I resurrected an iPod shuffle (Stuff). Go me, etc. But there was a point behind this. Having returned to buying CDs and been inspired by Russ Crandall’s five-game retro doodad, I figured I could make the same sort of focused experience with an old iPod. Getting there was a pain, but I’m happy with the result.

Infinite Brian Eno! That’s what Brian Eno : Reflection gets you, across a range of devices. For Swipe/TapSmart, I chatted with co-creator Peter Chilvers about how (and why) he and Brian Eno created this superb generative art and music app. 

Please help us keep the lights on by downloading Swipe for iPhone, checking out the free trial, and maybe lobbing us a couple of bucks per month.

The Apple I is 50. The week after the company itself hit the big five-o, its first piece of hardware followed suit. And it didn’t even have a keyboard. Read my piece for Stuff here.

Android has become my main gaming platform. For the longest time, it was iPhone, but that’s shifted due to the Retroid Pocket 6. Which made me think it was about time to update Stuff’s Android game roundups. So I added fab ‘Asteroids if it was more than shooting at rocks’ roguelike blaster Nova Drift to the best Android games list. As for freebies, oddball single-finger shoot ’em up Ponchorado made the cut.

Smart glasses aren’t always evil. Lots of idiots are recording people without their consent, but as this Bluesky post notes, smart glasses are a lifeline for many. As ever, with tech: 1) it’s complicated, 2) much of the narrative ignores accessibility benefits, and 3) tech bros mess everything up for the rest of us by having no moral compass whatsoever.

Apple locks out another user. As reported by The Register, a Czech user with an alphanumeric password discovered that Apple has dropped support for the caron/háček (ˇ) on the Lock Screen. Because he’d used that as part of his password and didn’t use Face ID, he’s stuffed. Apple’s response: wipe the device and start from scratch. The snag? It contains data that hasn’t been backed up. Zero marks to Apple on this, but also a warning that you should always back up data you care about. If not to a cloud service, at least to a local drive. That’s been trivial on iPhone for a long time now. By coincidence, backing up smartphones is the subject of my tips column in the latest issue of Stuff.

Apple turned 50 last week. Which, unsurprisingly, accounted for a lot of my work, which reflected on five decades of the tech giant in various ways…

Apple’s 50 best products ever! Was not entirely what I wrote for Stuff. I reasoned that pitting an Apple II against an iPhone was ridiculous. So, instead, I totted up personal votes from the team, which made for some… interesting results. The countdown was published in five parts – 50–41, 40–31, 30–21, 20–11 and 10–1 – after which editor Dan Grabham complained about a few entries having not made the cut.

I appeared on The Bunker podcast. Which, as a long-time listener, was a lot of fun. I talked to historian Alex von Tunzelmann about how Apple came to be, its successes and blunders, and whether it can survive the age of AI. Listen to the episode here.

How Apple changed photography forever. I wrote this piece for Amateur Photographer as a potted history of sometimes non-obvious (or, at least, non-iPhone) ways in which the company upended the world of photography.

Some Apple gear never makes it into the wild. These products often take on mythical status, or at least have you question what might have been – for better or worse. I wrote about seven of them for TechRadar.

Apple revolutionised mobile. Obviously. But, given that I write for iPhone mag Swipe (republished online at TapSmart), we figured it’d be fun to do a super-speedy 50 ways Apple changed the world: iPhone, iPod, iOS and beyond.

I also wrote some stuff that wasn’t to do with Apple’s 50th…

Apple Watch sleep tracking is weird. For my Stuff column this week, I talk about how Apple’s sleep tracking seems too keen to please, and that – surprisingly – I want it to be meaner to me.

Turn your smartphone into a games console! Sort of. With these mobile controllers, you can have some surprisingly excellent gaming larks, whether you’re playing AAA titles or retro fare.

Or stick with an actual retro console. Evercade Nexus is the latest iteration of Blaze’s handheld that aims to bring back the experience of classic gaming, rather than just the games themselves. I wrote about it for Stuff, which outlines the hurrahs (wireless play) and hurroos (oddly low screen PPI). Also, if you want a retro gaming handheld before this lands in October, there’s my budget retro handhelds roundup, which is also in the current edition of the print mag.

Your phone can scan more than documents. For TapSmart, I wrote about specialist scanner apps for photos, food, Lego, and more.

The clocks have changed! Which, as regular readers will know, has made me almost absurdly chipper. I am, apparently, solar powered. If you’d like to keep tabs on daylight and have an iPhone, check out my roundup of the best apps for doing so.

Need a new Mac? I updated my Mac buyer’s guide over at TapSmart.

Waste your time! With the 57 best browser games you can play for free, including the infuriatingly addictive 100 Jumps and the ‘likely to be atomised by Nintendo lawyers quite soon’ Wind Waker.

