By Jason Snell

December 30, 2025 10:29 AM PT

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My favorite things of 2025

The year is at an end, and as is tradition, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite stuff from the year gone by. This is it!

Also, Myke Hurley and I create a collaborative list of favorites every year called the Upgradies. This year’s episode is the 12th annual, so you can listen to our favorites in audio form or even watch them on YouTube.

New Apple Features

• Clipboard History on macOS: Two years ago, a question from a reader led me to ponder what stones Apple had left unturned over four decades of Mac development. My conclusion was that the lack of a clipboard history feature was a gaping hole. Somehow, in macOS Tahoe, the hole was filled. Apple added a clipboard history feature that might not satisfy power users of Pastebot, but will work pretty well for general use. My only real complaint about Apple’s implementation is that it requires two keystrokes—Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, and then Command-4 to enter Clipboard History mode. I’ve wired that sequence to my old LaunchBar clipboard history shortcut (Command-backslash), but users should be able to set that shortcut without needing a third-party tool.

• iPad Multitasking: They finally did it. Apple got over all of its hang-ups over not making the iPad too much like the Mac, and just went for it: iPadOS 26 multitasking is full, no-compromises Mac-style windowing. Put a window wherever you like, drag ’em around, do what you want. And because the feature is hidden behind a mode toggle, people who don’t want to use the feature will never see it. If I had any quibbles about Apple’s implementation, they were mostly about Apple ignoring some unique utility users found in Split View and Slide Over, two old-school iPad multitasking features that didn’t make it over in 26.0. Fortunately, Apple added most of the missing features back in 26.1 and 26.2.

• Private Cloud Compute in Shortcuts: Say what you will about Apple’s AI models, but the 26 OS updates gave every user access, for free, to Apple’s private cloud models via Shortcuts. Being able to pass steps of an automation to an LLM unlocks a lot of functionality, and I’m happy to do that all in a private environment and without setting up and paying for an API key from a third-party AI company. Next up: Apple needs to keep improving its models and start offering a way for third-party apps to hook into Private Cloud Compute. But this is a great start.

Some shiny app favorites

Over the decades, I’ve built up some intricate workflows based on apps I’ve been using forever. I try to remain open to new apps and new ways of working, but there’s a high bar to clear there. As a result, most of my time is spent with old favorites like BBEdit, Fantastical, and Safari. On the iPad, I’m still using 1Writer for writing, though I am constantly scanning for other apps that combine my preferred style of Markdown editing with an appropriate level of automation support.

Still, there are some apps that I want to single out.

• Mimestream continues to be my Mac mail app of choice. It only supports Gmail, so your mileage may vary, but I’m a Gmail user, and this is the Mac Gmail client of my dreams. I can’t wait for the iOS (and, hopefully, iPad) version.

• I got to use Final Cut Camera this year for a few multi-camera recording sessions for Upgrade, and came away very impressed. The integration between Final Cut Pro for iPad and Final Cut Camera on iPhone is solid, making it super easy to capture multiple camera angles and then put them all together later. My only real complaint is that there’s no way to use Final Cut Pro on the Mac to do the same thing. That makes about as much sense as the fact that Final Cut Pro for iPad still doesn’t support the background export feature in iPadOS 26 that was practically written for it.

• Callsheet by my pal Casey Liss has only become more firmly ensconced in our everyday lives, as we watch movies and TV shows and wonder who that actor is and what else we’ve seen them in, or how old they were, or what the age difference is between that older actor and his much younger co-star. I’m so glad to never have to visit IMDB again.

• Numbers is this obscure app from some fruit company in Cupertino that’s in the esoteric genre of “spreadsheet” apps. Anyway, in the last few years, I finally stopped using Excel, because I’ve discovered that I’m more comfortable in Numbers and Google Sheets. The end of a decades-long relationship is admittedly weird, but the more I dig into Numbers, the more I appreciate it. This year, with the help of a few readers, I managed to completely revamp how I generate financial charts using Numbers formulas I had never seen before. I still use Sheets a lot because it’s a lightweight answer to basic collaboration, but Numbers is an increasingly large part of my life.

