The iPhone Duo is here. Well, not here here. I don’t have one. But I did write about it for Stuff, saying what I want to do with the iPhone Duo (hint: not a spreadsheet next to my inbox) and griping that while its software is hugely ambitious, it’s also not ambitious enough. I also wrote about the new AirPods 5 becoming more like AirPods Pro.

Siri Recap is creepy. I write about why it – and the Apple Watch rewind feature – could be Apple’s biggest mis-step in years.

Apple’s event was weirdly dull. Maybe I’m just getting jaded and cynical, but there was little excitement as I dutifully sat down to watch Apple’s iPhone Duo event and then smash out words about it. That wasn’t always the case. And a lot of it, for me, is down to the format. Or, rather, how Apple’s desire for control has led to it turning live events into sterile videos. More on that here.

The JVC HR-3300 is 50. Which is mildly terrifying, on the basis that I grew up with the UK version of this in the family living room. It was a beast of a machine. Check out my piece about the VHS deck that changed home entertainment forever.

I own far too many retro handhelds. Helpfully, then, Retroid announced the Pocket Duo and then kicked off its usual days-long drip-feed of information. I covered the initial reveal and what might make me buy the dual-screen handheld and then added updates when more actual facts were known.

Is AI about to kill us all? Sorry, Ian. But at least the rest of my headline was “The answer might surprise you – but, well, probably won’t”. Because it probably won’t. That’s my take on the panic that erupted last week after an AI researcher claimed there was a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity within the next decade.

Brett C is done with AI. In fact, he was done with it last month, when he wrote about why. But I only read his post this week. It’s pretty great, not least for “I really like what Cal Newport encourages in his book Slow Productivity: work at a natural pace.” Today, everyone is obsessed with immediacy. That’s not good.

‘Xbox everywhere’ is dead. I somehow missed the news that Xbox Cloud Gaming’s most expensive tier now limits you to 15 hours of cloud streaming per month. That’s not a typo. 15 hours per month. I’d been using it now and again on smartphones. Now? No chance.

Disney are a bunch of muppets. Alas, according to Deadline, this has had a major impact on the actual Muppets, on the basis that Disney, The Muppets Studio and Point Grey Pictures are finding it difficult to land on a series premise they can agree on. Amazing. They did the special. People liked the special. Just do… more of that?

Was Lego better in the old days? Spoiler: no. My longer thoughts: here.

Spoiler: no.

Slightly longer version…

I like Lego, despite long having been a fully grown adult human. I’m now ‘don’t give a flying fuck about what other people think about what I enjoy’ years old. If people sneer that I like faffing about with plastic bricks and piecing together buildings, cars and miniature blocky takes on characters from Pixar movies, I don’t care.

What I do find strange, though, is a kind of ongoing grumble about how Lego was always better in the old days. Around the time I was updating my best upcoming Lego sets 2026 roundup for Stuff, I spotted a Bluesky post from someone torn about how Lego is a great antithesis for kids on screen and helps people be creative, yet generates “an absolute shit-ton of unnecessary plastic”. That inevitably led to people complaining that Lego isn’t creative anymore, because people just buy massive and expensive display sets rather than huge boxes of bricks.

I’m (fortunately) not old enough to remember the dawn of Lego, but I do have fond memories of growing up with it during the 1980s. And here’s the thing: I and most other people I knew started with sets for building specific things, rather than massive piles of bricks. But I’d often dismantle my sets and make whatever I fancied with the pile of plastic rubble I’d made. And that’s pretty much the case today. It’s just bollocks to argue that no one builds creatively with Lego anymore. My kid did for years. Plenty of adults do too, as anyone who’s ever visited a Lego show will know.

Sure, there’s a tendency towards display sets when people age. But that’s also… OK? I don’t think it’s any worse to spend £100 on a dust catcher for a shelf that you put together yourself rather than a roughly equivalent pre-made ornament. Moreover, that Lego is still Lego. It will last for decades and – if the current owner feels like it – can at any time be turned into something new. (And if your response to that is something something specialist parts, maybe take a look at how the inventive folks at Lego reuse even the most seemingly specific of parts.)

That’s not to say Lego (the brand) is perfect. Nor is Lego the toy. But I do suspect an awful lot of adults banging on about how Lego isn’t as good as it was back in their day are parping their nostalgia horn rather than being objective about how a toy is used by the bulk of its target market and the sheer quality and range of sets available today. 

Apple event incoming! But, as I write for Stuff, for me, Apple’s most important announcement next week won’t be a folding iPhone. 

Apple Intelligence isn’t great. I know: shocker. But I’ve spent a fair bit of time with it of late, for mag work. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out in terms of people’s expectations. But experiments over the past month or so have just added to my scepticism about consumer-facing AI.

The revamped Clean Up feature in Photos varies wildly, regardless of the new ‘High Quality’ option. Reframing images is mostly abysmal beyond very slight changes. Automated shortcut creation is fine if the result works. It often doesn’t. The revamped Siri is an improvement insofar as it no longer mostly directs you to Safari or ChatGPT. But, as I expected, it’s no more accurate than a typical consumer-facing LLM. Which means when Shortcuts screws up, don’t expect Siri to help you fix things rather than giving you plausible sounding slop.

Obviously, I wasn’t personally expecting better. All this stuff is varying degrees of smoke and mirrors. But carefully stage-managed demos from tech giants set certain expectations for the average user – and I’m not sure they’re going to be met. 

Sony’s PlayStation is back. But this time you have to build it yourself out of 1,911 Lego pieces. Entertaining, also, that this new Lego kit echoes Sony’s current thinking in not giving you a disc. (It has little dioramas inside instead.)

