Today, Apple announced the finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. The App Store Awards are Apple’s annual celebration of exceptional apps and games across 12 categories spanning the company’s platforms. It’s an excellent collection that includes solo developers, small indie teams, big companies, and many MacStories favorites.
Here’s the complete list of finalists.
As we head into the final weeks of 2025, Federico and I figured it would be a good time to update the MacStories Setups page. There’s an ebb and flow to the gear and apps we test each year, and as the fall OS update season fades into the past, it’s not unusual for one or both of us to take stock of our setup and make changes. That’s been very true for both of us this year, but in different ways.
Federico has been focused on simplifying his hardware setup and testing a long list of apps and services. In contrast, I’ve made fewer gear cuts, focusing more on strategic changes to the gadgets I use and settling on a core set of work apps.
The result is that Federico’s hardware setup changes have primarily been updates to his Apple and portable gaming gear. He made the transition from the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the iPhone Air, and couldn’t be happier with the result. He also replaced the M4 iPad Pro with the latest M5 model and moved from the AirPods 4 to the AirPods Pro 3.
Both of us ditched our previous Apple Vision Pro head strap solutions for the Apple Dual Knit Band, which has been a big upgrade. It’s comfortable, and having one dial to adjust both bands is both clever and far simpler than other solutions I’ve tried.
Federico also added the Ayn Thor to his handheld gaming lineup. The Thor, which I also bought this fall, is a dual-screen OLED gaming handheld that runs Android. It’s perfect for emulating dual-screen systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but it has also been excellent for game streaming and testing the emerging world of emulating SteamOS on Android. If game tinkering is your thing and this sounds intriguing, we have two episodes of NPC: Next Portable Console that go in-depth on the Ayn Thor.
Today, Apple released version 26.1 of its full family of OSes. Every platform received attention, including the proverbial “bug fixes and feature enhancements,” but it was iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1 that received the most changes that are likely to be noticed by users.
Let’s start with iOS 26.1 because most of the changes to it are reflected in iPadOS, too. Probably the biggest news is a new setting that allows users to choose between Clear and Tinted versions of Apple’s signature Liquid Glass design. Many readers we’ve heard from like Liquid Glass or didn’t notice a substantial difference when they updated to iOS and iPadOS 26, but for some, the design change was a regression in readability. With iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26.1, users can opt for a Tinted version of Liquid Glass that reduces transparency, increasing the design’s opacity and enhancing contrast.
Liquid Glass is an opinionated design, so I’m a little surprised at this change. I like Liquid Glass in more places than I don’t, but given the readability issues some people experienced, this change is a good one. If you like Liquid Glass or barely noticed it to begin with, you’re fine. However, if it rubbed you the wrong way, check out the Liquid Glass setting in the Display & Brightness section of Settings, which has a helpful before-and-after preview of what the change looks like.
With iOS 26, Apple placed two big buttons onscreen when an alarm went off. One was for stop and the other snooze. That wasn’t a big deal for many of the alarms you set throughout the day, but when you’re waking up in the morning blurry-eyed, two big buttons stacked on top of each other weren’t ideal. For a lot of users, it was a toss-up whether stabbing at their iPhone through a morning haze would stop their alarm or snooze it.
With iOS and iPadOS 26.1, the ‘Stop’ button for an alarm set in the system Clock app now requires a slide to stop gesture, which echoes the Slide to Unlock gesture of the original iPhone. The more deliberate gesture is a good move on Apple’s part. I can’t imagine someone tapping and sliding their finger to stop an alarm by accident.
Apple has also refined Local Capture for the iPhone and iPad, which is great. Local capture allows you to record high-quality audio and video from an iPhone or iPad, while simultaneously on a video call using a service like Zoom. It’s a feature that podcasters wanted for many years, and although I was excited to find that Apple had listened to our annual requests with iOS and iPadOS 26, the implementation fell a little short because it didn’t allow for gain control, making it difficult to get a properly balanced recording with some microphones. Likewise, there was no option in the first iteration of the feature to pick where your recording was saved.
