Camera AirPods Are Coming. Good Luck, Apple

Aaron Perris on Twitter has unearthed AirPods with a camera in action on the macOS 26.7 RC. This has been rumoured for a while from Mark Gurman, and this leak cements it. Oops. I recently wrote about how smart glasses are not being welcomed by society, and I had to cut some bits out of that article so I didn't go off on a tangent about what Apple would or wouldn't do. But I did have thoughts. Apple is usually never first to the market with a new product, and this is one instance I was wishing they were.

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Apple Will Build Its Own Magic Capture. I’d Bet on It.

I was watching Dave2D's video on the new Google Pixel 11 phones and one thing caught my eye: a feature called Magic Capture, in his own words: There’s a new mode called Magic Capture that records video. But while you’re recording, it also intelligently selects and captures still images from the footage. So, alongside the video file, you get these automatically selected photos. They’re cropped, unblurred, and tweaked to look as good as possible, all without you having to do anything. When I first heard about this feature, I thought, …

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Creeps Ruined Smart Glasses for the Rest of Us

I've been using my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for at least two years now. I initially bought them mostly for taking behind-the-scenes footage of me taking photos on my iPhone, so I could create Instagram reels and all that. I eventually ended up using Meta AI a lot too, and I have kept using it because it's much better than the Siri of yore. I have another pair of Ray-Ban aviators which I've been using for nearly a decade now, which is still the classier pair of sunglasses. But I've found myself reaching for the Metas, because they are much more than glasses that protect your eyes.

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Should You Buy the iPhone 17 Pro Now?

The question comes up constantly, especially with the impending increase of iPhone prices. Should I buy the iPhone 17 Pro now or wait? I figured it was worth making a video actually answering it.

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I’m Still Buying the iPhone 18 Pro Over the Foldable

Yesterday I wrote about how the Galaxy Z Fold 8 sold me on the foldable iPhone's form factor. This is the part where I explain why I'm still not buying one. Every year for the past twelve years or so, the reason I buy a new iPhone is the camera. The iPhone 18 Pro is rumoured to have a variable aperture lens. And based on the current rumours and mockups the foldable will not have a telephoto lens (the telephoto is my most used lens on my 17 Pro Max). So am I ready to give up the…

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The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Changed My Mind About the Foldable iPhone

Back in April I wrote that Apple's foldable iPhone had an aspect ratio that made no sense to me. Wider and shorter when closed, and I couldn't work out what that would mean for typing, or Maps, or the things I actually do on a phone every day. Now the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 is here. I've watched plenty of reviews and wanted to try one myself, so I walked into my local Currys the other day and had a play with one. I'm not worried about the aspect ratio anymore.

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Clicks Power Keyboard Review: Great Keyboard Idea, Bad Battery Decision

I pre-ordered the Clicks Power Keyboard, which should tell you how much I wanted a physical keyboard back on my iPhone. I pre-ordered mine on the 4th of January, and I got it delivered on the 24th of July. It was a long wait, and I'm still not sure it was worth it. The Wait When I pre-ordered, the Clicks website said that I should have the product shipped around the end of May, that did not happen, I got my initial "your product has shipped" email on the 15th of July.

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Is the iPhone Ultra Really Deserving of the Ultra Name?

Ryan Christoffel writing for 9to5Mac on why the iPhone Ultra sounds truly deserving of the 'Ultra' name: My main arguments against the Ultra name involve hardware features. iPhone Ultra will lack the Telephoto camera that iPhone 18 Pro offers, and battery life might be worse than iPhone 18 Pro Max. Justifying 'Ultra' when certain features don't match the 'Pro' line seems tough.

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Safari Profiles Are Great. Switching Between Them Isn’t.

I purchased a Stream Deck recently and I have been trying to set it up so it can assist me in being productive. It's been about 3 weeks and I am getting more utility out of it compared to the TourBox controller that I returned. Safari is my browser of choice, mostly because it syncs to my other Apple devices and it respects my privacy. Ever since Safari Profiles was a thing I have been a massive fan of them. I have multiple profiles for separate things, but there are three that I use a lot:

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Apple Upgrade Changes the iPhone Pricing Conversation

M.G. Siegler, writing on Spyglass: While Apple still didn't raise iPhone prices alongside this move, it's clearly another lever to pull getting ahead of that inevitable increase in a few weeks. Now a $100 or $200 price increase on the iPhone 18 Pro – perhaps soon to start at $1,299? – will look far less daunting when Apple can also tout the option to pay, say, $33.99/month I have always argued that Apple will not raise the prices on the iPhone 18 Pros coming this September. Mostly because the base iPhone 18s are rumoured to land next March, and an iPhone with an 18 on its name starting at $1,299 — when the 17 started at $799 — was never going to sit well with the public or Wall Street.

