and then, and you’ll notice visual differences thanks to Liquid Glass, but I’ve been moving between macOS Sequoia and Tahoe all summer long, and when I’m not seeking out what’s new, everything simply feels familiar and comfortable. That’s a good thing for an OS that’s relied upon by millions of people to get their work done.

But you’re probably wondering how I can say that given the Liquid Glass design and online drama surrounding it over the summer. The thing is, whether you’re a Liquid Glass fan or foe, it’s just not as big of a deal on the Mac as it is elsewhere. I’ll explain what I like about Liquid Glass and what I don’t, but it hasn’t moved the needle at all when it comes to my daily work.

What has moved the needle are the new features available in Tahoe. They won’t get in the way of your existing workflows, but if you’re interested iprn exploring new and better ways of getting things done, there’s a lot to like about this update. That’s why I’m such a big fan of macOS 26: it’s a release that walks a careful line between the familiar and the new. There’s no adjustment period, but there are plenty of new features to explore that I think will make a big difference in the way MacStories readers use their Macs.

So join me for a tour off the beaten path to explore what you can expect to discover in macOS 26 Tahoe.

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iOS and iPadOS 26: The MacStories Review

Old and new through the liquid glass.

My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new”. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

– Don Draper (Mad Men Season 1, Episode 13 – “The Wheel”)

I was reminded of this Don Draper quote from one of my all-time favorite TV scenes – the Kodak Carousel pitch – when reflecting upon my contrasting feelings about iOS and iPadOS 26 a few weeks ago. Some of you may be wondering what I’m doing here, starting my annual review of an operating system with a Mad Men reference. But here we are today, with an eye-catching iOS update that, given the circumstances, is betting it all on the glittering allure of a new visual design, and a tablet operating system that comes full circle with old, almost nostalgic functionalities repurposed for the modern age.

I’ve spent the past three months using and working with iOS and iPadOS 26, and there’s this idea I keep coming back to: the old and new coexist in Apple’s software strategy this year, and they paint a hyperrealistic picture of a company that’s stuck in a transition phase of its own making.

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Thoughts on iPadOS 26: Hello, It’s Good to Be Back

iPadOS 26.

iPadOS 26.

Apple released the first public betas of iOS and iPadOS 26 last week, and I’m going to cut to the chase with this story: although I’m still wrapping my head around Liquid Glass and trying to understand where this new design language will land, iPadOS 26 has fundamentally revolutionized my workflow in just a little over a month. While talking to Craig Federighi at WWDC, I did get the sense that Apple was approaching the iPad platform from a different – perhaps more humble – perspective, with a newfound willingness to listen to power users and find a better balance between the simplicity of the iPad and its flexibility. Actually using iPadOS 26, however, has far exceeded my expectations – which pushed me to completely rethink my desk setup (again) and the apps I use around the iPad Pro and iPadOS 26.

Conversely, I’ve been struggling to understand iOS 26 and the role of Liquid Glass. I’ve documented my issues with Apple’s new design with a variety of examples recently, but the truth is that at this point in the beta cycle, I don’t know what to write about Liquid Glass yet. For this reason, despite my many attempts to write this story over the past few weeks, I’ve decided to take a different approach.

Today, I only feel comfortable sharing my opinion about iPadOS 26, and I’ve chosen to delay my analysis of iOS 26 until later this year. I’ve found it incredibly challenging to form an opinion on Liquid Glass and iOS 26 when everything is still so in flux and being adjusted on a beta-by-beta basis. I feel like sharing what I think about Liquid Glass right now would be a fruitless exercise, or shortsighted perhaps, one way or another. Instead, since I find iPadOS 26 to be more of a known entity at the moment, I’ve decided to focus on that and how this software update is changing the way I work. The time will come for me to write about Liquid Glass and Apple’s vision for the future of its software design. Today, though, I’m all about the iPad.

It’s been an interesting month since WWDC. This year more than ever, I have a feeling that Apple isn’t done tweaking its OSes and much will continue to change between now and September. But for now, as always, let’s dive in.

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macOS Tahoe: The MacStories Public Beta Preview

Author’s Note: Apple released the public beta of macOS 26 Tahoe last Thursday, two days after developer beta 4. Instead of rushing a preview of Tahoe to publication at the risk of missing important aspects of the release, I chose to spend the time necessary to thoroughly test Tahoe first.

A year ago, the macOS Sequoia public beta debuted with a long list of caveats. Many of the features that had been shown off at WWDC 2024 weren’t in that initial public beta release or even the initial macOS 15.0 release, and some features, like a smarter Siri, still haven’t shipped. That made Sequoia feel incomplete.

The release of macOS Tahoe 26 promises to be different. The features highlighted during WWDC 2025 are all in the public beta. Some are more polished than others, but everything is there to try today. With its surprisingly long list of new system apps, changes big and small at the macOS system level, and, of course, Liquid Glass, Tahoe’s public beta release is a fun one for users who like to explore Apple’s latest macOS innovations as early as possible.

