I've watched 101 movies so far this year and I reviewed them all in this thread on Mastodon (I'll be doing this on Bluesky as well starting soon). Now,m truth be told, I love movies, and I think most movies I choose to watch are | Continue reading
The one and only Niléane on MacStories: Horse Browser Tries Its Hooves at a New Take on Tabs As you may have noticed in my screen recordings, when you start fresh with a new trail, the browser’s window is occupied by a large, 3D-animated horse that | Continue reading
Matt Rosoff writing for TechCrunch: Marissa Mayer Just Laid Out a Possible Business Model for Ad-Supported AI Chatbots In the AI era, Mayer imagines that when people ask about tickets for a specific concert, “they actually want to see exactly what seats are available, where they … | Continue reading
In which I try to explain why I find Digital Foundry so compelling in a way Apple fans might appreciate. | Continue reading
One of the things that bothers me about how many people use their computers in the modern era is in how they feel like they need to baby them. I think a lot of people feel like they need to baby their phone more than they do. Apple introduced optimized | Continue reading
Ryan Christoffel writing for: Apple’s Hitting Its AI Stride Right as Competition Is Slowing It happens all the time. Tech giants ship exciting new technology while Apple’s projects stay veiled in R&D, leading to the constant narrative that the company is ‘behind’ | Continue reading
Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz: Thank Goodness for iPad iPad Pro remains the most popular model, with almost half of all iPad sales in the most recent quarter (Chart 1). This is about the same share of sales compared to the year-ago quarter. Combine this with the fact that the | Continue reading
The world isn’t static, and you never know when your needs are going to change. When they do, the software you use to live your life should adapt to you, not the other way around. | Continue reading
Dan Moren: M4 Mac Mini Review: Phenomenal Cosmic Power, Itty-Bitty Form Factor When it comes to desktop Macs, it’s quite possibly the best one Apple offers. This is an amazing metric and does seem to check out. The Mac Studio and Mac Pro specced out with M2 Ultra | Continue reading
Have you heard about the iPhone 16 camera fault that's a massive issue and makes upwards of half of iPhone 16s technically defective? If you said yes, you're probably watching Shayne Mostyn's YouTube channel, which has been dedicated almost entirely to this "controversy& | Continue reading
When I launched the More Birchtree subscription back in January of this year, I made the commitment that it would mean access to more posts, not just an excuse to put existing stuff behind a paywall. With 86% of the year behind us, I wanted to check in on how | Continue reading
John Gruber: How It Went But he’s an optimist at heart. You’d like him. I, of course, don’t know who you are, dear reader, but I know you’d like my dad, Bob Gruber, because everyone likes Bob Gruber. It’s exceptionally | Continue reading
A hard look at the numbers and why it seems like such a challenge to change the narrative about gaming on Macs. | Continue reading
The word “pro” gets appended to a lot of products, and that tends to simply mean some combination of more features and better build quality. But I think there are (at least) 3 aspects to products, both hardware and software, that make them good professional tools. Reliability Pre … | Continue reading
John Gruber: The Brutal Clarity of This Result I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, | Continue reading
Jeremy Markovich: Tony Hawk Wanted to Track Down a Mysterious Skateboarder From 1979. We Found Her. Folks, we love two things around here: Tony Hawk and decades-old mysteries. On a shitty day, it’s nice to have something pleasant to link to. | Continue reading
I despise Donald Trump. I think he’s a lying, racist, fear mongering, transphobic, sexual abusing, convicted felon, incompetent, and dangerous person who is driven by hate and resentment. Yes, I think Trump is a bad person, but he’s not what I’m most riled up | Continue reading
Sarah Perez for TechCrunch: Substack Is Giving Out Free Subscriptions to Boost App Installs Publishing platform Substack is now pushing users to install its mobile app by offering gifted subscriptions. While Substack itself is available across platforms, including the web, those … | Continue reading
Tomorrow is the US Presidential election, and no one knows what's going to happen. Maybe Kamala Harris will win, maybe Donald Trump will. It's a toss up, just like it is every election cycle. Sometimes I think that we could have Jesus Christ himself running against | Continue reading
I used to share some YouTube videos every week in my newsletter, but that turned into feeling like work, so I stopped. Buuuut, it is fun to share some joy with others, so here's a few videos I've watched in the last week or so that | Continue reading
What does Call of Duty's massive success (and horrendous user interface) mean about the importance of design? | Continue reading
Pixelmator Team: A new home for Pixelmator Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. This is huge for this company, and it’s well-deserved. Pixelmator has long-been a prime example of what a great Apple developer looks like, and I’ | Continue reading
John O'Nolan: Democratising Publishing Having seen how things worked on the inside for several years, the conclusion I personally came to was that WordPress and Automattic were not truly about democratising publishing, after all. At the same time, I felt the product was becoming … | Continue reading
Maddie Bender for The New York Times: Can John Green Make You Care About Tuberculosis? Mr. Green has emerged as an unlikely spokesman in the global effort to fight the disease. His latest project, a book called “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” interweaves the social and scientific h … | Continue reading