With iOS and iPadOS 26.1, both issues have been addressed sooner than many of us expected, which is fantastic. Now, you can adjust gain and pick a save location for the files you record from Settings. It’s great to see Apple react so quickly to the feedback it received on this feature. The feature fell just short enough in its original implementation that I had decided not to rely on it unless I had no choice. However, although it’s not how I’m going to record most of the time, local recording now has sufficient settings that I will feel a lot more comfortable relying on it in the future.
I don’t know about you, but it’s not uncommon for me to accidentally activate my iPhone’s camera by inadvertently swiping left on my Lock Screen. For me, it’s a once-in-a-while thing, but if it happens to you a lot, you can now deactivate the gesture in Settings under the Camera section.
There are relatively minor changes to Photos, too. The interface elements for playing multiple selected images as a slideshow, marking them as favorites, or hiding them are now at the top of the Photo app’s three-dot “More” menu.
The iOS update includes a bunch of other small changes:
The lion’s share of changes to iOS are carried over to iPadOS 26.1, but there are a couple of revisions to the iPad’s OS that are unique to it.
First, Slide Over is back. Apple heard from a vocal group of iPad users who relied on Slide Over to get their work done and has added the feature back to the OS with a twist. The new Slide Over supports a single app tucked just offscreen with a little Picture-In-Picture style indicator along the edge of your iPad’s screen. Previously, you could switch between multiple apps using a dedicated Slide Over switcher interface. However, now, your Slide Over window can be resized to any size, which wasn’t possible before. Also, the single Slide Over app is a per-display restriction, meaning that if you use an external display with your iPad, you get a second Slide Over app.
Second, Apple has added some new menu items for managing window. There are now options to hide your current window, hide your other windows, and close all of your windows, all of which close gaps between how windows work on the iPad and Mac.
Like iOS and iPadOS 26.1, macOS Tahoe has gained a tinted version of Liquid Glass. If Apple is intent on preserving maximum transparency in Music and Photos, I may give the “tinted” version a try. I generally like Liquid Glass on the Mac, but it’s not perfect, and “tinted” mode may help.
Finally, AutoMix, the feature that uses Apple Intelligence to transition tracks of a playlist by matching their beats, now works with AirPlay. When I first tested this feature over the summer, I assumed AutoMix would work automatically with my Bluetooth speakers that I use at my desk, but that wasn’t the case. Now, however, whether you use AirPlay speakers or wired speakers, AutoMix will work.
Sadly, there’s not much to report about visionOS, watchOS, or tvOS. Each undoubtedly received under-the-hood improvements, but you’ll have to wait for substantive new features from them.
If there’s a theme surrounding the 26.1 updates to Apple’s OSes, it’s that the company is listening to its users. Tinted Liquid Glass, the return of Slide Over, and the updates to the very niche Local Capture feature are all great examples of Apple’s engineering teams turning around meaningful updates to its OSes based on feedback from users. That’s great to see, and a trend that I hope continues long into the future.
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.
Daft Music asks a question that’s been on my mind for a long while: what if Apple Music started over with a new Mac app? As a service, I love Apple Music. I’ve been a subscriber since day one. But I’m less enamored with the Music app, especially on the Mac.
Music on the Mac has a long history dating back nearly 25 years to Apple’s acquisition of SoundJam MP, which became iTunes, an app for organizing your music collection, syncing it to your iPod, and, later, buying music. Over the years, iTunes expanded to encompass TV, movies, books, apps, and even courses, which was too much for one app. So Apple began dismantling iTunes, with the final blow coming in 2019 with the release of macOS Catalina. The update retired iTunes, replacing it with Apple Music and dedicated apps for other types of media.
Music was a significant break from the design of iTunes, but as a long-time user of both iTunes and Music, what didn’t seem to change as much was the app’s underlying code. That’s consistent with reporting at the time that Music was an AppKit app built on the bones of iTunes. The choice to build Music for macOS on top of the iTunes foundation had the advantage of allowing Apple to preserve iTunes features that the Music app lacked on other platforms. However, the decision had a big downside, too. Built on what was already a nearly 20-year-old code base, Music inherited iTunes’ bugs, which have hung around unfixed for years.