I’m not sold on every feature, but it’s still early, and this is a beta, so I’ll reserve my final judgment for the fall. However, there’s a lot coming in macOS Tahoe, which makes it worth taking a closer look at today, so let’s dig in.

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watchOS 26: The MacStories Public Beta Preview

Author’s Note: Apple released the public beta of watchOS 26 last Thursday, two days after developer beta 4. Instead of immediately publishing a preview of watchOS 26, I took the time to review the OS again to ensure my preview accurately reflected the version released as a public beta.

Last year, watchOS 11 emerged from the bumpy launch of Apple Intelligence completely unscathed due to the fact that it included precisely zero AI features. Instead, what Apple Watch users got was a fully formed OS update that took some big swings in addition to refining many areas of the Apple Watch experience. It was a good year with notable updates across the system, particularly when it came to the Smart Stack and health and fitness features.

It’s unfortunate, though perhaps not surprising, that this year’s new watchOS release – dubbed version 26, like its OS brethren – is what might be considered a quiet year. However, after living with the beta for over a month, I’m happy to report that while there aren’t any substantial new features, there are still clever flourishes here and there that make my daily use of the Apple Watch more enjoyable.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect from watchOS 26.

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My Latest Mac Automation Tool is a Tiny Game Controller

Source: 8BitDo.

Source: 8BitDo.

I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for every use case, it excels in areas where those devices don’t because it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and costs a fraction of those other devices.

My experiments started when I read a story on Endless Mode by Nicole Carpenter, who explained how medical students turned to two tiny 8BitDo game controllers to help with their studies. The students were using an open-source flashcard app called Anki and ran into an issue while spending long hours with their flashcards:

The only problem is that using Anki from a computer isn’t too ergonomic. You’re hunched over a laptop, and your hands start cramping from hitting all the different buttons on your keyboard. If you’re studying thousands of cards a day, it becomes a real problem—and no one needs to make studying even more intense than it already is.

To relieve the strain on their hands, the med students turned to 8BitDo’s tiny Micro and Zero 2 controllers, using them as remote controls for the Anki app. The story didn’t explain how 8BitDo’s controllers worked with Anki, but as I read it, I thought to myself, “Surely this isn’t something that was built into the app,” which immediately drew me deeper into the world of 8BitDo controllers as study aides.

8BitDo markets the Micro's other uses, but for some reason, it hasn't spread much beyond the world of medical school students. Source: 8BitDo.

8BitDo markets the Micro’s other uses, but for some reason, it hasn’t spread much beyond the world of medical school students. Source: 8BitDo.

As I suspected, the 8BitDo Micro works just as well with any app that supports keyboard shortcuts as it does with Anki. What’s curious, though, is that even though medical students have been using the Micro and Zero 2 with Anki for several years and 8BitDo’s website includes a marketing image of someone using the Micro with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad, word of the Micro’s automation capabilities hasn’t spread much. That’s something I’d like to help change.

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Swift Assist, Part Deux

At WWDC 2024, I attended a developer tools briefing with Jason Snell, Dan Moren, and John Gruber. Later, I wrote about Swift Assist, an AI-based code generation tool that Apple was working on for Xcode.

That first iteration of Swift Assist caught my eye as promising, but I remember asking at the time whether it could modify multiple files in a project at once and being told it couldn’t. What I saw was rudimentary by 2025’s standards with things like Cursor, but I was glad to see that Apple was working on a generative tool for Xcode users.

In the months that followed, I all but forgot that briefing and story, until a wave of posts asking, “Whatever happened to Swift Assist?” started appearing on social media and blogs. John Gruber and Nick Heer picked up on the thread and came across my story, citing it as evidence that the MIA feature was real but curiously absent from any of 2024’s Xcode betas.

This year, Jason Snell and I had a mini reunion of sorts during another developer tools briefing. This time, it was just the two of us. Among the Xcode features we saw was a much more robust version of Swift Assist that, unlike in 2024, is already part of the Xcode 26 betas. Having been the only one who wrote about the feature last year, I couldn’t let the chance to document what I saw this year slip by.

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Interview: Craig Federighi Opens Up About iPadOS, Its Multitasking Journey, and the iPad’s Essence

iPadOS 26. Source: Apple.

iPadOS 26. Source: Apple.

It’s a cool, sunny morning at Apple Park as I’m walking my way along the iconic glass ring to meet with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, for a conversation about the iPad.

It’s the Wednesday after WWDC, and although there are still some developers and members of the press around Apple’s campus, it seems like employees have returned to their regular routines. Peek through the glass, and you’ll see engineers working at their stations, half-erased whiteboards, and an infinite supply of Studio Displays on wooden desks with rounded corners. Some guests are still taking pictures by the WWDC sign. There are fewer security dogs, but they’re obviously all good.

Despite the list of elaborate questions on my mind about iPadOS 26 and its new multitasking, the long history of iPad criticisms (including mine) over the years, and what makes an iPad different from a Mac, I can’t stop thinking about the simplest, most obvious question I could ask – one that harkens back to an old commercial about the company’s modular tablet:

In 2025, what even is an iPad according to Federighi?

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