John Voorhees

2041 posts on MacStories since November 2015

John is MacStories' Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015, and today, runs the site alongside Federico. John also co-hosts four MacStories podcasts: AppStories, which covers the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, which explores the fun differences between American and Italian culture and recommends media to listeners, Ruminate, a show about the weird web and unusual snacks, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about the games we take with us.
voorhees@macstories.net

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New Year, New Audio Setup: SoundSource 6 from Rogue Amoeba

Just the Best: MacStories’ Black Friday 2025 Picks

Black Friday deals started very early this year, and we’ve covered a lot of ground on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts since publishing our Early Black Friday Picks. A lot of those deals are ongoing, so it’s worth revisiting that story as you start your holiday shopping in earnest.

However, today, I wanted to hit the highlights of what we’ve covered over the past week on MacStories Deals and add some new deals to the mix that you probably haven’t seen yet, so buckle up, it’s time to go shopping.

MacStories Pixel Icons

All three MacStories Pixel Icon sets are 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Two of the icon sets are specially-designed for Shortcuts. We’ve all been there. You work hard on a shortcut and want to give it the perfect icon, only to realize that Apple doesn’t offer what you want in the Shortcuts app. The MacStories Pixel Icons fill that gap with an extensive set of painstakingly hand-crafted icons with multiple color options created by MacStories’ long-time designer, Silvia Gatta. We also offer a set of Perspective icons that are perfect for OmniFocus Pro and other uses.

Visit our dedicated MacStories Pixel page today to preview all three icon sets and purchase them for 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Apple Hardware

There are a lot of Black Friday deals on Apple hardware, but most of them are good, not great. I’m picky, so I’m only going to focus on just the great deals.

One of the best deals on Apple hardware during Black Friday is the M4 13” MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. If you want more memory or storage than that, you’ll have to settle for a smaller percentage discount, but even with more memory and more storage, you’re still doing better than any other deal this year. The 15” M4 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD is a good deal, too.

Among the many iPad deals, the best is on the 128GB iPad mini with an A17 Pro chip. I’ve had a mini since they were released and love it. The size makes it an excellent reading and video-watching device.

AirPods 4 are also heavily discounted for Black Friday. Apple’s most affordable wireless earbuds come with active noise cancellation and without. The model with no active noise cancellation slightly edges out the model with ANC as far as the discounts are concerned, but both models are a bargain.

However, the very best deals available from Apple in terms of the percentage discount are a 4-pack of AirTags and the Apple Pencil Pro. If you need either, now is the perfect time to buy them.

Smart Home

The holiday season is a great time to catch up on projects and start new ones. For me, that’s often tuning up my smart home setup and setting up some new devices thanks to Black Friday sales. Here are the best ones I’ve seen:

Aqara already makes some of the most affordable smart home devices out there, so you really can’t go wrong with their Black Friday deals. One of my favorites is the FP2 Presence Sensor. It’s far more sophisticated than a simple motion sensor. To start with, it can tell when you’ve left a room, which motion sensors can’t do. I’ve used an FP2 Sensor in my office to control lighting for a couple of years, wrote about it for Club members, and have been really happy with it.

Other great deals from Aqara include its U100 Smart Lock that works with Apple Home Key and HomeKit, the Aqara M3 Home Hub that I recently set up at home and love, and 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro, an outdoor HomeKit camera that I reviewed earlier this year.

My Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is paired with an Ecobee Smart Video Doorbell, which is also on sale for Black Friday. I’ve used various Ecobee smart home products for years and have never been disappointed. The same goes for its smart doorbell. I’ve had it installed for over a year, and it’s been reliable despite facing the sun on some very hot summer days.

Black Friday is also a great time to buy a robot vacuum and mop. There are lots of deals, but the model I’ve tested for the past couple of months and love is the Narwal Freo X10 Pro. It handles vacuuming and mopping, navigating via LiDAR and does an excellent job compared to other robot vacuums I’ve tried. I’ll be reviewing the Freo X10 Pro about it soon, but now’s the time to get it at a steep discount.

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Ten

Ten years ago this Sunday, I published my first article on MacStories. I’ve told the story of how I got started before, so today, I thought I’d see if I could come up with 10 things I’ve learned over the past decade. Carve Your Own Path. Success comes in many shapes and often has as...

Festivitas Brings Fresh Whimsy to Your Mac, iPhone, and iPad for the Holiday Season

Last year, Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a Mac app that lets you string holiday lights from your menu bar and across the top of your Dock. This year, Simon is back with an update to the Mac app and a new version for the iPhone and iPad.

