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.

Apple iPhone cases suck. I bought a silicone one for my iPhone 16 Pro and it’s started falling to bits this week – despite me being a very light user of the case itself. (In the sense I work from home and the iPhone only rarely leaves the house.) Given that I have a lovely editor, I got to grumble about this over at Stuff in ‘Why I am never buying another iPhone case from Apple’. 

Got a way with words? Outlier will hand your ego back to you. It’s yet another game that presents you with a grid of words. The twist is that you have to keep thinking of unusual ones. Use the same ones too often and your score gets docked. It’s a fantastic game to dip into now and again, and it’s now part of my best browser games roundup.

Netflix will shut down two game studios. Game File and others reported on this. The news isn’t surprising but it is nonetheless disappointing. Games always felt an odd fit for Netflix, and even today I see people angrily saying that they don’t want to have to open the Netflix app to play games. So Netflix’s messaging about the product itself didn’t break through. (It’s a bunch of standalone mobile downloads that require a Netflix login to run.) But this is also another example of how tough things are on mobile, alongside a reality check for all those people who claimed Netflix would be mobile gaming kind and Apple Arcade was doomed.

Wolf(enstein) 3D comes to Game Boy Color. Shane McCafferty is apparently some kind of wizard. Having previously got an excellent version of OutRun running on Game Boy Color and then Roguecraft GB, now he’s released WOLF. Suffice to say, the hardware was never supposed to run such games. I can only imagine that, by next week, Shane will have GTA V running on the thing.

Words are important. That became evident this week when the British government decided to scare the wits out of everyone by using the national alert system to warn about the risk of wildfires. Terrifying as the alert was (ARE THE BOMBS FALLING?) and problematic as the tech was (I know several people who received the alarm hours after everyone else), the wording was also an issue. As Simon Cox said on Bluesky, language for alerts needs to be simple. If there’s a fire, shout FIRE! Don’t say “Excuse me, everyone, but it appears that an uncontrolled conflagration has taken hold within the premises and we’d cordially invite you to exit with utmost haste and proceed to a safe haven to avoid any advancing combustion”. 

Climate change is rubbish. Beavers are not. As ever, humanity spends billions trying to correct its own screw-ups. And then we reintroduce a handful of beavers and they sort everything with their magical terraforming powers. More beavers, please, and fewer tech bros.

I wrote about 30 years of tech. This was to celebrate Stuff magazine’s 30th, which is on the way. It’s a properly long read (although bite-sized, so you can snack on it in chunks), covering everything from DVDs to iPhone to ChatGPT. How many of these do you remember?

What do I want to see from Apple? Two pieces on the subject this week, one on the September 2026 iPhone event and one on the upcoming Home Hub.

Should you buy an iPod? I’ve written about them for a couple of publications recently, and I’m torn. So I wrote a piece about what people who are more mindful about music ownership and playback might do instead.

Echo chambers aren’t ideal. So I rummaged through the App Store to find iPhone news apps that help you discover every side of a story.

C64 vs ZX Spectrum! Yes, I waded into that battle. Again. But this was through the lens of limited-edition remakes. So it’s TheC64 Mini Black vs The Spectrum White Edition. Which comes out on top? Read the piece to find out. And, er, don’t @ me if you don’t like the result.

Iris is great. I mean the Mac app, although I’m sure if you have a great pal called Iris that they are lovely too. Anyway, Iris is now part of my best Mac apps roundup. Which you can read. Here.

Laura Kidd (Penfriend) rocks. And it turns out she’s also a wonderful interviewee. I chatted with her this week and the results will be in an upcoming issue of Stuff, looking into her background, her thoughts on music and tech, and more.

40 years ago, Transformers the Movie was released. And traumatised a bunch of kids. We’d all grown up on the cartoon, where Decepticons (the baddies) couldn’t hit a barn door from ten paces. In the movie, they suddenly became sharpshooters, wiping out the original cast of Autobots (the goodies) in grim, abrupt battles that probably made parents wonder if they’d accidentally taken their kids into the wrong film. Ryan Lambie digs up long-buried memories about the horror for Den of Geek.

I Zzap!ed back this week. In the sense my copy of Legacy Volume 2 rocked up, featuring the second half of the C64 mag’s famous cover art. This one was particularly special for me, because I was one of the nutcases who first resurrected Zzap!64, back in 2002. Roger Kean (launch editor) and Oliver Frey (artist and sometimes editor) gave their blessing, but we couldn’t afford to commission a new cover. So I made one from an existing piece of Oli Frey art that I heavily edited in Photoshop.

Chris Wilkins of Fusion Retro Books owns the full rights to Zzap!64 and (ZX Spectrum mag) Crash now, and both of those publications have new bimonthly print editions. But Chris is a good egg and never wrote our 2002 tribute (and the next one, edited by Rob De Voogd and bundled with Retro Gamer #18) out of the picture. I appreciate that and, if only briefly, also being a part of the Zzap!64 story.

