Will Apple increase the MacBook Neo’s price? I’m invoking Betteridge’s Law in my piece for Stuff. My take: much of the attraction of the MacBook Neo is its low price. Getting rid of that would be a massive risk and a very bad idea, unless Apple has no alternative.

Blind bags and boxes are awful. Lego sells minifigs in blind boxes, which is awful. What’s not awful: Lego minifig scanner apps that let you see what’s inside. (Speaking of Lego, I also wrote 10 of the best sets you can buy today.)

Want new Apple Watch apps? I updated my Apple Watch apps and games roundup, which now includes the shiny new Pedometer++.

Kenny Who? Is the subject of the latest 2000 AD podcast. It uses as a launchpad a Dredd story that was satirical sci-fi pushback on exploitative publishing but that now feels like an on-the-nose critique on GenAI. It then goes deep into morals, practicalities and concerns surrounding GenAI in creative industries.

Comics are great. So I was very happy to see The Times writing positively about the success of The Phoenix, which has now overtaken The Beano in terms of subscribers. However, the numbers themselves are a far cry from the heyday of comics. Moreover, the two comics I mention are the only two British anthology weeklies for kids left in the UK. (2000 AD also soldiers on, but is very much teen+ these days.)

It’s a shame. Weeklies let publishers try new things and take way more risks. And comics in general are pretty awesome for a whole range of reasons. They are imaginative. They can be good for reluctant readers (but should not be considered ONLY a stepping stone to ‘proper’ books). They can encourage creativity. Graphic novels and manga remain popular, but it seems relatively few parents buy a subscription to a weekly for their kids. In part, that’s down to changing habits and cost. But awareness also plays a part. As Jamie Smart says: “We’ve always held on, pig-headedly, to the belief that children love comics. But they need to know they exist.”

So if you’re in the UK and in the position of having a youngling with no comics and the means to buy them some, do consider a Phoenix sub (first 6 issues for a ridiculously cheap £1) and/or The Beano (first 5 issues for £5). And if you’re an adult… read some comics too.

I want more control over my smart heating. Which might sound odd when you learn I’ve got a Tado system, which provides granular control of each individual room. But you only get one schedule. And this doesn’t work well as you come out of winter and 21°C feels very different from how it did a few months back. Tado is big on automation and AI and reckons that’s enough to cope. It isn’t. My argument: give me extra manual controls.

What does a new Apple CEO mean for iPhone? After writing for Stuff about what I want to see from Apple’s new CEO, I’ve penned a piece for TapSmart about how his leadership might impact iPhone.

The C64 and Spectrum are reborn as handhelds. I honestly didn’t see this coming, but a collab between HyperMegaTech and Retro Games Ltd has resulted in a couple of DS-like clamshells. Each one looks the part, echoing its 8-bit forebear. The screen aspect ratio is odd, although you can often successfully crop borders out of games to have them fit more optimally. I like the bundled games, though, which mix old and new. And there’s a microSD slot for adding more.

Drop7 is still amazing. And it’s now joined my iPhone classics series. I really wish Zynga would bring this game back, but it’d probably stick out in their catalogue for not being infested with exploitative IAPs.

Bacon in Zane is bonkers. Having invited players to flip bacon onto everything (including Francis Bacon) in Bacon – the Game, Philipp Stollenmayer has created a follow-up. This one-thumb iPhone effort has you nudge a piece of bacon through a medically implausible human body. It’s strange and a lot of fun – and now part of my best free iPhone games roundup.

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.