This week’s episode of the In the News podcast was recorded on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, so I share a few thoughts and stories about that to start us off, including some that are quite positive. Next, we look to the future. Specifically, September 9, when Apple will announce the 2025 version of the iPhone along with other new devices. We also discuss the history of Apple’s successful relationship with the advertising folks at TBWA, a reason that AppleCare One may not be for you, using the Invites app to count down the days to an event, a new camera app from Adobe, what to do about the increase in iPhones being inspected by customs agents when anyone enters the United States notwithstanding any confidential information that might be on that device, and how the shutdown of the TypePad service serves as a warning to all of us.

In our In the Show segment, we discuss Apple sharing the excellent show Trying with the BBC and the upcoming Apple TV+ limited series Savant.

In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a fun tip for changing the avatar when you are using the Google Maps app to navigate a route. And I explain what it means when you see a status icon at the top of your iPad that Apple doesn’t identify on its support page devoted to status icons.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

It is now official. Apple announced this week what some of us have suspected for a long time: on September 9, 2025, at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern, Apple will have a big event. And we all know what an Apple event in September means: the introduction of this year’s version of the iPhone. The graphic that Apple is using for the event is interesting, and you can see it right now at the top of the Apple website. It is a glowing, fluid, Apple logo. If you move your cursor over the logo (or, on a touch device like an iPhone or iPad, if you touch the logo), you can move the heat map effect around on the Apple logo. I suppose this animation is a sort of a nod to the new Liquid Glass interface that is coming in iOS 26. There are lots of rumors on what Apple might announce—an iPhone with a camera bump that stretches across the entire top of the back of the iPhone, a version of the iPhone that is very thin and that might be called the iPhone Air, a case from Apple made from a new fabric, lanyards that work with that new case, and more—and we will all know for sure in 11 days. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• In an article for Six Colors, Joe Rosensteel discusses a new iPhone app from Adobe called Project Indigo. Adobe calls it an experimental camera app, and as Rosensteel shows, it sometimes can produce a picture with color that is more true-to-life.
• The free Invites app for the iPhone from Apple gained a new feature this week. As noted by Zac Hall of 9to5Mac, create an event in the app, and then you can put a countdown widget on your home screen so that you can count down the number of days until an important event. It’s a great way to know how many shopping days you have before Christmas or how many days you have before your current iPhone starts to seem like yesterday’s news, starting on September 9.
• As Tim Cook begins his 15th year as Apple’s CEO, Jason Snell of Six Colors reflects on his impressive run so far.
• Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider reviews the latest generation of the Level Lock Pro, a smart lock for a door that works with Apple Home and the Home Key feature. This product looks to be feature-rich while not looking at all like a smart lock.
• Jonathan Reed of MacStories reviews the Aqara G410 Video Doorbell. He concludes that it is a solid product at a reasonable price. (It is $129.99 on Amazon.)
• Brittaney Kiefer of Adweek reports on the very long relationship between Apple and TBWA\Media Arts Lab, the agency that produces much of Apple’s marketing.
• I’m a fan of the new AppleCare One program, which allows you to protect three or more of your devices under one plan. It is cheaper than what I used before and offers more protection. But John Siracusa notes in a post on Mastodon that the service doesn’t work on a Mac if you have multiple user accounts enabled. For now, only use the service with products on which there is only a single Apple account enabled. Jason Snell notes that this seems to be “another reminder that Apple launches all sorts of products without anything but a surface consideration of the Mac.”
• Matt Burgess of Wired reports that smartphone searches by U.S. Customs and Border Protection when people enter the United States are now at a record high. These searches do not require a warrant, and anyone can be subject to smartphone search, regardless of whether they are a U.S. citizen. This practice is particularly problematic for attorneys who have confidential and privileged information on an iPhone, as I have discussed in the past.
• At the end of 2024, I decided to move this website from TypePad to the WordPress platform. After 16 years and 2,608 posts, it was a long and difficult transition, and I needed to hire an expert to help me with a lot of the technical details. After a few months, the transition was finally complete. This week, TypePad announced on its blog that the service is shutting down completely on September 30, 2025, as reported by Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica. As a result, all existing TypePad websites have to move or they will be gone forever. I feel bad for all of the people who now have to accomplish in just a few weeks what took me a few months.
• Apple is trying something new with one of its Apple TV+ shows. As reported by Max Goldbart of Deadline, Apple has sold rights to the first three seasons of the show Trying to the BBC. This is the longest-running comedy on Apple TV+ (with four seasons already and a fifth season in the works), and it is a fantastic show that my wife and I have enjoyed. I suppose that Apple hopes that if people watch the first few seasons for free on BBC, they will subscribe to Apple TV+ to see the rest of the series.
• Nancy Tartaglione of Deadline reports that Apple’s F1 movie (my review) is not just Apple’s most successful movie ever, it is also the top-grossing movie for Brad Pitt, with over $600 million in revenue.
• And finally, Apple released the trailer this week for a new eight-part limited series called The Savant. It features Jessica Chastain as an undercover agent who tries to stop domestic terrorism attacks, and it looks like it could be good. The first episode comes out on September 26, 2025. Here is the trailer:

Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast with a quick PSA on a recent security update, and then we discuss Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who recently declared to CBS News that he is the happiest person alive. He certainly does a lot to try to make other people happy. Next we discuss a device that has made a lot of people happy—AirPods—including ways to make them more comfortable in your ears and the amazing details on how they work. Next, we discuss using passkeys instead of passwords, the cost of Apple TV+, the benefits of being an Apple One subscriber, how an Apple Watch might help you detect a brain tumor, and the latest immersive environments for the Apple Vision Pro including a really cool one with a Harry Potter theme. We also discuss the Action Mode in the iPhone’s camera app.

In our In the Know segment, Brett shares some a tip for using the wonderful Live Photo feature in the Camera app, and I explain why you should consider using Apple’s Final Cut Pro app for the iPad—even if only for a month.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Steve Jobs gets all of the attention when people talk about the history of Apple, but there were two men in the garage who started the company, and the other founder was Steve Wozniak, who everyone calls Woz. John Gruber of Daring Fireball reports that Wox turned 75 years old this week. He also explains how Woz has tried to devote his entire life to the simple concept of making people happy. We can use more of that in this world, so Happy Birthday to Woz. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• It was just last week that Apple released iOS 18.6.1. Nevertheless, as reported by Juli Clover of MacRumors, this week Apple released iOS 18.6.2 and iPadOS 18.6.2. Apple says that these updates provide important security fixes and are recommended for all users.
• William Gallagher of AppleInsider shares the tale of a woman in the UK whose Apple Watch kept reporting a low heart rate. That led her to seek medical attention and discover that her heart was having ectopic beats, perhaps as a result of stress. And then subsequent tests discovered a brain tumor. No sensor on the Apple Watch discovered the tumor, but the fact that it encouraged her to seek medical attention turned out to be important for multiple reasons.
• Do you use AirPods but find that they sometimes fall out of your ears? (I’m talking about AirPods, not AirPods Pro.) If so, Amber Neely of AppleInsider recommends trying silicone covers ($8.99 on Amazon) to see if that keeps them from falling out.
• Do you wonder how AirPods work? A new video from Real Engineering does a great job of explaining the technology.
• In an article for Six Colors, Glenn Fleishman does a great job of explaining why passkeys are better than passwords. He also recommends using Apple’s own Passwords app to store passkeys if you primarily use Apple devices and to use 1Password if you want to use passkeys on multiple platforms. (I’ll add: if you already use 1Password, it makes sense to also use that app for your passkeys.)
• When the Apple Vision Pro was released last year, the HBO Max app included an immersive environment that made you feel like you were in the Iron Throne room from Game of Thrones. This week, HBO Max added another immersive environment: Hogwarts Great Hall from Harry Potter. As Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes, there is both a day and a night mode, and it features floating candles and ambient sound effects. This makes sense because HBO Max recently started filming a new TV series based on the books, but since that new series does not debut until 2027, I’m a little surprised that this immersive environment was released now.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider notes that Disney+ has a new immersive environment for the Vision Pro based on content from the new show Alien: Earth.
• If you like the Apple TV+ show Severance, there is a video episode of the Severance Podcast out this week. It features most of the cast members playing a silly game and trading jokes, and I enjoyed seeing the actors have fun.
• Apple TV+ is getting more expensive if you get it as a stand-alone service and pay monthly. As Joe Rossignol of MacRumors notes, when the service launched in 2019 (with very few shows), the monthly cost was $4.99. In 2022, Apple increased the price to $6.99. In 2023, the price increased to $9.99. This week, Apple announced that the monthly price is going up to $12.99. (The annual price remains the same at $99.99.) Virtually every other streaming service has also had price hikes, and I still think that Apple TV+ is a great value. Indeed, if you get Apple TV+ through the Apple One bundle, the price is staying the same—even though Apple did increase the price of Apple One back in 2023 at the same time that it last raised the price of the Apple TV+ service.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball believes that the change in the monthly, but not the annual, price for Apple TV+ and other streaming services reflects the rise in short-term customers.
• Ryan Christoffel notes that the Apple One service is becoming more worthwhile for two reasons. First, the price increase of Apple TV+ means that the price difference between that service and Apple One (which starts at $19.99) is even less. Second, another part of Apple One—the Apple Music service—is about to get much better in iOS 26 with cool new features like AutoMix, full-screen animated artwork on the lock screen, and much more.
• Speaking of Apple One, I’ll note that if you get the Premier package ($37.95 a month), you can share with five other people, plus you get Fitness+ and News+, two services that I use frequently and really enjoy. Plus, you get 2TB of iCloud storage for your family, which is really useful. (I see that my iCloud Photos library alone is over 800 GB right now.)
• And finally, in 2022, Apple released Action Mode, a way to reduce shakiness in handheld videos, which is especially handy if you are moving around a lot while you take a video. This week, Apple released an uplifting and tear-jerking video called No Frame Missed to show how the Action mode on an iPhone is also a great feature for people who have hands that shake because of Parkinson’s. Very cool.

