This is the second in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my iPad 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## iPad Pro In yesterday's post, I talked about how the smartphone is in its laptop era, and boy howdy is the iPad Pro in that era as well. After spending six long years on the same industrial design, the Pro model finally got a design and screen upgrade last year. With that in mind, it wasn't surprising that the upgrade in 2025 was a simple spec bump. The closest thing to a surprise is that we got an update at all, as the Pro routinely goes over a year without being touched. As for this upgrade specifically, the only real thing of note is the M5 processor upgrade, which makes everything a bit faster. Other than that, it's exactly the same iPad Pro as last year. I don't say that to belittle it, I just say it to reiterate that this is a laptop-style upgrade and it really only makes sense to people who need the performance bump. ## iPad Air Speaking of spec bump upgrades, the iPad Air was upgraded to an M4 this year. I'm happy to see these iterative updates across the iPad lineup, but there's not much more to say here. It's a bit faster version of the iPad Air we had before. The one thing I will mention is the display, which is plenty sharp and bright, but is criminally still running at a locked 60Hz refresh rate. All of Apple's premium iPhones do 120Hz now, and I think it's absurd that a tablet that's expensive is stuck in 2017 refresh rates. For the cheap iPad, sure, whatever, but when you're spending $600-$1,300 on a tablet, it's not exactly a budget device by anyone's definition. ## iPad Say it with me…it's a processor bump! This went from the A14 to the A16, which was a bit of a surprise, as this is the only new product in Apple's computing lineup with no support for Apple Intelligence. On the plus side, they did boost the base storage from 64GB (which was a crime) to 128GB, so that's something. ## Overall score - C This is probably the most divisive product line in 2025 from Apple. Was it great? Was it good? Was it awful? If you read enough blog posts from iPad users, you'll surely get all three answers. For my part, I think the iPad has some really good stuff going for it, and if you're a certain type of user, it's never been better, but something still feels off about the whole iPad situation. In terms of hardware, I think getting refreshes to 3 of the 4 models in the lineup is pretty good, especially since the only one to miss out (the mini) was upgraded in October 2024, so it's not criminally outdated or anything. Yes, these were all spec bumps only, but I'm not super bothered by that when the hardware is mostly really good. The iPad Pro hardware is basically perfect in my book, but lingering screen issues in the other 3 models continue to frustrate me: * iPad's non-laminated screen looks like shit (other iPads got this in 2014) * iPad Air's 60Hz screen is absurd on a premium tablet * iPad mini's jelly scroll and 60Hz combo Then there's the software, which has been divisive to say the least. For many years, iPad fans would dismiss the complaints of those who didn't like the iPad for work by saying, "just get a Mac". For the last couple years, though, it seems like Apple's software design strategy for the iPad has turned into "just make it work like the Mac". Some people love this, but I've seen more than a few vocal iPad proponents go, "ruh roh" at this year's iPadOS 26 update. I'll be honest, as a more casual iPad user these days as well, I actually agree with the critics on this one; my iPad experience is a bit more fiddly than it used to be, and the new windowing system is to blame here. Forcing me to choose between a free windowing system and never opening more than one app ever again in my life is an annoying choice to make, but it's one you need to make when upgrading to iPadOS 26. To their credit, Apple has improved the situation in subsequent point updates this year, bringing back Slide Over and improving the gestures to enter Split Screen mode, and my Comfort Zone co-host Chris has argued that you can still do all the things you used to be able to do with split screen, but it's still more fiddly. I still find myself resizing windows to split the screen, and having the windows stick to that size when I open them on their own later and needing to tap a couple things to get it back to full screen. This isn't the worst thing in the world, and of course it does come with the power-up of being able to freely resize windows, but as an 11-inch iPad user who never uses their iPad with an external display, the multi-window feature isn't actually useful for me, so I get the minor usability downgrades to give benefits to other people. And it's not just the Pro lineup that got these new features, it's every iPad. So even iPad mini users who can't dock their iPad to a display and who would literally never get a benefit from free floating windows also get these little paper cuts to usability without any real gain. This is a long-winded way for me to say that I understand why there's some angst in this update. ## What I want/expect in 2026 You'll have to forgive me, but a few of my software predictions are going to be a bit vague (I can never quite guess what they'll do next with iPad software), but I think I can see the shape of things to come. First, just like for the last few years, the flagship updates to iPadOS 27 will be features that quite literally bring the Mac way of doing things to the iPad. Second, I think the feedback they've received from iPad users on the new windowing system will make them bring back a dedicated split screen mode that lets users get split screen and slide over without needing to adopt the free windowing mode. Third, this isn't the Mac article (that's tomorrow), but given the rumors that the first touch-capable Mac is coming in 2026, it feels like there's something there for the iPad to be involved in that story. I'm not saying we're going to get to install macOS on an iPad Pro, but I'm also not _not_ saying something like that is happening. On the hardware front… * The iPad Pro will get a late-year upgrade to the M6 and no other notable hardware updates. It seems like the iPad Pro is now the default device that Apple ships their new silicon generations on day one at this point, so I think the most likely way I get this wrong is the M6 simply doesn't make 2026, but I think it'll get there. * The iPad Air will get an M5 bump, once again briefly causing "why does the iPad Pro exist?" discourse as they both have the same processor. This will frustrate me as someone who will still be annoyed the Air has a low-refresh rate display and it will frustrate Chris who values the Thunderbolt port. * The iPad mini will get an upgrade to OLED with ProMotion and will increase in price, making it a better, but somehow even more premium lil' tablet. * The base iPad will not get upgraded, landing it squarely in the "don't buy!" section of buying guides. If it does get an upgrade, I expect it to get a spec bump to a chip that supports Apple Intelligence, and this may be wishful thinking, but I also think the next upgrade will bring a laminated display to this model. I don't think I'm particularly good at predicting iPad things, so this all could be way off. We'll see!

