Weeknote: 4 November 2023
Remember, remember the fourth of November. Because I nearly forgot to write this weeknote.
Published stuff
Over at Stuff this week, I wrote some positive and non-snarky opinion pieces. Clearly, I must be ill. Anyway: wrap your eyes around ‘Good, better, best: With M3 MacBook Pros, Apple’s pro laptops make sense again’ and ‘Why I’m worried the M3 iMac upgrade means the end of Apple’s all-in-one’.
I also wrote about apps for NaNoWriMo (as in, writing novels), and the latest mammoth Lego modular.
Over TapSmart way, I wrote about 30 days with Apple Watch, apps to help you stay informed, and the wonderful Forget-Me-Not, which is now part of my ongoing classic apps series.
Upcoming stuff
Given what happened in tech land last week, you can probably guess what I’m working on right now. Beyond that, I’m starting to compile end-of-year app and game lists.
Other stuff
A few random thoughts knocking around this week.
One was about returning to Forget-Me-Not and realising it’s stuck in GameClub, which itself appears to be dormant. I wish I could somehow magic it into Apple Arcade as a ‘+’ game. Alas. But it also again made me think about old mobile titles that have vanished and now leave people with no way to access them. I look forward to the day when we can emulate iPhones – albeit probably (with some irony) on Android devices.
With news YouTube Premium pricing is going up, I’m starting to wonder whether in a few years every streaming service will cost £25 per month or something. Or if they’ll bin monthly options to stop people service hopping. It’ll be £100 per year or nothing.
Clearly, the entire industry is not sustainable. But people have been trained to pay – albeit relatively low monthly amounts. So what happens when those amounts are no longer low? (My guess: music will do better than telly, because you have access to ‘everything’ vs just a slice, and also you more often ‘relisten’ to songs than rewatch shows.)
Finally, Apple announced it had made billions but not enough billions. Its revenue dropped by 1%. Naturally, lots of publications raced to dust off their ‘Apple is doomed’ narratives.
It made me quite grumpy and the press response to me suggested a lot of what is wrong with the commercial world. Here was one of the biggest companies in the world, making billions in profit, being called beleaguered and in a rough patch because it cannot maintain endless massive growth and instead has ups and downs.
Parts of the world are literally on fire. We should be prizing sustainability. But no. And we are collectively never going to learn this lesson.
On a brighter note, after a recent trip to Spain, I again recognised the value of walking, versus hoofing for half an hour on the elliptical trainer. Turns out, I’m solar powered. So I’m struggling with the clocks going back. (I’d love to be on BST all year, but understand why that can’t happen.) However, on every dry morning, I’ve headed out early, walked to the local pond, and attempted to point my head at the sun. It feels good. I never want to leave.
I have good news. touchHLE exists, and even though it is very early in its development, it already runs a bunch of early iOS games perfectly. On Android (and Windows and Macs), of course, as you’ve predicted.
And thanks to piracy, a lot of early iOS games have been preserved.
Don’t tell Apple, though.
Lukas: I haven’t looked at touchHLE in a while, but last I saw it did show great promise. But he notion we’ll end up emulating old iPhone games on Android is quite perverse. But also Apple won’t change there.
Piracy preserving old games has always been the case as well. Loads of 8-bit titles wouldn’t exist without it. (And I recall cracked games rocking up as paid retro gaming downloads more than once. Tsk.) Although the nature of many modern games (servers, etc) means some will be gone for good when they shut, which is a pity.