• ChatGPT and Claude aren’t great Mac apps yet, but the more they properly integrate with the Mac, the more promise they show. ChatGPT gained the ability to look right into specific windows on my Mac, and Claude’s support for MCP servers and AppleScript creates some delightful synergies. I firmly believe that most AI discourse is hype, but that there are also genuinely useful applications for the technology underneath that giant hype bubble. Last week, I got Claude to grab text from BBEdit, proofread it, and insert the result back into a new BBEdit window. Just amazing—but of course, the Claude app isn’t automatable, and there’s no way to “save” a Claude prompt for re-use later. You have to laugh—this technology is so remarkable and so primitive at the same time. Given OpenAI’s purchase of Software Applications, a startup from the creators of Shortcuts that aimed to fuse LLM technology with the Mac interface, this is an area worth close attention in the next few years.

• Longplay arrived for the Mac this year, bringing its delightful album-oriented approach to listening to music over from iOS. I listen to most of my music while working at my Mac, so this is a great fit. I admire the developer’s commitment to automation hooks: he built in support for AppleScript, Shortcuts, and even control via MCP from AI apps. The real bummer is that it’s constrained by a macOS limitation that prevents apps from directly AirPlaying Apple Music tracks. Apple needs to fix that.

• Superwhisper exemplifies the potential for good integration between our devices and AI systems that goes beyond chatbots. While I doubt I will ever be a voice-first user of computer interfaces, Superwhisper’s concept is flexible enough to impress even me. It will convert your speech into text, yes, but it can also process it through an LLM—and change how it processes it based on how you’re currently using your Mac. I really like the idea of a tool that knows that my text in BBEdit is not the same as my text in Mimestream or Safari. Superwhisper gets that.

• Festivitas delighted me last year with its ability to string holiday lights across my Mac’s menu bar. For the Mac’s entire history, there have been “utilities” that don’t do anything useful, but provide delight, and this one fits right in. This year’s update added snowfall and, more importantly, support for automation via Shortcuts. I’ve spent the last month with a one-in-seven chance of a snowfall every 20 minutes, and it’s been delightful. I can not tell you how much delight about seeing those first flakes and saying to myself, “Oh, it’s snowing!” As someone who has never used a snow blower or shoveled a sidewalk, snow is a delightful effect that I generally only see in holiday-themed movies.

Television

1. The Pitt (HBO Max): Set in more-or-less 15 hours of real time in an emergency room in Pittsburgh, this show is incredibly intense. The crucible of emergency medicine is a perfect place for human drama of all kinds, and “The Pitt” has Noah Wyle at its center, holding it all together—or at least trying to. Beyond his history as a star of “ER,” Wyle’s just got the perfect mix of wisdom and weariness and personal hang-ups to drive the show, assisted by an excellent ensemble cast that allows the show to whip from case to case, never letting the pace slacken. This show is a throwback to the classic days of the adult network TV drama—yeah, to the days of ER”—but with a modern sensibility only available on a streaming service. I can’t wait for the second season, which debuts in a matter of weeks.

2. Pluribus (Apple TV): Creator Vince Gilligan steps back a bit from the antiheroes he covered in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” and instead focuses on a flawed, reluctant hero: Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), an anhedonic romantasy novelist who is exactly the wrong person to save the world nearly singlehandedly. And yet that’s what Carol is forced to do. She’s rebuffed in attempts to get help, has moments of misery and desperation, but in the end, I think she’s gonna save the world.

3. Ludwig (Britbox/BBC): What a premise. This is a British mystery show about a reclusive world-famous puzzle constructor who (for reasons) must pretend to be his identical twin brother, a police detective. His lack of social graces or knowledge of how the police work should give him away immediately, but his preternatural ability to solve puzzles ends up saving the day. This is like a weirder, funnier “Sherlock,” and star David Mitchell hits the tone perfectly. “Ludwig” feels like it was constructed just for me.

4. Severance (Apple TV): The first season of “Severance” was so good, at least in part, because it was so simply structured and constrained. There were innies and outies, and the two worlds did not collide (until they did, in the finale). But I admit really doubting if the show could pull off a second season after it overturned the game board and changed the conditions of the show’s premise. Turns out it could. Season two was different, and broadened the world of the show, but managed to keep the same themes in play, amp up the weirdness at the edges of the premise, and lead to a satisfying conclusion that makes me anxiously anticipate the third season.

5. Adolescence (Netflix): A gut-wrenching tour de force, this British series consists of four episodes, each of which is performed as a single unbroken shot. “The Studio” plays with this trick to comedic effect, but in “Adolescence,” the same technique is used to prevent you from ever looking away from the heartbreaking truth: A girl has been killed, a boy has been arrested for the crime, the parents have to come up to speed in a hurry, and the wheels of justice grind slowly. This is not easy viewing, but it’s powerful and brilliantly executed.