I ate some bread. Yeah, I know. An odd note to end on. But something went very wrong with my innards years ago and my diet has gradually shrunk to an alarming degree. Fortunately, I now have a wonderful dietician who’s helping me (along with angrily wondering why lots of procedures were never done and lots of advice was never followed by specialists and GPs I saw). Having given me ways to help repair my gut, I’m now onto the exciting but scary prospect of reintroducing gluten. Here’s what I ate today. It had been in the fridge for a week (because I was terrified to start), yet it still tasted better than most gluten-free rubbish. Here’s hoping this goes well, because I’d bloody love it if I could eat at least some normal bread again. And if you have no problems with gluten yourself, don’t wipe it out of your own diet, because reintroducing it isn’t always a given.

Lego isn’t the only brick brand. But, for good reason, Chinese brands in particular built a bad reputation for themselves. Things have been changing, though, with a handful of companies innovating beyond Lego’s efforts. One such example is Lumibricks. For Stuff this week, I look into one of its sets in ’Why Lego should be paying close attention to this upstart company lighting up the block-building world’. 

Want a tastier iPhone browser? Then check out Quiche Browser. And if you do, read my guide to many of its best bits.

Apple gear is expensive. We all know this. But Apple had long made it more palatable to buy an iPhone through its Upgrade Program(me). That’s now gone, replaced by very different schemes in each country. I wrote about the actual UK and rumoured US versions last week. (I’m not currently familiar with what’s happened elsewhere.) In the event, I think folks in the US have come out of this rather well. Sure, the Apple Upgrade Program is akin to a car lease, but it appears there are no real downsides, assuming you budget for a hefty final payment – assuming you want to keep your device. But also, you can now upgrade gear beyond iPhones.

Here in the UK, that option does not exist. Instead, we get the Flexible Finance Account. This basically gives you a line of credit with Apple that you can spend on a range of (but not all) products, with varying interest rates. You can still upgrade an iPhone after a set number of payments, but not an iPad or a Mac. However, what’s most strange in the UK is how buried the options are. Go to buy a Mac and it says you can pay over 36 months at 6.9% interest. It’s only when you’re several pages into the checkout process that the 0% option is surfaced. Hard to tell whether this is intent or just poor UX. Not great either way.

Journalists don’t know everything. In fact, they often don’t know a great deal once they move beyond their specialist subject areas. Either way, speaking to experts, distilling information and advice, and then making all that accessible is what makes for good journalism. Which is why it was depressing this week to see The News Agents spouting COVID disinformation. Fortunately, Prof Christina Pagel was on hand to offer a retort – but she really shouldn’t have had to.

Another retro doodad is here! Earlier this year, I received a Retroid Pocket 6 review unit, which I duly covered for Stuff. Out of every review unit in the gaming space, it’s the one that’s subsequently had the most playtime. Much of that comes down to its sheer range, supporting everything from the most ancient of home micro and console games to indie Steam hits via the likes of GameNative. Out of the blue, I was recently sent its 4:3 cousin, the Retroid Pocket Nova. I’ll be putting that through its paces soon – but I’m willing to bet right now that it’s also going to be fab.

Oops. Bit late this time, because reasons. (Mostly that it’s still stupidly hot in the UK and my brain melted this weekend.) Anyway…

Pod people! MacFormat 433 (September 2026) has my feature on the return of the iPod. Apple hasn’t sold one of its digital music players in years, yet they’re making a comeback. Writing this piece was also a great excuse to get a bunch of my old iPods out of storage for a pic. Getting the bloody things working again with recent versions of macOS, though, wasn’t trivial. In a couple of cases, ‘It just works’ became ‘it once worked’ – or ‘it worked once’.

Has Apple’s Upgrade Program(me) been upgraded? My column for Stuff this weekend looked into the announced UK and then rumoured US replacements for the iPhone upgrade program(me). The US version is now live. If anything, I think I was optimistic in my column. The US has too many unknowns and quite a few exclusions. But the UK programme has added complexity and doesn’t appear to be working as expected. For example, while the current offers list states you can pay 0% for a Mac over 12 months, only 6.9% over 36 months is available for me at checkout. No thanks.

EDIT: It turns out the additional finance options are there in the UK, but you have to go through several pages of the checkout process to reach them. That strikes me as pretty rough UX, given that I imagine a lot of people just won’t bother, because they’ll assume 0% is not available.

MOAR LEGO! This time, it’s the bridge of the Enterprise and the X-Files. I want to believe! (Mostly that I’ll actually put together the sets in my growing guilt pile someday. Sigh.)

Atari games as movies? Bonkers. Mind you, we’ve been down this road before. A few years back, I suggested we put these retro games on the big screen instead.

Comic-Con happened. John Wagner and Pat Mills are still conspicuous by their absence from the Eisner Hall of Fame. Tsk.

Coyote vs ACME trailer! Looks good.