For the past week, I’ve been testing the Belkin Stage PowerGrip. It’s an iPhone accessory that adds a DSLR-like grip to your iPhone while simultaneously charging it. Belkin isn’t the first company to make an accessory like this, but the Stage PowerGrip delivers a bigger battery at a more affordable price than its competitors. That’s why it initially caught my eye. However, what I didn’t expect was for the device to make a compelling case to become part of my everyday on-the-go setup, which it absolutely has. Here’s why.
More Than Just a Camera Grip: Belkin’s Stage PowerGrip for iPhone
Podcast Rewind: Phone Reviews and Daily Notes
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Comfort Zone
Matt reviews basically every phone of 2025, Chris has Apple silicon Christmas in October, and the whole gang gets creative on their phones.
In the Cozy Zone, the gang discusses everything in their travel bags.
MacStories Unwind
This week, John asks Federico to explain how he uses Daily Notes in Notion, after which they discuss the AI browsers and why they are so disappointing.
Finding the Best Sleep Tracker→
Earlier this year, Andrej Karpathy wrote an in-depth analysis of four sleep tracking methods that Federico recently recommended I read. I’m glad he did, Karpathy, an AI researcher who has worked at OpenAI and Tesla, took the kind of nerdy, data-driven approach that I love.
Over the course of two months, Karpathy plotted sleep tracking results from:
- an Oura ring
- a Whoop fitness band
- an 8Sleep Pod 4 Ultra smart mattress cover
- the Apple Watch running the app AutoSleep
Karpathy got the best results from the Whoop band and Oura ring, but just as interesting were how the data correlated to how he felt after a good night’s sleep:
…my sleep scores correlate strongly with the quality of work I am able to do that day. When my score is low, I lack agency, I lack courage, I lack creativity, I’m simply tired. When my sleep score is high, I can power through anything. On my best days, I can sit down and work through 14 hours and barely notice the passage of time. It’s not subtle.
I recommend reading the entire post for all the details of how each tracking method compared on variety of metrics. I’ve long been intrigued by the Whoop band and Oura ring as a companion to the Apple Watch. There’s overlap between the devices, but Karpathy has planted a seed in my brain that may lead to my own multi-device experiments.
Sky Acquired by OpenAI
Sky, the AI automation app that Federico previewed for MacStories readers in May, has been acquired by OpenAI.
Nick Turley, OpenAI’s Vice President & Head of ChatGPT said of the deal in an OpenAI press release:
We’re building a future where ChatGPT doesn’t just respond to your prompts, it helps you get things done. Sky’s deep integration with the Mac accelerates our vision of bringing AI directly into the tools people use every day.
I’m not surprised by this development at all. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have all been developing features similar to what Sky could do for a while now. In addition, Sam Altman was an investor in Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky.
Ari Weinstein of Software Applications Incorporated, who was one of the co-founders of Workflow, which was later acquired by Apple and became Shortcuts, said of the acquisition:
We’ve always wanted computers to be more empowering, customizable, and intuitive. With LLMs, we can finally put the pieces together. That’s why we built Sky, an AI experience that floats over your desktop to help you think and create. We’re thrilled to join OpenAI to bring that vision to hundreds of millions of people.
It’s not entirely clear what will become of Sky at this point. OpenAI’s press release simply states that the company will be working on integrating Sky’s capabilities.
Claude Adds Screenshot and Voice Shortcuts to Its Mac App
Anthropic introduced a couple of new features in its Claude Mac app today that lower the friction of working with the chatbot.
First, after giving screenshot and accessibility permissions to Claude, you can double tap the Option button to activate the app’s chat field as an overlay at the bottom of your screen. The shortcut simultaneously triggers crosshairs for dragging out a rectangle on your Mac’s screen. Once you do, the app takes a screenshot and the chat field moves to the side of the area you selected with the screenshot attached. Type your query, and it and the screenshot are sent together to Claude, switching you to Claude and kicking off your request automatically.
