Weeknote: 14 February 2026 – new iPhones, Bear app, Setapp Mobile, Spotify and AI, lazy children and Squid Bits
A new iPhone is imminent! Exciting! Only no, because it’s the iPhone 17e. I write for Stuff about why Apple may as well rename it the iPhone 17ehh.
Bear joins my classic iPhone/iPad app series. In the piece, I have a great chat with Shiny Frog co-founder Danilo Bonardi about how Bear made note-taking fast and beautiful.
The death of Setapp Mobile matters. In fact, more than you might think, as I outline for TapSmart.
Want to support our indie journalism? Please consider downloading Swipe for iPhone and iPad. Free trial! Two issues per month for just $2/£2/€2!
Spotify goes all-in on AI. According to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, the company says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December. I can’t imagine what horrors are now lurking in the codebase. The company is depressingly light-touch regarding AI music too.
Apropos of nothing, Bandcamp and Deezer have both come out against AI ruining the music industry.
Children are lazy! Apparently. Or at least, that appears to be what Ofsted chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver is inferring in his utterances over at LBC, in a piece by Katy Dartford. He argues it’s bizarre the school year was “determined around harvesting” and then, inevitably, argues children are in school for a “ridiculously low percentage of the year” and calls the six-week summer holiday to be scrapped. What’s actually bizarre: adults constantly slamming school children for not being in school enough, rather than recognising that they need lives beyond the classroom. Enough.
Squid Bits is awesome. Ending on a brighter note, I’ve long hoped Jess Bradley’s very silly comic strip for The Phoenix would get a collection. And that’s now happening. Hurrah!
The Spotify article sounds like absolute BS. This quote in particular:
> “An engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app, (…) And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production”
What? That’s not how that works. To me, this sounds like they have OKRs for LLM usage for their devs or something like that, so their devs are lying through their teeth about what they’re doing, just to make their numbers look good. “Oh yeah, I pushed five updates to prod on Slack while on the bus this morning!”
If this were actually true, I would recommend that people immediately uninstall Spotify, because that is some serious malpractice. But I’m 99% sure it’s not true.
> argues children are in school for a “ridiculously low percentage of the year” and calls the six-week summer holiday to be scrapped
When I read stuff like that, I have to wonder about these people. What kind of childhood did they have to come to that conclusion? Or maybe they just don’t remember what it’s like to be a child at all?
@Lukas: Yeah, there is a whiff of Billy Bullshit in the Spotify piece. But that just furthers my “hey, alternatives exist” thinking.
As for school holidays, heaven knows. I’m so sick of middle-aged men (and it’s almost always men) arguing that children forget everything over the summer holidays or that school hours should be longer. Kids are stressed enough. And, hey, it’s nice to have at least some opportunity to do things as a family – and also for kids to have flexibility after school to manage their time and try new things.