Disney+ bundle, MasterClass, Field Notes and more

The big streaming video platforms just keep getting more expensive. As such, Disney’s latest content bundle feels like a breath of fresh air. For $20 a month, you can get access to Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max ($33 / month gets you ad-free playback and downloads, among other premium features). Each platform has its own benefits and particular focuses, making it a package that covers a ton of ground.

Hulu is great for catching up on current programming from major networks plus a fair handful of original content like Alien: Earth, Only Murders in the Building, The Bear and Reservation Dogs; it also has a solid rotating movie library. HBO Max is, as the name suggests, the place to get HBO originals like The Pitt, The White Lotus, Succession, Game of Thrones spinoffs House of the Dragon and the forthcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Last of Us along with classics like The Sopranos and The Wire. It also has a vast movie catalog and remains the only place to stream Friends. And, of course, Disney+ covers the massive Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars catalogs, including new movies like Inside Out 2 and shows like Andor. All told, together it’s a massive library with a ton of content you won’t find elsewhere. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor

You can almost think of MasterClass as an elevated streaming platform. Yes, it’s a learning app, complete with step-by-step instructions from A-list instructors, plus assignments that encourage trying new skills in the real world, but it’s also just a lot of fun to sit and idly watch. It makes a good gift for anyone you know that’s always quoting an article they just read or a documentary they just watched, but also for those who appreciate entertainment that’s a little more sophisticated than reality TV (not that there’s anything wrong with the latter).

The MasterClass lineup reads like the course catalog from a mythical university: David Sedaris teaches humor and storytelling, John Legend teaches songwriting, Amy Poehler teaches improv-based life skills, Roy Choi teaches intuitive cooking. Each class ranges from about two to eight hours and is split up into manageable five- to 15-minute lessons. If you faithfully follow along, taking notes and putting effort into the assignments, you’ll come out the other end better at whatever the topic was.

But I found MasterClass also lends itself to idle, popcorn-in-hand couch viewing. Everything is beautifully shot and set to lovely music, with plenty of backstory on the instructors and slo-mo close-ups. A subscription gives you access to classes on iOS and Android devices and Apple, Roku, Fire TV and Android TV interfaces.

Despite its big-name instructors and high production quality, a MasterClass subscription won’t run you much more than standard ad-free streaming services. Gift subscriptions are bundled by the year and range from $120 for an individual account and $240 for a premium account, which allows offline access and up to six devices at once. Keep an eye out: The gift packages often go on sale for the holidays. — Amy Skorheim, Senior Reporter

If 2025 was a stressful year for you, you’re not alone. And while our phones aren’t exactly the best companions for our mental health, they do occasionally offer some tools that can help. The Headspace app is a great example: it features a wide variety of guided meditations, including sessions for beginners as well as specific exercises that focus on reducing anxiety, learning breathing techniques, increasing your compassion and so on. It goes beyond meditation, though, with personalized content to help manage your stress levels throughout the day via different check-ins, meditations and video content.

There are also yoga and fitness sessions, and parents can also check out a “mindful parenting” category as well as play back stories for their kids. Plus, there are sleep tools like soothing music and “sleepcasts,” while other audio programs center on focusing, moving more and starting your day. For $13 a month or $70 a year, Headspace can be a great tool to add some peace of mind to your day. — N.I.

If you love audiobooks but want to support booksellers instead of Amazon or Spotify, Libro.fm is your best favorite option. The service works with local booksellers — when you sign up, you can choose a store to support and they’ll get a portion of the sales. That’ll happen whether it’s a monthly subscription or individual book purchases. A $15-per-month subscription provides one audiobook credit and 30 percent off of any additional titles. And if you’re a particularly avid listener, the $24/month subscription includes two book credits. Naturally, Libro has apps for iOS and Android, and you can download DRM-free files for playing on a computer or other device. In my searching, Libro’s catalog seems extensive, with plenty of new titles and classics alike. — N.I.

The photo-editing app VSCO has been around almost as long as Instagram and has gone through several iterations over time. But its combination of comprehensive editing tools and one-tap filters and film simulations is addictive, easy to use and offers tons of flexibility in how you present your images. The $60-per-year VSCO Pro plan offers almost an overwhelming amount of tools for people who want to take their photography to the next level, whether they’re shooting with a smartphone or a more advanced camera.

It unlocks VSCO’s best “pro” presets for dialing in various looks for your images, all of which can be tweaked to your liking. And if you want to create your own look you can make recipes of your own that let you apply a specific set of edits to any photo you want with one tap. You can also make edits through VSCO’s studio on the web now, for when you’re on a larger screen, and sync those changes back to your mobile devices. And VSCO now integrates with Adobe Lightroom, letting you easily move images between the two platforms depending on what you’re looking to do.

If you’re mostly just interested in doing edits on your phone, though, VSCO also offers a $30-per-year Plus plan that unlocks the presets, along with editing tools, recipe creation and community access while keeping the more career-oriented features and some of the additional edit tools for the Pro tier. — N.I.

Sure, iOS and Android now offer built-in journaling apps of their own, but I’ve been using Day One to collect my thoughts for well over a decade now and can’t recommend it enough. For starters, it has a minimal but lovely design that’s easy to understand. But don’t assume simplicity means a lack of features — there are loads of ways to set up and customize your journaling space. I have more than a dozen individual journals in my Day One, and there’s no limit on how many you can add. You can view your entries in a calendar, by location (if you turn that on) or in a simple chronological list — or you can view just the ones you’ve added photos or videos too. There aren’t any limits on how much media you can add to your journals, either.