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and wearables). You can also read iPhone 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## iPhone 17 Pro I know this new Pro model isn't universally adored, but I think it's great. I would agree with the critics that it's not as beautiful as the previous Pro models, but I do think it has a unique charm and is a very practical device (shout out to everyone who demanded a more opinionated design, and when they got it, complained that it wasn’t universally adored). Add on to that the fact that battery life has improved to the point where I was able to purchase the smaller Pro phone this year and be completely happy with it in terms of battery life. That hasn't been the case since maybe the iPhone 13 Pro. From a technical perspective, I think these are really strong updates across the board as well. The A19 Pro is incredibly performant, as you might expect. The new telephoto camera is a step in the right direction, and it fills out the camera system to feel pretty great across the board. Add onto this the front-facing camera, which is now a square sensor that lets you take landscape or portrait selfies with the phone in whatever orientation you prefer. Genuinely awesome stuff. We're still early days on this phone, but I think it is shaping up to be one of the best Pro generations we've ever had. ## iPhone Air Also relatively divisive, the iPhone Air came onto the scene with a mix of desire and confusion. As I've said a few times, the passionless, objective pitch for this phone is pretty rough: "would you like to pay $200 more for less battery life, fewer cameras, and worse speakers than your current iPhone? No? Really???" But of course, the draw of the Air is not that it's a worse phone on the metrics we've long used to judge phones, it's that it's really fucking thin. I'll be the first to admit that it is striking how thin and light it is in hand, to the point where even though I personally get more value from the Pro model, I find myself using the Air now and again because it is so cool. I'm lucky enough to be at a point in my life where I have my pick of the best phones and I can just use what I like the most, and I think it says something that this phone has a draw on me even though it's objectively worse on several metrics. Also, I can't say this enough, this is a different sort of new phone than the iPhone X was in 2017. Check out the Apple compare page to see how the iPhone X was an upgrade in every single way over the other iPhones on the market at the time. It wasn't paying more to get a cooler design with compromises, it was paying more to get a cooler design _and_ better specs across the board. Finally, one real draw for this phone for me is that the screen size is in a really happy medium between the Pro and Pro Max models. 6.5" in a fatter screen is really nice for me, and the iPhone Air gets me that. ## iPhone 17 The absolute glow up of the year, the iPhone 17 is a real banger, and it all comes down to the screen in my opinion. All three flagship iPhones got the same ProMotion display, and I can't stress how much this makes the lineup feel more premium this year. Add onto that a 36% YoY battery life jump (that's huge), the same square selfie camera as the Pro and Air, 48MP ultra-wide camera, doubled 256GB base storage, smaller bezels, and all this without a price increase, which many of us were expecting. Great "standard" iPhone this year, even if the Pro models continue to be the best-selling model line. ## iPhone 16e The red-haired step-child of the iPhone released this year, the iPhone 16e has been razzed all year long, but I stand by my initial assessment that it's a very strong base iPhone for people who want an iPhone that will last for a long time, but don't want to spend top dollar. Did you know the iPhone 16e was the 4th best-selling smartphone in the world in Q3 2025? Yup, bigger than every single Android phone made by anyone. That said, I do understand why it felt a little too stripped-down for the price. The lack of MagSafe is the one that puts it over the edge in my opinion, and rumors of that coming back to the 17e is encouraging. That said, compared to buying an older iPhone 15 or 14 Pro for similar prices come with some upgrades such as cameras and displays (at least on the 14 Pro), but those also come with trade-offs (2 generations worse performance, less battery life, Lightning on the 14 Pro, weight, no Apple Intelligence) as well. All that said, it's not the best phone, and it's not the phone for me, but it's the first time in many years that I've been able to look at the "SE" phone in Apple's lineup and actually say it's a reasonable purchase. ## Overall score - A I think you could argue this is a B year for the iPhone because outside maybe the iPhone Air, there wasn't anything exceptionally innovative in the lineup, but in my book, smartphones are past their pure excitement era and are in their "laptop era". Each update is more iterative than before, and that's okay. We're 18 years into the iPhone era, and it honestly would be insane if the hardware and software changed as much year-on-year as it did at the beginning. Obviously we're not at the end of the line and there is innovation to come, but as far as slab-style phones go, we're filing down rough edges and creating change for the sake of change (aluminum is the best! Now steel is the best! No, titanium is the best! J/k, aluminum is the best again!). In that world, the fact we got 4 new iPhones this year and all of them were meaningful upgrades over what came before, is pretty impressive. Rumors have it that we're going to get a folding iPhone in 2026, and that will surely shake things up, but right now all I can think of is Jony Ive in the iPhone 8 introduction video describing that phone as the final, purest form of the original iPhone design. I feel that way about the latest iPhones for the iPhone X generation of phones. We may be on the cusp of something new, but that just means that we're really freaking good at making the old stuff, so I think any of the iPhones released in 2025 are great buys no matter what iPhone you're coming from or what your budget is. ## What I want/expect in 2026 I hope 2026 is the year of new form factors for Apple products, and the folding iPhone would be the biggest move Apple could make in that regard. Now, Samsung has been shipping folding phones to the public since 2019 and I know several people who have used them and loved them for several years, so it's not like Apple is first here, but I'm fascinated to see how they handle the UI on this sort of device. The recent rumors that it's going to be a quite small folding phone also intrigues me, and wonders if the wealthy people who loved the iPhone mini will finally have something that they can enjoy again. This might be a dangerous assumption, but if we do indeed get a folding iPhone this year, I think the rest of the lineup will be more boring (again, in the laptop era, that's not a terrible thing). Frankly, the updates this year set this up nicely. The Pro models got a design refresh, so they'll probably stay the same, but get new colors (my money's on a deep purple model as well as the return of a space black model). The iPhone Air doesn't have a number attached to it, which everyone has assumed meant it would not get annual updates (for now), and I would agree that we won't see a new model in 2026. Similarly, I agree with the rumors that suggest Apple will split the iPhone 18 and 18 Pro launches, with the Pros coming out in September and the non-Pros coming in early 2027. I'd expect this to lead to the Pro line selling an even higher proportion of the overall lineup as people who can't wait for the spring will just spend a bit more and get the Pro for the first time in a while. I know it’s not quite the same as it once was, but this would mark the first time since 2006 that a “standard iPhone” wasn’t released. And I would expect the iPhone 17e to be the first iPhone we get in the year, coming in the spring and sporting the A19 processor, MagSafe, and the same design as the current model. Criticisms will remain, the base storage will stay at 128GB, the colors will stay the same, and the $599 price point will be a bit too much for people. As for the folding phone, all I can do are make guesses, so here's some shots in the dark: * The name will be iPhone Ultra (or maybe the Folio if they’re feeling wild) * The phone will fold like a book, not like a flip phone * The outside display will be the smallest iPhone display since the iPhone 13 mini * The internal display will allow split view and picture-in-picture (no slide over, no free windows) * No Apple Pencil support, but there will be a new stylus specifically for the iPhone * The crease is still visible, but it’s marginally better than the current Samsung standard * Starting price $1,999 * Storage will start at 256GB * There will be 2 cameras on the back, wide and ultrawide * Battery life has 2 advertised numbers from Apple, one for screen open and closed. One of them will be "the best battery life of any iPhone ever" * Camera Control is here, but lacks sliding gestures (applies to all iPhones going forward) * Apps run in iPad layouts on the internal display, further blurring the lines between what iPhone, iPad, or Mac apps are Now, if the folding phone doesn't happen this year, I guess they'll have to spice up the rest of the lineup, but I think this is actually the year of the folding iPhone.