That’s where Daft Music by Dennis Oberhoff comes in. It’s a simple, elegant Apple Music “do-over” that also happens to be the first Mac app I’ve tried that was built from the ground up for Liquid Glass. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dig in.
Liquid Glass is the sort of change that takes some getting used to from the perspective of both users and developers. The design language shifted a lot over the course of the summer beta season, which made developers’ lives tougher than in some years. This has resulted in a variety of Liquid Glass implementations across our favorite apps, which is a fascinating study in the range of designs Liquid Glass encompasses.
Today, we wanted to share some of our favorite implementations of Liquid Glass and other features debuted this fall by indie developers. We’ll have more coverage in the weeks ahead, but let’s dive into some of the best OS 26 updates we’ve seen so far.
From developer Klemens Strasser, Art of Fauna is a unique jigsaw puzzle game with a focus on accessibility and animal conservation. Each puzzle features a gorgeous wildlife illustration from the 18th or 19th century and can be solved either by aligning pieces of the picture or by rearranging written descriptions of the animal pictured phrase by phrase. Everything about the app, from the font to the colors to the complexity of the puzzle phrases, can be adjusted to fit each user’s needs. With its beautiful artwork, intuitive gameplay, ambient sound design, and adaptability, it’s no wonder the app won an Apple Design Award for Inclusivity this year.
Version 1.8 of Art of Fauna came out alongside iOS 26 with Game Center integration and Liquid Glass design elements in its navigation buttons. But the most interesting new feature is integration with a new app from the team behind Structured called Awake. Put simply, Awake is an alarm clock app that helps you wake up by challenging you to accomplish a task before you can disable your alarm in the morning. With this integration, you can choose to make an Art of Fauna puzzle your morning mission, starting your day with some brain training and a beautiful puzzle. In Awake, you can select the difficulty level of the puzzle you’re presented with each morning, as well as whether you’d like the app to prefer unplayed puzzles over previously played ones.
Art of Fauna is available on iPhone and iPad. It can be downloaded from the App Store and includes ten puzzles for free. There are 100 other puzzles available from five different biomes that can be purchased all at once for $8.99 or in packs of 20 for $2.99 each. 20% of all proceeds from the app are donated to nature preservation causes, and you can learn more about the supported causes in the app’s Giving Back section.
Marcos Tanaka’s watch later utility is a go-to for many – myself included – when it comes to saving, organizing, and watching YouTube videos. With its latest update, version 2.6, Play has added several features enabled by iOS 26.
First up is a Liquid Glass redesign. The sidebar, toolbar, and buttons are all elevated above the content and incorporate the transparent glass material. Buttons and view transitions now feature some fun animations, too, like when the ‘+’ button morphs into the Add Video popover once it’s tapped.
The on-device Apple Intelligence model has enabled Tanaka to add a couple of new AI features as well. Each video’s detail view now includes a ‘Generate’ button that will create and present a text summary of the video’s contents. For those who want to get an idea of what a video is about before watching it, or for those who want a quick refresh on a video they’ve watched before, this feature will come in handy, and it’s a clever application of the on-device model now available to developers. Also, when adding tags to a video, Play can now suggest tags based on a video’s contents, both existing tags and new tags that you can create.
Play is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple TV and can be purchased from the App Store for $2.99. Additional features, like subscribing to channels within the app and searching video transcripts, require a subscription to Play Premium, which costs $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $99.99 for a lifetime subscription.
Amazon’s Big Deal Days runs today and tomorrow (October 7–8), so I thought I’d share some of the best deals I’ve discovered so far. We’ll be keeping an eye out for other deals and posting them on the MacStories Deals accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, too, so be sure to follow either for the very latest finds.
For prices, be sure to visit the MacStories Amazon storefront.
Events like Big Deal Days are always a great opportunity to pick up fast external SSD storage. I’ve used Samsung’s T line of external drives for years, starting with the T5. Lately, I’ve switched to the company’s T9 portable SSDs because they feature USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which offers the fastest transfers you can get short of something like Thunderbolt 4 or 5, delivering 2,000 MB/s. That’s plenty fast for working with big files or moving a bunch of smaller files from one device to another. I’ve used the T9 for Carbon Copy Cloner backups, Time Machine backups, editing in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, and moving my ROM library from one handheld device to another, and it’s been reliable in every case.