Instead of double-tapping the Option key, you can also set the keyboard shortcut to Option + Space, or a custom key combination. That’s nice because not all automation systems support two modifier keys as a shortcut. For example, Logitech’s Creative Console cannot record a double tap of the Option button as a shortcut.
I send a lot of screenshots to Claude, especially when I’m debugging scripts. This new shortcut will greatly accelerate that process simply by switching me back to Claude for my answer. It’s a small thing, but I expect it will add up over time.
My only complaint is that the experience has been inconsistent across my Macs. On my M1 Max Mac Studio with 64GB of memory, it takes 3-5 seconds for Claude to attach the screenshot to its chat field whereas on the M4 Max MacBook Pro I’ve been testing, the process is almost instant. The MacBook Pro is a much faster Mac than my Mac Studio, but I was surprised at the difference since it occurs at the screenshot phase of the interaction. My guess is that another app or system process is interfering with Claude.
The other new feature of Claude is that you can set the Caps Lock button to trigger voice input. Once you trigger voice input, an orange cloud appears at the bottom of your screen indicating that your microphone is active. The visual is a little over-the-top, but the feature is handy. Tap the Caps Lock button again to finish the recording, which is then transcribed into a Claude chat field at the bottom of your screen. Just hit return to upload your query, and you’re switched back to the Claude app for a response.
One of the greatest strengths of modern AI chatbots is their multi-modality. What Anthropic has done with these new Claude features is made two of those modes – images and audio – a little bit easier, which gets you from input to a response a little faster, which I appreciate. I highly recommend giving both features a try.
Podcast Rewind: What’s Next for Apple Intelligence, Budget Android Handhelds, and an Interview with Joe Rosensteel
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
AppStories
This week, Federico and John discuss what might be next for Apple Intelligence and how it fits into the broader AI market.
On AppStories+, Federico and John cover the fallout from the Sora app and why AI can’t replace human creativity.
This episode is sponsored by:
- Claude: Get 50% off Claude Pro, including access to Claude Code.
NPC: Next Portable Console
This week, Steam Deck, Switch 2, and Vision Pro accessory follow-up, Thunderbolt 5 eGPUs, Android handhelds break into the budget category, and the ROG Xbox Ally X is a bust.
On NPC XL, Apple’s M5 chip promise gaming advances on the iPad, but can it deliver?
First, Last, Everything
On this episode, we’re joined by Joe Rosensteel. Joe is a VFX artist who’s worked on big-name Hollywood productions as well as smaller commercial projects. He’s a writer on his own blog and for the Six Colors website, and he also has a podcast with Dan Sturm called Defocused.
Max Weinbach on the M5’s Neural Accelerators→
In addition to the M5 iPad Pro, which I reviewed earlier today, I also received an M5 MacBook Pro review unit from Apple last week. I really wanted to write a companion piece to my iPad Pro story about MLX and the M5’s Neural Accelerators; sadly, I couldn’t get the latest MLX branch to work on the MacBook Pro either.
However, Max Weinbach at Creative Strategies did, and shared some impressive results with the M5 and its GPU’s Neural Accelerators:
These dedicated neural accelerators in each core lead to that 4x speedup of compute! In compute heavy parts of LLMs, like the pre-fill stage (the processing that happens during the time to first token) this should lead to massive speed-ups in performance! The decode, generating each token, should be accelerated by the memory bandwidth improvements of the SoC.
Now, I would have loved to show this off! Unfortunately, full support for the Neural Accelerators isn’t in MLX yet. There is preliminary support, though! There will be an update later this year with full support, but that doesn’t mean we can’t test now! Unfortunately, I don’t have an M4 Mac on me (traveling at the moment) but what I was able to do was compare M5 performance before and after tensor core optimization! We’re seeing between a 3x and 4x speedup in prefill performance!
