2025-09-30 18:58:57
Source: Logitech.
Today, Logitech introduced an updated version of its MX Master series mouse dubbed the MX Master 4. It’s a good upgrade, but the changes are largely incremental; while I like it a lot, the MX Master 4 won’t be for everyone. Logitech sent me the MX Master 4 to try, and I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks, so I thought I would share what the experience has been like so far.
I’ve been a fan of Logitech’s MX Master line of mice since the 2S, and before the MX Master 4 showed up at my door, I was using the MX Master 3S mouse for Mac. It’s comfortable, has a great scroll wheel, and is highly customizable. However, the soft touch surface over most of the top did mean it got dirty quite easily.
Source: Logitech.
That’s changed with the MX Master 4. Gone is most of the soft ribbed surface of the 3S. Instead, both of the MX Master 4’s buttons and most of its body are made of hard plastic. There is still some soft touch material along the right-hand side and under the surface where you place your thumb, which helps you grip the mouse. However, the top surfaces where my MX Master 3S got dirty are all hard surfaces that shouldn’t discolor and are easy to wipe off.
At first glance, it’s easy to mistake the MX Master 4 for the 3S. The overall shape of the top of the mouse is similar, but you’ll notice that there are fewer seams around the buttons, and the slope of the underside that rises to meet the top of the mouse is more dramatic. The effect is a more sleek, modern look.
On the bottom of the mouse, which is flatter than the 3S’s, you’ll also find a different pattern for the smooth pads that help the MX Master 4 glide along your table or desk. According to Logitech, the six black screws on the bottom of the mouse are designed to make the mouse easier to take apart for recycling or repair, too. Also gone is the silver strip of plastic along the base of the MX 3S as well as the silver underside. Instead, everything about the MX Master 4 is color-matched, with the buttons also encased in a semi-transparent plastic that gives the device a more futuristic look.
Source: Logitech.
As for connectivity, Logitech has finally updated its wireless Bolt receiver with a USB-C connector. Logitech says that the new receiver and antenna in the MX Master 4 combine for a 2× stronger connection than the 3S. With USB-C adoption so widespread today, most people should have no trouble finding a place to plug in the Bolt receiver. However, you can also connect via Bluetooth, and like the mouse that it replaces, the MX Master 4 can be paired with up to three different devices.
Logitech has also incorporated haptic feedback into the MX Master 4. As you use it, you’ll feel tactile responses from automations, shortcuts, and notifications. For example, when you first set up the mouse and download its software, you’ll feel haptic responses acknowledging that your mouse has been properly set up. And if you use the Actions Ring feature, a menu of shortcuts that can radiate from your pointer thanks to Logitech’s Options+ software, you’ll get haptic feedback when you mouse over the options, as well as when you select one.
The Actions Ring has been given a dedicated button on the MX Master 4 that sits under your thumb, and it shows a lot of potential. The feature reminds me of a Stream Deck or a similar device like Logitech’s own Creative Console. Instead of hardware, though, the Actions Ring is hardware-activated software that allows you to assign different actions to its buttons that can change based on the app you’re using. I haven’t used the Actions Ring extensively yet, but the convenience of having a dedicated button for frequently used menu items and other actions under my thumb is something I’m excited to spend more time with.
Other notable features of the MX Master 4 include the quietest button clicks of any MX Master mouse yet, up to 70-day battery life, and optical tracking of up to 8,000 DPI.
Source: Logitech.
The updates to the MX Master 4 are not monumental, so 3S users whose mice are in good shape may want to hold off on updating. However, if you’ve never tried the MX Master series of mice, or if you’re still using an older 2S or similar model, the new MX Master 4 is an excellent upgrade. The build quality is superb, plus the inclusion of haptics and the highly customizable Actions Ring add to the overall experience of using the MX Master 4.
The MX Master 4 mouse comes in Graphite and Pale Gray globally and Black and Graphite Charcoal in North America and Europe. The MX Master Mouse for Mac comes in White Silver and Space Black and doesn’t include the Bolt receiver but is otherwise the same as the MX Master 4 mouse. Both variants are available now for $119.99 directly from Logitech and will ship in October. Amazon has the MX Master 4 in stock, too, listing October 5 as the delivery date.
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Join Now2025-09-30 01:16:42
Source: Apple.
