One of the best ways to use MagSafe on iPhone is to make it carry your wallet. It means you don’t have to remember to pick up multiple items every time you leave the house, and it ensures that you always have access to credit and ID cards that you can’t carry virtually in the Apple Wallet app.
Now that we’ve had MagSafe for a few years, there are lots of great wallets to choose from. Here are six of the best that you can slap onto the back of your iPhone today.
Almost every day, our robot vacuum tangles itself in charging cables, which the kids toss cavalierly across the floor. Snaking from behind the couch, the cords wait like baited fishing lines to ensnare our unsuspecting Roomba. It’s an unmitigated cable management disaster.
Luckily, we just got some Cable Blocks from Function101. Cable Blocks are rubbery little magnetic blocks that sit on your desk or nightstand and hold cables out of the way. It’s a simple and clever design.
Here’s why Cable Blocks are my favorite cable management system.
In this week’s Awesome Apps roundup, we have a synthesizer app that brings back the sound of the ’80s, a solid VPN for safely surfing the Web, an app for testing external drives for recording high-res video, and a guide to the best eateries in Italy.
★★★☆☆
Alternative-history space-race drama series For All Mankind returned to Apple TV+ Friday with a season 4 opener that handled two tough jobs pretty well — painfully looking back at past tragedies and peering ahead with trepidation to probable new ones. After all, space is dangerous and so are people.
In an episode called “Glasnost,” set 8 years after the end of season 3, For All Mankind sets its sites on asteroid wealth and a joint mission led by the United States and Russia to get it. And it doesn’t take long for people to start dying up there.
If you love the synth sounds of the ’80s, we have something for you. AudioKit Pro launched a brand-new hybrid synthesizer app for iPhone and iPad Wednesday for those who love the sounds of the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s.
And while the developer said the synth app usually costs $19.99, right now you can get it for $3.99. And by the way, it’s currently rated #1 in Music on the App Store.
iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max can record ProRes video at 4K and 60 fps, but only if the handset is connected to an external drive that’s fast enough to handle it. To find out if your SSD is up to the job, there’s OWC Drive Speed.
This new app verifies transfer speeds between your iPhone and external drives. It displays the maximum frames per second a drive can handle. Because you don’t want to find out on the day of the shoot that the SSD you’re counting on is a dud.
The best Italian restaurant app just got better. Osterie d’Italia 2024, the latest app version of Slow Food Editore’s killer guide to Italy’s most authentic restaurants, now serves up its piping-hot recommendations in English for the first time.
Plus, a much-improved search functionality makes it easier than ever to find a great place to eat in Italy. And a new feature lets you store your notes and photos about particular restaurants in the cloud so you can access them in subsequent versions of the annually updated app.
★★★★★
Have an M.2 NVMe drive you want to use with your MacBook or iPad? Put it in the HyperDrive Next USB4 NVMe SSD Enclosure and you can access the contents at speeds up to 40Gbps.
I plugged a solid state drive of mine into this very rugged enclosure to put it to the test.
★★★★☆
The just-launched Apple Pencil includes USB-C charging, making it easy to use with the budget iPad. While top quality, the new model doesn’t have all the features of Apple Pencil 2 but costs $50 less.
I tested the stylus with my iPad and found reasons to like it even more than the premium version.
★★★☆☆
The Kuxiu X36 Boom Mic Arm is a solid metal piece of gear for mounting a microphone to your desk. It has a clean, logo-free design that blends in with any setup.
Unlike other boom arms, the Kuxiu X36 isn’t free-floating and adjustable with a single finger — it’s a firm stand that will hold its position. It’s split into three segments, not just two, so it’s nonetheless highly adjustable.
After some months of testing, I was surprised to find a much better use for it than mounting my microphone. Read on to see what it’s best for.
Fans of all-in-one desktops are about to get the improved iMac they’ve been waiting for. The first reviews of the 2023 version are out and they’re full of praise for performance gains that that come with the new Apple M3 processor.
“The 2023 edition of the 24-inch Apple iMac is a real pleasure to use, and arguably the best all-in-one desktop when it comes to the amount and variety of tasks it can accomplish,” said the PCMag reviewer.
★★★★☆
The Zagg Pro Stylus 2 is ready to help you take handwritten notes on an iPad and sketch out your ideas, too. Or you can use it on your iPhone — don’t try that with Apple Pencil.
It wirelessly charges on the edge of an Apple tablet, and that’s just one of the tricks it can do.
I tested the Pro Stylus 2 with my iPad Pro and iPhone 15 and came away pleased.
★★★☆☆
Journey recently unleashed an odd-but-useful beast — “the world’s first 4-in-1 laptop sleeve” with wireless charging, aka the Journey Nexa.
