Late yesterday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a blistering opinion, concluding that Apple had willfully disregarded the Court’s 2021 injunction, which found that the anti-steering provisions of the App Review Guidelines violated California state law. Judge Gonzalez Rogers also referred Apple’s conduct to the U.S. Attorney to investigate whether criminal prosecution of the company and one of its employees is warranted. For its part, Apple has said it disagrees with the decision and will appeal, but it will comply with the Court’s order in the meantime.
If that all sounds like it’s a big deal, that’s because it is. Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ 80-page opinion and order don’t pull any punches, painting a damning picture of Apple’s response to the Court’s injunction. It’s a unique and unflattering look behind the curtain at how Apple responded to the Court’s 2021 order that’s worth looking at more closely.
The Lost Crown was released at the beginning of last year. Developed by Ubisoft Montpellier in France, the game was released to critical acclaim and won an Innovation in Accessibility Award at The Game Awards in 2024, but Ubisoft was unhappy with the game’s sales. The comeback of the celebrated series sold around 300,000 copies in its opening weeks, totaling around $15 million in revenue. In today’s “blockbuster or bust” gaming world, that wasn’t enough. Ubisoft released the Mask of Darkness story DLC in the fall but disbanded the team behind the game.
However, Ubisoft wasn’t finished trying to recoup its investment in The Lost Crown. The company called on its Da Nang studio to port the game to other platforms, starting with the Mac last December. The same group also adapted the game for the iPhone and iPad.
Today, The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is available everywhere. It’s on the Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, PS4 and PS5, Switch, PC, Android, and other platforms, with Android being the latest addition alongside the iPhone and iPad.
If you’re a console or PC gamer, it would have been hard to miss The Lost Crown’s release in early 2024. The game follows Sargon, a warrior in an imagined version of ancient Persia, who is tasked with trekking to Mount Qaf to save Prince Ghassan. Along the way, there are puzzles to solve and a fun combination of platforming and fluid combat. It’s a shame the game didn’t fare better because it’s an absolute gem.
I’ve played at least the opening level of The Lost Crown on an M1 MacBook Air, M4 Max MacBook Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, M4 iPad Pro, and Sony PS5. Ultimately, the game ran well on all five devices, but there were differences. The PS5 was the smoothest of all, and the game looked phenomenal on my OLED TV.
As you’d probably expect, the game runs very well on an M4 Max MacBook Pro and M4 iPad Pro, although both got quite warm, and I could clearly hear the MacBook Pro’s fans when I removed my headphones. In both cases, I noticed a little hitch in the frame rate from time to time when transitioning from one area of the map to another, but it wasn’t a big deal in either case. The Lost Crown’s gorgeous artwork and sound design really shine on both devices, too.
The worst experiences were on the iPhone and M1 MacBook Air, for different reasons. The iPhone 16 Pro Max handled the game well, and it looked great, but the game is a lot more fun on a bigger screen. I noticed more frame rate hitches on the M1 MacBook Air than on any other device, but I didn’t really expect the game to be playable, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that it worked.
Dialogue scenes work better on the iPhone than combat where everything is tiny.
Both the iPhone and iPad versions of the game have been adapted for touch. There are on-screen touch controls, but I’d highly recommend using a controller instead. The onscreen controls are well done, but The Lost Crown’s combat feels much, much better with a controller. If you’re looking for a good controller for iPhone or iPad, check out our Setups page for a few recommendations.
An example of the mobile version’s touch controls.
The mobile versions of The Lost Crown have added automatic parrying and healing potion use, as well as a new option to slow down time during combat, all of which are designed to make the game more touchscreen-friendly. I’m glad those options are there, but again, you really should use a controller with this game. It’s also worth noting that none of the Apple platform versions of the Lost Crown include the DLC, and the Mac version is capped at 60 fps; that doesn’t bother me, but I know it’s an issue for others. The Lost Crown also supports cloud saves if you have an Ubisoft Connect account, but the saves only work Mac-to-Mac or among iOS and iPadOS devices, which stinks.
Finally, we need to talk about the princely price Ubisoft is charging for The Lost Crown on the Mac. The game is $40, which is less than the $60 launch price over a year ago, but now, you can pick it up for as low as $15–$25 on other platforms, depending on whether it comes with the DLC. Given that difference, it’s hard to recommend the Mac version of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown unless you have no other way to play it.
Playing on iPhone with a controller.
The iPhone and iPad versions are much more reasonable. First of all, you can download and play the tutorial level of the game for free to see if The Last Crown is for you, which I appreciate. Second, until May 5, the full game is available for $9.99 – the best deal available anywhere. There’s no guarantee you’ll ever have the option to play the DLC on either device, but $10 is fair for anyone who prefers to play games on their iPhone or an iPad. After May 5, the price is set to rise to $14.99, which is in line with console versions of the game that don’t come with the DLC.
So in the final analysis, there’s not much to commend the Mac version of The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown if you have any other way of playing it because it’s more than double the price of PC and console versions. The iPhone and iPad versions are a closer call, especially while the game is on sale for $10. The Lost Crown looks great on both and plays well (though not perfectly), but any iPhone’s screen is a little small for a game like The Lost Crown. That said, if your preference is for portability or you don’t have the option of a PC or console, The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is worth downloading on your iPhone or iPad to try the free tutorial level.
One aspect of macOS that I truly love is the level of customization that it allows for. Out of the box, Apple’s desktop operating system is easy to use, and its user interface has been streamlined over the years around its core principles: apps, windows, icons, and the mouse cursor. That being said, the Mac differs from Apple’s other platforms when it comes to third-party apps. Apps like BetterTouchTool, Raycast, Moom, and Bartender perfectly illustrate how developers are able to create far-reaching, advanced utilities for the Mac, sometimes to the extent of fundamentally changing how you use your computer.
