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.

I hate AI search. Search engines are integrating it to gradually shift emphasis away from websites and onto chatbots that give you all the answers. But chatbots are confidently wrong much of the time. It’s refreshing, then, to see Quiche Browser fighting the good fight and defaulting to non-AI search.

This won’t come as a surprise to folks who’ve used this (currently iPhone-only) app. It’s opinionated in all the right ways but also respectful enough to provide users with options. So if you’re an AI tech bro, you can turn all that crap back on. But also, if you want a very specific button in the toolbar, it’ll let you add that too. It’s fab. Hence my column for Stuff this week: This tiny iPhone browser is fighting back against AI – and I wish it was on every Apple device.

I don’t hate Apple Arcade. Some people do, which I find odd. The service is like Netflix for games. And while it’s not the only entrant in this space, it’s in many ways the best option for Apple gear. Also, if you subscribe to Apple One, you get Arcade lobbed into the mix anyway, so you may as well try it.

Over at Stuff, you can read my major overhaul of the best Apple Arcade games. And if you want to learn more about the service, read my Apple Arcade explainer.

I rather like Lego. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that anyway. August, though, is wallet-punch month for fans of plastic bricks as Lego floods the market with new sets. I cut my favourites down to nine for Stuff’s upcoming Lego column. But it could so easily have been double that number. That said, my editor would have then figured out how to place plastic bricks directly under my every footstep, in order to teach me a harsh but contextually apt lesson about going over budget when writing about Lego.

A new Apple TV is coming. At some point. I write that – especially after Apple’s price hikes – it’ll take more than the little black box having an iPhone chip from 2023 inside to make me buy one.

When should you buy a new iPhone? Over at Stuff, m’colleague Tom Morgan-Freelander believes right now. Over at TapSmart, my take is… it depends.

Accessibility makes iPhones better. For TapSmart, I explore new accessibility features in iOS 27 and argue that it’d be nice if some of them weren’t buried in Settings.

New balls, please? Wimbledon might be done, but if you fancy playing your own final, check out my list of the best tennis video games ever made.

You don’t need a new task manager. Nor do I. But I do rather like Wheneri, which gives you countdowns for ‘occasional’ tasks you want to monitor, such as changing a fridge’s filter. It joins my best free iOS apps roundup. Also in apps, a refresh to my best BBQ apps for iPhone.

Want to get ahead in journalism? Ian Dunt has some tips. He’s more positive than most and, naturally, goes at this from a politics angle. I’m more cynical about things, because ‘my’ patch has been atomised over the past decade. I wish I’d carved out a bigger personal space sooner. Lesson learnt.

Make writing accessible. One tip Dunt doesn’t cover when starting out writing is accessibility – and it’s something even many veteran writers mess up. My belief is that even if you’re covering the most arcane area of political policy or the nerdiest game that ever nerded, you should get the reader up to speed rather than making assumptions that they already know everything. There are few things I find more frustrating than a writer who’s all, “Nuts to you – spend an hour on Wikipedia before reading my glorious prose”, rather than them using a short paragraph to set things up.

LLMs can’t program. So claims Samir Talwar in an excellent piece that doesn’t hold back: “The code is trash. Not even slightly trash; it’s beyond repair.” I feel much the same about writing. LLMs churn out confident copy, but a seasoned writer will spot inconsistencies and issues with flow and logic. Part of the problem is LLMs are designed for engagement and don’t push back. They’ll tell people who run text through them that the result is amazing. That is, until they are challenged to compare the human-created text and the LLM’s own output, whereupon they’ll often change tack. In short, LLMs want to keep you happy, whatever you ask. So don’t trust them.

Netflix is going retro. The WSJ reports that we may now be in the final stages of Netflix transforming into the very ecosystem it replaced: live TV with bundles and ads. Good job, everyone!

The Online Safety Act is rubbish. I may have mentioned this before. But this is a specific kind of rubbish based around privacy. As Matt Gallagher writes for Byline Times, adults are increasingly handing over personal data to overseas companies with questionable records. Alas, I doubt the current UK government will be content until kids are shielded even from Wikipedia and adults are forced to sign into every single website they want to access.

