This week's Comfort Zone is special for two reasons. Obviously, WWDC is a fun week for nerds like us, but we also had Federico Viticci on the show! Watch on YouTube | Continue reading
Elena Rossini has a very strong 3-minute video explaining the fediverse that I just had to share. | Continue reading
Apple revealed their new design system this week built on a concept they're calling "liquid glass". This is partially a UI reskin, but it's also chock full of new UI concepts that break from iOS tradition. Yes, your old apps will still work and | Continue reading
I bought a Microsoft Surface on May 9 and have been using it for exactly a month as of today, the first day of WWDC. I bought it in large part because I was frustrated with my iPad. I love the iPad's hardware and physical flexibility, but the | Continue reading
Well, I managed to get my hands on a Switch 2 on launch day. I've played it for a few hours, and as is tech blogging tradition, wanted to share my first impressions. Random stuff The sound design in the UI is top notch. Nintendo did an amazing | Continue reading
Last week I wrote about how for the first time in a decade, Apple would not be sending any executives to be interviewed at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live. Well, it turns out that Apple will be holding an early screening of F1 at the same time | Continue reading
Why it might be unfair for Google to be getting all the blame for "killed the web" right now. | Continue reading
Last week I posed a challenge to Birchtree readers: this summer, watch 2 movies you skipped previously. Pretty simple, right? Yes, but here's the tricky part. - The first movie should be one you skipped, but that was well-received by critics and/or audiences. You didn't | Continue reading
6 months ago, I signed up for Surf Social, which was doing a slow roll out. I'd kind of forgotten about it, especially since I'd literally burned out on social media a few days ago, but today I woke up to an email in my inbox | Continue reading
Here's a relatively un-flashy video, but stick with me here because I think this is really exciting stuff. 0:00 /0:52 1× What we just watched was me ask Claude for the Mac to look at my email inbox, find the emails with feedback on my | Continue reading
Casey Newton writing for his Platformer newsletter: The AI Browser Wars Are About to Begin Here, I think we begin to understand the opportunity that companies see here — and why "web browser" probably isn't the best word for what they are building. Setting all the | Continue reading
Counterpoint Research: iPhone 16 Leads Global Smartphone Sales in Q1 2025 Apple’s iPhone 16 was the best-selling smartphone in Q1 2025. This also marked the return of the iPhone series’ base variant to the top spot in the first quarter after a two-year gap. After several years | Continue reading
My review of the latest Doom game, which absolutely rocks. | Continue reading
John Gruber announced The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025 with one notable adendum: in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined. An … | Continue reading
Today we're going hands-on with Dia, the upcoming browser from the aptly-named The Browser Company. Maybe this will turn into something special, but to me it really feels like they've thrown away a lot of product differentiation as well as trust in their user base to | Continue reading
By Matt Birchler | Continue reading
Back when I was still using Twitter, I would develop a serious fatigue of social media every year or so and needed to take a step back from using it. I've written about this several times on this blog, but when I left Twitter and jumped feet-first into | Continue reading
NVIDIA just released an official version of their (only one good enough to be worth you money IMO) game streaming service to the Steam Deck, and it is positively fantastic. The Steam Deck works great for most games, but there are a few that just don't really work | Continue reading
I genuinely think Wheatus’s Teenage Dirtbag is one of the best one hit wonders from my teen years and this acoustic version of it is a delight. | Continue reading
NVIDIA just reported their financials for Q1 of fiscal year 2026, and it's all big numbers. The reported a record $3.8 billion in gaming revenue, but that is dwarfed by the $39 billion they made from "data center" revenue. All things said, they brought in | Continue reading
MacRumors reporting on Mark Gurman's report that Apple is changing their naming format for operating systems: We're not going to be getting iOS 19, we're getting iOS 26. It has been fundamentally strange that Apple currently has OS's with the same | Continue reading
CleanShot 4.8 is out now and it has some nice new features, including a bespoke color picker that I actually really love. You'll never guess who they got to cover the updates in video 😉 And out of the interest of transparency (and mild comedy), I do | Continue reading
This is one of those YouTube videos that perfectly captures two of my interests: YouTubers creating beats out of random sounds and Metal Gear Solid. | Continue reading
It’s probably been a decade since I’ve had comments on this site. I generally don’t like the idea of paying for a blog where I host comments I don’t write. That’s doubly true when it’s comments that are | Continue reading
