My wife’s first reactions to buying a Mac for the first time in years

My wife bought a 12” MacBook in 2016. It was her first Mac. She loved how thin it was and that it looked great, but it ran terribly and only got slower with time. In early 2020 she upgraded to a Dell XPS 13 with a 10th gen Core | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Most people’s phones don’t look like ours

Lou Plummer: The Phones of Normal People They hate updates because they interrupt stuff they'd rather be doing. They don't care about the new features being announced at WWDC because they do not want to learn how to do new things with their already too complicated | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Let’s change the conversation around macOS on iPads

Ryan Christoffel quoting Apple’s Greg Joswiak on 9to5Mac: The fact is that the majority of Mac customers have an iPad, and they use them both Which lead Ryan to argue: there’s one big reason this will likely never happen. If iPad owners get access to macOS | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Apple gets a genuine AAA game to release day-and-date with PC and consoles

I’ve been critical of Apple’s ability to make the Mac a viable gaming platform, but credit where it’s due, getting the new Assassin’s Creed game releasing on the same day on PC, consoles, and Mac is a big win, and basically unheard | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Employees opting out of return-to-office mandates

Scharon Harding wriring for ArsTechnica: Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft Return-to-Office Mandates Drove Senior Talent Away A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Apple listened and fixed my main issue with the CTF

Apple two weeks ago: What’s New for Apps Distributed in the European Union First, no CTF is required if a developer has no revenue whatsoever. This includes creating a free app without monetization that is not related to revenue of any kind (physical, digital, advertising, or oth … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Google I/O: the vibes were off

Casey Newton writing for Platformer: Google’s Broken Link to the Web Aside from the opening act, the TikTok DJ Marc Rebillet, no creator, developer, or startup took the stage. Instead, a handful of celebrities appeared in brief videos, with Wyclef Jean enthusing over AI music too … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

I’ll just say it, I want an iPad that runs macOS (members post)

The more I think about it, the more I’m squarely in the camp of people who want iPad-like hardware that runs macOS, and I’m not sorry for saying it. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Apple apologizes for crushing ad campaign

Apple VP of marketing to Ad Week (via 9to5Mac): Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Settle down about the Apple Pencil, nature is healing

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Apple selling 4 Apple Pencils is great. It’s more confusing than it ought to be, but this week’s iPad event clearly showed me how this is going to play out in the near( | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Apple’s “Crush” ad is getting roasted, and I get it, even if it didn’t bother me

Kenneth Shepard writing for Kotaku: Apple’s New iPad Ad Sparks Loud, Immediate Backlash The intent is obvious. Apple wants to communicate that all these creative tools and works are available within the tiny tablet. But the visual of countless instruments, statues, and other piec … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Marvel Studios is making an immersive, interactive story just for the Vision Pro

Marvel Studios: Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive Announce ‘What If…? – An Immersive Story,’ Coming Exclusively to Apple Vision Pro Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive announce What If…? – An Immersive Story, the first-ever interactive Disney+ Original story coming exclusively to App … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

What Steve Jobs said about styli (styli really doesn’t seem like a real word, but Birchtree’s stringent style guide requires I use it)

I found myself watching the original iPhone announcement today, and I know it’s cliche to say, but damn is that a remarkable presentation. Steve Jobs so clearly presents the current state of the world, explains the problems with the current state, and then proceeds to explain how … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Incomplete thought: why do iPads and Windows computers earn such different responses from Mac fans? (members post)

Why do iPads bring out a very specific reaction while other products don’t? | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Quick thoughts on the new iPads

Check out the event if you missed it, but let’s go from least updated to most updated, shall we? iPad mini Tim Cook might as well have said, “the iPad mini remains a product in our lineup,” as the mini got a single, minor shout out | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

On those expensive as hell iPad Pro rumors…

Maybe the first Apple rumor of 2024 was that the upcoming iPad Pros would be extraordinarily expensive. Quoting that piece: Apple's upcoming OLED iPad Pro will start at $1,500, rising to between $1,800 and $2,000 depending on size and configuration, representing a major increase … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Ok, spatial personas are fuckin’ rad

