3 Premium Mac Apps to Try This Month (September 2025)

With macOS 26 Tahoe on the horizon, many Mac users are looking forward to Apple’s annual free software update. While you wait, why not check out some premium apps that more than justify their price tags?

Here are three paid Mac apps that can speed up your Mac workflow for September 2025.

1

Middle

If you’ve ever used a traditional three-button mouse with your Mac (or on other platforms like Linux or Windows), you may be familiar with the elusive third click. Even though macOS offers an arguably better and more tactile experience with a trackpad, not having a third-click feels like a missed opportunity that introduces unnecessary friction into your workflows.

Middle ($7.99) resolves this by adding several gestures to your Mac that emulate this missing functionality. With it, you can click with three or four fingers, tap with three or four fingers, or force touch (press extra hard with a single finger) to perform a third-click. You can also add the same feature to Apple’s Magic Mouse with a single center click, two- and three-finger click, or a three-finger tap. How you implement this is up to you, since you can pick your preferred gesture in the app settings. There’s also an option to map middle-click to a shortcut combination where you hold the Fn button and use a regular click.

By far the biggest use for Middle is web browsing. Middle click is perfect for opening links in new background tabs, but also for tidying up your browser by closing tabs. You can do this without focusing on the tabs at all, which is perfect if (like me) you frequently need to nuke your browsing session because you’ve not closed anything for days. This functionality works great in other apps that make use of tabs, like Finder and Terminal.

Middle costs $7.99 outright, and you can try it for free for seven days. Middle is made by the same developer as Rectangle, one of the best Mac window management tools (that also happens to be free).

2

SideNotes

I don’t know where I’d be without a decent note-taking app, and for this I mostly rely on Apple Notes. But not everyone can get by with a single note-taking app, and there are a lot of things that Apple Notes can’t do. In particular, Apple Notes cannot be pinned to the side of the screen and invoked as a hovering notepad whenever you need it.

That’s where SideNotes ($19.99) comes in. As the name suggests, this is a note-taking app that lives on the edge of your screen. Click the small notch, hit the keyboard shortcut, or click on the menu bar icon, and your notes will appear. You can use two-finger scrolling gestures to reveal and hide the app, too. Notes can be organized into collections and color-coded, and take a variety of formats.

Notes can be rich Markdown files complete with images, highlights, code blocks, and other formatting; or plain text and code files. You can also share notes quickly via the macOS share sheet to your contacts or quickly upload them to receive a URL that you can pass along to others. The app is full of customization options, including positioning and invoking settings, shortcuts, and themes (with the option of downloading more). You can also import, export, and make backups of your note collection.

The main reason I use SideNotes is so that I can quickly jot things down and recall them as I work. If I were to rely on Apple Notes for this task, I’d have to constantly be switching windows and spaces. With SideNotes, I can quickly access my scribblings without interrupting whatever it is I’m working on. The app doesn’t replace Apple Notes for me since the things I record in SideNotes are generally work-related and often only required temporarily. If I do need to save a note, I can use the share sheet to export its contents directly to the Apple Notes app. It’s great for saving code blocks or text that you may frequently need while working, without having to dig through Apple Notes to find it.

SideNotes has a 30-day trial, after which you can pay $19.99 for the current major version. You also get up to five activations, which means you can use the app on up to five separate Macs.

3

PopClip

PopClip (from $12) is a useful utility that lets you quickly perform actions by selecting text with your pointer. When you do so, a menu will appear above the text with useful options including copy, paste, search, open link, dictionary look-up, and reveal in Finder. These are context-based, so they won’t all necessarily appear for everything you select.

Thanks to its context-aware nature, PopClip lets you do things like open non-hyperlinked web addresses, jump to directories using pathnames, or search the internet. The app only works for text that you select with your pointer, which for me is a plus since it means it won’t appear unnecessarily when I’m manipulating text with the keyboard.

But these are just the basic functions that you get when you first install the app. From here, you can expand PopClip with the help of the PopClip Extensions Directory. These extensions can do things like manipulate text to apply title case or sentence cases, convert Markdown to HTML right before your eyes, or count characters, words, and lines. You can go further with language translation services to instantly translate passages or pass selected text off to your favorite translation services.

But there’s so much more to dig into here, including app integrations with some of the Mac’s biggest names like Notion, Obsidian, Fantastical, TickTick, Alfred, Slack, and more. Many web services are also included, like Google Maps, Bitly, Pocket, and Apple Music. And then there are AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity too.

PopClip is available for $12 for a standard license, which includes two years of updates from the date of purchase. Alternatively, you can pay $25 for a lifetime license, which includes updates forever. The developer notes that the app has been going for 13 years already, with no plans to stop any time soon.

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Missed last month’s list? Check out three premium apps for August 2025. Heading back to school for September? Check out the best open-source apps for students that won’t cost you a penny.