Today I learned something amazing: Safari supports higher than 60Hz refresh. It's the only mainstream web browser that doesn't, and I have never understood why, but apparently as of the end of 2025 in Safari version 26.3 (and maybe earlier) you can enable it. Here's how to do it. _Disclaimer that this may cause issues, but I can't imagine what. The entire web has already run at higher refresh rates for years, so unless this breaks something in Safari specifically, you should be fine._ ## Mac Go to Safari's Settings (via the menu or with `Command + ,`. Make sure developer mode is enabled (this won't break things, it just exposes some more UI, such as the very basic ability to inspect HTML, like every other browser). Go to Feature Flags on the far right. Search for "60fps" Turn off the "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps" feature. Restart Safari. When you reopen it, website should render at up to your display's max refresh rate. ## iPhone and iPad This is very similar to the Mac flow, except you don't need to enable developer mode. 1. Open the Settings app 2. Tap "Apps" (hear the bottom) 3. Tap Safari 4. Tap "Advanced" (bottom) 5. Tap "Feature Flags" (bottom) 6. Scroll to "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps" and disable it 7. Force quit Safari and reopen it Find Apps in SettingsGo into Safari's settingsAdvanced is at the bottomFeature Flags is at the bottom as wellFind the setting and turn it off

Andru Marino writing for The Verge: It’s finally time to retire the word ‘podcast’ > In 2026, instead of trying to define what a podcast is, I think we need to stop using the word altogether. “Podcast” is becoming an outdated or even a potentially cringe internet relic, similar to how the phrase “web series” faded from use online. Honestly, I don't disagree with this. I've found the "_actually_ , if it's not audio-only and available via RSS for free, it's not a podcast" argument exhausting for as long as it's been happening. Marino posits that "shows" is a better way to describe these things, and I agree. It's a more broad term, but I think it better captures what is happening in the space. Here's an example of how annoying I find the current "podcast" argument. Every week, Niléane, Chris, and I sit down and talk for about 90 minutes, cameras and microphones recording every moment. Chris edits it, and exports it twice: once as a video file and once as an audio file. The audio file gets uploaded to our podcast host and the video file gets uploaded to YouTube. We unquestionably recorded one piece of "content" and Chris edited one "show" but what were we doing when we recorded? Were we podcasting? Were we doing something else? To me, we'e making a show, and that show can be enjoyed (or hate-listened to, if you're nasty) in podcast apps, in video on YouTube, or even in audio on YouTube…it's all fluid. I'm fine with it staying "podcast" as well. After all, we all have a "phone" in our pocket, even though that's a pretty old fashioned way to describe the function of that product as well.

From the Anthropic blog: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size > It remains unclear how far this trend will hold as we keep scaling up models. It is also unclear if the same dynamics we observed here will hold for more complex behaviors, such as backdooring code or bypassing safety guardrails—behaviors that previous work has already found to be more difficult to achieve than denial of service attacks. I'm sharing this because I've seen it posted a few times on social as proof that LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but reading past the headline reveals a much more nuanced finding. Basically, this is something to be aware of if you're building LLMs and to protect against, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker.

Last Friday, Paris Buttfield-Addison posted 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple, which kind of blew up. > A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Yeah, effectively, they got a $500 Apple gift card, tried to add it to their account, and this triggered a high enough severity fraud alert in Apple's system that it automatically locked their Apple account. Not good. The post is a good reminder of how tied to these large companies we really are. I assume most people reading this post have an Apple account, and it's a good exercise to consider how much of your digital life would become inaccessible if you suddenly lost access to that account. Would you lose all your photos? All of your contacts? All of your files? Obviously, the odds of you losing access to your Apple account are exceptionally low, and Buttfield-Addison's experience is the exception, but I think it is a good reminder that completely benign behavior can occasionally lead to serious consequences you would not see coming. This leads me to three main thoughts on the topic. First, companies like Apple and Google have over 1 billion users, and their automated systems are likely correct far more often than they are wrong, and I don't think they need to go away. However, a good appeals process is necessary to have, and what happened in this person's case is not ideal. How would someone without a blog and ability to reach an audience have gotten this solved? Second, when you're locked out of your Apple ID, you should be able to download effectively everything from your account. This would mean that if I was locked out of my Apple ID, maybe I wouldn't be able to use it or add new data to that account. But if I still was able to authenticate, I should be able to download my photos, my files, and other relevant information that I may want to get out. This would make it so that even if I wasn't able to get the attention that this person did and resolve the issue, at least I could still get a backup of my information. And third, I strongly think that everyone should have some level of redundancy in as much of their digital life as they can. Photos are the big one that I think everyone should be considering. A lot of the things on my computer can be replaced or recreated if they're lost, but not my photos; I can never recreate those moments that I've captured. I personally treat Apple Photos as my de facto photo library, and it works great, but for many years, I had Google Photos also backing up those images, which gave me a second online backup. In the event that my Apple ID was locked, I would still have all of my photos in Google. Since getting a Synology NAS last year, I've actually switched that to having the Synology Photos app automatically back up my photo library to the NAS so that I have local access to all of my photos. Now those photos aren't tied to any online account, they're literally on a hard drive in my house. Consider what's important to you and figure out a solution that works for you. * * * This story has a happy ending, with Buttfield-Addison posting an update yesterday: > We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Great news, but again, would someone without a blog and a few thousand social media followers have been able to get here? I don't know…

