Could Apple convince me to spend $2000 on an iPhone Fold? Probably not. But my Stuff column this week says what Apple would need to do to tempt me.

Age verification in the UK is a disaster. I predicted this in my column last weekend. But I’m nonetheless surprised by how badly it’s gone. Reddit is blocking subreddits on sexual assault and periods. Spotify is blocking access to a range of content unless you verify your age. Wikipedia is challenging the UK government in court. 

Predictably, the press and political response has been dreadful. The former are conflating porn sites and sites that “may contain pornographic content”. And Labour’s Peter Kyle suggested, in facile fashion, that every time an adult verifies their age, they are protecting a child. Meanwhile, teens are merrily installing VPNs and using Norman Reedus’s face to get around age checks.

A few months from now, everyone will act all shocked when teens are still accessing porn, British adults are blocked from an increasing amount of content, a massive data leak occurs with verification data that was supposed to be anonymous, and the entire UK is blocked from Wikipedia. Labour ministers will then be wheeled out to say on TV that’s a “small price to pay for protecting children”.

What if your cloud accounts were blocked, without warning? I asked this question on Bluesky and Mastodon after yet another report of a user’s Google account being abruptly shuttered for no obvious reason. The threads are well worth perusing for people’s thoughts and recommendations. I suspect even most folks with a robust backup system aren’t really thinking about what they’d do if Google, Apple, Microsoft or Dropbox banned them. 

Liquid Glass still sucks. I posted this shot of an unreadable iPad menu bar. Someone suggested app devs should update their UIs to make them work with Apple’s design, despite it being a moving target. I’d argue Apple should stop mucking around and just stick a solid colour behind the new menu bar.

I switched to DuckDuckGo on my iPhone and wrote about it for TapSmart. It’s been an interesting experiment. Notably, I haven’t switched back to Google yet.

Bring back Music Memos! OK, so that’s never going to happen, but my article outlines why I’d love to see its feature set integrated into other Apple apps.

There’s a new WALL-E and EVE Lego set. Lego is going to sell so many of these.