MacSparky

I wrote yesterday that maybe Apple needs to buy Perplexity. To make my case, Perplexity released a voice assistant to their iOS app that makes Siri look pretty bad. I occasionally make quick videos for the MacSparky labs members that don’t go through the…

PowerPhotos 3.0 has officially landed, and it’s a big one. For the uninitiated, PowerPhotos is a utility that fills in the gaps in Apple’s Photos app. It’s long been the Photos utility of choice for many Mac power users, offering features like multiple…

Early in my experience with ChatGPT’s voice feature, my daughter walked into the room and I told it to say hello to her. It did, cheerfully, and it totally creeped her out. I turned the voice off. A week later, I fired ChatGPT back up, and it asked me how…

Author Paul Loomans joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about time surfing, a zen approach to keeping time on your side. This episode of Focused is sponsored by:…

I had to chuckle when I read this Verge article about Meta’s attorneys botching their document redactions during the FTC antitrust trial. Having spent three decades in the legal racket, it was shocking to me how often lawyers (and their staff) were…

News broke this week that Perplexity AI is in talks to integrate its assistant directly into Samsung and Motorola phones. What’s especially interesting here is how this upends the usual Android assistant narrative. Google has been baking Gemini into Android…

The Opal C1 Webcam is meant to be the webcam everybody actually wants to use. It\’s got tons of software features and a better lens system than anything you\’d find in most (all?) other webcams. It\’s time for me to kick the tires… This is a post for…

On this Mac Power Users feedback episode, Stephen and I revisit iCloud.com access and Advanced Data Protection, make confessions about recent setup changes, and answer a bunch of listener questions. This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:…

There’s a rumor that Apple is working on an on-device medical AI. The idea is that your iPhone or Apple Watch could use its onboard silicon to privately analyze your health data and offer recommendations, without sending that sensitive information to the…

In this week’s episode of The Lab Report: Meta’s lawyers are not Mac power users, Intel Macs go vintage. and some controversy over Siri’s AI investment cuts. I also share my Freeform calendar video and urge you to update to iOS 18.4.1 right now. … This…