Stephanie Vee: Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don't Just Replace it With Another Subscription > streaming music sucks for almost everyone involved. I believe we only do it because we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that renting music indefinitely is cheaper than purchasing it outright – especially since streaming companies grant us the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet with our subscriptions. Spoilers for an upcoming Cozy Zone episode, but I've come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we're paying for music when we're actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away. > To me, a music streaming subscription only really makes sense if you’re at that impressionable stage of your life where you still live and breathe new music – or if you’re one of those rare people who continue to seek out new music as you age. As for the rest of us? I think we should maybe just own our shit and stop paying tech CEOs to rent it. Chances are, I’ll still be rocking out to Hot Fuss in my retirement home, so why should I rent it from the likes of Daniel Ek for the next four decades (or longer)? As one of the seemingly rare 40-year-olds who still checks the new music releases every week, this resonates with me as well. I kind of feel like I want to buy all of the music I listen to in 2026…we'll see.

I didn't really set out to do it, but my Quick Subtitles app actually makes for a pretty interesting benchmark tool. Back in October I compared sustained performance between the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air by using the app's batch feature, but it wasn't much work to tweak that feature to build a bespoke benchmarking mode into the app, so that's what I did. ## The test This benchmark is pretty simple, you give it an audio or video file and it transcribes the file using Apple's on-device language model over and over and over again. I maxed everything out by giving it a Cozy Zone podcast episode to transcribe 20 times in a row. After each run, it logs how many words per minute it transcribed in that specific run, and begins again. To be clear, this is a very specific benchmark that tests the performance of a combination of features of the system on a chip, including the neural engine, CPU, and memory. This is not a wide ranging, general benchmark. But that's not what I'm using it for, I'm using it in this case to test thermal throttling. See, whatever combination of components this tests, it generates heat…a lot of heat. **I wanted to know how quickly each device would thermally throttle. When it did throttle, how much performance did it lose?** ## **iPhone 16e** This is the one you're probably least interested in, but here's our baseline. * A18 processor, 6-core CPU and 4-core GPU As we can see, the first transcript hit 170 words per second, and by the 4th one we were about as throttled as we could get. Performance was around 66-70% of the max performance most of the run. ## iPhone Air The iPhone Air is where things get more interesting. * A19 Pro processor, 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU This one was basically the same exact story, just with a higher starting point. We started at a very good 208 words per second to begin, but by the 4th run we were bottoming out around 130 words per second, or about 62% of the max performance. ## iPhone 17 Pro Here's where we get to see the benefit of a vapor chamber. * A19 Pro processor, 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU This one starts at a highest-yet first run of 217 words per second, dropping to 151 in the 20th and final run. That's a drop to 70% of the performance, but you can see a pretty linear trend as it gets marginally slower each time. What this tells me is that the vapor chamber is doing some good work, but since it's not active cooling, it's just passive cooling, eventually we still get pretty darn hot and need to throttle. These last two were especially interesting because back in October I did a similar test, and I suspected that the Air was indeed throttling due to worse thermals, but I didn't have enough granular data to prove it. I think this test shows pretty conclusively that its raw performance at this workload is comparable to the Pro phones, but only for a couple minutes. ## MacBook Pro Now let's get kind of unfair and bring a freaking laptop to the shootout. * M4 Pro, 14-code CPU and 20-core GPU There are a couple notable things with this test. First, in terms of throttling, buddy this thing doesn't throttle. Outside of the first run, which was oddly a bit slower than the rest, every single other test was almost exactly 227 words per second. And second, while this is objectively faster than the iPhones, it's not that much faster. Its fastest time was only 5% faster than the iPhone 17 Pro's best time, which is pretty remarkable for the phone. Basically, if you need to transcribe a one-hour podcast, your phone and Mac will be about the same speed doing it, but if you need to transcribe a season all at once, do that on the Mac. * * * Benchmark mode will be in a Quick Subtitles which should be out before the end of the year. Shameless plug…More Birchtree subscribers get beta access to all of my apps, and it should be in the beta in the next day or two (depending on App Review time, which yes, also impacts TestFlight).

