Michael Burkhardt

At CES 2025, UGREEN announced a vast array of new products, including new Thunderbolt 5 docking stations, and a new 6-port 500W desktop charging hub. All of these products will be available in the coming months.

MacPaw, the company behind many great Mac apps such as CleanMyMac and Setapp, unveiled Eney at CES 2025. It’s an all new AI assistant for your Mac, aiming to simplify your digital life. Eney will help you complete tasks quickly, effortlessly, and with ease.

ShiftCam, a company behind many great iPhone accessories for content creators, unveiled PLANCK at CES 2025. The company calls it the world’s smallest portable SSD, and it’ll be great for helping you record large videos on your iPhone.

At CES 2025, Hyper unveiled the HyperSpace Trackpad Pro – a first of its kind. Apple’s Magic Trackpad, so far, has been the only good external multi-touch trackpad on the market. Hyper aims to change that with this new product, and unlike the Magic Trackpad, it’ll also work super well for Windows users.

Belkin unveiled a number of new products at CES 2025, including new MagSafe/Qi2 wireless chargers, all sorts of new USB-C charging bricks, and a new 20,000mAh power bank that’s still relatively compact. They also have new pairs of headphones, and announced an all-new creator bundle. We got to go hands on with it all at CES Unveiled last night.

There’s been a lot of talk about augmented reality tech lately, especially with the unveiling of Snapchat Spectacles and Meta Orion. Those are both highly expensive and unobtainable to consumers – but there is a growing market of affordable glasses, that provide some of the benefits of AR glasses at a much more palatable price tag. The RayNeo Air 2s’ are one of them, and I’ll be providing some of my thoughts.

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.

Sonuby is a different kind of weather app, designed for users who often partake in outdoor activities. For example, if you often snowboard, you can have a weather forecast that places snow conditions front and center. Weather needs can be very individualistic, which is why Sonuby allows you to tailor the app to what you care about.

With iOS 18, Apple introduced support for RCS messaging, a new protocol that enhances the texting experience between iPhone and Android users. Unlike SMS, you can see read/delivered receipts, send larger files, and have typing indicators, features that were previously missing. At first, only the big three carriers supported RCS messaging. Since then, a lot more have joined in on the fun.

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg recently reported that Apple will be redesigning the Magic Mouse – for the first time since its introduction in 2009. In the mouses fifteen-year history, the design has remained mostly the same, besides the switch from AA batteries to Lightning in 2015, and Lightning to USB-C in 2024.

However, that’ll soon be changing.

Now that the iPhone 16 lineup has been released to customers, some people might be thinking about what’s next for the iPhone. However, it isn’t the iPhone 17, and it’s just a few months away.

Apple’s had a very eventful fall, with a jam packed September event, an iPad mini 7 launch in mid October, followed up by an “exciting week of announcements” at the end of the month.

With all of those new product announcements, there were also a number of discontinuations of older products, meaning they’re no longer available to purchase from the Apple Store. However, there’s still good deals to find on last gen products from third parties.

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.

Type is a minimalist note taking app for your Mac, allowing you to easily capture notes and keep them organized – all from a simple keyboard shortcut. It’s the best way to jot something down in a pinch, without any of the potential distractions.

Apple Card passed its five year anniversary this year, and I’ve recently been thinking about whats next for the credit card. With Apple Card not being super profitable, combined with the fact that Apple wants to grow its services revenue among declining hardware sales, I think it could make a lot of sense for Apple to start offering a higher end credit card.

In the latest edition of the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman laid out a couple updates on Apple’s developments on health features for AirPods. We’ve heard reports on this matter in the past, but this provides a little more insight.

According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, Apple is working on a new smart home doorbell, to compete with the likes of Ring. It’d offer “advanced facial recognition”, and integrate wirelessly with smart home locks.

According to MacRumors, Apple is preparing the release of iOS 18.2.1. We don’t have a known build number at the moment, but we’ll likely see this software update released in the near future.

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.

one sec aims to help people reduce mindless scrolling on social media, requiring users to make a conscious decision on whether or not they want to actually open that app every time. It’s very configurable, so you can customize one sec to meet your needs.

With iOS 18, Apple introduced support for RCS messaging, a new protocol that enhances the texting experience between iPhone and Android users. Unlike SMS, you can see read/delivered receipts, send larger files, and have typing indicators, features that were previously missing. At first, only the big three carriers supported RCS messaging. Since then, a lot more have joined in on the fun.