Belkin’s iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks has a bad name but is a very good accessory. It lets you clip your iPhone onto your laptop so you can make use of macOS Ventura and iOS 16’s Continuity Camera feature, which turns your phone into a webcam that absolutely crushes pretty much anything that’s built into MacBooks these days. And if that was all it did, I’d still be happy with it — but its design and features are what truly make it worth considering, even though there’s already a flood of other accessories meant to do the same job.
There are too many iPads, iPhones, and Apple Watches
Last week, I decided I was going to buy a new iPad.
There’s nothing wrong with the sixth-gen iPad I currently have, except it’s heavier than I’d like. All I want to do is watch my silly dramas in bed and for it to hurt less when I whack myself in the forehead while drifting off to sleep. It’d be nice to have a faster tablet for odd tasks where my iPhone screen is too small and my laptop is too large — especially on vacation. Besides, four years is a respectable amount of time to wait when all you want is a slightly faster (and perhaps more colorful) version of what you already got.
I moseyed on over to the Apple website. There was the ninth-gen iPad and the 10th-gen iPad. There was also the iPad Mini and the iPad Air. I’m not a Pro, but there were two of those — an 11-inch and a 12.9-inch model. I’m a gadget reviewer. I know several other gadget reviewers, and I knew what I wanted out of a new iPad. You’d think I’d have been able to suss this out. But no.
As my colleague Monica Chin aptly put it, the new iPad doesn’t make sense. At $449, it’s too expensive to be entry level — especially when, as my editor Dan Seifert points out in his review, the Air can easily be found on sale. Plus, I’m not buying a silly USB-C to Lightning Pencil adapter just to try