6. Murderbot (Apple TV): This adaptation of Martha Wells’s wildly successful series of science fiction novellas about a killer cyborg manages to be both a great sci-fi action series and an incredible comedy that gets to the heart of the human condition. In “Star Trek,” there’s usually a non-human character (Spock and Data being the most famous examples) who lets the show get to the heart of the human condition. Murderbot does the same, but in reverse: It doesn’t want to be human, but it wants to be recognized as a person with free will all the same. And yes, between the philosophy, there are exploding alien planets and funny jokes, usually at the expense of Murderbot’s space-hippie clients.

7. Dept. Q (Netflix): Led by Matthew Goode’s incredibly magnetic performance as a detective who is parked in a do-nothing job after a catastrophic shooting incident, this British crime show is about Goode’s DCI Carl Morck identifying misfits and outcasts and slowly building up an entire department that’s going to solve cold cases despite the desire of management for them to simply sit still and do nothing. If this sounds like a spin on “Slow Horses,” well, you’re not wrong—these are just detectives instead of spies. Alexej Manvelov dazzles as Akram, a former Syrian policeman who has been emptying trash cans when he’s spotted by Morck, who knows a good copper when he sees one.

8. The Studio (Apple TV): It would have been easy for Seth Rogen’s Hollywood satire to crash and burn. Elevator pitch: It’s “The Player”, but “Curb Your Enthusiasm!” Except “The Studio” makes every moment count, and every joke hits dead center. The inside jokes (praising Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, shooting extravagant one-shots, a cameo from Matt Belloni) are fine, but even if you’re not a Hollywood insider, there’s enough humor in this story of Rogen fighting to become a studio head only to find that the chalice is just as poisoned as it was for the last person to hold the job.

9. Hacks (HBO Max): Season four of HBO’s series about two women in the comedy business—young writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) and veteran performer Deborah (Jean Smart)—found the show back on top creatively. Deborah gets to realize her dream as the host of a late-night network TV show, and Ava makes sure she’s got the clout as the show’s head writer. As 2025 proved in real life, being the high-profile host of a late-night talk show is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. A special shout-out to co-showrunner Paul W. Downs as Jimmy, Deborah and Ava’s eternally put-upon manager.

10. Andor (Disney+): The first season of “Andor” proved that franchises like Star Wars can produce adult prestige television drama. The second and final season wrapped things up in a satisfying way, but the whole thing left me with the slightest sense of disappointment. The second season offers four three-episode blocks set in different timeframes, and it all felt a little rushed. I’m not saying “Andor” absolutely needed to be five seasons long, but I think it deserved more time than it got. As a result, while I liked “Andor” season two, I couldn’t help but consider it a bit of a letdown compared to the incredible heights of season one.

Honorable mention: “The Diplomat” (Netflix), “Slow Horses” (Apple TV), “The Lowdown” (Hulu/FX), “The American Revolution” (PBS).

Movies

I didn’t see enough movies to rank, but here are the ones I liked the best:

• Superman (2025): James Gunn understands what makes Superman a special character and modulates the tone of this movie accordingly. It’s got the humor of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, but is fittingly less cynical and dark. What cynicism there is gets spread around to Nicholas Hoult’s excellent Lex Luthor and the trio of Justice Gang superheroes, Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl.

• Thunderbolts: If you’re expecting the Marvel take on the Suicide Squad, you’ll miss out on Marvel’s best movie in quite some time. “Thunderbolts” is about people who have made mistakes and find themselves at rock bottom, finding a reason to live and seeing the value of connecting with other people. David Harbour and Florence Pugh are both excellent, and a scene involving a limo ride through the desert made me fall in love with this movie.

• Flow: Winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, this dialogueless movie about a cat and a ragtag group of other animals (excellent capybara and lemur!) trying to survive a mysterious flood is just a treat from beginning to end.

• My Old Ass: Don’t let the title distract you. This is an excellent movie about a teenager suddenly being put into contact with her future self (Aubrey Plaza) is a heartfelt and funny coming-of-age story with a science fictional twist. Or as I wrote on Letterboxd, it’s like “Arrival,” but with a boat.

