Michael Burkhardt

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.

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal this morning, Apple is working on two new foldable devices for 2026 and beyond. The report also provides some details on the rumored ultra-slim iPhone 17 model.

With iOS 18.2, Apple introduced an all new Mail app. It introduced mail categorization, a fresh coat of paint, contact photos/business logos for conversations, a new system for grouping emails, and more. All of that sounded nice when it was unveiled back at WWDC, but now that I’ve actually spent some time using it, I’m having some doubts.

For the longest time, we’ve heard rumors about Apple developing some form of AR smart glasses. Nothing has come to light of that, though we do now have Apple Vision Pro, which has a number of similarities with potential AR glasses, albeit in a much bulkier form factor.

However, despite companies like Meta and Snapchat showing off cool demos of augmented reality glasses, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reports that Apple is around 3-5 years away from “getting the approach right.”

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is aiming to release its first foldable in 2028. Gurman describes it as “something akin to a giant iPad that unfolds into the size of two iPad Pros side-by-side.”

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.

TechniCalc is a fully featured calculator app, with all of the advanced features you’d need – but without a clunky or outdated UI. It focuses on being clean, easy to use, while being good for mathematicians. It’s available for iPhone, iPad, Mac.

Apple transitioned the Mac lineup to Apple Silicon starting in 2020, and they completed the transition in 2023. Since the transition started, Apple quickly started dropping support for Intel Macs on newer versions of macOS. That raises the question: how much longer will Intel Macs receive software support?

According to recent reports from Bloomberg, Apple will be releasing another iPad Air with “internal improvements” as early as spring 2025.

The iPad Air was just refreshed with M2 in early 2024, meaning there’d be around 12 months between refreshes, rather than the typical 18-24 months between iPad Air refreshes. With such a short turnaround time, it leaves you wondering: what will Apple actually be updating in these iPads?

Apple today announced that it would be expanding its retail presence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the online store opening in 2025, and physical stores opening in 2026.

Seemingly, for the first time in forever, Apple will be updating every single Mac with an M4 chip, presuming rumors hold correct. There have been a number of times where this has been close, but it hasn’t happened anytime in the past decade, at least.