Apple ships the Mac with several built-in apps that are surprisingly feature-rich and fast. But over time, I found myself replacing a handful of them with third-party alternatives that simply did more.
I didn’t make these switches overnight. Each replacement solved a specific problem or added a feature I couldn’t live without. These are the Mac apps and tools I use instead of Apple’s stock apps.
With automatic mail categorization in Apple Mail, you can organize your emails and keep your personal inbox less cluttered. It’ll intelligently put all your newsletters, receipts and promotions into separate folders.
If you struggle keeping up with your inbox, this feature is a great way to make your email easier to understand at a glance.
Keep reading below or watch our quick video.
An iPhone 18 Pro DRAM shortage is threatening to leave Apple’s next flagship phone in short supply the moment it launches. Roughly $1 billion worth of finished processors are reportedly stuck at chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, with no memory to pair them with.
The holdup traces back to the global memory crunch that’s already reshaping Apple’s lineup. With the iPhone 18 Pro and Apple’s first foldable, possibly called the iPhone Ultra, just weeks away, the clock is ticking.
Apple plans to refresh the base-model MacBook Pro this fall with its new M6 processor, according to numerous rumors. The performance boost should make it more appealing to those who want a macOS laptop with more ports than a MacBook Air, but at a lower price than Pro models with Pro and Max chips.
Here’s what to expect from the first (and possibly only) M6 MacBook Pro.
Are you ready for some football?! Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition is now available on Apple’s game subscription service, bringing EA Sports’ blockbuster football franchise to iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro without ads or in-app purchases.
It’s the first time the Madden series has been offered through Apple Arcade, giving subscribers a premium version of one of gaming’s most popular sports franchises.
“Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition is a chance to bring the most authentic NFL experience to a new audience of football fans, letting them play and compete as the league’s most elite players, or take control as GM and shape a franchise,” said Evan Dexter, EA’s vice president of Franchise Strategy and Marketing.
The Claude AI for Microsoft Excel Mastery Bundle will show you how to use Anthropic’s AI to build formulas, automate spreadsheets, create dashboards, analyze data and more.
You’ll master Microsoft Excel with these five lifetime courses — and you’ll pay just $19.99 (MSRP $97).
August 7, 2006: Apple unleashes the first Mac Pro, a high-end desktop computer that completes the company’s transition from PowerPC to Intel processors.
Built for computation-heavy tasks like 3D rendering and professional audio and video editing, the quad-core, 64-bit Mac Pro serves as a replacement for the Power Mac G5 (from which it borrows its aluminum “cheese grater” design).
OpenAI’s first smart speaker will supposedly look like a “doughnut that’s roughly the size of a hockey puck,” according to a new Bloomberg report. This odd design will help the speaker stand out from the competition.
It will also apparently enable the speaker to work in “different positions.”
Apple on Thursday released macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, a surprise security update that fixes a potentially serious vulnerability in the operating system’s Screen Sharing feature.
While the update doesn’t bring any new features, Mac users should nevertheless install it as soon as possible — or the new security patches for macOS Sequoia and Sonoma.
Thinking about upgrading to an iPhone 18 this fall? Apple just made the decision a little easier.
The company increased the max trade-in values for most iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch models in the United States, marking the latest value bump this year. The higher payouts let customers put more money toward a new device, whether they’re buying outright or through the new Apple Upgrade program.
MacPaw is bringing on-device AI to its Mac assistant, Eney. The company partnered with Liquid AI to build a local intelligence stack designed to run on your Mac, not in the cloud.
The partnership pairs Liquid AI’s foundation models with MacPaw’s own inference and memory technology. Eney will be the first product to get the upgrade, and results are expected later this year.
iPad shipments slowed in the second quarter of this year, the first time that’s happened in over two years. The source of the problem is easy to pinpoint: the extra-long wait for a new version of the budget iPad.
And unfortunately for consumers, Apple supposedly won’t release a replacement for the iPad (A16) for many more months.
August 6, 1997: In one of the most famous moments in Apple history, Steve Jobs reveals a $150 million Microsoft investment that saved his company from ruin.
Although often presented as an inexplicable gesture of good faith on the part of Microsoft boss Bill Gates, the cash infusion into Apple actually benefits both companies.
Domain registration looks cheap right up until you’re five projects deep and every name renews in a different month at a rate you never agreed to. Registrars raise those prices whenever they want, and your card gets charged automatically while you’re not looking. But that doesn’t happen with Hostdeal domain names.
Skip that annoyance with this Hostdeal domain names lifetime subscription. It lets you lock down six domains for life with a single payment of just $29.99 (regularly $120).
Charging your iPhone to 100% won’t instantly fry your battery. But regularly keeping it at full charge for hours matters more than you might think.
The real culprit isn’t the charge itself — it’s how long your phone stays plugged in at maximum capacity. Apple’s built-in tools do help, but temperature and charging habits matter even more.
Three recently discovered WebKit privacy leaks expose users’ real IP addresses on iPhone and Mac, even when they use a proxy browser or iCloud Private Relay, according to a new report.
This would mean Apple’s trusted privacy tools aren’t working as advertised. If you’ve relied on proxy browsers for anonymity or iCloud Private Relay for privacy, that protection apparently has some serious gaps.
August 5, 1997: Apple gets into a standoff with Power Computing, a maker of Macintosh clones. A very public clash at the Macworld Expo in Boston marks the beginning of the end for Apple’s mid-1990s strategy of licensing the Mac operating system.
“If the [Mac] platform goes closed, it is over,” predicts Power Computing CEO Joel J. Kocher of Apple’s strategy. “[It’s] total destruction. The kiss of death.” Of course, things don’t turn out exactly like that for Apple…
Despite what really seemed like a series finale three years ago, Ted Lasso is back. Apple TV began streaming season four on Wednesday, reviving its Emmy-winning comedy with what amounts to a soft reboot rather than a direct continuation of the story.
Here’s what to look forward to as Ted, Coach Beard and all our favorites return.
A handful of small but real changes are coming to Apple’s next budget iPhone, with iPhone 18e rumors pointing to a new chip and a RAM configuration nobody expected. None of it amounts to a redesign – this is still a budget phone, just slightly better.
The extra memory is the most interesting shift, but it comes with a catch. Most other specs, including the screen and camera, look set to carry over largely unchanged from the iPhone 17e. Here’s everything reported so far, and how solid each claim actually is.
Apple kept the iPad’s Split View feature alongside the new multitasking stuff in iPadOS 26, despite what you might have read online. And setting it up is as easy as a couple of flicks of your finger.
Here’s how to keep using Split View on your iPad. Apple even made a video that demonstrates what to do.
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The Razer Travel Case Folio is a combination keyboard case/stand created for gamers who need a keyboard while they game on the go with an iPad, Steam Deck or even an iPhone. And it’s also useful when you need to get some work done on your tablet.
Put a Razer Joro or an Apple Magic Keyboard into the folio, then deploy its built-in kickstand and it’s ready to prop up your tablet, gaming handheld, etc. for fun or productivity.
I tested the new accessory with my mobile setup. Here’s what I found.
Apple faces a $32.5 billion lawsuit over how its Photos app scans and stores faces. A federal judge cleared the case to proceed as a class action late last month, allowing millions of Illinois iPhone owners to join.
The case has been years in the making, and Apple has fought to shut it down at nearly every turn. Now it heads back to the court, with the company’s privacy practices on trial.
Apple decided to cap the number of bug bounty reports a researcher can have open at once. The move follows a flood of AI-generated “slop” that overwhelmed Apple’s internal security team this year.
But the cap almost backfired. A small Italian security firm had found a serious macOS flaw using ChatGPT, but they couldn’t report it because their group had already hit its new limit.
August 4, 2008: In an internal memo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs owns up to mistakes in launching MobileMe. He spins the company’s bungled cloud service rollout as a learning opportunity.
“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs writes in an email to Apple employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”
Apple plans to bring one of the iPhone and Mac’s most useful ecosystem features — cross-device clipboard sync — to Windows PCs. Don’t expect it anytime soon, though, as the functionality likely won’t arrive until fall 2027 at the earliest.
Apple is not adding cross-device clipboard sync support for Windows PCs to iOS because it wants to, though. The feature stems from an interoperability request Microsoft submitted under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.