Earlier today, Apple published a press release highlighting some of the apps that are taking advantage of its new Foundation Models framework. As you’d expect, indie developers and small teams are well-represented among the apps promoted in the press release. Among them are:
It’s a group of apps that does a great job of demonstrating the breadth of creativity among developers who can leverage these privacy-first, on-device models to enhance their users’ experiences.
Apple’s happy to see developers adopting the new framework, too. Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said:
We’re excited to see developers around the world already bringing privacy-protected intelligence features into their apps. The in-app experiences they’re creating are expansive and creative, showing just how much opportunity the Foundation Models framework opens up. From generating journaling prompts that will spark creativity in Stoic, to conversational explanations of scientific terms in CellWalk, it’s incredible to see the powerful new capabilities that are already enhancing the apps people use every day.
Judging what we’ve seen from developers here at MacStories, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. I expect you’ll see more and more of your favorite apps adding features that take advantage of the Apple Foundation Models in the coming months.
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What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
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Join Now2025-09-27 06:30:00
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Matt wants to wrap up conversation on Liquid Glass, Niléane has a music app that feels like it’s from 2004 (and we mean that in a few good ways), and Chris judges everyone on how well they relaxed last week.
On Cozy Zone, the gang compares what they do with their old tech and packaging. Needless to say, there are some shocking revelations.
This week, John visits Mike the shipping guy, Federico’s philosophy on hardware takes a turn, John declares Apple Watch charging in the shower a myth, and we share videogame and TV picks, plus a deal.
Sigmund and Devon break down CANAL+’s immersive documentary MotoGP: Tour De Force and say one last goodbye to Acapulco upon its series finale.
For even more from the Comfort Zone crew, you can subscribe to Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is a weekly bonus episode of Comfort Zone where Matt, Niléane, and Chris invite listeners to join them in the Cozy Zone where they’ll cover extra topics, invent wilder challenges and games, and share all their great (and not so great) takes on tech. You can subscribe to Cozy Zone for $5 per month here or $50 per year here.
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MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.
If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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Join Now2025-09-26 05:29:35
Source: Lux.
Earlier this week, I shared my early impressions of the iPhone 17 Pro Max and included a few galleries of photos I’d taken at each of the model’s standard zoom levels. I was impressed by the results, which made me all the more excited to learn more of how Apple pulled this off.
One of my favorite annual iPhone camera reviews is from the team at Lux, the makers of Halide and Kino. Their experience with the iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras was similar to mine, but with a lot of nerdy camera detail that I love. The overall conclusion of their testing in New York, Iceland, and London is that:
This is, without a doubt, a great back camera system. With all cameras at 48MP, your creative choices are tremendous. I find Apple’s quip of it being ‘like having eight lenses in your pocket’ a bit much, but it does genuinely feel like having at least 5 or 6: Macro, 0.5×, 1×, 2×, 4× and 8× .
The story covers every camera and each zoom distance. Of the 2x, Lux found that:
Shooting at 2× on iPhone 17 Pro did produce noticeably better shots; I believe this can be chalked up to significantly better processing for these ‘crop shots’. Many people think Apple is dishonest in calling this an ‘optical quality’ zoom, but it’s certainly not a regular digital zoom either. I am very content with it, and I was a serious doubter when it was introduced.
Lux’s highest praise was probably for the 8x zoom:
The overall experience of shooting a lens this long should not be this good. I’ve not seen it mentioned in reviews, but the matter of keeping a 200mm lens somehow steady and not an exercise in tremendous frustration is astonishing. Apple is using both its very best hardware stabilization on this camera and software stabilization, as seen in features like Action Mode.
There are loads of beautiful photos in the post and a lot more detail than I’ve quoted here. Be sure to read through the entire post because what Apple is doing with camera hardware and software is really quite remarkable.
→ Source: lux.camera
2025-09-25 07:29:29
Matt Birchler makes a great utility for the iPhone and iPad called Quick Subtitles that generates transcripts from a wide variety of audio and video files, something I do a lot. Sometimes it’s for adding subtitles to a podcast’s YouTube video and other times, I just want to recall a bit of information from a long video without scrubbing through it. In either case, I want the process to be fast.
As Matt prepared Quick Subtitles for release, he tested it on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, an iPhone 17 Pro with the new A19 Pro, an iPhone 16 Pro Max with the A18 Pro, and an iPhone 16e with the A18. The results were remarkable, with the iPhone 17 Pro nearly matching the performance of Matt’s M4 Pro MacBook Pro and 60% faster than the A18 Pro.