I finally had my first spatial persona experience, and it was pretty rad. A friend and I spent about 30 minutes playing chess, checkers, and battleship, in the Game Room app. Over those 30 minutes, it did genuinely feel like I was sharing the same space as my friend. I | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Praying for passkeys to get better

William writing at Firstyear's blog-a-log: Passkeys: A Shattered Dream Passkeys are now seen as a way to capture users and audiences into a platform. What better way to encourage long term entrapment of users then by locking all their credentials into your platform, and even bett … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

The kids are figuring it out

Justin Ling writing for Bug-eyed and Shameless: Leave Those Kids Alone I’ve had a rule for a long time. It’s a simple rule and it goes like this: What students do on-campus is none of my business. Campus politics is a weird and insular business, and | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

The Rabbit R1 perplexes me

If I’m being totally honest, I don’t understand the Rabbit R1 at all. As a piece of hardware, it looks cool, so I understand if you want to spend $200 on a thing that will look cool on your shelf, but take away the cool physical | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

My Vision Pro spends most of its time in a drawer, and how that relates to cognitive bias (members post)

I reckon with why I'm generous with the Vision Pro falling short of my hopes while I'm happy to drag other products for doing the same thing. Also the best improvised version of Blur's Song 2 I've ever seen. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

Think of literally anyone else

In software discussions, there’s a relatively healthy trope of saying something like, “sure this would be fine for power users, but what about normal people?” That’s a good question to ask, but what comes next always bugs me. The “normal person” will | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

What’s old is new and what’s new maybe isn’t what we want

Joshua Topolsky: Rabbit’s R1 AI Companion Is Not the Future You Were Promised Right now, every time you want to do something like that with your phone, you’re jumping into and out of individual apps; the r1 supposes a future where all your apps connect into | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 6 months ago

A few of my tech-related hot takes

Let’s have some fun and rattle through some relatively spicy takes I have about tech! Movie theaters are awesome and people still like them. Yes, home theaters and high quality headsets like the Vision Pro make the at-home experience better than ever, but there are still major el … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Be quick to praise, but slow to criticize

I think when it comes to most things in life, especially someone else’s art, we should all strive to be quick to praise the things we enjoy, but take our time before criticizing what we don’t. I was thinking about this over the past week as | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

64GB iPads need to go extinct

Well, I recently got an iPad Air. It turns out I really did miss having an iPad, and having one back in my life is wonderful. I ended up getting the 64GB M1 model on a steep discount ($200 off)…clearly Best Buy was clearing out their inventory for | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Logitech (accidentally?) commits a cardinal sin of Mac software

Stephen Hackett first reported this yesterday and it was so wild I almost didn't believe it at first. After some searching online, it seems that this folder was generated by Logi Options+, the software that came with my mouse, the Logitech MX Master 3S. Version 1. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

A.I. tools are constantly “6 months” from really getting awesome

David Pierce for The Verge: Rabbit R1 Hands-On: Early Tests With the $199 AI Gadget Almost immediately, though, I started running into stuff the R1 just can’t do. It can’t send emails or make spreadsheets, though Lyu has been demoing both for months. And: Rabbit’ | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Wait, how many Vision Pros are selling?

Ming-Chi Kuo used to just provide supply chain data and he was remarkably reliable at that. Then he moved into more general punditry, and honestly it feels like things are off the rails enough that I find it hard to take his data seriously without looking into it further. The | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Calm companies are underrated

Justin Jackson: We Need More Calm Companies A calm company's purpose is to provide exceptional service to customers while simultaneously improving the lives of the people who work there. I love this, and it’s good to be reminded that there are many companies out there that | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

How I fell in love with LEGO (members post)

Today we dive into why LEGO has unexpectedly become my go-to hobby over the past couple years. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Digital wallets on iOS already exist and here’s how they compete today