During Big Deal Days, the biggest discount is on the 2TB model, with the 1TB model a close second. Depending on your storage needs, you can’t go wrong with either.
More recently, I also started using Lexar’s Armor 700 Portable SSD. In fact, it was one of these drives that we used to transfer huge video and audio files from Apple’s podcast studio at WWDC back to my hotel room for editing.
Like Samsung’s T9, Lexar’s drive features 2,000 MB/s transfer speeds, plus an aluminum case for heat dissipation, a rubberized exterior to help protect against drops, and IP66 water and dust resistance. I’ve been using the 1TB model of the Armor 700, but it’s the 4TB model that’s on the deepest discount during Big Deal Days.
For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront.
Logitech has gone all-in for Amazon’s big sales event, too. There are a bunch of keyboards, mice, and other accessories on sale, but I’d focus on these three:
The MX Keys S for Mac was my go-to keyboard for years. I’ve switched to Apple’s Magic Keyboard more recently, but if you’re looking for an alternative low-profile keyboard made for the Mac, this is a great pick.
Keys-to-Go 2 is the keyboard I throw in my bag when I need to connect to a handheld gaming device, or when I want a keyboard “just in case” but don’t want to carry my iPad’s Magic Keyboard case. The replaceable watch battery it came with is still going strong, and the integrated cover keeps it from getting damaged. It’s not the most ergonomic keyboard ever designed, but it’s perfect for lightweight travel.
I got a POP Mouse for the same reason I have Logitech’s Keys-to-Go 2 keyboard. It’s a good lightweight on-the-go mouse I can connect to multiple devices. I love that it comes in bright colors, too.
For prices, visit the MacStories Amazon storefront.
As Apple’s newest and most cutting-edge platform, visionOS is also the hardest to nail down. Vision Pro as a product is still so nascent that people don’t quite know what to make of it. Is it a VR headset for gaming and watching movies? Is it a specialized tool for designers and doctors? Or could it be a computer that everyday people might one day be interested in using for both work and play?
The jury is still out. Although the Vision Pro is very much a product you can buy right now and visionOS is an operating system that users run every day, there’s still an intangible element surrounding the whole ordeal. Most people who aren’t enthusiasts or early adopters have no firsthand experience of what the platform is like. The current form factor limits the potential user base for visionOS to those willing to wear a bulky headset regularly. It’s simply not a platform that just anyone can easily pick up and try for themselves.
But for those who do take the plunge, there’s something about visionOS that’s undeniably compelling on a fundamental level. It just feels cool to see windows and objects within your real space and then be able to move them around freely using your eyes and hands. It’s an interaction model that’s long been dreamed about and speculated on, and it’s available in the here and now.
For some, the form factor tradeoffs and software limitations of the Vision Pro are enough to outweigh the novelty and magic of it all. But there are others who can’t get enough of visionOS as it stands today and can see its potential to be even more in the future. For them – well, I guess I should say for us – the Vision Pro feels like the future.
Based on the ways Apple is moving the platform forward this year, it seems that the company is listening to feedback from both parties. visionOS 26 includes flashy new features for Vision Pro superfans who want to get the most out of the platform’s unique immersive experiences, but it also packs in a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to bring it closer in line with Apple’s other platforms and make the system more approachable to everyday users. And at the same time, the platform is pushing further into areas of interest like gaming and collaboration where it can offer something truly unique from anything else in Apple’s lineup.
When I reviewed visionOS 2 last year, I was amazed at the progress that the platform’s development team had made in such a short time. That pace of growth has not let up over the past year, with enhancements like Apple Intelligence and a remade Guest User mode coming in the middle of the visionOS 2 cycle. And visionOS 26 keeps that rapid development going with a ton of new features, improvements, and capabilities that make Vision Pro even more powerful and enjoyable to use.
Let’s get into it.
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.