I got a preview of this sort of performance over the summer when I ran an episode of NPC: Next Portable Console through Yap, an open-source project my son Finn built to test Apple’s Speech framework, which Quick Subtitles also uses. The difference is that with the release of the speedy A19 Pro, the kind of performance I was seeing in June on a MacBook Pro is essentially now possible on an iPhone, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice speed to do this sort of task if all you have with you is an iPhone 17 Pro, which I love.
If you produce podcasts or video, or simply want transcripts that you can analyze with AI, check out Quick Subtitles. In addition to generating timestamped SRT files ready for YouTube and other video projects, the app can batch-transcribe files, and use a Google Gemini or OpenAI API key that you supply to analyze the transcripts it generates. Transcription happens on-device and your API keys don’t leave your device either, which makes it more private than transcription apps that rely on cloud servers.
Quick Subtitles is available on the App Store as a free download and comes with 10 free transcriptions. A one-time In-App Purchase of $19.99 unlocks unlimited transcription and batch processing. The In-App Purchase is currently stuck in app review, but should be available soon, when I’ll be grabbing it immediately.
→ Source: birchtree.me
2025-09-24 21:01:30
Last Friday, just before midday, my new iPhone 17 Pro Max arrived at my home – a Deep Blue model with 512 GB of storage. Since then, it’s dropped neatly into my daily iPhone routine. In many ways, it’s not that different from the iPhone 16 Pro Max that I’ll be trading in. I’ve been on iOS 26 for months, so the operating system isn’t a big change, but there are some notable differences that I thought I’d share.
This year’s setup process was smoother than usual. I was in a rush to set up my iPhone because it arrived at about 11:30 AM and Federico and I were planning to record this week’s episode of AppStories all about our hardware first impressions. Given time differences, that didn’t leave me much time to get up and running.
I decided to go with restoring from an iCloud backup, which gets your iPhone to a usable state faster than other options but can take a long time to download all of your apps. It was a good call because by the time we started recording about 45 minutes later, not only did I have access to the basics, but most of the apps assigned to active Home screens had already been downloaded, giving me a chance to play around with things a bit before recording.
I had plans to go out late in the afternoon and was hoping to get as much of the transfer finished by then as possible, so I connected my iPhone 17 Pro Max to an Ethernet adapter and let it do its thing. When I left the house around 4:00 PM, I was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly all of the 520 apps I had installed were already downloaded.
The 17 Pro Max dissipates heat with the help of a vapor chamber.
Apple made a big deal of the iPhone 17 Pro line’s new vapor chamber, which, combined with the aluminum case, is designed to dissipate heat better than before. In my experience so far, it absolutely does manage heat better, but that’s not to say the phone doesn’t get pretty warm. When I was setting up my new iPhone, it got quite warm, as did my old 16 Pro Max. However, while the 16 Pro Max got hot above the Apple logo on the back of the phone, the 17 Pro Max’s heat was more evenly distributed. That meant no one spot got as hot as the 16 Pro Max, but more of the phone got warm, including the sides, which I’d never really noticed with the previous model.
In the three days since I set up the 17 Pro Max, I’ve noticed it get warm now and then, but nothing close to as warm as the 16 Pro Max typically did. I’ve been out a couple of times on warm (80—85℉) sunny days taking photos and videos, and while the 17 Pro Max gets a little warm, it’s much less noticeable than before.
Initially, I was a little underwhelmed by Apple’s iPhone lineup this year. I love the Air, but the camera tradeoffs were more than I was willing to make. As for the Pro line, I’m not a huge fan of the two-tone style and giant camera bump. It feels too industrial to me, which may be the point, but I prefer a sleeker look.
The orange case is great, but Cosmic Orange isn’t for me.
I was also disappointed by the Cosmic Orange color. I like orange but prefer something brighter like the orange Apple Silicone Case. As you can see from the image above, it’s brighter than the Cosmic Orange iPhone. I had a chance to compare them in person at a local Apple Store over the weekend, and all it did was confirm to me that I’d made the right choice getting the Deep Blue model.
Apple didn’t make a black iPhone 17 Pro this year, which led some people to expect the Deep Blue model would be closer to black than blue. As it turns out, although Deep Blue is a very dark blue, it’s not a blue that would be mistaken for black. It looks great and minimizes some of the phone’s industrial look that I don’t like, so it’s a big win in my eyes.