The Information had a new report out this week that has a bunch of info about some upcoming Apple products. I'm not one to shy away from paying for news, but I still haven't been able to justify $1,000 per year, so thankfully MacRumors summarized the news for me. Here's my quick reactions to each item. ## iPhone 17e > Specifically, the report said the iPhone 17e will support "magnetic wireless charging," which implies that the device will feature MagSafe for faster, magnetic wireless charging I'm an iPhone 16e defender, but I think that MagSafe is the straw that broke the camel's back on this thing for a lot of people. The notch and single camera are sacrifices, but in my opinion, it's the lack of MagSafe that really pushed this over the edge to make a lot of people consider it a bad deal. The price might still be a bit high, but I strongly feel that the lack of MagSafe made this phone _feel_ cheap. ## Folding iPhone > Apple's first foldable iPhone will be equipped with a 7.7-inch inner display, and a 5.3-inch outer display Now this is interesting. Both the Samsung and Google folding phones have 6.5" external displays and 8" internal displays. That means their external displays are very much like a normal phone (the iPhone Air is that size). Apple going with a 5.3" external display is really, really interesting. The iPhone 13 mini had a 5.4" screen, and it felt like an absolute baby, and apparently this one will be marginally smaller. Yikes! Those who love small phones for their deep pockets, this might be a dream device. ## iPhone Air 2 > Apple is apparently considering adding a second rear camera to the device And: > the report said Apple is considering lower pricing for the iPhone Air 2 I think both of these would help this phone immensely. The sales pitch for the iPhone Air is quite literally, "pay more to get less," and I don't think anyone should be surprised to hear that isn't the most compelling pitch to most people. And again, this is totally different than the iPhone X, which was an upgrade over the cheaper phones in literally every single spec from display to cameras to battery life: you paid more to get more. As I I've been saying for a year now (I predicted it on Comfort Zone), I don't think the iPhone Air will be a middle ground iPhone for long, I think Apple's vision for it is to be the "normal iPhone" and they want to work the base iPhone out of the lineup. The only reason it wasn't that this year is because they couldn't get the features and price where they needed them to be (aka literally the situation the MacBook Air was in before it took over the MacBook's position as the entry-level Mac laptop). These changes would get them closer to being able to do that with the iPhone. ## Camera Control > Apple plans to remove touch sensitivity and haptic feedback from the Camera Control on the standard iPhone 18 model, which suggests that it will be removing the button's capacitive layer. The report did not say if this change will extend to the iPhone 18 Pro models, but it seems likely for consistency. This was already a rumor floating around out there, and the more we hear it the more likely it seems. I think Camera Control will go down much like 3D Touch: a cool, over-engineered feature that some people like, but most people find to be way too much and therefore will be retired shortly after being introduced. Cards on the table, I was a 3D Touch fanboy, and I actively dislike the Camera Control gestures.

Quick Reviews just won the MacStories Selects Best New App award, and I'm over the moon about it! I honestly didn't seen this coming at all, and I genuinely teared up just a bit when I saw the news. Yes, yes, awards aren't the end-all-be-all and there are plenty of great new apps this year, but it's so nice to see an app that I made mostly for myself has made other people happy as well. I like Jonathan Reed's writeup on the blog: > Like Matt’s other apps, Quick Reviews is a simple concept that’s well thought out and executed, making it a joy to use. It’s now part of my movie-watching ritual, and I suspect that’s the case for many others. It’s a pleasure to be able to name Quick Reviews the Best New App of 2025. And I also appreciated this from Federico and John on AppStories: > Federico: I think what's especially nice about it is that it is the kind of utility that is focused, that is made by a new indie developer for Apple platforms, and is focused on people…on people enjoying art made by other people. > > John: Which is a positive spin that can be shared on social media. The thing I think is too easy on social media is to share hot takes, complaints, and gripes, and with Matt's app, you can share things you love, which I really think makes all of social media a better place for everyone. Well, this is where I remind you to check out Quick Reviews for iOS here. It's free to use, but $10/year gets you Magic Mode which autofills a bunch of metadata for you, (one-way) Letterboxd sync, and a simple year in review image generator.

In what might be a first for the platform, Jonathan Hoefler posted an insightful thread on Threads about a topic in which he is an expert and didn't make it vapid engagement bait. It's about the Times New Roman vs Calibri debate and how asinine basically all of it is, but it ends with this bit that I love: > if there _are_ circumstances in which one typeface is easier to read for immigrants with disabilities, chances are it will be equally beneficial to middle-aged white guys with fancy eyeglasses. This is the message I try to share are widely as possible. I hate it when people say that "some people need accessibility," which is something I heard a lot this summer in the liquid glass discourse. Accessibility is not putting white text on a white background…how dark you need to make the text to be legible varies from person to person, but there's no point along the way where you go from "normal people" to "people who need accessibility features". Proper text contrast lets everyone read easier. Keyboard shortcuts allow anyone to navigate interfaces how they want. Consistent, obvious UI helps everyone understand how their software works. * * * On a related note, I liked this post from Steven Aquino: **Times New Rubio:** > Typographical nerdery notwithstanding, however, what I take away from Rubio’s directive is simple: he cares not one iota for people with disabilities, just like his boss. Whether Times New Roman, Calibri, or something else is the best font for the most people in official documents is interesting, but come on, inclusivity isn't exactly a top priority for this government.

Idan Dardikman writing on the Koi blog, 8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions, documents how "Urban VPN Proxy" is potentially harvesting your chats with 10 major LLMs. The extension is used across millions of users on Chrome and has 10k reviews on the iOS App Store (the post covers the Chrome extension, but there's no reason this wouldn't work on iOS as well, they just can't inspect what's happening on iOS like they can on the web…another point for the open web 😉). Setting aside the contrived setup they had for this post, from what I can tell, it's a good case study in what software is capable of doing on your computer. Also that you don't just get privacy just by installing a VPN…at best, a VPN just means you're trusting your behavior with the VPN company. Also, I gotta say, it's yet another example of a problem framed with AI, but it really an issue with traditional software. Just sayin'.

The widely adored Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered (seemingly by their son) over the weekend, and this is what he said in reaction to the news: > A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace! Someone is deranged here, but it's the sad sack in the White House.

There are some new potential leaks about the upcoming folding iPhone, and this bit stood out to me: > The leaker claims Apple has chosen not to include 3D Face ID hardware or a 3D ultrasonic under-display fingerprint sensor, as both systems would add internal volume and complicate efforts to slim down the device. This was rumored before, so this isn't exactly breaking new ground, but the more I hear it, the more likely it seems to be. Depth could be the issue here, although they solved this on the iPhone Air with the camera plateau, and one would think that the folding phone would have a plateau as well. Maybe they'll be filling that one with more cameras and therefore there wouldn't be space for the full set of Face ID components? I guess it could be a cost issue, but honestly, this thing is going to be super expensive, so I don't see why they'd be pinching pennies here. Also: > For the external display, the leaker claims Apple is using a 5.25-inch panel with a punch-hole camera implemented via a HIAA (Hole-In-Active-Area) design, a technique that minimizes inactive screen space around the cutout. It is unclear what will happen to the Dynamic Island in both instances. Losing the dynamic island as well would be a real annoyance as well. Or would it…honestly I'm not sure. I know that the whole feature is a clever attempt to take a negative (needing a larger camera cutout than other phones because of your Face ID feature) and turning it into a positive with some neat functionality. I love having timers and sports scores up there, and it's even nice to be able to quickly get to my music/podcast app in a single tap no matter what else I'm doing on my phone, so losing it, even if it meant having a smaller camera cutout, would feel like a bit of a compromise. Does removing Face ID mean Apple gets to do the smaller cutout they've always wanted to do? TLDR: I'm torn. What excites me about this device combined with the rumored touch-enabled Macs coming in 2026 is that there's going to be some meaningful change in Apple hardware in a way we haven't seen in a while. iPhones that turn into iPads. Macs that turn into iPads. And iPads that…well, I guess they're just gonna be iPads for a while longer.

