9to5Mac has links to two mock ups claiming to represent the iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro coming this fall. If I could be so bold, I’d say the 17 Air looks potentially reasonable, but the 17 pro render looks absolutely atrocious. I think there’s | Continue reading
M.G. Siegler: The Great AI UI Unification And depending on which model you choose to use, you get other options from there, as various buttons will be enabled in the message box for 'Web Search' and now 'Deep Research'. Oh and I forgot the ' | Continue reading
Dustin Bluck writing for the Castro blog: State of the App: Year 1 Private and popular feeds update have seen marked improvements, but unpopular feeds were the real issue before and that issue is entirely gone. I emailed Castro support back in 2021 to ask them for help with my | Continue reading
Zac Hall writing for 9to5Mac: Apple’s Competitive Edge in AI Hinges on These Three Unreleased Siri Features It feels like a make-or-break moment for Siri, and these three remaining iOS 18 features are key indicators of Apple’s ability to leverage AI with Siri. These three Siri | Continue reading
An update to my app, Quick Reviews, is rolling out now! After a lot of feature adds in the first few updates, I took this as a chance to clean up some bugs and improve a few elements that made the app a little annoying to use at times. Oh, | Continue reading
99% of the time I want my software to be as fast as humanly possible. I want UI elements that respond quickly, and I want keyboard shortcuts to do as much as possible. But 1% of the time, for whatever reason, I just like when a computer takes a long | Continue reading
My fellow F1 fans should watch this to make sure they know the main rule changes coming in this season. I totally missed that the fastest lap point was going away. Unsecured and still-using0the-default-password cameras are quite the thing…always always always change your password … | Continue reading
Chris Welch writing for The Verge: Netflix Says Its Brief Apple TV App Integration Was a Mistake Considering the trajectory of 2025 so far, perhaps we should’ve known that Netflix finally playing nice with the Apple TV app was too good to be true. And now the streaming | Continue reading
Too often I see people suggest that others are a static combination of beliefs. I stongly believe that people can, and do change. | Continue reading
Josh You publishing a study on Epoch AI: How Much Energy Does ChatGPT Use? A commonly-cited claim is that powering an individual ChatGPT query requires around 3 watt-hours of electricity, or 10 times as much as a Google search. However… We find that typical ChatGPT queries using … | Continue reading
Matt Gemmell went iPad-only in 2016, but he's made the move Back to Mac [The Mac is] satisfying in the conventional way, in that it meets needs without drama or acrobatics. It works in the sense that it directs its resources firmly in the direction of service, rather | Continue reading
Casey Newton writing on Platformer: Google Slings More AI at the Web To get the web we had at its peak, platforms and publishers had to align around mutually beneficial incentives. They did it before, and they can do it again. It would nice to see some progress here before | Continue reading
Thomas Ricouard: Is Software Engineering Over as We Know It? Writing code has always been a means to an end, especially in my case, where my goal is to build and ship products to millions of users. What’s really happening is a shift in focus: away from obsessing | Continue reading
noclip is quite the find, and I've lost more time than I'd like to admit in it this week. Basically, it has a bunch of 3D models from mostly PS2-Wii era games that you can explore in your browser. It's awesome and anyone with | Continue reading
Zac Hall writing for 9to5Mac: Apple Responds After Being Forced to Approve Porn App on EU iPhones Due to DMA The bottom line for parents, though, is that the “Apple-approved” messaging around the porn app on iPhone omits the fact that Apple is legally required to approve the | Continue reading
Adam Engst: Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers Say I want to proofread this paragraph while writing in Lex, which is running in Arc. To invoke Writing Tools, I must select the paragraph, Control-click, and choose Writing Tools > Proofread from the conte … | Continue reading
The Tico Times: El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment Bitcoin was never used by most Salvadorans, its modern city was never built, and now it will cease to be legal tender in El Salvador, the first country in the world to adopt it in 2021: a | Continue reading
Federico Viticci for MacStories: The Many Purposes of Timeline Apps for the Open Web But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not l … | Continue reading
People think I'm joking or something when I say that Android TV is better than you'd think, and that tvOS could learn some things from it. Today's post is a video walk through of Android TV which tries to illustrate why it's compelling to me. | Continue reading
I know it's a bit of cliché, but count me in the group of white men who 2021's Inside really connected with me in a huge way. Anyway, now All Eyes on Me is going to be stuck in my head for the next month. | Continue reading
Quick Reviews is currently available on the App Store and is a free download. Check it out! I recently wrote about how the app works, so I’ll let you read that to see how it works. I have finalized my monetization, so I did want to lay that | Continue reading
If you enjoy your Vision Pro, don't let this post imply that i think you're wrong to enjoy it. This is a personal blog with my personal experiences, not some neutral outlet trying to assign an objective score to each product. It’s been one | Continue reading
