I was just on GitHub and saw the famous contribution visualization, and this really put into perspective how much more of a developer I was this year. Here's the last 4 years of contributions:33 contributions in 2022, a bit more in 2023 and 2024, but y' | Continue reading
Kathryn Krawczyk from Canary Media: Clean energy is still winning. These 10 charts prove it.Solar’s monumental rise is the main reason for the shift: The source more than doubled its share of global electricity production from 2021 to 2025. And while coal still remains the world’ | Continue reading
Amanda Hess for The New York Times in 2018: The End of EndingsDidn’t endings used to mean something? They imbued everything that came before them with significance, and then they gave us the space to reflect on it all. More than that: They made us feel alive. | Continue reading
This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Vision Pro 2024 and 2023 report cards.Vision Pro, gen 2I'm going to give myself a round of applause here, because absolutely no | Continue reading
I'm a big fan of movies, they're my favorite medium for storytelling, and it was sometime in 2019 that I said to myself, "man, you don't watch that many movies for someone who claims to love movies."Of course, I was watching | Continue reading
This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Mac 2024 and 2023 report cards.MacBook ProOnly one MacBook Pro got an update this year, and it's the baseline model, which was | Continue reading
Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI | Continue reading
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 ProIn yesterday's post, I talked about how the smartphone is in its laptop era, and boy | Continue reading
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 ProI know this new Pro model isn't universally adored, | Continue reading
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& | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
In which I calmly explain what I think caused all of the problems with the Star Wars sequel trilogy. | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
Birchtree runs on Ghost, and I'm super happy with it; I'd use it even if the company behind it was unremarkable. Thankfully, they're also very cool, and have been supporters of the fediverse for several years now. Earlier this year, they made it so | Continue reading
Oh man, what remarkable timing. I had a blog post scheduled to go up later today, in which I said some nice things about Dia, the Arc replacement from The Browser Company. I've been pretty salty towards The Browser Company for the past 18 months or so, but | Continue reading
The major game studios release one game every five to ten years at this point, when they used to release absolute classics every one or two years. I do not like this trend. | Continue reading
It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. | Continue reading
The findings were basically that after 500 charge cycles, the slow-charged iPhones dropped 11.8% in battery capacity, while the fast-charged iPhones dropped 12.3%.I think a lot of people still see their phones as dumb PC terminals from 1995. "If an app isn't "closed& | Continue reading
Here's a quote from a post on Reddit. I'm not linking to it because this could be seen as punching down, and I really don't mean it that way. I’m sure you could Google for it if you want to see the | Continue reading
This video brings up some salient points on the security concerns of using a browser that has an agent capable of doing things. New technology tends to bring new security concerns that need to be tackled, and prompt injection is undoubtedly one we have for LLMs.One thing I found | Continue reading
I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this notification pop up on my phone this evening.After nearly 2 months of fighting with App Review (in fairness, I haven’t done much the last month as I’d lost the will to fight for a bit) | Continue reading
John Voorhees: Apple Recreated the App Store on the Web With No Way to Download or Buy AppsAn even bigger difference from the native App Stores is that you can’t buy anything on the web. That’s right: there’s no way to log into | Continue reading
Joe Rossignol for MacRumors: iOS 26.2 Lock Screen Gets Liquid Glass SliderWhen you select the "Glass" option, you can use the new slider to make the time look almost entirely clear, or give it a more frosted, solid look.Honestly, it's a nice change, | Continue reading
Last night was an absolute drubbing for conservative politics across America, and I couldn't be happier about it. Zohran Mamdani demolished Andrew Cuomo for the second time this year, and will be the next mayor of New York City.And California's Prop. 50 passed with an | Continue reading
I gotta be honest, I'm bummed they aren't referencing the classic Mac boot sound anymore. | Continue reading
I have had it with these monkey-fighting agent modes on this Monday-to-Friday plane. | Continue reading
There is one main type of value I can bring to this blog. If I lose that, what am I even doing? | Continue reading
I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago, I published my iPhone Air review and in it, I declared that the iPhone 17 Pro was the better phone for me. My plan was simple: finish the review, move my eSIM back to the 17 Pro, and carry on | Continue reading
Tim Cushing: Trump Continues to Attack Biden for All the Stuff Trump Officials Did While Trump Was Still PresidentIf there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there’s no one left with … | Continue reading
This post came across my radar, which shows Windows game support on Linux is at a new all-time high.You can see that the area in red has been constantly shrinking, at a steady pace, and this past month is no exception with this category getting very close to just | Continue reading
Joe Rosensteel: Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple?While the acquisition was announced almost a year ago in November of 2024, Apple only folded the developers in eight months ago. Prior to the acquisition, Photomator was updated monthly, often with major features. In … | Continue reading
Back in February 2024, Xbox held a short podcast where they reacted directly to swirling rumors about Xbox exclusive titles that were about to go multi-platform, which was giving Xbox fans anxiety. This question from host Tina Amini was right near the start:So when you are thinki … | Continue reading
Matias Heikkilä: AI Can Code, but It Can't Build SoftwareCoding, however, is not what most people are getting paid for. Building a production-ready app is not coding, it’s software engineering.Absolutely true. I've said a few times that the software development work | Continue reading
This morning I’m watching Candyman from 1992 and there’s a joke about how you can’t just trust everything you read in the newspaper.I grew up in the 2000s and was keenly aware that you couldn’t just trust everything you read online. | Continue reading
Mike Masnick: Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is an Attack on the Open InternetEven if you love Reddit and hate AI, you should be worried about this lawsuit. If it succeeds, it would fundamentally close off most of the open internet.And:If that’s | Continue reading
Here's a clip from a post on Reddit. I'm not linking to it because this could be seen as punching down, and I really don't mean it that way. I’m sure you could Google for it if you want to see the | Continue reading
There are some very negative takes out there about ChatGPT Atlas, and I think it's fair to say I agree with some of the critiques, but raise an eyebrow at a few others. | Continue reading
Quick Notes is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It's completely free with no in-app purchase. It does require iOS 26 (sorry, it makes things easier).I'm excited about this app because it solves a use case I personally have and could not | Continue reading
I recently wrote a member's post about how I don't think the iPhone Air is a good comp to the iPhone X. One response I got a few times for this was that the iPhone Air is actually more like the MacBook Air, which was a | Continue reading
Anil Dash: The Majority AI ViewWhat's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as | Continue reading
The thing I love about being a developer is that I can identify gaps in my own life and instead of complaining about how annoying they are, I can actually fix them. It's amazing!As I revealed to More Birchtree subscribers a few days ago, I had a | Continue reading
Back in January, I predicted that OpenAI's next big app would be a web browser. Well, their next big app was actually Sora, which I think sucks, but their browser, Atlas, is here today and I think this is the first AI-powered browser that has any chance of | Continue reading
I think it's fair to say nerds on the iOS betas this summer had feelings about Liquid Glass, ranging from love to absolute disdain. The question was how the general public would react to the interface material. My position was that I fundamentally didn't like it | Continue reading
I'm just not so sure the iPhone Air to iPhone X comparison is all it's cracked up to be. | Continue reading