Finally, a few not-me things:

• Reece Rogers (Wired) on ChatGPT farting out all the wrongness.
• Marco Arment writes to presumed next Apple CEO John Ternus.
• Daryl Baxter chats to AltStore’s Riley Testut about App Store rules, Delta 2.0 and indie developers.

Apple is 50. Almost. I asked everyone on the Stuff team about their favourite Apple products and wrote about the top 50, which the editor scythed into five parts, which start today. Some of the choices (and omissions) may well surprise you.

Mac OS X isn’t 50. It hit its quarter-century, though, and I wrote a quick piece about this most lickable of operating systems. 

BlackBerry is back. Ish. The new Titan 2 Elite is aiming at the thumbs of the nostalgic. So I wrote the tongue-in-cheek ‘Over 6,000 people backed this new BlackBerry wannabe and I think they’re all mad’, which apparently pissed off QWERTY fans. Perhaps they can use those tiny keys to search the web for a sense of humour.

Before BlackBerry phones was the BlackBerry 850. Effectively a souped-up pager, it made business types very happy. I wrote about that too.

I recorded a podcast! I’ll be on The Bunker next week, talking about Apple, who’ll duly remove me from the company’s Christmas card list. Again.

Apple loves ads. Apple is going to infest Apple Maps with them. Apple appears to have lost sight of doing everything for the benefit of the user and not treating people who buy its gear as the product.

UK age verification continues to be a shitshow. Apple is now challenging user ages, to which you must respond with a credit card, driver’s licence or passport, unless the account itself is over 18 years old. Bit of an edge case and not got one of those proof methods? Tough.

It’s Clockschangemas Eve here in the UK. Overnight, the clocks will shift to British Summer Time, and I’ll be able to breathe again. I adore this time of year, with mornings where the sun doesn’t rock up at stupid o’ clock and where there’s more light in the evening to play football with my kid while she’s still keen. Honestly, I wish we’d ‘forget’ to change them back in the autumn one year…

The Last Ninja was a game for the C64 that got a lot of praise at the time, even though it was a bit fiddly and shit. It looked good, though, and it sounded great. Now, its music sounds even better, due to Matt Gray’s new recordings.

How about an Apple TV Neo? Over at Stuff, I write about the MacBook Neo, Apple’s previous forays into more affordable hardware, and the possibility of a new telly box. I’m also really chuffed with the image I made for this one.

MacBook Neo runs an iPhone chip. Or, at least, a chip initially designed for an iPhone. But what might that mean for actual iPhones? For TapSmart, I consider several potential advantages – although I suspect Apple won’t implement most of them.

Want a new iPhone or iPad? I updated my iPhone buyer’s guide and iPad buyer’s guide with Apple’s latest models.

Android isn’t killing sideloading. A new Google blog post outlines a new one-time process for power users. This comes in response to fears Google would remove sideloading entirely. Instead, it’s going to be locked behind several layers of warnings, which may or may not be the thin end of a shitty wedge. We’ll see.

Google is serving fake news. Well, AI-rewritten headlines. According to The Verge, this is currently a “small” and “narrow” experiment. Given the slap Apple (rightly) got when its AI mangled headlines in your notifications, I’m hoping Google slams on the brakes. I doubt it will. In fact, I’m convinced its AI Mode tab will soon become the default for any search results and non-AI options will be hidden behind a single white pixel with an alt tag that reads ‘beware of the leopard’.

Meta kills its metaverse darlings. The company that renamed itself after the metaverse is now setting fire to its own metaverses – well, bits of them. For now, chunks of its vision will live on via mobile. TL;DR: not many people care about the metaverse, but they sure do still love Roblox and Minecraft.

Apple is being Apple. Leaks regarding its iPhone Fold multitasking plans suggest it’ll hold back that device much like it long held back the iPad. I grumble about this over at Stuff.

iPhone cameras are great. But they’re even better when you use an excellent third-party camera app and do everything you can to keep your photos safe. 

(Both for TapSmart – please consider downloading our sister app, Swipe, and trying a trial.)

Banning everything is bad. I wrote a while back about local smartphone bans at schools. The UK looked set to ban social media for teens. But the government surprisingly pushed back last week. The opposition fumed. I was glad of the government’s decision. Here’s why.

Want to stop buying things? Not Yet is an app that helps you to consider purchases and see if you still want to go through with them a few days later. Check it out in my free apps roundup.

Lego Luigi! He now joins Lego Mario, who finally has someone to race against. This set also made it to my upcoming Lego roundup. Although I imagine most Mario fans are more excited about Mario minifigs launching in 2027.

Remember OutRun? Sega’s 1980s racer remains a much-loved highlight of the era. Most of the home conversions, alas, were dreadful. Which makes it all the more impressive Shane McCafferty got the game running on the Game Boy Color. I thought that would be the most bonkers OutRun version ever. Wrong. Because someone got it running on Apple Watch. ZX81 port next, please!