Thank you to Sanebox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. In previous posts, I’ve discussed how SaneBox vastly improves an inbox by letting you see just the good stuff. This month, however, I want to focus on security.

Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated every day, sending you emails that seem legitimate in the hopes that you will click a link and be tricked into providing personal information and/or a login password. Every email service includes a spam filter that analyzes message content and attempts to block malicious emails. While you should take advantage of these filters, unfortunately, they are never enough. The bad actors can take advantage of AI to draft emails that, at first blush, may seem entirely legitimate.

That’s where SaneBox can help. For privacy reasons, SaneBox never looks at the content of any of your emails. (Which, by the way, I consider a great feature.) Instead, SaneBox examines the sender and subject lines of your messages. It intelligently keeps the emails you are most likely to want in your inbox, while moving less important messages to folders such as @SaneLater. This makes a huge difference. It means that when I’m working with my inbox throughout the day, there are relatively few emails in there. About once a day, I review the messages SaneBox has placed in the @SaneLater folder. When I do, I naturally adopt a more critical mindset, evaluating whether each email is important to me. Some of these messages are legitimate, but others are either spam that slipped past the spam filter or emails that simply do not deserve my attention. Or, they are emails that are improperly trying to attract my attention, something sent by a malicious actor. That is because typical phishing emails are sent by someone unknown to me, so there is a high chance that they are automatically sorted by SaneBox into my @SaneLater folder, not my regular inbox.

Another risk is known as spearphishing: an email that comes specifically to me, perhaps from the email of someone I do know, because that person’s email was compromised. But here again, SaneBox helps. Those rare emails may end up in my Inbox, but because SaneBox vastly limits the number of emails in my Inbox, each of them gets more of my attention, making it easier for me to spot something that isn’t quite right.

When I see an unwanted email from a sender that I don’t want to deal with again, I don’t bother using something like an “unsubscribe” link in an email. I rarely trust those to work—especially if the email came from a less reputable source. In fact, some companies may use your click to confirm your email address is valid, allowing them to sell your email address to others for misuse. Ugh. Instead, I just move the email into my @SaneBlackHole folder. With that one move, SaneBox will forever move all emails from that sender into that folder. They can send me as many annoying emails as they want in the future; I don’t care, because I never see them. It is awesome.

The primary reason I have subscribed to SaneBox for so long is that it provides a superior inbox experience. But I also very much appreciate that it enhances my email security—an increasingly important benefit.

If you would like to experience the difference SaneBox can make, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you don’t like having a clean and tidy Inbox that is even more secure and decide to return to how you had it before, no sweat. But if you appreciate having a better way of working with email, using this link in this post will give you a generous $25 credit for when you pick a plan—and there are lots of different plans offered so that you can choose the one that gives you just what you want.

Thanks again to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month and for giving all of us a better and safer way to work with email.

Apple’s traditional September presentation is just around the corner, so Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast discussing the latest speculation on what Apple may announce. After discussing upcoming hardware, we then discuss upcoming software, including the great new features coming to watchOS 26 and the changes coming to the Messages app in CarPlay. We also discuss the return of the blood oxygen sensor feature to the Apple Watch, the latest shows on Apple TV+, and the end of using a dial-up modem to access AOL or a BBS.