My Nomad MagSafe-compatible wallet usually covers the part of the 17 Pro Max with the Ceramic Shield.
The only caveat is that the Ceramic Shield on the back makes a rectangular patch that looks a little closer to gray than I’d prefer. It’s not a huge deal since I usually have a MagSafe wallet hiding that area, but again, I’m not that into the two-tone look.
I love the rounded edges of the 17 Pro Max.
Surprisingly, another aspect of the 17 Pro Max that I absolutely love is the unibody design. There’s something about how the metal wraps around from the back to front that really works for me. Part of it is that the edges are rounder than on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, making the 17 Pro Max more comfortable to hold. The unibody design also makes the phone seem more sturdy. Plus, while I know intellectually that my new phone weighs 6 grams more than the 16 Pro Max, it doesn’t feel that way when I hold both, which I think has something to do with the fact that the rounder edges of the 17 Pro Max make it feel slimmer than it really is. In what may be another mind trick, the front glass of the iPhone 17 Pro Max feels a little smoother, too.
As I mentioned, I swung by my local Apple Store on Sunday to check out the iPhone Air and the latest accessories. I’ll get to the accessories in a bit, but when I saw the Air, I had that moment of amazement that it could be so thin and light, but not one moment of regret. The Air looks great, and I’m excited for what that sort of miniaturization of iPhone hardware means for future models, but it’s not for me.
I just like having a big battery and three cameras too much to trade those for a thin iPhone. Yesterday, I charged my phone early in the day, used it relatively lightly while I was working at my desk, and then headed out in the afternoon to test the cameras some more. When I went to bed last night, I left my phone on the couch by accident, where it sat until I got up today. It still had about 50% of its battery left. I love that I rarely have to think about whether my iPhone is charged, let alone worry about it.
Over the past few days, I’ve been experimenting with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s three rear-facing cameras. In Austin Mann’s review of the iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras that I linked to yesterday, he said:
On the 16 Pro, the 5x (120mm) often felt a little too tight. The new 4x (100mm) feels far more natural and much more familiar. It’s a classic portrait and landscape focal length in the photography world, and with the bump up from 12MP to 48MP I’ve been really happy with the results.
I’m no pro photographer, but having used the new zoom cameras, I have to agree. Both focal lengths feel great, but the real star is the detail both can capture thanks to their 48MP sensors.
To show off what these cameras can do, I picked three scenes of things I might snap a quick photo of while out on a walk. I left the cameras on the Standard Photographic Style and didn’t do any cropping or editing, taking 24MP shots, which is also a default setting, with the Wide, Main, 2×, 4×, and 8× options.
First up is an island in Lake Norman:
Next, I walked over to Davidson College and took a series of photos of the steeple of the campus church:
Finally, I took a similar series of shots of Chambers Hall on campus:
I’m really pleased with the results. It was a bright, sunny day, which always helps, but to my untrained eye, there’s a noticeable improvement in image quality now that all of the iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras have 48MP sensors.
I like the Neon Yellow Silicone Case with the Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max.
When I stopped by the Apple Store over the weekend, I checked out the latest accessories, too, but didn’t buy anything. I prefer to use my iPhone caseless, but I wanted to see what my “official” options are because I do use a case when traveling.
Purple Fog goes well with Deep Blue, too.
The TechWoven cases struck me as durable options, although I wasn’t wowed by any of the colors. Instead, I was drawn to the bright Silicone Cases. Historically, these cases aren’t the most durable, but as someone who gets a new phone every year, that’s less of a consideration. The bright orange is great, but for my Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max, I think I’d probably go with Neon Yellow or Purple Fog.
I like the new Beats case but wouldn’t like having a lanyard full-time just to have a way to prop up my iPhone.
I also checked out the new Beats cases. I love the little pill on the lanyard that you can pull apart to create a perfectly sized divot for propping your phone up. The colors are nice in person, too, but in the end, I didn’t buy one because I don’t want a lanyard on my iPhone.
So that’s my mini-review of the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It does the same Pro Max things I love with some nice perks like better cameras and a unibody design that’s functional and comfortable to hold while making the phone feel more substantial. Photographers and fans of great battery life really can’t go wrong with the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.
What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed every MacStories fan.
Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;
Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;
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