Michael Burkhardt

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

If you’ve ever found yourself striking up a conversation while out and about, you may end up wanting to quickly share your contact information with another person. While Apple does offer NameDrop, it lacks granularity, and isn’t always the most reliable. Passable brings contact sharing into neat looking Apple Wallet passes, and it offers tons of granularity.

The next iPhone lineup is around the corner – and it’s going to be a different one. The base model iPhone 18 won’t be making an appearance quite yet, as that model has been shifted to a spring release schedule. This September will squarely be on the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the all new foldable iPhone.

Of course, there’s one major elephant in the room: price hikes. It’s inevitable that the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will cost more, which begs the question – is buying an iPhone 17 Pro at today’s prices a good idea?

According to the latest Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to include up to 1.5TB of RAM in the upcoming M7 Ultra chip. This’ll mean Apple Silicon will finally match the highest RAM configuration available on the highest end 2019 Intel Mac Pro.

Every year, Apple has a ‘Back to School’ promo for students – offering some kind of special incentive if they buy a Mac or iPad during the promotional window. Typically, this has come in the form of free accessories (like AirPods), or a $100-150 Apple gift card. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the offer should be returning later this week.

Last year, Apple completely reinvented multitasking on the iPad, with the introduction of windowing in iPadOS 26. At first, this meant the removal of the simpler version of multitasking, Split View and Slide Over. Those features did eventually return, but at a cost – they required you to use the clunky new windowing system. I was hoping iPadOS 27 would improve this, but it didn’t.

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

Many apps make it easy to track your Pokémon card collection. Route 25 takes that a step further by bringing a social experience into the mix, so you can talk to other collectors about your cards, pulls, and so on.

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is likely to have very limited supply for iPhone Ultra at its time of announcement in September. This means it’s plausible that the company may delay shipping it for another month or two, similar to iPhone X.

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

PulseKit is an all-in-one app for iPhone that makes it easy to track all of the key analytics that matter to you – without needing to code anything on your own. Everything is visible right from your home screen and lock screen with widgets.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman revealed that Apple has a new M7-powered entry level MacBook Pro in the pipeline for spring 2027. This isn’t an ordinary MacBook Pro refresh though. It’ll bring the upcoming redesign down to the entry level, something that previously wasn’t expected.

Spotted by developer Sam Henri Gold on Twitter, iOS 27 beta 2 includes references to an upcoming Apple product codenamed B790, likely to be the rumored AirPods with cameras.

BenQ has been making excellent Mac-friendly monitors for years, and their new MA270S is the creme de la creme of their lineup. It’s a 27-inch 5K monitor, but with a feature that most monitors don’t ship with: a glossy finish.

All of Apple’s displays ship with glossy finishes by default, but for one reason or another, matte finishes have dominated the external monitor market – and BenQ is bucking that trend. This makes the MA270S much more at home with the Mac.

Apple just announced unprecedented price increases for the majority of its product lineup, with only iPhone and Apple Watch not yet seeing a price hike. This is because of the AI-driven memory crisis, caused by AI data centers buying up loads of memory supply, putting tons of pressure on the market.

Apple tried to hold out for quite a while, but the situation got out of hand. It’s worth noting that these memory pressures have existed for the entirety of the year, and it’s only now getting to the point where it’s unsustainable. Nonetheless, we’ll be diving into the why of it all, and when you should expect things to get better.

Later this year, Apple will be debuting an updated version of the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips – a long awaited refresh. The current Mac Studio, released in early 2025, includes an M4 Max and M3 Ultra chip, so at least on the high end, it’s pretty behind.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the M5-based Mac Studio, which should just be a chip upgrade, is still on track to launch this year. Looking ahead to 2028, there may be more interesting changes in the pipeline.

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

Mirage is a brand new app that brings best-in-class desktop wireless screen sharing to your entire Apple ecosystem. You can stream from your Mac to your iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, or even another Mac. It’s very low latency and has a plethora of great features that make it the one stop shop for remotely using your Mac.

We’re about 3 weeks out from when Apple unveiled iOS 27 to the world at WWDC26, and it’s still safe to say: this is an incredible update. It’s incredibly performant, and besides some small quirks and a little battery drain, it feels much more usable than iOS 26.5.

While iOS 27 does support every device that ran iOS 26, the same isn’t true for iPadOS. A number of older iPadOS 26 devices will not be receiving the iPadOS 27 update, which I think is quite a shame – and Apple should mitigate this one way or another.

Last year, Apple debuted Digital ID on iPhone, allowing users to use their US passport as identification in Apple Wallet. Apple’s been rolling out drivers licenses in Wallet slowly over the past few years, but that’s on a state-by-state basis. Digital ID is universal, allowing anyone with a passport to use it.

Of course, you can use it at TSA checkpoints in airports – but Apple had a bigger scope in mind: digital age and identity verification. While not yet confirmed, it’s possible that we could see a first major implementation of this quite soon, in Claude.

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

If you’re looking to level up your podcast experience, check out Brink. It’s a well made iOS podcast app with rich features, including a news tab, podcast summaries, trending podcasts, AI playlists, and much more. It’s also well made for iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, and feels right at home on the iPhone.

Mophie’s been a mainstay in the charging tech industry, and today, they have an all new lineup of premium 25W MagSafe charging products for Apple users – available from Mophie.com and Apple Retail.

While most 25W MagSafe chargers deploy some kind of active cooling tech, Mophie has a new approach meant to keep your devices cool without the additional noise – dubbed StealthCharge.

Apple wrapped up its WWDC 2026 keynote this week, outlining all of its major new software features for the coming year, with Siri AI and improved stability taking the spotlight. That said, there are a few new features that are reportedly still in the works, and we should still see them by September, per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.