The British arts sector is getting another kicking. Yep, the UK government is at it again. Apparently, performing and creative arts university courses will no longer receive funding from a government teaching grant as part of “difficult decisions” about spending priorities. Funny how the arts always suffer. And depressing that successive British governments hollowing out the arts seem incapable of understanding the country’s strength in that sector, along with how much money the arts make and how much soft power they provide. Yet in years to come, politicians will act all shocked when the UK’s influence has waned.

Sony is ending selling games on physical discs. It’s not alone. But it’s wild this happened during a week in which Sony also announced hundreds of digital films people had bought were to be removed from their libraries. But, hey, “trust us” with your ‘purchased’ digital-only games? Hmm. As I write on Stuff, I think this is all a terrible idea.

Tidal has demonetised AI music. Which is good. But it’s not enough. I wrote for Stuff about the AI music crackdown, but how only one major music service (not Tidal) is willing to fully protect human creativity and combat slop. (Also: to the person who bought my most recent album off the back of this piece – thank you! I really need to get out the new one that’s been bumbling along for years now…)

Apple gear just got more expensive. I explore whether Apple really needed to raise its prices and how to still secure a tech bargain (while avoiding costly mistakes).

StandBy makes idle iPhones useful. Find out how to get the most from it here.

16,000 games on Apple Watch? Sort of. Picpic brings Pico-8 to Apple’s wearable. 

Google wants the UK to ditch copyright rules for its AI. And other AIs. It’s the latest entry in “Wah! Waaaaaah! Our business model doesn’t work unless we can freely rip off all human creativity, ever, without compensating creators!” In the UK, this is especially bonkers, given that it remains illegal to rip a legally bought and owned CD to MP3 on your computer. But Google will likely convince the UK government that every creative endeavour should be available for it to remix and regurgitate, entirely for free.

One rule for the public – another for megacorps… Bah.

Meta has new $299 smart glasses. I don’t want them. But, as I wrote for Stuff, I’d happily try some AirPods Pro for my eyes.

Retroid released another retro doodad. It’s more or less the Retroid Pocket 6 (my current gaming fave) but optimised for 4:3 systems. Here’s my piece on this end-game 4:3 handheld.

I’m an AI sceptic but have used it. My piece for Stuff outlines how – and what I thought it was good for. (Spoiler: not much. And even when I had some success, I felt guilty with all the waste.)

The N64 turned 30. Yeah, I know. Sorry if you’re old enough to remember using one at the time. Drown your sorrows with my piece remembering the foggy fun it unleashed and six of the best N64 games.

Apple updated RAW. I wrote about what this means from a consumer standpoint for Amateur Photographer.

I appeared on the PhotoActive podcast alongside co-hosts Kirk McElhearn and Jeff Carlson. The subject? Apple’s AI shenanigans in iOS 27. Have a listen here.

Brexit turned 10. It’s still a shitshow. People wonder why. Advocates moan that ‘proper Brexit’ hasn’t happened. But the UK did leave the EU, and so the original mandate was discharged. It’s done. The problem is that although individual Brexiters knew what they were voting for, Leave was a coalition of entirely incompatible versions of Brexit, largely driven by entitlement and outright bullshit. That means it’s an impossibility that the entire Leave group can ever be satisfied.

I hope one day that the UK will be back in the EU or at least the single market. But I also hope we never again have another referendum that is so poorly considered in terms of its setup and the lack of consideration for the ramifications.

The EU is effectively killing periodical imports. It took aim at Temu. It hit magazines and comics, which will no longer be viable to send. I’m pro-EU – see above – but, good grief, this legislation is daft. (Friends in music also suggest this will basically end their physical exports to the EU.)

Apple hiked its prices this week. The Apple TV is now hilariously overpriced. Although it’s not funny that broader Apple tech – notably the entry-level iPad and the MacBook Neo – are now less accessible to the masses. Back in March, I wrote about how AI is eating the tech world and your favourite gadgets will be next. (An editor later changed the title. Tsk.) I got crap for this piece at the time, since it was framed around retro-gaming doodads. But now? It’s everything. No one can say they weren’t warned.

Speaking of warnings, PlayStation is deleting paid movies from people’s accounts. Play Has No Limits should be the new slogan. It’s not the first time Sony’s pulled this move either.

As ever, if digital content you’ve bought isn’t DRM-free and is locked to a single device or service, you don’t own it. You just paid for a long-term rental. Maybe think about your purchases accordingly.