In our In the Know segment, Brett discusses the low power mode on the Apple Watch and iPhone, and I discuss some additional reasons to check out the new app called Cassette that I reviewed a few days ago.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

For the reasons I mentioned last week, my guess is that we are about three weeks away from Apple announcing new iPhones and more, such as perhaps a new Apple Watch. Jason Snell of Six Colors looks back at Apple’s history of taking a product that starts one way and then splitting the line into multiple products (such as regular size versus larger iPhones) and speculates on how Apple might do something similar this year to come out with a new version of a product. And what might be included in the Pro models of the iPhone, one of Apple’s highest-end products? Joe Rossignol of MacRumors has some ideas, and they include (1) an increase of RAM from 8GB to 12GB, which I suspect would help with AI, (2) up to 8x optical zoom, up from 5x on the current high-end iPhones, (3) an anti-reflective display, and (4) improvements to video recording. There were other predictions and revelations this week about what is coming soon because of some code discovered in beta software from Apple. For example, Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac says that the next version of the Apple TV 4K will include an A17 Pro chip—the same chip used in the iPhone 15 Pro—which may be included so that it can support Apple Intelligence. And now, the news of note from the past week.

• Even if you don’t buy a new Apple device this Fall, you can still get a new feature for the Apple Watch. Or an old feature? I’m not sure. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that after 18 months of Apple being unable to sell an Apple Watch in the United States with a blood oxygen feature, Apple has released iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 to provide a “redesigned” version of this feature, while Apple continues to appeal the court ruling barring the original version of this feature.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains that the redesigned version of the blood oxygen feature works by taking blood oxygen measurements on your watch but then processing the data and displaying the results on your iPhone. Perhaps that is why Apple’s release notes call it a “Blood Oxygen experience” instead of a blood oxygen feature.
• I installed the updates last night and took my first blood oxygen measurement since August 3, 2024—the date that my Apple Watch Series 7 broke, and I replaced it with a newer model that could not, per court order, have this feature enabled. The measurement part on the watch seems to work the same as before, but after the measurement is taken, my watch told me to look at the Health app on my iPhone. And my iPhone lock screen had a notification saying that I had a new blood oxygen recording. When I tapped the notification, I was brought directly to the Blood Oxygen part of the Health app, where I saw that my reading was 99%.
• There is a new Messages app for CarPlay in the upcoming iOS 26, and Stephen Hackett is not a fan, for the reasons that he explains in his post on 512 Pixels. For example, unless a name is very short, it is truncated. I guess Apple hopes that you pay attention to the picture more than the letters in the name.
• Amy Skorheim of Engadget discusses the new features coming to the Apple Watch in wachOS 26. She especially likes the new wrist flick feature.
• Tim Hardwick of MacRumors reports that Netflix is rolling out a new interface for the Apple TV. The most noticeable change is that the left-hand sidebar navigation is gone, replaced with a menu bar at the top.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac reports that two of the shows currently streaming on Apple TV+—Chief of War and Platonic—are some of the best-reviewed shows of the service. I’m enjoying Chief of War, and while I haven’t started Platonic yet, I did like the first season.
• And finally, if you are of a certain age, you can close your eyes and imagine the sound of a modem making a connection to a service such as America Online. Surprisingly, dial-up access to AOL has continued to work even in recent years, but as repoted by Yan Zhaung of the New York Times, this week we learned that the AOL dial-up access service will end on September 30, 2025. Roman Loyola of Macworld explains that Apple actually played a role in the creation AOL because of its cooperation in 1988 with a company called Quantum Computing Services. Quantum Computer Services had previously created a service called Quantum Link (Q-Link), which was an online service for the Commodore 64 that I used when I was in high school in the mid-1980s. I suspect that it won’t surprise you that I also ran a BBS in the 1980s, which meant that I couldn’t use my Commodore 64 to access Q-Link if someone was using my BBS because they were tying up my computer and my phone line. I didn’t see any interesting new videos to share at the end of this post this week, so here is an old one, a movie called BBS The Documentary from 20 years ago that is now available on YouTube. It addresses the rise and fall of the BBS community in the 1980s and 1990s. If you lived through that like I did, this is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Here is Part 1 of 8 of the documentary:

I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to use technology to be more productive as an attorney, and that is the source of inspiration for most of my posts on iPhone J.D. But sometimes, you just want to have some fun. I often enjoy looking at photos and videos that I have taken over the years using the Photos app on my iPhone or iPad, so when I heard about a new app called Cassette that you can use to watch your own videos, my first thought was, why would anyone need that when we have the Photos app? But then I tried the app, and I got it. You know how looking at an old video—such as a video of your teenage kids back when they were cute toddlers—can bring a smile to your face because of the nostalgia? Why not have an app to play videos with an interface and functionality that is full of nostalgia. That is Cassette.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, home videos were typically watched using a VHS or VHS-C cassette tape. You would put it in the VCR and watch the video. There was no way to drag the playhead to jump ahead ten minutes like you can with a digital video on YouTube. Sometimes, the video would abruptly jump from one scene (like Christmas) to another scene (like New Year’s Eve) because we would use the same tape in the video camera until the tape was full.

The Cassette app recreates some of that experience in an iPhone and iPad app. Each year of your videos is represented by a single cassette tape. When you tap a tape to play it, you see the tape inserted into a virtual VCR—which is a cute animation.

Next, you see the videos on that cassette (i.e., from that year).

You can play a video either in the small representation of an old TV, or you can tap the TV to make the video larger. Virtually all of my videos are taken in landscape orientation, so this feature works much better on my iPad than my iPhone because, for now at least, the app doesn’t let you turn an iPhone to landscape mode and play the video that way. (I hope this is fixed in a future update.) [Update: The creator of this app told me that this feature is planned.]

You cannot jump around in a video, but you can make the video rewind or fast forward, just like a VCR would do. And the location and date of the video are displayed using letters and numbers that look very much like what an old video camera would superimpose on a video.

When a video is done, it moves on to the next video in your camera roll.

Yes, you can use the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad to view a single video in your camera roll, but the experience is less fun than what the Cassette app provides. Moreover, the main screen of the Cassette app has a large button that says “Take Me Somewhere.” Tap that to play a random video—something that almost always makes me smile as I say, “oh yeah, I forgot about that one.” The Photos app doesn’t have a way to play a random video (although it does have the Memories feature, which can also do a good job of surfacing a video that might delight you).

You can use almost all of the app’s features for free. But if you pay the one-time price of $7.99, you can upgrade to Cassette ColorPlus, which lets you manually select a specific video to start watching. It also gives you the satisfaction of knowing that you helped the developer. It only took me a few minutes of using this app to decide that I wanted to pay.

The creator of this app is Devin Davies, an iOS developer in New Zealand who is known for his popular recipe organizer and meal planner app called Crouton (which won an Apple Design Award in 2024). As Apple acknowledged with that award, Davies knows how to create a delightful design, and he has done it again with this app.

I was going to end this review with a link to one of the best scenes of the great show Mad Men, but then I saw that just a few hours ago, John Gruber of Daring Fireball had the same idea and beat me to it in his own post about this app. As Don Draper might say, an app like this “takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

If you ever record video on your iPhone, I encourage you to check out Cassette and play around with the Take Me Somewhere feature. It is sure to bring a smile to your face.

Click here to download Cassette (free, but $7.99 to unlock all features).

We start this week’s episode of the In the News podcast taking a look back at the seven people who have served as CEO of Apple since 1977, especially Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. We then look forward to who might replace Tim Cook whenever he retires. Next, we look forward to September 9, when we expect Apple to introduce the 2025 iPhone models. We also discuss Maps and CarPlay in iOS 26, a product from Belkin that could be a good replacement for the excellent MagSafe Battery Pack from Apple, immersive orangutans, and more.

In our In the Show segment, we discuss some great shows that are currently airing on Apple TV+, some of the things that we are looking forward to on Apple TV+ this Fall., and one of our favorite scenes from Season 2 of Severance (but don’t worry, no spoilers).

