Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, and Dialog, a show where creativity meets technology.
He can also be found on his two other podcasts on Relay FM – Connected and Remaster.
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Spigen announced a new retro-inspired iPhone case called the Classic LS, featuring a boxy design reminiscent of the Macintosh 128K and Apple Lisa, complete with keyboard-style buttons and a beige color scheme. Guess who got one. (Link)
Taphouse is a new native macOS client for Homebrew that brings a visual package management experience to Mac users, complete with features such as adopting existing apps into Homebrew, third-party app updates, and Mac App Store integration. It reminds me of the package manager from the Steam Deck. (Link)
If you’re not Very Online and, specifically, Very Online and Plugged Into AI News, you may not know that over the past couple of weeks, a lot of folks seem to have realized that it’s possible to use Anthropic’s Claude Code desktop coding agent to do a lot more than just coding on a computer. I count myself amongst those people, and I think I know why this is happening now: the combination of a holiday break and the recently released Claude Opus 4.5 means people have had a lot of free time on their hands to tinker (we know this), and they’ve been able to spend some quality time with a really good model. Plus, when you consider how much Claude Code has grown over the past year since its introduction with skills, hooks, plugins, a web version, and other features that can be quite overwhelming at first, you’ve got yourself a recipe for Maximum Tinkering that has resulted in a lot of people sharing some utterly fascinating non-coding workflows for Claude Code. The more I read these stories, the more I wonder if Anthropic should rename their product ‘Claude Agent’ instead of 'Claude Code’, which is selling it short at this point.
We’ll be exploring this frontier of coding agents as, actually, general agents on MacStories throughout the course of 2026. Today, I thought I’d start simple: would you believe me if I told you that I used Claude Code to recover 400 GB of storage on my MacBook Pro?
I expect AR glasses to become more mainstream in 2026 as prices start to fall while the tech has improved. One sign on the tech side is innovations like those from Lumus, a company that Engadget profiled this week, which has greatly improved the field of view for AR glasses. (Link)
It feels like Goldman Sachs began signaling that it wanted out of its deal with Apple on the Apple Card almost as soon as it launched. This week, their wish was finally granted as Chase took over the reins. (Link)
A lot has changed since the last time I shared my iPhone Home Screen here in MacStories Weekly in October 2024. The past year in software and apps has been a whirlwind of experiments, discovery, and reevaluation of old workflows for me. As you can probably tell if you’ve been listening to AppStories in 2025, AI has played a fundamental role in helping me and John reassess the apps and services that we use. This entire industry is moving so fast – and the capabilities of AI are changing so quickly – that it can be (a) hard to keep up with everything and (b) challenging to settle on anything in particular for too long. When you consider that I’m a very curious person by nature, that it’s my job to write about these experiments, and that I love testing new apps…well, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that my Home Screen has been in a state of flux for the majority of 2025.
As many of you probably know, we always take a little time off during the winter holidays to recharge and spend time with our families and friends. This year is no different. The website will be quieter than usual for a couple of weeks, and this is the last issue of MacStories Weekly for the year. Weekly will be back on Friday, January 9. The Monthly Log for December will be published as usual before the end of the month.
As for podcasts, there’s one more episode of AppStories, MacStories Unwind, and NPC coming next week, with all three shows then taking a two-week break. There will be an episode of Cozy Zone for subscribers next week, too, but Comfort Zone is taking the week off. Also, First, Last, Everything and Magic Rays of Light are currently on hiatus. Their return dates haven’t been set yet, but we’ll let you know when they resume.
If you’re looking for a good long-form read about something a little different over the holidays, this GQ article by Elizabeth Nelson does a great job capturing The Replacements’ at their peak in 1984, an interesting time in music that also saw Prince’s rise from local Minneapolis act to superstar status. (Link)
On a recent episode of NPC XL, Brendon explained how he’d turned a gaming handheld into an iPod. He also mentioned the Snowsky Fiio Echo Mini, a DAP (Digital Audio Player) that looks like a cassette player. That sent me on a bit of a Google search tangent, where I found this great story about the device by Gita Jackson on Aftermath. (Link)