H I really enjoyed this talk by Scott Jenson, who did UX at Apple and Google, and now works with Mastodon. Here's a few choice quotes I jotted down while watching: > There are already 36 window management systems, we don't need a 37th. And this about iPadOS 26: > The fact that they make you pick your window manager when you boot is the ultimate UX sin. And this about liquid glass: > Who doesn't love liquid glass? If your big claim to fame with your operating system is that you have some fancy, shiny pixels, you've really lost the plot. And this critical bit about why one device selling more units doesn't mean it is better for everything: > Mobile won consumers, but it didn't win productivity. And he mentions that the original Macintosh had a screen the same physical size as the iPad mini. Yes, the Mac windowing UI originated on a screen as big as the tiniest iPad…an iPad that many suggest is too small to support windows at all today. Anyway, it's a really great talk, and I've just scratched the surface with these quotes, so I highly recommend you make a little time for it.

I'm not saying 2026 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop," but it **will** be the year that people like me pull the trigger on a Linux installation on their gaming PC. I just think there's been a years-long bubbling up of frustration among gamers about how terrible Windows is and how misaligned Microsoft seems to be with their needs. Today there are options, and you could install basically any Linux distro and cobble together a gaming setup that works reasonably well, but it's more work and clunkiness than most people are willing to deal with. All these people need is an easy-to-use, obvious place to go. Meanwhile, Valve has put in tons of work over the last 10 years making Windows games run pretty great on Linux, and is releasing the Steam Machine, their desktop/console device that will run a flavor of Linux. Based on my experience with the Steam Deck, it should be pretty great. My prediction is there will be a slightly modified version of that Linux distro made available for general PCs, which will be easy to install and go some level of viral in 2026. And by viral, I mean enough people will do it that The Verge will write an article about how gamers are flocking to this Windows alternative. I think the odds of this happening increase significantly if we can get NVIDIA drivers working much better than they do now. I haven't tried Linux on my Intel/NVIDIA system, but my understanding is that AMD GPUs work better than NVIDIA ones in the Linux distros that are out now. But NVIDIA has a much bigger portion of the gaming market, so, if we can get better support for ray tracing and DLSS in Linux, that's going to make this a more compelling thing for PC gamers.

Founded in 2011, The Verge is an exceptionally modern publisher in the grand scheme of things, but its writing style is pretty traditional. More specifically, its policy towards putting links in in articles is old school and irks me to no end. Take this article from today about the release of GPT 5.2: > In the blog post, OpenAI also said GPT-5.2 is better for AI agents’ workflows — part of the ever-intensifying battle between AI companies to offer the most efficient and useful AI agents. That particular quote isn't super relevant to my post, but it helps illustrate my point. I mentioned a Verge article, I clearly linked to it, and you can read it yourself if you'd like. The Verge's post gets this reporting from OpenAI's blog post, and they reference it a few times, but they never link to it. They do have 6 links in their post, but: * 4 of them go to other The Verge articles * 1 goes to The Information * 1 goes to The Wall Street Journal Nothing in what they wrote lets you get to the OpenAI blog post they're referencing (here it is, if you wanted to read it). Why? I appreciate that if they are a primary source on a story, as in they got a statement from OpenAI for them to report on, then that makes sense. But in this case they're reporting on someone else's post. It just seems like if you're reporting on something someone else posted online, you ought to link to it. * * * _Posted as a happy, paid subscriber to The Verge, but this gets in my craw._

Based on the best data I can find, last year Spotify had 602 million active users as of early 2025, with about 42% of those users being paid subscribers (less than half!). Additionally, 2/3 of the people on premium are on it with some sort of incentive that gets them access for free or at a discounted rate (usually something like bundled in with their cell service). And according to this data, only about 12% of their revenue comes from advertising. Put another way, 58% of Spotify's users account for 12% of the revenue. Put still another way (and if my ballpark math is right), if a Spotify subscription is $10 per month: * A third of the premium subscribers are paying $10 * Two-thirds of premium subscribers are generating some amount less than $10 * Free users are generating about $1 Now, I'm sure these metrics are somehow off a bit, but you get the idea. If a free user especially contributes about $12 to Spotify over a year and listens to thousands of songs by hundreds of artists, how exactly would you split that $12 up in a way that's fair to all those artists?

Richard Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT > I call it a "bullshit generator" because it generates output "with indifference to the truth". We are three years into the ChatGPT era, and I feel as confident as I have at any point in those last three years that, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are a serious and notable technology advancement, they are more of a normal technology than many give them credit for. On one end, you have people who think LLMs are truly intelligent and we're just 6 months away from becoming God. On the other end, you have people who think it's absolute fluff that nobody actually wants. I don't know the author of the post I was referencing, but it certainly sounds like they are more on the latter side of this dichotomy. I quoted the specific line about "indifference to the truth" because it's one that I constantly see from the anti-LLM crowd: the idea that these models "don't actually know anything," and I cannot express to you enough how little I care about that critique. Yes, I will agree with you that neither ChatGPT, nor Claude, nor Gemini, nor anything currently available **knows** anything in a conscious sense, but that doesn't mean I don't find them useful. Does a spreadsheet "know" anything? No. Does HTTP "know" things? Absolutely not. That doesn't mean those technologies are useless either. As ever, I feel like the people on either end of me are looking at LLMs as if they're magic, and some think that magic is good and others think it's bad. It's just normal technology, people. Computers haven't had to understand what they were doing before and they don't have to now.

