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.

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.