Looking at Max’s benchmarks with Qwen3 8B and a ~20,000-token prompt, there is indeed a 3.65x speedup in tokens/sec in the prefill stage – jumping from 158.2 tok/s to a remarkable 578.7 tok/s. This is why I’m very excited about the future of MLX for local inference on M5, and why I’m also looking forward to M5 Pro/M5 Max chipsets in future Mac models.
Remess Visualizes Your Life in Texts
Text messages are a chronicle of our lives. But by the same token, those conversations remain locked away in Messages. The app’s search has improved with macOS Tahoe, which I appreciate, but finding past snippets of a chat log doesn’t allow you to understand the full arc of conversations across your entire family and friend group.
That’s where Remess by Fahmi Omer comes in. It’s a Mac app that accesses your Messages and Contacts databases locally to paint a picture of your life in text messages.
To run Remess, which is an open source project that you can inspect on GitHub, you need to run a Terminal command that bypasses Apple’s Gatekeeper protection and give it both full disk access and access to your contacts. The developer says the app only accesses your information locally, but there’s an element of trust there that’s worth considering before you take the plunge. That said, if you go for it like I did, Remess is a lot of fun.
Let’s take a look.
The app starts out very high level with the total number of messages sent and received:
Then, it digs into the details. This is what writing at MacStories for nearly a decade looks like:
From all-time numbers, Remess digs into what a typical day of texting looks like for you:
The app also calculates the year you sent the most messages and how many people you’ve exchanged texts. After this brief tour of your life in texts, Remess lands on a dashboard with additional data, a graph of your texting totals, a word cloud of most frequently-used words, and a ranking of your contacts and groups ranked by texting totals.
You can filter texting totals by year, too, which is an interesting way to spot patterns in your messaging habits.
The word cloud should probably filter out common words, but the rest is about what you’d expect from me: Mac, app, shortcuts.
I’m not sure I learned anything about my texting habits from Remess that I didn’t already have a sense of based on my day-to-day messaging. Still, it’s interesting and fun to see the magnitude of the number of texts and the way they’ve accumulated over time.
Remess is available as a free download directly from its developer.
M5 iPad Pro Review: An AI and Gaming Upgrade for AI and Games That Aren’t There Yet
How do you review an iPad Pro that’s visually identical to its predecessor and marginally improves upon its performance with a spec bump and some new wireless radios?
Let me try:
I’ve been testing the new M5 iPad Pro since last Thursday. If you’re a happy owner of an M4 iPad Pro that you purchased last year, stay like that; there is virtually no reason for you to sell your old model and get an M5-upgraded edition. That’s especially true if you purchased a high-end configuration of the M4 iPad Pro last year with 16 GB of RAM, since upgrading to another high-end M5 iPad Pro model will get you…16 GB of RAM again.
The story is slightly different for users coming from older iPad Pro models and those on lower-end configurations, but barely. Starting this year, the two base-storage models of the iPad Pro are jumping from 8 GB of RAM to 12 GB, which helps make iPadOS 26 multitasking smoother, but it’s not a dramatic improvement, either.
Apple pitches the M5 chip as a “leap” for local AI tasks and gaming, and to an extent, that is true. However, it is mostly true on the Mac, where – for a variety of reasons I’ll cover below – there are more ways to take advantage of what the M5 can offer.
In many ways, the M5 iPad Pro is reminiscent of the M2 iPad Pro, which I reviewed in October 2022: it’s a minor revision to an excellent iPad Pro redesign that launched the previous year, which set a new bar for what we should expect from a modern tablet and hybrid computer – the kind that only Apple makes these days.
For all these reasons, the M5 iPad Pro is not a very exciting iPad Pro to review, and I would only recommend this upgrade to heavy iPad Pro users who don’t already have the (still remarkable) M4 iPad Pro. But there are a couple of narratives worth exploring about the M5 chip on the iPad Pro, which is what I’m going to focus on for this review.