You can turn your iPhone, iPad or Mac into a piano teacher with Flowkey’s interactive lessons, real-time feedback and song-first approach to learning.

Flowkey is designed to meet you where you are, whether you’ve never touched a keyboard or you already know your way around one. And it costs just $59.50 for three years with code MARCH15 (which also takes 15% off many other items in the Cult of Mac Deals store through March 29). A flesh-and-blood piano teacher might charge that much for a single lesson!

March 22, 1993: Apple launches the PowerCD, the first device from the company that doesn’t require a computer to work.

A portable CD player that also works as an external CD drive for Macs, it offers a glimpse of the extremely lucrative path Apple will follow a decade later. However, the PowerCD itself will ultimately fail to take off.

This week on the Cult of Mac podcast: The surprise release of AirPods Max 2 gives us plenty to talk about (including all the things Apple didn’t fix about the high-end headphones).

Plus, special guest Christina Warren (developer advocate at GitHub and co-host of the MacBreak Weekly podcast) joins us for a deep dive into one of Leander’s favorite topics — OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that’s got everyone snapping up Mac minis, and the rise of agentic coding.

Also on the Cult of Mac podcast:

• More on the MacBook Neo, including why every Mac owner should be thrilled that it comes with just 8GB of unified memory.
• Griffin reviews the new Studio Display XDR and iPhone 17e.

Listen to this week’s episode of the Cult of Mac podcast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video version, embedded below.

Stuck using an older version of Microsoft Office? This offer gets you a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Home and Business 2021 for Mac for just $52.97 with code MARCH15. With a low one-time payment, you can bid farewell to Microsoft 365’s pesky recurring subscription fees. You’ll never need to pay again for Microsoft’s widely used software for work and school.

And if you need Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows, you can secure a lifetime license for even less: just $35.97 using the same code. (Note: You also can use code MARCH15 to save 15% on almost every item in the Cult of Mac Deals store through March 29.)

March 21, 2007: Apple launches the Apple TV, a gleaming-white set-top box with a remote control, for bringing iTunes media to the living room.

Unfortunately, the device lacks key features needed to make it a killer entertainment system. It’s something of a missed opportunity for Apple.

ChatPlayground AI gives you easy access to more than 40 of the top AI models across 25 apps, all in one place — and all for one low price. It includes big names like ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Llama, Perplexity and Gemini, and it lets you send one prompt to multiple AIs simultaneously.

That means you can compare results to find the right AI tool for the job at hand, without jumping from one AI app to another. If you’re a heavy AI user, it will save you time as well as money. Normally $619, a lifetime subscription to ChatPlayground AI’s Unlimited plan is on sale now for only $67.15 with code MARCH15.

Safari’s Hide Distracting Items feature lets you remove ads from your iPhone, along with other elements on the page that irritate you. It doesn’t require an ad blocker or a paid extension — Apple built it right into the browser in iOS 18.

Hide Distracting Items is not an ad blocker per se. But if pop-ups and other items with no obvious close button pester you, Hide Distracting Items can come to the rescue. Here’s how to use it — keep reading or watch our video.

CEO Tim Cook says Apple just had its “best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers.” That means the MacBook Neo is doing exactly what it was designed to do: bring in people who have never owned a Mac before.

The first entry-level macOS notebook launched on March 11, and Apple can’t keep up with demand. Orders placed today come with wait times of several weeks.

Streaming is great until you want to watch something offline, save a show before it disappears, or avoid the limits most platforms put on downloads — that’s when you need a streaming downloader like Keeprix.

It works with Netflix, YouTube and other major streaming services, letting you save the videos you care about so you can watch them whenever you want. That means no dealing with ads, expiration timers or unreliable Wi-Fi. And a lifetime subscription to Keeprix is on sale for $95.99 (regularly $159.99).

March 20, 1997: Apple launches its Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, a futuristic, special-edition Mac that’s ahead of its time in every way. Not part of any established Mac line, it brings a look (and a price!) unlike anything else available — and Apple delivers them to buyers in a limo!

And yet the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh promptly bombs. Today, it’s a collector’s piece.

An analyst’s report shows Apple’s new MacBook Neo is even more affordable than it first appears. The total cost of ownership is about half that of comparable Windows PCs.

It may sound counterintuitive at first — how can a $599 Mac be half the cost of a $599 PC? — but the analyst showed that the typical lifespan of a Mac is so much longer than that of a Windows PC that the Apple model costs much less over time.

The iMac has always occupied a special place in Apple’s lineup — a beautifully integrated all-in-one desktop computer that bundles a 4.5K Retina display, camera, speakers and microphone into a single elegant slab of aluminium with color-matched accessories.