• The best movie I saw all year was Das Boot, from 1981. I had never seen it before, but since we covered seven submarine movies on The Incomparable this year, I decided to watch the legendary film about the crew of a German submarine during World War II to see what all the fuss was about. Short answer: Every accolade received by “Das Boot” is accurate. It’s a masterpiece. Action, suspense, character moments, and moments of sheer terror. Versions of this film vary from a 149-minute theatrical release to a 300-minute TV miniseries version; I watched and highly recommend the 208-minute “Director’s Cut,” which keeps things moving while allowing time for character moments.

Books

• Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Just great. Mythic fantasy, sort of, but undergirded by science fiction. Post-apocalyptic, sort of, but also about the start of something new rather than the end of something old. Concerned with young people on quests but also deep time. Moonbound is a charming, sweet, weird tour of a far future of talking beaver engineers and multi-dimensional witches.

• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Like a sci-fi version of Travis Baldree’s “Legends & Lattes,” this is a sweet book about robots who just want to live their lives and make noodles. There’s the occasional negative noodle review on social media and plumbing problem to deal with in a post-21st-century-civil-war San Francisco, but mostly it’s just about nice robots who want to open a restaurant. Delightful.

• Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway. Harkaway made a lot of news this year, as he continued the series of spy novels begun by his late father, John Le Carre. But Harkaway isn’t just the son of Le Carre, he’s one of our very best writers. “Sleeper Beach” is the sequel to his excellent “Titanium Noir,” both set in a world where billionaires can get drug treatments that allow them to defeat aging—at the cost of their growing taller with every treatment. The billionaires are literally titans, and gradually peeling themselves away from the rest of humanity. (Subtext much?) Unfortunately, “Sleeper Beach” is only available in hardcover in the United States right now as an import, not as an e-book. So if you haven’t read “Titanium Noir,” just read that, and hopefully “Sleeper Beach” will be out more broadly in 2026.

• Can You Solve the Murder? by Antony Johnston. Antony’s a friend, but I have to plug this book. It’s a real crime novel, but you choose the direction the investigation goes. It’s vastly more sophisticated than the Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a kid. You have to take notes and write down codes that lead to different outcomes as you move through the book. By the end, I felt satisfied as a mystery reader and felt like I had played a very wordy video game.

• The Barker and Llewelyn Mysteries by Will Thomas. Holmes and Watson inspire this series of mystery novels, and while Barker and Llewelyn have a somewhat different dynamic, it’s a similar vibe. Will Thomas brings a modern take on the classic Victorian mystery genre, and while each book solves a mystery, the series tells a larger story as you watch the characters grow and change. I read book 10, Blood is Blood, this year. Those nine books of character groundwork lead to some spectacular payoffs and really show off how long-running series can be so much richer than standalone books.

• Apple In China by Patrick McGee. I usually keep my “work reading” separate from my novel reading, but I have to mention McGee’s book, which offers revealing details never before reported and explains the complex way Apple builds manufacturing dominance while also elevating China’s ability to manufacture world-class products. It’s maybe the best Apple-related book I have ever read.

Honorable Mention: “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” by Laura Spinney, “The Wind Through the Keyhole” by Stephen King, “The Incandescent” by Emily Tesh, “The Why Is Everything” by Mike Silver, the entire Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman, “Royal Gambit” by Daniel O’Malley, and “Strong Female Character” by Fern Brady.

Miscellaneous things

• Herdling, from Okomotive and Panic, is exactly my kind of game. It’s calm, beautiful, has great music, and only runs three or four hours. In Herdling, you lead a herd of strange fuzzy creatures on a journey from a dilapidated city to mountainous heights. It reminds me most of Journey, one of my all-time favorite games. (I played it on the Switch 2, which is excellent, but I’m not using it enough. Story of my life. It’s all those books I read!)

• The Rest Is History remains my favorite podcast find of the last few years, and was my most-listened-to podcast of the year. Apparently, I was just at the start of an immense wave of popularity for the show, as it won Apple’s Podcast of the year award this year.

• A new robot entered my life. I bought a RoboRock vacuum to replace my five-year-old, noisy, annoying Roomba, and thus far, it’s an improvement in almost every single way for a quarter of the price I paid for that old Roomba. The only issue: RoboRock claims to support Siri and Shortcuts, but… none of that stuff works. Still, the app is fine, and the robot is quieter and smarter. (I wasn’t willing to spend $1000 on a robot vacuum, but I got this one on sale for about $230? What a deal.)

• The Combustion Predictive Thermometer isn’t cheap, but it’s really great—a wireless temperature probe with multiple sensors that can dynamically determine when my cooking will be done. As my kids will tell you, I love a gadget, and this is a great kitchen gadget.

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