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About Time MacBooks Got a Touchscreen

The next "new" MacBook is rumoured to get a touchscreen. I belonged to the camp that touchscreens are bad and MacBooks should never have one, until I started using a Microsoft Surface at my work. The Surface laptop itself, I don't have anything good to say about it. It heats up, the trackpad is bad, and the display isn't worth talking about. But I have started to appreciate the touchscreen, to the point that when I'm on my M1 MacBook Pro, I miss it. There have been moments I've actually touched my MacBook screen to dismiss a pop-up, only to realise it does nothing.

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Turns Out Play Does Have Limits

From the Sony PlayStation blog: As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format. A couple of weeks ago, when GTA 6 pre-orders went live, we already got a taste of this.

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The Hardest Part of Siri Now Is Remembering to Use It

I was listening to the latest episode of The Talk Show, and John Gruber said the hardest thing is to remember to use it. He meant Siri, and he's right. There are two kinds of people when it comes to Siri. There are people like me, who decided a long time ago that Siri is bad and never really went back to check. I use it to set timers and alerts, to remind me to buy things and to turn the lights on in my flat. That's all I ask pretty much.

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Apple’s Pricing Escalator Usually Goes One Way

Apple, in a statement shared with MacRumors: The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

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Apple’s UK Price Increases, in Pounds This Time

Apple raised prices across most of its lineup today. The UK price increases hit Macs, iPads, HomePods, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, some of them steeply. If you've been following the news, none of this is a surprise. Most of the reporting is in US dollars, so I dug through the Wayback Machine and put together the UK numbers. Macs MacBook Neo: +£100 → £699 MacBook Air: +£200 → £1,299 MacBook Pro: +£300 → £1,999 iMac: +£200 → £1,499 Mac Studio: +£400 → £2,499 iPads iPad Pro: +£200 → £1,199…

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The iPhone Air 2 Could Get a Second Lens. I’d Still Want Three

John Gruber has a post about which camera lenses he's used most on his iPhone 17 Pro, and reading it I knew I had to check my own. My results didn't surprise me, mostly. Across over 9,000 photos, my lens usage breaks down like this: Telephoto (4×): ~47% Main (1×): ~38% Ultra Wide: ~15% The telephoto being ahead of the main lens doesn't surprise me at all. I love zooming onto things, getting that reach, and the compression that comes with it. What does surprise me is the ultra wide. I'd have expected that to sit around 8%.

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iOS 27 Is Making Me Angry

I've got the iOS 27 developer beta on an iPhone 15 Pro and I haven't had any major bugs so far. And the performance, I feel, is better than my iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26. Apple could have done this ages ago, but they didn't. I am aware that this is because refinement alone doesn't sell phones, new features do. But it still makes me angry that it took iOS 27 to show what was possible. The last time we had a "Snow Leopard" year for iOS was in 2018 with iOS 12.

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What I Noticed Using iOS 27’s New Photo Tools

I wanted to play with the new photo editing tools on iOS 27 and ended up making a video out of it. I did almost no preparation. The only thing I did beforehand was pick about twenty photos to edit. Everything else I noticed while filming, and a few of those things are the reason I'm writing this. The biggest one: iOS 27 won't let you use Clean Up on a Pro RAW image. iOS 26 does this without complaint, and there's no obvious reason a RAW file should be off limits.

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Apple’s Staggered iPhone Release Has a $1,299 Problem

Nicole Nguyen and Rolfe Winkler writing for the Wall Street Journal: Apple isn't immune to soaring chip prices, Chief Executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. When asked which devices would be getting price increases and when, Cook responded, "We're still working through that." We're likely to find out more this September, when the next iPhone and other devices are expected to arrive. So for now, we decided to make an educated guess at how much more Apple hardware will cost, using the anticipated but as yet unannounced iPhone 18 Pro.