The tragedy in Washington D.C. this week was horrible, and a shocking incident. There should and will be an investigation into what went wrong here, but every politician and official who spoke at the White House today explicitly blamed DEI programs for this crash. The message may … | Continue reading
A year ago I tried to understand how much power ChatGPT was using and if I should be outraged by it. Today I try it again. | Continue reading
Ben Turner: Chinese Researchers Just Built an Open-Source Rival to ChatGPT in 2 Months. Silicon Valley Is Freaked Out. Now, R1 has also surpassed ChatGPT's latest o1 model in many of the same tests. This impressive performance at a fraction of the cost of other models, its semi-o … | Continue reading
Katie Campione writing for Deadline with a very long headline: Broadcast Was “Surprisingly Resilient” in 2024 Amid Production Declines, but Streaming Still Leads the Pack; ‘Fool Me Once’ Led TV Last Year, Luminate Says big IP franchises were still the best performing series on Di … | Continue reading
Casey Newton: Hands on With Operator — A Promising but Frustrating New Frontier for Artificial Intelligence The experience revealed to me one of Operator’s key deficiencies: it can use a web browser, but it cannot use your web browser. This matters a lot, because your browser is … | Continue reading
A certain individual who owns a certain social media site spoke at a certain President's inauguration earlier this week and at one point gave a very distinctive salute. Now look, I'm not calling this billionaire a Nazi, and I'm not telling you whether I | Continue reading
John Siracusa is making a new Mac app and he’s been talking about the development process on ATP for the last few weeks. I got a kick out of his frustrations with using a payment system that delivered a confusing user experience he had no control over, and | Continue reading
I teased this last week for More Birchtree subscribers, and today I'm excited to announce my new app, Quick Reviews! Wait, Quick Reviews which I've been making on the web for years? No, Quick Reviews for iOS. I talked about what tools helped me make this | Continue reading
By Matt Birchler | Continue reading
Oh buddy, what a game! | Continue reading
I don't use TikTok so I have no idea, but presumably some people are like "what do I even watch on my phone now?" LegalEagle with a good explainer over what's happening. For the record, I think this sucks and isn't how | Continue reading
In this very special episode, the gang makes their "Pro" and "Pro Max" predictions for tech in 2025 and oh my, does it get wild! Who's best clued into the tech coming this year? Who is just wish-casting their way to third place? This | Continue reading
The Ghost Blog: The Story So Far This year we're going to ship ActivityPub to everyone, in a flagship Ghost 6.0 release. I have nothing else to add other than I’m happy with my choice of blogging back end. | Continue reading
Ryan Christoffel writing on 9to5Mac: Why Vision Pro Is Apple’s Best Reason Yet to Bring Touch ID Back to iPhone Because Face ID on iPhone does no good when Vision Pro is strapped to your face—an unfortunate detail I’m reminded of every time I | Continue reading
A lot has been said about Meta’s recently-announced moderation changes, so I won’t add too much to your reading backlog today, but I did want to comment on it after letting it simmer in my head for a bit. Let me just start by repeating the | Continue reading
I've been working on something new, but it's not ready for prime time. | Continue reading
Hey everyone, this post is for everyone, but it’s a part of a new series I’m doing on More Birchtree where I review the books and games I read and play in 2025. My movie reviews have been a relative hit on social media for the | Continue reading
I recently lost my Apple TV remote (the latest model) and despite apparently being somewhere in the couch according to Find My, my wife and I can not find it. We were using our phones as remotes for a couple days, which was annoying, but got the job done. But | Continue reading
This behind-the-scenes of one of my favorite 2024 movies was so much fun Shout out to Truth social, which got called out as having the best UX in this video...which is based on Mastodon The internet's dad, Hank Green, is starting a new podcast I'm | Continue reading
Niléane is out, so Chris and I are left to fend on ourselves! Chris steals like an artist and I defend a new purchase…oh, and we have some fun with desks that sadly ends in Vision Pro slander. Why does this keep happening?! Watch on YouTube | Continue reading
A new book explaining assembly theory, a new way of thinking about the question of "what is life?" | Continue reading
Today's a symbolically big day for Birchtree! After doing this site and its many offshoot projects since 2010, I finally put a ring on it and registered Birchtree Productions LLC. 🎉 For you, this means basically nothing at all. Footers might be updated and I might invest … | Continue reading
Andrew Fear writing for the official NVIDIA blog: PC Gaming in the Cloud Goes Everywhere With New Devices and AAA Games on GeForce NOW Get immersed in a new dimension of big-screen gaming as GeForce NOW brings AAA titles to life on Apple Vision Pro spatial computers, Meta Quest 3 | Continue reading
I thought this was a fascinating post by Simon Willison: Things We Learned About LLMs in 2024 This increase in efficiency and reduction in price is my single favourite trend from 2024. I want the utility of LLMs at a fraction of the energy cost and it looks like that& | Continue reading
Kate Knibbs writing for Wired: Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old Earlier this week, the California Highway Patrol sent an Amber Alert push notification to phones in the Los Angeles area about a 14-year-old girl that authorities bel … | Continue reading
In this new series, I’ll be reviewing the media I experience (I don’t like saying I “consume” media) in more detail than I normally do. Don’t worry, the movie reviews are staying free and on social media ✌️ | Continue reading