Apple has a new CEO. Selected, at least. In September, John Ternus will take over from Tim Cook. Over at Stuff, I say what I’d like to see from Apple’s new CEO.

Over at his blog, Daryl Baxter also explores how the new CEO might shake things up, adding that he wants to see the return of Apple’s fun side at events. It’s a good point. Apple keynotes feel rigid. Even attempts to manufacture fun through skits and Hair Force One come across as forced. They’re not natural. I’ve no idea what Ternus will do with announcements, but making them more human and charismatic would be a start.

Apple loves ads. Which is one of the things I note in the Stuff piece I hope Ternus dials down. Over at TapSmart, I outline why.

SSD pricing has gone bonkers. I didn’t realise quite how bonkers until I started researching pricing for a piece on backups. I tend to buy 1TB Samsung T7s and found a receipt from 2023: £137. The current cheapest price I could find: £159. That surprised me, in a good way – until I realised the 2023 price was for two of those drives…

Labour wants a nationwide school smartphone ban. Last year, my daughter’s secondary school announced a phased ban, which was due to start this September. I wrote for Stuff about why the reasoning and mitigation suggestions were deeply flawed. But now Labour’s stomped in, doing what Labour loves, arguing for a nationwide ban. Despite 90% of secondary schools already having restricted-use policies. Note that what is being argued for is not a ban on use within schools – it’s about banning them entirely from the premises. Fun times for kids who rely on digital payments for buses, use apps for homework, need a phone for security and anxiety issues, and so on. 

MusicHarbor is fab. I wrote about how it means I never miss albums from my favourite bands.

Also fab: Longplay. This album-centric music player joins my best Mac apps roundup. 

AAA games on a phone. Not a new thing, but also – generally – not a great thing, given how much space they take up. A better bet is to stream games, Netflix-style. My roundup suggests several great options for iPhone, but they work just as well on Android.

Task management. This is an area in which I’ve bounced between countless apps. None stuck. Reminders has. For now, at least. So over at TapSmart, I figured it’d be useful to write about some of the best Reminders features.

Moleskine and AI, sitting up a tree. Apparently. Cheryl-Jean Leo’s blog post digs into Moleskine’s GenAI shenanigans with its Lord of the Rings collection. After reading, I found it impossible to tell precisely what AI had been used on (bar the dreadful social media posts), which was down to Moleskine being disingenuous and inconsistent at best. As Leo notes, Moleskine’s manifesto talks about the “timeless power of handwriting” and how you can “put pen to paper [and] unleash your unique voice”. So: all for creativity – if they’re words.

Again, anyone being pro-human creativity and/or against GenAI scratch-creating content cannot just defend their turf. It’s all or nothing. I hope this flub from Moleskine gives the company a kick in the bank account. Experience suggests it probably won’t.

Coyote vs. ACME looks great. The trailer had me grinning. The digs at Warner Bros were amusing. The whole thing just looks like so much fun. And to think this entire movie was going to be deleted so that a corporation could claim a tax break.

The Wayback Machine is full of holes. That’s always been the case, but outlets are increasingly blocking the project, despite people who work for those outlets considering Wayback Machine an indispensible resource. My column for Stuff this week is all about this: The internet’s time machine is starting to run out of time itself.

Neo Geo is back! Again. You might be forgiven for thinking it never really went away, what with all the various Neo Geo gadgets over the years. But the AES+ is a 1:1 recreation of the notoriously spendy original, chips and all. That authenticity largely extends to the pricing. Individual games will set you back 70 quid/90 US dollaroonies – which is more than an entire Neo Geo Super Pocket.

The MacBook Air M5 is rather nice. I imagine you knew that already, but you might like to read my review regardless.

Lego. There is more coming. Always. I updated my upcoming list for Stuff, along with writing a standalone piece on the UCS Mandalorian N-1 Starfighter set.

Liquid Glass is still terrible. I’m saying this because several takes of late suggest upgrade laggards are scared Apple will merge its operating systems. Which is an odd take. I wouldn’t give two hoots about that, if the output was optimised per system. It might even be beneficial if an iPhone could match Android when it comes to external display support.

Most of my devices remain on pre-26 systems, though, because Liquid Glass still has dismal usability and accessibility, regardless of what controls you turn on. There are so many holes. Yet Apple won’t deal with them because we’re now on the road to the ‘27’ systems. Here’s hoping WWDC will bring better news on the operating system UI and accessibility front than last year did.

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.