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The 2018 iPad Pro Deserved One More Year

Last year when Apple showed off iPadOS 26 with its new Mac-inspired multitasking features and Liquid Glass, I was surprised that it had support for the 2018 iPad Pros. But this year is the year that it got the cut, and I had been meaning to write about it. But Riley Hill got to it before I did on his blog, Slatepad.org. The whole article is definitely worth reading, but the part that stayed with me most was the ending: After getting eight years of OS support, I think it’s worth briefly reflecting on this landmark iPad.

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The iPhone 16 Series Is Getting Everything Apple Promised — Just Two Years Late

Apple initially marketed the iPhone 16 series with the tagline ‘Hello, Apple Intelligence’. Later on, this became ‘Built for Apple Intelligence’. The world has moved on from the iPhone 16 series to the iPhones 17, and now even to the rumoured iPhones 18. But the 16 series of iPhones still haven’t got the full iPhone 16 Apple Intelligence features that were promised. The features shown off during WWDC 24 weren’t really ready, and the last two years have been embarrassing for Apple. Apple had to pull their ads, settle a lawsuit, and arguably occupied the last spot in the race to figure out AI.

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New Video: 20 iOS 27 Features Apple Didn’t Talk About

Apple’s iOS 27 keynote was essentially an hour of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Which is fine, that’s the story they wanted to tell. And honestly, spending time on these smaller changes would have felt like filler in an otherwise tight event. I bought a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro specifically to run the beta on, which I did the day the developer beta dropped. I also signed up for the new Siri waitlist, but it took over 96 hours for it to come through. Four days. So in that time, I went through the beta and found features Apple hadn’t spoken about.

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My Thoughts on WWDC 26: Apple’s Snow Leopard Year

WWDC 26 felt different. Usually WWDCs in the past have been structured in a way where you get to see what each of the operating systems from Apple are getting. This year Apple decided to break free of that tradition, talk about platform improvements, talk about trust and safety, and then talk about Apple Intelligence that is available across almost all operating systems (tvOS 27, where art thou?) I felt like this change of pattern in talking about the latest developments was a tad boring, but boring is what I wanted when I…

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Eight Months With the iPhone 17 Pro Max

My iPhone 17 Pro Max 8-month review is up on YouTube. I wanted to get this video out for two reasons: WWDC is tomorrow, and I haven't been giving the channel much love. This is me starting again and trying to be consistent. Battery health is at 97% after 223 cycles. The camera is still the best I've had in my pocket. iOS 26 is getting there, slowly. And Siri is still bad.

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Four iPhones, Four Eras of iOS Design, Photographed

I just bought an iPhone 15 Pro to put the iOS 27 betas on when they release. When it arrived, I realised it still had iOS 18 on it (not the latest iOS 26). I already had an iPhone 3GS I got off eBay for nostalgic reasons, and the same iPhone 4S I took to Lisbon. I have my 17 Pro Max that I use daily. Between the four of them, I had a phone representing each major era of iOS design: skeuomorphic, flat design when it started, flat design when it ended, and the latest Liquid Glass.

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Save The Date.

Akash Wadhwani has put together a beautiful piece of work: a full visual history of every WWDC invite, going all the way back to the beginning. With WWDC just two days away, the timing is perfect. The only thing I did not like about this was the dickover asking for my email address mid-scroll. But that doesn't take away the effort put into this.

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Siri Is Bad. But That’s About to Change.

Siri popularised the idea of a voice assistant. When Apple introduced it with the iPhone 4S, it felt like the future. And then, slowly, it became a bit of a joke. Google Assistant got better. Amazon's Alexa got better. Siri didn't stay where it was, it felt like it regressed. Then ChatGPT arrived around 2021, and Siri, already the weakest of the major assistants, looked even worse by comparison. At WWDC 2024, Apple promised a lot. I wrote this at the time: Apple cannot afford to fail when they are the only company that people trust, and possibly the only company out there that can bring personal AI to the masses.

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The “Waiting…” Widget Problem

I was clearing up space on my iPhone and accidentally hit the "offload unused apps" option. This feature works well as expected, but what iOS considers unused is not how I'd consider them. iOS considers an app unused if it has not been opened for a while, sounds good right? Except that I do "use" apps that I don't open. I am talking about apps that I use the widget to display some information, but never have to open the app. The example in my case is a Quran Quotes app.

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