But I’m not here to talk about these powerful apps today. Rather, I would like to highlight the other reason why I am so thankful for this ecosystem of third-party apps on the Mac: they can simply be a lot of fun. Over the past few months, I have collected and adopted a series of small, whimsical additions to my Mac’s user interface. Most of them are nothing short of pointless – except for the fact that they have made using my Mac an absolute joy, even if only in subtle ways.
From custom icons to unnecessary sound effects, here is a roundup of my favorite additions. My hope is that this can be a starting point for anyone willing to join me in the club of more whimsical Mac setups.
It’s not often that I come across something that slides so effortlessly into my everyday workflow as the MOFT Invisible Stand has. It doesn’t use batteries, it takes up negligible space, and it’s so light that I never question throwing it in my bag when I leave the house. The stand is barely there until I need it, which is when it really shines.
I’ve been experimenting with different automations and command line utilities to handle audio and video transcripts lately. In particular, I’ve been working with Simon Willison’s LLM command line utility as a way to interact with cloud-based large language models (primarily Claude and Gemini) directly from the macOS terminal.
For those unfamiliar, Willison’s LLM CLI tool is a command line utility that lets you communicate with services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude using shell commands and dedicated plugins. The llm command is extremely flexible when it comes to input and output; it supports multiple modalities like audio and video attachments for certain models, and it offers custom schemas to return structured output from an API. Even for someone like me – not exactly a Terminal power user – the different llm commands and options are easy to understand and tweak.
Today, I want to share a shortcut I created on my Mac that takes long transcripts of YouTube videos and:
reformats them for clarity with proper paragraphs and punctuation, without altering the original text,
extracts key points and highlights from the transcript, and
organizes highlights by theme or idea.
I created this shortcut because I wanted a better system for linking to YouTube videos, along with interesting passages from them, on MacStories. Initially, I thought I could use an app I recently mentioned on AppStories and Connected to handle this sort of task: AI Actions by Sindre Sorhus. However, when I started experimenting with long transcripts (such as this one with 8,000 words from Theo about Electron), I immediately ran into limitations with native Shortcuts actions. Those actions were running out of memory and randomly stopping the shortcut.
I figured that invoking a shell script using macOS’ built-in ‘Run Shell Script’ action would be more reliable. Typically, Apple’s built-in system actions (especially on macOS) aren’t bound to the same memory constraints as third-party ones. My early tests indicated that I was right, which is why I decided to build the shortcut around Willison’s llm tool.
DEVONthink is a difficult app to review because its flexibility means it can serve a wide variety of purposes. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks as an archive and research companion that houses thousands of plain text files, but the app is capable of effectively replacing your Mac’s file system, storing and cataloging all sorts of files. With lightning-fast search, tagging, and a plethora of other organization methods, DEVONthink 3 has a well-earned reputation as a premier tool for researchers working with lots of files. However, DEVONthink’s capabilities are so varied that it can also serve as a text editor, an RSS reader, a read-later app, and a lot more.
Today, DEVONtechnologies is releasing a public beta of DEVONthink 4, a big update with a focus on AI, but with other new features and refinements to existing capabilities, too. Which of these features matters most to you will depend in large measure on how you use the app. I’m going to focus on the new AI tools because those are the additions that have had the greatest impact on the way I use DEVONthink, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the app offers many other tools that may suit your needs better.
Marcos Tanaka kicked off his App Store career with a real banger when he released MusicHarbor, an app for following the work of your favorite music artists on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. We awarded MusicHarbor App of the Year in 2020, and since then, it has been steadily updated, making it my go-to app for catching up on my favorite bands. Today, MusicHarbor’s latest update, version 5.0, takes the app even further with new news, top chart, time capsule, and list features.
A lot has changed in my professional life over the past year. As of today, I am working fully from home on three separate long-running projects, and now more than ever, the web browser has become central for all three. Since the M2 MacBook Air is my only computer, I found myself in urgent need of a way to allow these virtual workspaces to coexist on the same device.
Fortunately, Apple added profiles to Safari in macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17 (then later in visionOS 2). Profiles offer a way to keep your bookmarks, cookies, extensions, and browsing history separate between, say, a Personal profile and a Work profile. Even though Google Chrome and Firefox have had similar solutions in place for a while, Safari remains my web browser of choice, so I wanted to take full advantage of the new feature.
In my prolonged usage, Safari profiles work exactly as intended. I’ve set up four different profiles: a Personal profile and three separate work profiles. They are each logged into a different Google account, and they each have their own set of bookmarks, their own pinned tabs for quick access to relevant tools and web apps, and their own set of extensions. Safari makes it easy enough to tell profile windows apart by allowing you to assign a custom icon and color to each one.
That being said, Safari’s implementation of profiles has one major UI flaw: Apple has made it unusually cumbersome to switch between them on the fly, or even to launch Safari into a specific profile directly. So, to no one’s surprise, I have once again attempted to leverage the power of Mac automation utility BetterTouchTool to come up with a workaround. The solution I’ve arrived at is simple, but it makes a huge difference.
It’s been quite a while since I did a full review of Agile Tortoise’s Terminology, an extensible dictionary and reference tool for the iPhone and iPad. It’s hard to believe the app has been around for 15 years now, but with today’s release of version 5.0, Greg Pierce has introduced a thoroughly modern ground-up rewrite of the app that is richer and more extensible than ever, making it one of my favorite research tools.