Yet despite the machine’s considerable visual appeal, iMac setups are a surprisingly rare sight in Cult of Mac‘s long-running Setups section. I noted in March 2025 that, out of 616 Setups articles written over more than four years at that time, only 11 featured an iMac as the centrepiece. That’s partly due to the fact that Apple desktop sales. They made up just 14% of Mac sales in 2024, while MacBooks accounted for a whopping 86%.

Apple had years to refine its high-end headphones, the AirPods Max. But with the just-announced AirPods Max 2, the company played it safe.

An upgrade to Apple’s H2 chip brings some notable new features to AirPods Max 2. However, with many of the original model’s shortcomings still present, the revamp feels like a missed opportunity.

Google has begun internally testing a dedicated Gemini app for macOS. While the company continues to improve its AI tool almost every other week, the lack of a native Mac app limits its full potential.

A dedicated app will make Gemini more accessible and better integrated into everyday workflows on macOS.

MacPaw’s CleanMy®Phone app frees up storage space on your iPhone by scanning for duplicate photos, massive videos, screenshots you forgot about and other silent space-eaters.

CleanMy®Phone offers a smarter, more Apple-like way to take control of your storage on your iPhone or iPad. And one year of access is on sale for just $19.99 (MSRP $44.99) for a limited time. Alternatively, you can grab a lifetime sub for just $51 with code MARCH20.

Apple’s iOS 26.4 update includes a small line in its release notes that is drawing outsized attention. It promises “improved keyboard accuracy when typing quickly.”

While that might sound like a routine tweak, it appears to address a typing problem that has frustrated iPhone users for months.

Pansophy is a secure personal AI assistant that runs on your Mac (or other computer). Once installed, Pansophy acts like a constant companion that can help with writing, coding, research, planning and everyday problem-solving.

You can ask it to draft emails, clean up text, brainstorm marketing ideas, outline projects or walk through tricky concepts. It feels similar to chatting with a cloud-based model, only everything happens on your CPU.  It’s a fully local AI assistant that runs without accounts, subscriptions or cloud processing. And right now, you can get a lifetime subscription to Pansophy for just $59.97 (regularly $199).

March 19, 1990: The ultra-fast Macintosh IIfx makes its debut, sporting a hefty price tag appropriate for such a speedy machine.

The fastest Macintosh of its day, it boasts a CPU running at a “wicked fast” 40 MHz. It gains an additional speed bump from a pair of Apple-designed, application-specific integrated circuits. Prices start at $9,870 and run up to $12,000 — the equivalent of $24,561 to $29,862 in 2026 money!

Over the past few years, the artificial intelligence race looked like a story about infrastructure. Which company can build the biggest, most power-hungry data center, stock it with the most Nvidia GPUs and spend the most money? OpenAI, Amazon, Google, xAI — they’re all in a competition to build industrial-scale computing factories just to run the most powerful AI models. But it looks like developer Dan Woods just upended that story by running a data-center AI model on MacBook.

And that could mean Apple wins the AI race after all.

The Tessan Voyager 205 Universal Travel Adapter combines a global plug adapter with a powerful 205W GaN charger with seven ports. It’s bigger and heavier than your usual travel adapter — but also far more capable.

Does the Voyager deserve a spot in your travel bag? Find out in our review.

The MacBook Neo runs macOS on an Apple A-series processor with excellent performance, which has caused people to suggest that the Apple TV 4K could be hacked to run macOS and create a full-featured desktop computer for $129.

Or they propose Apple itself port macOS onto the video streamer and release it as a desktop that costs $200 or less.

Neither one is likely at all. Here’s why.

Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, Comet, is now available on iOS. It features AI Comet Assistant, which can analyze a webpage to provide a quick summary or pull specific details. 

A dedicated voice mode lets you ask questions instead of typing, and it works across all your open tabs.

Apple on Wednesday seeded the iOS 26.4 Release Candidate to beta testers, signaling that eager iPhone users should circle March 25 on their calendars. The new version brings in fresh emoji, a tweak to Liquid Glass and other changes.

The macOS Tahoe 26.4 Release Candidate has also been released, as have equivalents for iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and more.

Everyone knows Apple Watch is an excellent health and fitness companion. But did you know it’s also handy for taking selfies? That’s thanks to Apple Watch’s best-kept secret: the Camera Remote app.

This indispensable Apple Watch app lets you use your iPhone’s best camera to take selfies. Using the app will elevate your selfie game, enabling you to take more flattering shots — with better compositions, more interesting poses and much, much more.

I use it all the time to take photos for Cult of Mac, and I’ve learned a few tricks along the way. So here’s my definitive guide to taking better selfies with Apple Watch.

We all know subscription fees multiply like rascally rabbits. Wouldn’t it be nice to have cloud storage that doesn’t add to the misery? FileJump offers a refreshing alternative. Why rent your cloud storage month after month when you can score 2TB of cloud space for just $75.65 for life with code MARCH15?

No more recurring payments or surprise fees. Just a one-time investment for a lifetime of secure, accessible cloud storage.