The default set of lights consists of traditional multi-colored bulbs that blink on and off as you use your Mac. That’s the set I use the most, but Festivitas offers many more options. You can control the lights’ opacity, whether they appear along both the menu bar and the Dock or just one of them, and the colors of the lights and the cable from which they hang. You also have more than a dozen light styles to choose from, including round holiday lights, bats, clovers, eggs, stars, hearts, snowflakes, cocktail glasses, beer mugs, “2026,” “WWDC,” and more, covering a wide variety of holidays and festive events. Plus, you can control how the lights blink. It’s a lot, but it’s also just plain fun to tweak everything to suit your tastes.

This year, the Mac app adds a virtual snowstorm that you can start from the app’s settings or menu bar item. It’s a great addition that looks amazing against a dark backdrop like the Obsidian theme I often use to write. A fun touch is that the snowflakes avoid your pointer, and you can adjust the sensitivity of this feature in settings. You can also use your pointer to push around the lights hanging from the menu bar, which is handy for those times when they obscure Safari’s menu bar or other content.

The snow is lovely. I highly recommend pairing it with the Animal Crossing Snowy Day soundtrack on Nintendo Music. It’s an incredibly peaceful and relaxing combination.

Festivitas supports Shortcuts, too. Simon has created some fun example automations that you’ll find in the app’s settings to do things like turning on the snowstorm when snow is forecast and activating your lights when you play music.

Festivitas on iPhone.

Festivitas on iPhone.

New this year is a Festivitas app for the iPhone and iPad. The app lets you build small, medium, and large widgets to place on your Home Screen. You can either frame a photo with twinkling lights or create a transparent-style widget so the lights frame an element of your Home Screen. I love that the lights framing the photos are animated, an effect I know isn’t easy to do with a widget. You can also add text and make other adjustments to each widget.

Festivitas isn’t going to help you get more done. In fact, it might even slow you down a little bit, and maybe that’s the point. Taking a moment to enjoy the app’s lights and be mesmerized by the falling snow is a good reminder to slow down a little and have some fun.

Festivitas for the Mac is available directly from the app’s website for any price you want to name between $3.99 and $9.99. The iPhone and iPad version is a free download on the App Store with a range of in-app purchases from $3.99 to $9.99 to create a similar name-your-price system.

AppStories, Ep. 462 - 33 minutes

The Ever-Changing App Store

FedericoJohn

This week, Federico and John explore current changes to the world of apps through the lens of its past evolution.

On AppStories+, we build “money’s no object” holiday wish lists for ourselves.

Also available on YouTube here.

[Subscribe here.](https://staging.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/plans)

Subscribe here.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

AppStories Episode 462 - The Ever-Changing App Store

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32:35

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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A New Sort of Automation

One of the problems with all the AI hype is that it tends to fall into the trap of selling AI as a way to be lazy. Even Apple succumbed to this, although the ads showing workers using Apple Intelligence to be lazy have since been removed from YouTube. But AI at its best allows...

Our Top Amazon Early Black Friday Picks

If you haven’t noticed, it’s not Friday, and Thanksgiving is still a week away. Yet here we are, talking about Black Friday deals. That’s because every year, Amazon pushes the start of its deals a little earlier.

This is far from the first article you’ll come across about Black Friday deals, and it won’t be the last. But what’s different about our approach to Black Friday is that we’re pickier than most sites.

When I sat down to consider Amazon’s Black Friday deals, I looked at a long list of factors, including:

  • whether we’ve reviewed and recommended a product on MacStories,
  • the percentage of the discount,
  • the absolute dollar amount of the discount (which we can’t list due to Amazon rules),
  • whether each deal beats past deals,
  • and a bunch of other factors.

What we’ve come up with is a list of a couple dozen excellent deals that will save you loads of money on everything from great holiday gifts to nerd staples like storage, networking gear, and upgrades to your computing setup.

Every time I write one of these roundups, I inevitably run across even more great deals after the story has been published. So in addition to this story, we’ll be posting deals on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier members will be sharing their Black Friday deal finds on Discord too. If you’re not a member, you can sign up here. The Discord server is just one of the many perks of joining the Club.

Finally, please note that the Amazon links in this article are affiliate links. If you follow one of our links and buy something, we make a small commission.

Storage

Some of Amazon's best deals are on storage.

Some of Amazon’s best deals are on storage.

Storage is a staple of Black Friday, with excellent deals on hard drives and SSDs of all shapes and sizes. This year is no different. Whether your Mac’s drive is filling up and you need to offload some large files or you’re looking for a backup solution, now is the time to pull the trigger and get more storage.

I mention Samsung portable SSDs a lot on MacStories and the MacStories Deals accounts because I’ve used them for years and they’re reliable. Samsung’s fastest model – the T9 – is my favorite because it uses USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2, making it equally good for quick backups and working on large files externally.