Journey Nexa Laptop Sleeve with Wireless Charging is a 4-in-1 device — MacBook sleeve, wireless charger for iPhone and AirPods, mouse pad and desk mat. But I found space limits it when you try to use it four ways at once, and it could benefit from some other improvements.
Some people just hate having anything in their ears, like earplugs or earbuds that insert in the ear canal. Others love having music during workouts, but despise sweating all over their earbuds or headphones. For them, Soundcore rolled out the bold-sounding AeroFit and AeroFit Pro open-ear, true-wireless earbuds Wednesday.
The new buds are good at what they do, but they’re not for everyone. I tried out both sets.
Apple unveiled the 24-inch iMac with M1 chip way back in April 2021, and while the rest of the company’s Mac lineup got an M2 upgrade since then, the all-on-one desktop missed the boat. To make up for it, Apple announced the M3-powered iMac at its ‘Scary Fast’ event.
How does the 2023 iMac compare to its predecessor? Does it pack any other improvement besides the faster chip? Read this comparison to find out.
The Apple TV+ documentary The Enfield Poltergeist goes in-depth on “the most famous poltergeist haunting in history.” The events inspired The Conjuring 2 and are creepy Halloween fun, though unlikely to convince anyone that ghosts are real.
I suspended my disbelief for a few hours and enjoyed the show for what it is.
★★★★☆
Don’t want to spend hundreds on great-sounding earbuds? Affordable earbud and speaker maker EarFun unveiled its updated stemless earbuds Monday, EarFun Free Pro 3. They check a lot of quality boxes at a low regular price of $80, or $60 with current discounts (see below).
Like previous EarFun releases, the new buds nail high-quality sound and offer an array of premium features. But in this case, I found the active noise cancellation (ANC) unimpressive — that is, until EarFun sent out firmware update VO.2.1 in early November, and it improved noticeably.
★★★★☆
Apple dropped its leather iPhone cases, but the Mujjo Full Leather Wallet Case with MagSafe is a brilliant alternative. It protects your valuable handset while also providing an easy way to carry credit cards and drivers license. Plus, it looks gorgeous while doing so.
I carried my iPhone 15 Plus this case on holiday, to restaurants … everywhere I went for weeks. Here’s why I love this case for my iPhone 15 Plus, despite a notable drawback.
AirBuddy is a handy Mac app that lets you monitor all your nearby Bluetooth devices and AirPods. You can check battery life, switch them back and forth between multiple Macs on your desk, and best of all — get the same beautiful AirPods animations that you see on your iPhone.
It offers granular Bluetooth controls that Apple should build right into macOS.
New in iOS 17 are interactive widgets on the Home Screen — that is, widgets that can do things, not just passively show information — and a handy one is Calcullo.
Calcullo is a $1.99 calculator widget for your Home Screen that makes it easy to tap out quick calculations on the fly.
★★★★☆
EZ Internet Solutions is a rural internet service provider that can give you a solid cellular internet connection that’s truly unlimited — no data cap, no speed throttling. If you live in a spot without any internet infrastructure, but you do have a cell connection, it is a solid option you should consider.
EZ Internet Solutions offers cellular home internet in places AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile don’t. Contrast that with HughesNet, a popular satellite internet provider, which charges an arm and a leg only to give you a fraction of the speed.
I truly live in the middle of nowhere, and yet I’ve been using EZ Internet to live stream a video podcast every week for months without a hitch.
★★★★★
As far back as I could remember, Martin Scorsese has been synonymous with the movies. Now Apple TV+ has financed his latest work, an adaptation of David Grann’s true crime novel The Killers of the Flower Moon about the death of a native American community and the birth of the FBI to the tune of $200 million.
Killers of the Flower Moon will go down as one of the director’s boldest and most furious statements in a career full of them.
Dungeon Hunter 6, the new installment in the long-running RPG series, offers heaps of fantasy-themed battle. It’s a mix of real-time fighting and strategy, and offers a fun look to its characters and many, many monsters.
It’s a free to play game for iPhone and iPad, with in-app purchases.
★★★★☆
The Samsung T9 solid-state drive is small enough and tough enough to go almost anywhere. And it’s available in capacities up to 4 terabytes.
I put the recently launched SSD to the test with a range of Apple devices and came away pleased with the design and performance. That said, Mac users can’t take advantage of one of its best features.
NetNewsWire is a delightfully simple RSS reader for Mac, iPhone and iPad that syncs over iCloud. What’s an RSS reader? It’s the best way to keep up with your news, read blog posts, get YouTube videos, read webcomics and follow anything online.
NetNewsWire is an app I leave open perpetually on my Mac and open dozens of times a day on my iPhone. Since its relaunch a few years ago, it’s become one of the most important, core apps for my work and relaxation. Best of all, it’s totally free and open-source with no ads or tracking.