Here's a little challenge I'd like to pose: this summer, watch 2 movies you skipped previously. Pretty simple, right? Yes, but here's the tricky part. The first movie should be one you skipped, but that was well-received by critics and/or audiences. You didn& | Continue reading
Video conferencing is absolutely amazing tech, but it's not perfect. Google Beam and the Vision Pro's spatial personas are trying to improve some of the limits of those webcam calls a lot of us are doing every day, but they're coming at them from | Continue reading
I love Kyle Bosman. I think his style is lovely and his comedic instincts just land with me. The best thing I can say is that it's the only video game channel that my wife doesn't roll her eyes at. | Continue reading
Euan Graham, Nicolas Fulghum, and Katye Altieri: Global Electricity Review 2025 (yes, I did read this after watching Hank Green's video) Rapid solar growth is helping the world meet growing electricity demand and avoiding the use of more expensive fossil fuels. Global solar gener … | Continue reading
I love, love, loved Absolutely (Story of a Girl) and I was a teenager, and I've watched this video at last a dozen times over the years because I love that sometimes you're famous one day and just a normal guy the next. I hope this | Continue reading
By Matt Birchler | Continue reading
Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism: AI Chatbots Are Becoming Even Worse at Summarizing Data Alarmingly, the LLMs' rate of error was found to increase the newer the chatbot was — the exact opposite of what AI industry leaders have been promising us. This is in addition to a correlat … | Continue reading
Johnny Ryan: EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis Dr Johnny Ryan said "Today's court's decision shows that the consent system used by Google, Amazon, X, Microsoft, deceives hundreds of millions of Europeans. The t … | Continue reading
Werner in the Things blog: A Swift Cloud We’ve rebuilt Things Cloud from the ground up. The system that keeps your to-dos in sync is now faster, built with modern technology, and ready for the future. This is gonna sound like a burn, and I don't | Continue reading
Glenn Fleishman writing for Six Colors: Can We Still Love Apple? Should We Ever Have? Maybe it is the right time for this love affair to come to an end. Not the end of my love for what I can do with Apple stuff, but creating boundaries, something good for | Continue reading
This is such a good, quick video explaining why we don't really understand why LLMs work the way thy do. | Continue reading
By Matt Birchler | Continue reading
Matthew Gault for 404 Media: NFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan On Friday, thousands of NFTs that had once sold collectively for millions of dollars vanished from the internet and were replaced with the phrase “Thi … | Continue reading
This post is a simple reminder that you can enjoy the benefits that AI tools bring to you without making it your whole damn personality. The important thing remains the human connections and the work we do. Use AI to assist you do things you haven't been able | Continue reading
Riley Hill on his SlatePad blog, linking to a Wall Street Journal article about how many Vision Pro users are regretting their purchase: I Paid $3,500 for Apple’s Vision Pro. Seven Months Later, I Still Use It (Almost) Every Day. The narrative being presented is that early | Continue reading
I've been using a new phone for the past month, as shown in the photo above. Hmm, that might not be the best way to show it off, how about this comparison? There we go! This is the Motorola Razr+, which released in 2023 and up until this | Continue reading
A year ago it was estimated that (using some fuzzy, maybe 10x too pessimistic math), that ChatGPT uses as much electricity as 17,000 US homes. This was reported as some sort of travesty to the environment (something I care about, for what it's worth), but "numbers | Continue reading
Bruce Springsteen is on his "Land of Hope and Dreams Tour" right now, which kicked off yesterday in Manchester where he said this between a couple songs: There's some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting | Continue reading
John Koblin: HBO’s Streaming Service Becomes ‘HBO Max’ Again The reason for the change, executives explained, was straightforward. People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content like “The White Lotus” and “The Last of | Continue reading
Got that? Good, because Warner Bros. is reverting the name of their "Max" streaming service to "HBO Max": Ahead the company’s upfront presentation in New York at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, WBD President and CEO David Zaslav said the name will change | Continue reading
18 months ago there were 1 billion monthly RCS users around the world. Today, Google announced that 1 billion RCS messages are sent in the US alone every single day. Finding a comparable iMessage number is hard, but the worldwide number may be around 8 billion messages per day. A … | Continue reading
Things are bubbling up. | Continue reading
I don't know how Synthet got into my YouTube recommendations last year, but I'm so glad it did. | Continue reading
Okay, I didn't do it, but Nathaniel Bandy did and this list is so much fun. It was humbling to see some of my favorite childhood handheld games listed right up front as some of the worst, but I get it. Nathaniel isn't a long-time fan, | Continue reading