You can add all sorts of other things to your entries too, like audio recordings, activities or workouts synced from your phone, drawings you can make with an iPad and Apple Pencil or even other files you want to associate with a particular memory. You can also naturally protect your journal via a passcode or biometric authentication like Face ID. A premium subscription ($35 annually) can encrypt and sync this all to the cloud and any devices you want to use Day One on. It’s available for iOS, Android, macOS and in your web browser. — N.I.

Plants can be a lot of work, but they’re also great at bringing some tranquility and variety to a living space. A subscription to The Sill can cut out a bunch of the work getting started with such an endeavor. The company sells a huge variety of plants online, but it also offers three- or six-month subscription boxes, where you can get or gift a new plant every month. It lets you choose factors like “easy-care” for newbies or “pet friendly” if there are curious cats in the house. There’s also an orchid-specific subscription if you want to choose something a little fancier. The company also smartly does not auto-renew subscriptions, so it’s easy to avoid accidentally getting sucked into more greenery than you can handle. Shipping plants can feel perilous, but in my experience they’ve been really well-packaged, and if the plant is damaged you can just send a photo within 30 days to get it replaced. — N.I.

A Planta app subscription could make a perfect companion to some plants from The Sill. For $8 a month or $36 a year, Planta helps plant-lovers who might not have the greenest thumb take care of their flock. Using your phone’s cameras, Planta can identify plants and offer care tips. If one isn’t looking great, Planta will offer a treatment plan to get it healthy again. It also has a light meter which can analyze a room and figure out if it gets enough light to support a particular plant, and there are a variety of tools to keep a plant collecting organized. Finally, the app’s watering reminders take into account 30 different parameters as well as local weather conditions to make sure specific plants are getting the water they need. — N.I.

Subscription services, including Apple TV, keep getting more expensive, which makes Apple One worth a look if you use more than a few of Apple’s offerings. The individual $20-per-month plan combines Apple Music, Apple TV, 50GB of iCloud storage and Apple Arcade. Given that Apple Music and Apple TV now cost $24 a month total, you’re already coming out ahead here. The $26-per-month family plan steps the iCloud storage up to 200GB and lets you share all the plan’s benefits with up to five people.

Finally, the $38-per-month “premiere” plan steps up to 2TB of storage and adds in Fitness+ and News+; those last two services cost a total of $23 per month on their own, so if you’re at all interested in them this is probably the best way to go. And at this point, all of Apple’s offerings are pretty good. Arcade has a load of fun games with no ads, Apple TV has a number of excellent shows and movies at this point including Severance, Platonic, The Studio, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Silo and Pachinko, to name just a few. Meanwhile, Apple Music differentiates itself with features like spatial audio and lossless playback to go along with its massive catalog. — N.I.

For YouTube junkies, there’s nothing better in the world than making ads on the platform vanish. A $14/month (or $140/year) YouTube Premium subscription does that and a lot more to boot. If you’re watching on a phone or tablet, you can download basically any video and save it for offline playback. The YouTube app will also automatically download videos based on things you like, so you’ll never be stuck on a flight without something to watch. Videos also can play in the background, which means you can switch to other apps without stopping. This comes in handy for picture-in-picture, if you’re listening to something that’s audio-only or if you just don’t want to interrupt the video while you switch away to send a text message.

Premium also comes with a subscription to YouTube Music, the company’s competitor to Spotify and Apple Music. It’s a pretty solid service, and it does a few things that Apple and Spotify can’t offer. For example, all of YouTube’s music video content lives alongside its standard streaming catalog, which means users can build playlists that combine videos uploaded to YouTube alongside official artist releases. It’s also one of the few music services that lets you upload your own music files so you can access them along with the streaming catalog. — N.I.

Yes, the digital world is great, but getting things out of your head and on to paper — real paper, not a notes app — can foster organization and inspiration alike. For years, my go-to for such tools has been Field Notes. Every quarter, the company produces a new variation of its classic notebooks, utilizing different printing techniques, designs, colors and a host of other clever things to make each release a work of art of its own.

Like clockwork, I end up splurging on them even if I still have a stack of notebooks waiting for me, but that’s my own problem. Past editions have included tributes to the US national parks, a set of notebooks with intricate foil-stamped covers and a snow motif where each of the 99,999 books they produced had a unique snowflake design on the cover. A $120 annual subscription includes four quarterly releases (each of which usually contains two 3-packs of the quarterly edition) as well as subscriber exclusives with each release, random freebies throughout the year and an ongoing 10-percent discount. — N.I.

Like it or not, AI tools are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and Google users will get a lot of mileage out of the company’s AI Pro plan. For $20 a month or $200 a year, you’ll get everything in the standard Google One Premium plan — that includes 2TB of storage, 10 percent credit back on Google Store purchases and “premium” Workspace features like enhanced Meet video quality and improved Calendar scheduling.

But the real draw here are the variety of AI-powered features. For starters, the Gemini app gets access to the 2.5 Pro model, which Google calls its most advanced model for “complex tasks.” It also includes Flow, the AI-powered video creation tool that uses Google’s Veo 3 video-generation model. NotebookLM users get higher limits than free users so that they can generate more overviews and notebooks and can run more queries. Finally, Gemini features will be available across Google’s main apps like Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets — you’ll get tools to analyze your documents and emails and tools for polishing your writing. It’s probably one of the most accessible and comprehensive AI plans you can get for people familiar with the Google ecosystem, which is almost everyone at this point.