I see more people than I’d expect suggesting that enabling digital wallets for payments on the iPhone is massively dangerous and would lead to widespread fraud and I’ve even seen suggestions that these wallets would charge users a service fee to run all transactions. I’ | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Incomplete thought: I looked at ChatGPT’s energy use and it doesn’t seem that bad…

I looked at how much electricity ChatGPT is supposed to use and compared it to some other items. From that perspective, it doesn't seem that crazy. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Emulators aren’t new; here’s the great ones on the Mac

The first few emulators hit the App Store this week and while two of them were promptly removed (for different reasons, neither of which were because emulation is wrong), Delta seems to be quite good (I’m still using it for the first time so too early to say | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

A quick bit on what the iPhone’s market really is

I was recently doing some research on a post that never quite came together in a cohesive thought. However, I did come across this quote from Ben Thompson on how he would define the iPhone’s market: the high-end smartphone market — that is, the iPhone market — is | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

MKBHD’s real responsibility

Ben Thompson on Stratechery: MKBHDs for Everything Surely the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

You used to need 1,000 true fans. In the social media age you need at least 1 million randos (members post)

How the world of social media made it so you could reach more people than ever, but that 1,000 true fans concept hasn't really changed. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Apple clarifies its stance on retro game emulators on iOS

Joe Rossignol for MacRumors: Apple Further Explains Why Game Boy Emulator iGBA Was Removed From App Store While it did not explicitly name GBA4iOS, Apple told us it removed iGBA from the App Store after learning that it was a knockoff app that copied another developer's work and | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

What if password managers were never allowed on iOS?

I have found myself writing about myths and what I find to be unfounded fears about allowing companies to compete with Apple’s apps a lot recently. One of the concerns a few people brought up with my last post about competition was that even if it might make | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

An app that’s good enough for most people still benefits from competition

Francesco on his blog: Wishing for a Better Apple Notes It’s fair to say that Notes has received substantial updates in the last few years. […] The app is almost perfect, I can scan and edit PDFs, write or draw with the Apple Pencil, organise notes with folder | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Just Some Tips Anyone Can Use to Level Up Their Design Game

Below is a cleaned up transcript of a talk I recently gave at work to an audience of mostly developers. I used Claude (Opus) to clean up the transcript and have edited out some sections due to discussions of our internal systems. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the very succinctly t … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

X-Men ’97 is an absolute stunner

Alex Abad-Santos for Vox: What if an Animated X-Men Series Is the X-Men’s Best Future? The stuff in between the lightning bolts, telekinesis, and super strength is what matters. It’s hard for me to overstate how good X-Men ’97 really is. This week’s | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Apple opens up more iPhone repair options, which raises an interesting question

Jason Koebler for 404 Media: Apple Announces Half Measure to Make iPhones More Repairable Immediately After Law Banned Its Repair Practices What this means, practically, is that Apple will let you swap the screen of one iPhone with the screen of another iPhone, something that was … | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

It was 23 years from Macintosh to iPhone. It’s been 17 years since the iPhone.

Jason Snell for MacWorld: Call Apple Vision Pro a flop at your own risk Today, we are so tech-savvy as a society that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the ground floor of a barely feasible product category. And yet, that’s just | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Incomplete thought: the problem with the Humane AI Pin (members post)

In this new series, I’m working out thoughts before I’ve figured out what I really think. Today is about the fundamental issue holding back the Humane Pin (despite the AI silliness). | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

Being the wallet is isn't cool. You know what's cool? Being the card people use in a ton of wallets.

Forgive the lengthy quotes in this post. These are from a podcast, and people are more verbose when speaking than when writing. I've chosen not to edit them down to make sure you get the full answer. I was listening to The Vergecast this week and a caller | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

A trifecta of Elon Musk garbage

What a day! We’ve got 3 links I’m pushing through as an omnibus post. Benj Edwards for ArsTechnica: Elon Musk: AI will be smarter than any human around the end of next year On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the imminent rise in AI superintelligence | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago

How to effectively design a user modal (members post)

Today we're diving into how to design an effective modal interface, why button text really matters, and a few cool links with data that might surprise you. | Continue reading


@birchtree.me | 7 months ago