Currently, both the 4TB Samsung T9 SSD and the 2TB model are on sale on Amazon, with the biggest discount on the 4TB model. You can save a little more with SanDisk’s 2TB external drive, but it runs at half the speed of the Samsung T9, so I recommend the T9. However, if you want to go really big with an SSD, SanDisk has Samsung beat with an 8TB model that, while expensive and half the speed of a Samsung T9, will be far faster than a mechanical hard drive for backing up a Mac with lots of internal storage. Samsung sadly does not offer an 8TB T9 drive.

SSDs are great, but even on sale, they’re more expensive than mechanical hard drives. If you don’t need the fastest speeds and can tuck your hard drive away somewhere the heat and noise won’t bother you, Amazon has a great deal on a 14TB Western Digital Elements hard drive. I’ve used Elements drives a lot over the past several years for archiving big projects and Time Machine backups, and I’ve been very happy with their performance. If you need a big drive, now is the time to pick one of these up; they’ve never been cheaper.

Smart Home

For starters, the Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is deeply discounted for Black Friday. I reviewed this outdoor HomeKit-compatible camera earlier this year and love it. From the feedback I’ve heard, MacStories readers seem to love the camera, too.

I also reviewed the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K this summer. Paired with Philips Hue lights, it’s remarkably capable, syncing the colors of your lights to whatever is on your TV. While it’s not a smart home essential, it is a lot of fun, and if you need a little push to pull the trigger on this sort of gadget, this discount is a great excuse.

On the more practical end of the spectrum, Philips Hue is also offering a great deal on its Go Smart Portable Table Lamp, which works plugged in or via its built-in battery. I’ve had my eye on this lamp for a while because it’s very portable and would add nice accent lighting when I’m working on my balcony in the evening or anywhere else with less-than-ideal lighting.

Finally, as I mentioned on the Setups video that Federico and I recently released, I love my new SwitchBot Smart Desk Fan. It oscillates left and right as well as up and down, and it has nine speed settings. Best of all, I can control it from the buttons on the front of the device, using the included remote control, or with Shortcuts because it works with HomeKit.

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Apple Announces 45 App Store Awards Finalists for 2025

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced the finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. The App Store Awards are Apple’s annual celebration of exceptional apps and games across 12 categories spanning the company’s platforms. It’s an excellent collection that includes solo developers, small indie teams, big companies, and many MacStories favorites.

Here’s the complete list of finalists.

iPhone App of the Year Finalists:

iPhone Game of the Year Finalists:

iPad App of the Year Finalists:

iPad Game of the Year Finalists:

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MacStories Setups Update: An Apple Gear Refresh, Dual-Screen Gaming, and HomeKit→

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

As we head into the final weeks of 2025, Federico and I figured it would be a good time to update the MacStories Setups page. There’s an ebb and flow to the gear and apps we test each year, and as the fall OS update season fades into the past, it’s not unusual for one or both of us to take stock of our setup and make changes. That’s been very true for both of us this year, but in different ways.

Federico has been focused on simplifying his hardware setup and testing a long list of apps and services. In contrast, I’ve made fewer gear cuts, focusing more on strategic changes to the gadgets I use and settling on a core set of work apps.

The result is that Federico’s hardware setup changes have primarily been updates to his Apple and portable gaming gear. He made the transition from the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the iPhone Air, and couldn’t be happier with the result. He also replaced the M4 iPad Pro with the latest M5 model and moved from the AirPods 4 to the AirPods Pro 3.

Both of us ditched our previous Apple Vision Pro head strap solutions for the Apple Dual Knit Band, which has been a big upgrade. It’s comfortable, and having one dial to adjust both bands is both clever and far simpler than other solutions I’ve tried.

Ayn Thor.

Ayn Thor.

Federico also added the Ayn Thor to his handheld gaming lineup. The Thor, which I also bought this fall, is a dual-screen OLED gaming handheld that runs Android. It’s perfect for emulating dual-screen systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but it has also been excellent for game streaming and testing the emerging world of emulating SteamOS on Android. If game tinkering is your thing and this sounds intriguing, we have two episodes of NPC: Next Portable Console that go in-depth on the Ayn Thor.

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Apple Beefed Up Its Rule Against Copycat Apps→

Last week, I wrote about Apple’s new policies surrounding mini apps. However, that wasn’t the only change made to the App Review Guidelines last week. Apple also added a new subsection “c” to its rule against Copycat apps:

4.1(c) You cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer.

As I wrote earlier this year, this isn’t a new problem, especially for developers of popular games on other platforms. Copycat versions of Blue Prince, Palworld, Wordle, Cuphead, Balatro (before it was released on the App Store), and Unpacking have all appeared on the App Store in recent years.

The update to App Guideline 4.1 shows that Apple is aware of the problem, which is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the awareness will lead to better enforcement, too.

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