Jennifer Maas writing for Variety: 'Dinner Plan' Short Film at Nebula Casts Griffin Newman, Zach Cherry Nebula has set the cast for its upcoming short film from “Night of the Coconut” director and popular video essayist Patrick Willems, “The Dinner Plan.” A dark comedy | Continue reading
Anil Dash: It feels like 2004 again. A generation ago, those of us in tech might talk to our friends or family and hear them say, "I think the ads in my Hotmail account are terrible, and I can’t send any attachments. And Yahoo search is getting | Continue reading
Michael Burkhardt writing for 9to5Mac: Meta Quest 3S review: Apple would never make this The reason why I say Apple would never make it is for one reason, and one reason only: it’s too low quality. Michael goes on to note the lower quality build of the Quest | Continue reading
Apparently there are surgeons who are getting tons of value from the Vision Pro. That’s great, but is it evidence that the Vision Pro is a great success, or is it just that surgeons use literally every headset that comes out regardless of if those headsets are successes or failur … | Continue reading
The iPad mini jelly scroll situation taps perfectly into my favorite category of controversy: things that have objective facts mixed with subjective experience. Beware the idea that we all see, hear, and smell the world the same. | Continue reading
Apple will be announcing new Macs next week, and that could mean it’s finally time for them to update their Magic accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, and Trackpad) in some manner. Odds are, they’ll just get revved with USB-C instead of Lightning, but it’s always possible | Continue reading
The Verge is reporting on Joker: Folie à Deux, one of the most derided movies of 2024, coming to digital storefronts less than a month in theaters. The film released in theaters on October 4 this year, and it will be available to buy online October 28, so 24 days | Continue reading
What it was like being a part of my first Apple hardware embargo. | Continue reading
Chris Welch for The Verge: Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound Being able to use Apple’s $250 earbuds as a hearing aid is a huge deal for those who can benefit from this capability. That’s substantially less expensive | Continue reading
Blooper Team’s Jacek Zieba, who just released the Silent Hill 2 remake, in an interview with GameSpot: Bloober Team Says It's Done Making "Shitty" Games And Silent Hill 2 Remake Wasn't A Fluke [P]eople in the studio were like, 'Okay, | Continue reading
Riley Hill: I Bought A Vision Pro After Everyone Said It Was Dead After about two weeks of using the Vision Pro, Riley has some interesting thoughts about using the Vision Pro for the first time many months after the hype cycle has cooled off considerably. He’s pretty | Continue reading
Yesterday I posted this video about a Mac app called Supercharge which adds a number of quality of life features to your Mac, one of which is the ability to cut and paste files in the Finder. I commented how nice this was, as it was something I use all | Continue reading
David Pierce: How Digg helped invent the social internet In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote it with a “dig” or demote it with a “bury.” | Continue reading
Lori Glavin: FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for Passkeys The FIDO Alliance has published a working draft of a new set of specifications for secure credential exchange that, when standardized and implemented by credential provider … | Continue reading
Last night I pushed an update to Quick Reviews to make 2 changes: The reset buttons on the color, text size, and score names settings are now green and actual HTML buttons with aria labels, making them more accessible. I've disabled the "API" that allowed people | Continue reading
Back in May when the latest iPad Pros were announced, there was some consternation about how the Apple Pencil story was still confusing, and I wrote: I think it’s a sure thing that the 11th generation iPad will one day be a thing, and while I’m | Continue reading
Casey Newton many weeks ago: Three apps that made me more productive this year A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I | Continue reading
Kyle Orland for ArsTechnica: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities The results of this new GSM-Symbolic paper aren't completely new in the world of AI research. Other recent papers have similarly suggested that LLMs don't actually perform formal reason … | Continue reading
Steven Aquino writing for Forbes: Home Depot’s Rollout Of Apple Pay Reminds Apple Pay, Accessibility Are One My friend Chance Miller reported this week for 9to5 Mac that Home Depot is ending its laggardness by finally beginning to roll out support for Apple Pay in its stores. Thi … | Continue reading
Mastodon recently added the ability to natively add author labels to links on Mastodon. Basically, when a link is posted, you can have your Mastodon account automatically tagged so people can more easily find you. I would have written up an explainer on how to do it, but Robb Kni … | Continue reading
Last year, I thought Mujjo’s iPhone cases were excellent. I thought they were so good that when I realized I actually wanted the iPhone 15 Pro Max, I bought a second case from them without hesitation. So when they reached out to me this year to see if | Continue reading
Above is a photo I took of the Statue of Liberty last night from a boat. It looks pretty good, right? The colors are nice and there's a decent amount of detail for a pic taken in total darkness. But 2 megapixels?! To give you some context, this | Continue reading
"Good UX" means balancing a lot of (sometimes conflicting) priorities. What's good UX when you can't make everyone happy? | Continue reading