In our In the Know segment, we both talk about the Apple Watch. Brett discusses the water lock and eject water feature, and I discuss countless ways that an Apple Watch is incredibly useful when you are taking a Summer vacation.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Apple has had seven CEOs since the company was founded in 1977, but I cannot help but think of Steve Jobs as the CEO of Apple. And yet, as Harley Charlton of MacRumors notes, August 1, 2025, was the 5,091st day that Tim Cook was the CEO of Apple—surpassing the 5,090 days that Steve Jobs was Apple’s CEO from 1997 to 2011. (At first, Steve Jobs was the interim CEO, but as reported by Michael Kanellos of CNet on January 5, 2000, Steve Jobs announced during his keynote address at the Macworld 2000 San Francisco convention that he was becoming the permanent CEO.) By almost any metric, Cook has done an amazing job as Apple’s CEO since 2011. At 64 years old, I’m curious how much longer he will want the difficult job. William Gallagher of AppleInsider recently speculated on who might replace Cook as CEO one day. I feel certain that it will be someone who is working at Apple right now. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• When will Apple reveal the 2025 version of the iPhone? As noted by Tim Hardwick of MacRumors, there were rumors this week that the announcement will be on September 9. But regular readers of iPhone J.D. already knew that. As I noted a full year ago, Apple has been mostly following a pattern for a while now, and based on that pattern, I predicted that new iPhones would be introduced on the same date—September 9—in 2024, 2025, and 2026. Suffice it to say that if you are in the market for a new iPhone right now, I recommend that you wait another month.
• If you are a lawyer, then you probably know how useful it was when Westlaw added the ability to locate jurisprudence using a natural language search. Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac reports that Apple is doing something similar in the Maps app in iOS 26. Just use your own words to tell the Maps app what you are looking for—such as “find cafes with free Wi-Fi”—and the app will use AI to understand what you are looking for and give you search results.
• I have good news for what I’m sure is the very large number of iPhone J.D. readers who drive a Lotus car—or more specifically, the electric Eletre and Emeya models. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that the British sports car maker is bringing Spatial Audio support to CarPlay so that drivers can enjoy immersive 3D sound in Dolby Atmos from the 23 speakers.
• No matter what kind of car you drive, if you have CarPlay, one of the improvements coming in iOS 26 is that phone call notifications won’t take over your entire screen. As Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac shows, this means that a call notification won’t get in the way of your navigation.
• Ankur Thakur of iDownloadBlog describes the new Wrist Flick gesture coming to newer models of the Apple Watch in watchOS 26.
• Simon Jary of Macworld reviews the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Magnetic Power Bank Qi2, a device that is the spiritual successor to the excellent MagSafe Battery Pack from Apple that I discussed in 2023 but which, unfortunately, Apple no longer sells. The Belkin device costs $59.95 on Amazon.
• You can currently get the latest model of the iPad mini for only $399 on Amazon, which is a $100 savings.
• If you go to iPhoneJD.com/appleimmersive, I keep an updated page listing all of the immersive video content from Apple for the Apple Vision Pro. It has been quite a few weeks since Apple released new content. On May 30, 2025, Apple released Bono: Stories of Surrender, and on June 19, 2025, Apple released a short video associated with the F1 movie. Today, Apple is releasing a new episode of its immersive series Wild Life. The new episode is called “Orangutans,” and Apple’s description is: Bond with young orangutans at an extraordinary rehab center in Borneo as they grow, play, and learn the ropes of jungle life. I watched this video just a few minutes before publishing this post, and it is incredible, one of my favorites of all of Apple’s immersive videos. Primarily, this is because of the subject matter. I enjoy watching the orangutans at a zoo because they are often funny and cute. That is true in this video, and it is even better because they are right there in front of you. Additionally, there is some incredible photography in this immersive video that does a fantastic job of showing the height of the trees that the orangutans climb on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.
• Summer is soon coming to a close. My daughter starts school as a high school senior in just a few days, and I know that many students have already started school. As we look forward to the Fall, that also means a new season full of good shows to watch. Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac runs down the shows coming to Apple TV+ this September, October, and November, and there is a lot to look forward to. I’m especially excited to see the new season of Slow Horses on September 24 and the new show Pluribus on November 7.
• What’s good on Apple TV+ right now? I’m loving the current season of Foundation. The new show starring Jason Momoa called Chief of War started last weekend, and I thought that the first two episodes were great. And the second season of Platonic has just started, a show that had a funny first season. Alexis Soloski of The New York Times interviews Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller, the husband-and-wife team that created the show.
• If you didn’t get a chance to see Apple’s F1 movie when it was in an IMAX theater earlier this Summer, you now have another chance. As noted by Apple, starting today, you can once again see F1 in an IMAX movie theater. As I noted last month in my review, the movie is great fun to watch on an IMAX screen.
• Speaking of the movie F1, not only has it been a hit for Apple, with revenue of over $552 million, but Caitlin Huston of The Hollywood Reporter says that The Formula One Group (the group responsible for the promotion of F1 racing) has seen a big boost in revenue as a result of the popularity of the F1 movie.
• And finally, stop reading if you haven’t watched the Apple TV+ show Severance yet. But if you have, one of the coolest scenes from Season 2 involves the character Mark and a video camera. Apple just released a clip on YouTube of part of that scene, and it is fun to watch again: