No one wants to admit it, but our iPhones can sometimes be black holes. Mobile games and social media can sap our attention and damper our productivity. On the flip side, your smartphone can help bring you to a better headspace and alleviate your stress and anxiety, thanks to all the mindfulness apps you can try.

One example is the Mindfulness.com app. For a limited time, you can purchase a lifetime Plus Plan for $69.99 (regularly $399), courtesy of our Back to Education campaign, which ends August 24.

Life By Ella follows a teen as she takes herself in a bold new direction: She’s going to seize every day and experience everything she was afraid to do before. The kids and family series debuts September 2 on Apple TV+.

Apple posted an extremely upbeat trailer for the upcoming show Monday.

AirVersa’s new Purelle Smart Air Purifier for HomeKit came out on Amazon in the U.S. on Saturday. According to the company, it’s the first air purifier to support the Thread networking standard.

That Thread support will be important when the Matter home automation standard starts helping devices made by different makers work well together.

If there’s one thing Apple displays are known for, it’s high prices. OK — all joking aside — if there are two things they’re known for, it’s crisp, accurate colors and being worth the price for that level of quality.

After all, those who work or play with graphics, photos, video or animation need great color.

And if you go dual-display, it helps if they’re the same model. Today’s featured Mac Studio setup, for example, corrected mismatched displays and the resulting color inconsistency by adding a second Studio Display.

Two of the best-loved shows on Apple TV+ — Severance and Ted Lasso — took home honors over the weekend from the Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards.

Severance won five awards, including Best Drama, and Ted Lasso won two awards, including Best Comedy. Apple TV+ topped all streaming services with 53 nominations overall.

Whether you’re getting an iPhone 13 series handset at a discount because iPhone 14 is coming soon or you just want to change up your case for the iPhone you already have, you can’t go wrong with the tasteful and tough Journey iPhone 13 Leather Case.

The company sent me a MagSafe-compatible, tan-colored case for iPhone 13 Pro to try out. I found it a refreshing switch from the Apple clear MagSafe case I’d been using, which had begun to blacken at the corners over the past several months.

This cloud storage post is presented by pCloud. 

If you’re looking for reliable cloud storage for the whole crew, pCloud’s new family plan delivers 10TB of shared storage. Plus, a great back-to-school deal can save you some serious money (up to 80% off).

The Switzerland-based company, subject to strong privacy laws, offers affordable, super-secure cloud-based storage and backup for individuals, families and businesses.

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The switch to gallium nitride continues to lead to less bulky but more powerful charging accessories. As their names indicate, the HyperJuice 245W GaN Desktop Charger and 245W USB-C Battery Pack can each supply 245 watts of power, but GaN means they aren’t oversized.

Both launched Monday.

It’s hot in China. Hot enough that the government is ordering industries in parts of the country to temporarily halt electrical consumption so there’s enough left for air conditioning. An Apple analyst warns that iPad assembly could be affected.

Apple is expected to launch a redesigned budget iPad and an updated iPad Pro this autumn, and production problems could limit their availability.

Your Apple Watch can tell a lot about you — including how well you sleep at night. It offers insight into your sleeping habits, like how many REM cycles you go through each night, your average time in bed and your heart rate when you’re snoozing. You can even set sleep reminders.

But you know what it can’t tell you? Whether you’re snoring (although maybe your partner can answer that question better). If you wake to see your partner irritated in the morning, you may want to curb your snoring with VitalSleep, an anti-snoring device that’s on sale for $64.95 (regularly $99).

In a recent report, Apple outlined the “rigorous scientific validation processes” used to develop the health and fitness features baked into its products.

Wearables like Apple Watch monitor our bodies around the clock, providing health insights in real time. That’s a new and unprecedented development in medical technology. The benefits are already clear, as the report illustrates, with anecdotes about how Apple Watch has saved lives.

But anecdotal evidence is not the same as scientific research. By cherry-picking the best outcomes, anecdotes risk overlooking the bigger picture. Scientists must look at all the outcomes, not just the good ones. With that in mind, I took a closer look at the scientific studies cited in Apple’s report, to find out what they tell us about the impact Apple Watch is having on our health.

The newest beta of Microsoft Office gives iPad users the option to convert handwriting done with an Apple Pencil or other stylus into text using Apple’s Scribble system. It’ll should be available to all in the near future.

Apple’s handwriting-recognition system uses AI to recognize letters and words, and will allow users to quickly edit a document or spreadsheet on the go with a stylus. But it could also be used to write entire Word docs.

Apple tried to talk Facebook into creating a version of its social network without adverts, according to a new report. Users would pay a subscription fee and would not be tracked for advertising purposes.

Obviously, it didn’t happen.

You don’t have to wait until September to get the details on the next-gen Apple Watch. Many of them leaked out already.

Here’s what to expect out of the upcoming Series 8, and a new “extreme sports” Apple Watch. An updated Apple Watch SE is also supposedly in the offing.

This can be a challenging time of the year for children, as school resumes and several necessities are required. Unfortunately, not all households can handle those costs, which include class supplies and daily meals. For a limited time, you can help kids in need through the power of a purchase. During our Back to Education event, when you pick up the Maglight Mini, an eight-in-one utility flashlight, for only $17.99 (reg. $29), a donation will be made to a deserving recipient.

This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: We’re taking a long look (and listen) at all the hottest new features coming in iOS 16, including the return of the battery percentage indicator. Some of the impending changes look (and sound) great. Others … not so much.

We want two big tweaks: a polished version of the battery percentage indicator, and an iPhone ping that doesn’t sound like garbage. (The existing one is great, and the proposed one is definitely not an upgrade.)

But, hey, there’s still time for Tim Cook’s team of tweakers to bring things up to snuff. In fact, somebody already did the heavy lifting for them on that battery icon (see below)!

American Sign Language is the most-used form of communication for deaf people in the United States, but you don’t have to be hard-of-hearing to find value from it. So whether you want to communicate with the deaf community, become a first responder, do social work or simply pick up a new language, the Complete American Sign Language Master Class Bundle might come in handy. It’s on sale for a limited time for $49.99 (regularly $349).

Surface, the Apple TV+ mystery about a woman with no memory, goes tripping in an episode filled with twists, turns, memories and hallucinations.

Sophie has a secret identity. Her husband, James, has a secret file that Baden the cop needs to steal and investigate. And literally nothing is going to go as planned. Sophie treats herself to a little psychotropic therapy when her therapist lets her down.

She learns a little more than she bargained for in this mostly OK episode.

Have you put off learning to code because it’s challenging to get started? There’s a lot to learn, but that’s nothing a good teacher can’t help with. With the 2022 All-in-One Learn to Code Certification Bundle, you can explore several popular coding languages, and that’s just the start.

This training is also price-dropped during our Back to Education promotion, which ends August 24. Get it for only $39.99 (regularly $3,000) — no coupon necessary.

Play pinball in a galaxy far, far away as an update to Zen Pinball Party adds two new tables based on Star Wars. Enjoy characters and music from some of the bast of the Skywalker saga.

The pinball game launched on Apple Arcade in 2021, and already lets players have a go at tables with a Kung Fu Panda theme, or Trolls, or How to Train Your Dragon.

Loot, the Apple TV+ sitcom about a rich woman discovering the meaning of life through charity work, finally hits the wall I’ve been waiting for after weeks of politesse and a too-overwhelming fear of the vulgar side of comedy.

In this week’s season finale, Molly and the crew head to Corsica for a billionaire energy summit where she must make an important choice. She must decide between her rich, debonair boyfriend and his million-dollar ideas about conservancy, and her friends who want to do real, on-the-ground work and fight the root causes of the problems facing their neighbors.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert created a parody Thursday night of the psychological thriller Severance on Apple TV+. The segment’s a must-see for fans of the show, or for fans of nouveu-comedy classic The Office, which figures into the mashup heavily.

I just called Severance a psychological thriller. In his lead-in to the video, which you can watch below, Colbert was probably more accurate.

“Severance is easily one of the top dystopian workplace sci-fi mystery black comedy psychological thrillers I’ve ever seen,” he deadpanned, getting a laugh.

Apple TV+ series Trying, the James Corden of sitcoms, invents some new fake problems for its characters to solve this week. Tyler bumps his head, Princess steals a solution to an outcast’s problem, Nikki and Karen don’t feel like moms, Jason is disappointed in his son’s taste, and there may be a new wrinkle in the couple’s decision to keep their kids.

The writers also show their Tory hand this week with jabs at all things lower class — except when it’s necessary for our characters to engage in them. Not even a special cameo from a great villainess can lift this week’s offering above pitiful.

With so many people working from home these days, a whole lot of them spend much of their life in one room — wherever the computer setup is, that is. And that’s all the more the case in apartments and small homes. So improving the setup can have a pretty big impact.

In today’s featured Mac Studio setup, swapping out two smaller displays for one bigger one, adding a desk shelf and making a few other changes made quite a difference in enhancing the workspace.

This post on discount Microsoft software is brought to you by Keysbuff.

The Back to School Sale continues at software activation keys provider Keysbuff.com. You can always score great deals on Microsoft products from them. But as a Cult of Mac reader, you can click on the links below and get an even better deal on Windows 10 — and find major savings on lots of other Microsoft software, too.

To rack up maximum savings, use promo code COM at Keysbuff.com. That will save you an extra 25% off the site’s already-low prices on keys for Windows 10 Pro Global, Microsoft Office 2021 Pro and other software.