Microsoft is killing the Blue Screen of Death. In my piece for Wired, I take a trip down memory lane to wave goodbye to the iconic screen we all love to hate. (Spoiler: there will still be a BSOD, but the B will stand for something new.)

Even Hades couldn’t save Netflix Games. Is mobile gaming doomed? Betteridge-baiting headline aside, this column for Stuff dives into my thoughts on mobile gaming, from its earliest days to the huge problems this side of gaming now faces. In my view, it’s – as ever – all about money.

The HDMI spec now includes 16K. Which is clearly bonkers. At least, I argue that point in my head-to-head opinion over on Stuff. Fighting on behalf of screens with more pixels than atoms in the universe (or something): Tom Morgan-Freelander.

The Trump Phone keeps changing. Wired notes it’s already a lot different from one week ago. Absurd, given that people are preordering something that still lacks defined specs. A week and change ago, I suggested the following over at Stuff: “It’s also unclear whether the phone will ever exist in reality. But if it does, millions of idiots will buy one. Are you one of them?” I wasn’t expecting to be proved right so quickly.

Apple design now baffles me. The company sometimes claimed it had more taste than it actually had. Brushed Metal won’t go down in history as gorgeous design. But something feels very wrong over Cupertino way. Sure, the macOS Finder icon is now 73% less hideous. But Liquid Glass has so many problems, the new alarm design on iOS is abysmal, and then there are the menu bars. Yikes.

From WFH to WTF. Anuj Ahooja over on Mastodon said: “In the last five years, we’ve gone from ‘employees will never have to go into an office’ to ‘employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans‘ to ‘lol we don’t need humans’.” It’s an astute observation and the path we’ve travelled is like double whiplash. It’s quite something that while people were fighting managers to retain rights from covid that were one of its few benefits, many managers reasoned they could do away with people entirely.

Blinding lights are bad. It’s been hot in the UK, and so we have fans in almost every room now. And they all appear to have been equipped with an LED that could be redeployed as a floodlight. So it’s a good time to celebrate the one-year anniversary of a Stuff column: Dear all tech companies: stop adding obnoxious eye-searing lights to gadgets. (Reader: they did not stop. They will never stop.)