Earlier today I wrote about why I think the pay-per-stream metric is a bad singular reference point, and doubly so when it's used as a cudgel in the fanboy wars to show why your brand is better than someone else's brand. Jason Dettbarn, who is closer to the music industry than me, wrote up a reply at his Crucial Tracks blog: > I get that bands currently make more money on Spotify in total, but if bands/fans/etc. keep advocating and the listening behavior switches to better paying services (or forces Spotify to pay more), then that's a good thing. This is a fair retort. Putting pressure on Spotify to increase the payout pool and reduce their profits is worth doing. My intention was more to point out that when people pay in so little for access to all the music in the world, and when many millions more pay zero for access to that music, there's simply not enough money to pay all the artists all they deserve. What I especially liked in their post was a link to this from Los Campesinos! (a band I love) where they shared their streaming music revenue as well. > It being Streaming Stat Season, I thought now would be a good time to offer a detailed breakdown of how much money we make from our music being streamed. Hell yeah, transparency like this helps demystify the world and lets people set more realistic expectations for how much money is being made out there. I was doubly happy when I saw they shared raw totals from each platform as well as the per-stream rates. Here's how their revenue broke down for streams of their newest album: | Streams | Income | % of total streams | Income per stream ---|---|---|---|--- **Spotify** | 6,970,117 | £20,428.50 | 74.94% | 0.29p **Apple** | 1,373,111 | £6,496.50 | 14.76% | 0.47p **YouTube** | 352,615 | £1,494.42 | 3.79% | 0.42p **Tidal** | 192,958 | £1,440.14 | 2.07% | 0.75p **Amazon** | 170,361 | £1,159.62 | 1.83% | 0.68p **Other** | 241,702 | £921.14 | 2.60% | 0.38p As I suspected from my last post, Spotify may have had the lowest per-stream rate, but they contributed 75% of the total listens and 64% of the total revenue. So yes, Spotify had more people listening to Los Campesinos! music and it paid them the most, but the per-stream rate was lower. Again, I think the much lower revenue Spotify makes from their free users is a notable detail here, as Apple, Tidal, and Amazon don't have these users in the mix, and I maintain that if they did, their per-stream payouts would drop closer to Spotify and YouTube's numbers. * * * This data also brings up something important that I didn't really touch on in the first piece: Spotify doesn't have a set per-stream payout, it fluctuates. Doing some quick math on their overall revenue numbers, you can see there's a 20% swing from month to month as all sorts of variables shift. I think some people think that when you stream a song on Spotify, that increments a counter that adds $0.004 to the artist's payout, but that's not the case. Based largely on the company's overall income, they have a "pot" of money (for lack of a better word) set aside to pay out everyone on the platform every month. For simplicity's sake, let's say that pot is $100 and there are 2 artists on the service, you and another band. Last month, you got 20 streams and they got 30 streams. That meant you accounted for 40% of the streams on the platform, and therefore you got $40, or $2/stream. But then the next month, the other band's music goes viral and while you got the same 20 streams you did last month, the other artist got 100 streams. Now you account for 16.7% of the streams and those same 20 streams only got you $16.67, or $0.83%/stream. These numbers are extreme examples, but they should illustrate the point that artists in this sort of system are fundamentally competing with each other for a fixed amount of money. Ideally, the pot that gets paid out will scale with subscriber revenue, and my understanding is that it does for these music streamers (it doesn’t always, though…looking at you, TikTok). The reasonable push back is that they should add a bit more to the pot so that a higher share of their revenue is going to the artists. My contention, and what I tried to communicate in that last piece, although I may have implied it too subtly, is that even if Spotify bumped up the pot to the point where they were just breaking even as a business, there simply isn't enough money coming in from consumers to pay artists well in this system. I personally paid about $120 for streaming music last year and I listened to over 400 artists, 1,600 songs, and probably like 5,000 streams. How is that $120 going to pay out a fair amount to all those artists as well as pay to keep the music service itself running? I'm totally willing to bet there is more margin to be had, but I can't help but keep coming back to the fact I simply think streaming music is a business model at the prices we pay today that fundamentally does not value music. * * * I was feeling kind of down after writing these two posts today, so I took the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and bought Los Campesinos! latest album direct from them. By my quick math, this one act did as much good as 8,205 streams would have done them. I'll close this post with the same thing I said in that first one: > If you want to actually support your favorite artists, buy their music outright. Bandcamp is a good option here, and direct from the artist is even better

Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty, wrote about this last week: > **I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit.** That structure increases trust, encourages adoption, and creates the conditions for Ghostty to grow into a widely used and impactful piece of open-source infrastructure. You love to see it.