Speaking of Sony, Game File reported on a recent court filing in which the gaming giant claims it’s already obvious digital games aren’t owned by consumers. The company argues “reasonable consumers would not be misled” into thinking they own the games they pay for, on the basis terms and conditions state software is “licensed to you, not sold”. 

According to Game File, Sony also bizarrely adds that people buying a digital game inherently understand they can’t own it because, if they did, no one else could have a copy. I guess all those digital games (and albums and books and comics) I’ve bought, downloaded and now own are just figments of my imagination.

Identity verification is broken, according to a Gizmodo report. The reason? 153 million driver’s licences are up for sale. Gizmodo’s not wrong. And so many people in tech said this is precisely what would happen when politicians screamed THINK OF THE CHILDREN when actually thinking of how age-gating might play with a certain portion of the voter pool. A pity they didn’t think more about what happens when everyone has to upload identity documents to access an increasingly wide range of websites.

MapQuest vs Trump is the, er, map-based story of the week. President Orange decided to ‘rename’ Lake Ontario, on the basis it would annoy Canada. The new name? Lake America, on the basis he has precisely no imagination. Most of the world sighed. But US tech giants dutifully got in line and updated their maps within the US to be Trump-friendly. Google was first. Apple then capitulated after a few days of goodwill towards the company. Microsoft did the same. MapQuest… didn’t. And, as The Guardian reports, it’s now gained a lot of new users.

Danny Boyle and AI, sitting in a tree. I didn’t see this one coming, but Boyle confirmed his new film uses GenAI. Deadline reported that Ink uses it to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and Margaret Thatcher. Because, you know, there’s no other way that could possibly have been done without GenAI. Never before have we seen old images animated on the screen.

What’s even more bizarre about this is Boyle then saying that the “danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?”

I mean, he’s not wrong. But there’s also a danger in, say, seasoned filmmakers deciding to use GenAI and therefore further normalising it, thereby putting people in the creative industries out of jobs. (See also: Eurogamer’s strangely casual dismissal of Crazy Taxi’s AI use.)

I just watched Coyote vs ACME. I had high hopes for the movie, not least after how Warner Bros. tried to kill it as a tax write-off. It’s a great shame that it hasn’t performed amazingly at the box office so far, because the film is a lot of fun and, as Mark Kermode said in his review, not only has a plot that properly fills its run-time, but real moments of emotional heft and pathos. Also, do check out the AMA with Wile E Coyote – and especially this wonderful interaction.

I found an end-game retro handheld! Well, one was sent to me. Regardless, I checked out the Retroid Pocket Nova and it’s extremely good. I’m not kidding when I say in the piece that this is the first time where I’m genuinely unsure as to what else I could want in one of these things – at least as far as 4:3 gaming goes.

Apple cut a price. Really. In perhaps my most IMPORTANT and TOTALLY SERIOUS article ever, read about how Apple did the unthinkable by knocking over 50% off of an infamous product.

Make Liquid Glass not suck. All you need to do for this is install the new ‘27’ operating systems, which appear to have had actual designers in the mix again. But my tutorial explains how to make Liquid Glass far more tolerable than that.

I wish Apple would steal more from Android. Specifically these three features for power users.

LEGO Star Wars is getting silly again. The latest big-o-set is a 6,000+ piece grey triangular dart. Where do people store these things?

BitCam returns! This lovely little app takes snaps that look as if they were created on a really old-school Mac. Best of all, the entire interface looks like it’s beamed in from a Mac Classic. It’s now part of my best free iPhone apps roundup.

Gear: I wrote about the PocketBook Q e-reader and Apple Mac Studio. The second of those is… spendy.

A short one this week, because summer hols.

AirPods Pro are getting cameras. Here’s how Apple can avoid the Meta ‘pervert glasses’ trap. That’s my Stuff column this week, which explores how Apple could avoid making the same bad decisions that Meta did. Mostly, that’s down to not being Meta. In short, don’t provide video, audio and streaming capabilities to people who’d do bad things with it. Whether Apple will hold the line there is another matter.

I belatedly ‘upgraded’ to macOS 26. Scare quotes entirely intentional. For various reasons, I had to shift my main work Mac to Apple’s design disaster. I’d been using it only on a secondary machine until now. As a daily driver, it’s still awful. I can see why some people just got used to macOS 26, but it’s like getting used to being repeatedly kicked in the shins. Eventually, you just become numb to the pain. Fortunately, the ‘27’ cohort is an improvement. Look out for a piece next week from me on Liquid Glass that – shock! – isn’t entirely negative. (Mostly because it outlines how to use existing and new settings to make Macs, iPads and iPhones tolerable.)

You need more Lego. Actually, you probably don’t. I certainly don’t. But if your wallet hasn’t fled for the hills, here are 46 massive sets to buy.

Wired claims there’s an AI slop backlash. I’ve seen this among individuals, notably those who are young or in creative fields and therefore very heavily impacted. But Wired’s piece argues any AI rejection is also appearing in the form of ‘slop’ buttons on websites like LinkedIn. I’m sceptical of those, to say the least. They’re surely about companies discovering what people think is slop, in order to train their own models to output content that doesn’t read like slop – for a fee.

Rain would be nice. It was sobering today to take a stroll around a local – and usually large – body of water and see so much of it missing. This kind of thing is commonplace throughout Europe right now, and I’m sure many of us have never seen anything like it. Don’t let the idiots try to make out everything’s OK when we inevitably end up with flooding this winter. Rainfall averages working out across an entire year isn’t helpful when fields and bodies of water are scorched for months on end and then later underwater for several months.