Here's a question: let's say Music Service A pays me $0.01 per song streamed on their platform and Music Service B pays me $0.03 per song streamed. Which of these services is better for my income as an artist? Wait, wait, there's more data you need to know. Music Service A paid me $10,000 last year and 100,000 people listened to my music. Music Service B paid me $3,000 and 10,000 people listened to my music there. So I'll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money? I'd imagine most people would prefer to have more people discovering their work and bring in more actual money than have fewer people hear them and make less money, right? Welcome to the Shopify vs Apple Music debate! * * * This was inspired by one of Brian Merchant's latest posts over on Blood in the Machine (a recent blog discovery for me, but it's pretty good), How to quit Spotify. I'm not going to disagree with the post's overall message…I don't like Spotify either and I would agree that the business model it pioneered has represented a massive reduction in direct value most artists get from the raw musical output they create. After all, I grew up in the 90s when a new CD routinely cost like $17 from the local music store, which is about $33 in today's money. But I find the "Apple Music pays more per stream" argument endlessly frustrating because it's horribly misleading. Yes, it's a single data point, but it's telling a sliver of the full story. To put it simply, Apple Music and Spotify have basically the same deal with music labels, the difference is that Spotify has a free tier while Apple Music does not. As such, Spotify makes less money per user, but they have way more total users than Apple Music. If Spotify got rid of their ad-supported free tier today, then they would be paying artists basically the same as Apple Music. Of course, that would reduce the number of people using Spotify, streams would go down, and payouts to artists would go down as well. But the pay per stream would be higher, so all good, right? This very short article explains the pro-rata model if you want to get an idea for how it works. By a similar token, if Apple Music added a free, ad-supported tier today, many people would start using that, and pay-per-stream would go down to Spotify levels. Or maybe you think that would be a terrible thing, and you think there should be no way for people to stream music without paying $10 or more per month, but let's talk about that then and not about how choosing Apple Music is the more "ethical" choice. In that same post, Merchant links to this video by musician (and another YouTuber I like) Benn Jordan, in which he shares the exact pay per stream he got from music services in 2024. Unfortunately, he doesn't share any raw payout amount, he just shares the per-stream amounts. That resulted in this chart which I've seen a few people share. I think this shows the absurdity of the whole "per-stream pay is all that matters" argument. For one, if this is the metric you care about, then you should only release your music on Peloton! Or maybe Qobuz, a French streaming service which, despite him saying he'd never even heard of until a few months ago (neither had I), has the highest per stream rate of the normal music services on this list. I'm guessing that because he'd never heard of it, it's not bringing in an actually significant sum of money. he also mentions that he's sure that if they get as big as Spotify, their per-stream rate will go down as well. That could be true, but really only if they add a free ad-supported tier. In fact, here's an updated version of the chart with a line that I think clears up the difference. I'm not here to say that Spotify is a faultless company or anything (I don't like them myself and I don't use them), but I think this obsession over pay-per-stream is a bad way to talk about these services. It's a data point worth considering, but it's not the end of the conversation. I'll leave you with a couple assertions I feel pretty confident about. 1. If Spotify stopped offering a free tier, their pay-per-stream would match Apple Music/Deezer/etc. 2. If Apple Music/Deezer.etc. added a free tier, they would instantly drop to Spotify's pay-per-stream rate. 3. I strongly suspect Spotify paid him more in 2024 than any other service on this list. 4. Streaming music is a tough business to make meaningful profits for anyone unless you're huge. Yes, I would like to see Spotify and others increase the amount they pay to artists, but they can only do so much, this is simply not a great way to compensate artists. 5. Consumers don't want to reconcile the fact that they want to pay 10% of what they paid for music in the 90s, they want exponentially more of it, and somehow they also want artists to be paid the same as they used to. 6. If you want to actually support your favorite artists, buy their music outright. Bandcamp is a good option here, and direct from the artist is even better (Jamie xx, for example).

I recently discovered the Generative AI Adoption Tracker and it's a really interesting look at the data on how often Americans specifically are using AI tools such as ChatGPT both at work and in their personal lives. Above is a snapshot of results from August 2024 through August 2025. The notable trend on both lines is an upward trend, although what's most interesting to me is that the number of people using it in their personal lives is higher than those using it at work. There's a narrative out there that some people are trying to sell that workplaces are "mandating AI" and that's why usage is anything at all. It's the "people don't want this" argument. To me, this data tells a story of people increasingly finding ways to use AI in their normal lives, even if they are don't necessarily find it useful at work. Side note: I do think that workplace bosses mandating AI tools or strongly suggesting that AI is the only way to keep up ought to interrogate why many workers aren't adopting it like the bosses want them to. If a tool makes my job meaningfully better, AI or not, I'm gonna use it, you don't have to convince me. Maybe some people are resistant to learn anything new, but my impression is that the gains bosses have promised have been too grand and the use cases too broad, so employees get a bad taste in their mouth. Again, I'll shout it from the rooftops, **if a piece of software is revolutionary and will make workers' jobs easier, they will use it. If you find you have to keep making the hard sell to your employees, maybe it's not bringing as much value to them as you think.** Anyway… There's also a factor of job type. I personally have a job that happens 100% on a computer and benefits in many ways from AI-powered tools. That's not everyone, though, so it's not surprising that many people don't find value from it at their workplace. Of note, there's no frequency on that graph above, that just shows how many people use it at all. If we filter down to people who say they use AI on a weekly basis, the numbers come down marginally. And if we go down to people who use it on a daily basis, we get much further down the percentages. So yeah, it's fair to say not everyone is using AI all the time, but about half of US adults use it regularly, and at this growth pace, it's on track to hit 2/3 of American adults by this time next year. That's not too bad for a technology 0% of Americans were using just 3 years ago. Whether this will end up warranting the trillions of dollars being dumped into it now is another story.

A new study is out looking 28 million people who did and did not get Covid vaccines. Here's the big takeaway: > Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 […] and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality […], with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause. Looking good.

I know some people have problems with digital IDs, but I personally think they're very convenient in theory and choose to use them eyes open to why others choose not to. My car can use my phone as a key, everywhere I shop accepts contactless payments, and the only reason I needed to carry a wallet with me day to day was my driver's license. This is why I was so excited to hear that my home state was rolling out support for digital driver's licenses in 2025. It didn't happen until November, but it did and I set it up immediately. It only took a few minutes and went smoothly, and I was ready to embrace my wallet-free life. Well, until reality set in… See, I did drive a few places without my wallet, and felt free! I was a bit worried that if I was stopped, the cop would not know what to do with it since it was just released. I haven't been pulled over in well over a decade, but it was still on my mind. But okay, that's fine, it'll sort itself over time. But then I bought some Draino and needed to prove my age. I can't flash my digital ID to the cashier and they certainly don't have an NFC reader for me to tap and prove my age. And then I went to Best Buy to pick up an online order, and they needed to see a photo ID to validate I was who I said I was. The digital ID has no photo, and again, they don't have hardware for me to tap my phone. So here I am, a few weeks after I got the digital driver's license I wanted, and I'm still carrying my physical wallet around with me when I leave the house. Bummer.