Weeknote: 19 April 2026 – holes in the internet, Neo Geo, the new MacBook Air, Lego and Liquid Glass
The Wayback Machine is full of holes. That’s always been the case, but outlets are increasingly blocking the project, despite people who work for those outlets considering Wayback Machine an indispensible resource. My column for Stuff this week is all about this: The internet’s time machine is starting to run out of time itself.
Neo Geo is back! Again. You might be forgiven for thinking it never really went away, what with all the various Neo Geo gadgets over the years. But the AES+ is a 1:1 recreation of the notoriously spendy original, chips and all. That authenticity largely extends to the pricing. Individual games will set you back 70 quid/90 US dollaroonies – which is more than an entire Neo Geo Super Pocket.
The MacBook Air M5 is rather nice. I imagine you knew that already, but you might like to read my review regardless.
Lego. There is more coming. Always. I updated my upcoming list for Stuff, along with writing a standalone piece on the UCS Mandalorian N-1 Starfighter set.
Liquid Glass is still terrible. I’m saying this because several takes of late suggest upgrade laggards are scared Apple will merge its operating systems. Which is an odd take. I wouldn’t give two hoots about that, if the output was optimised per system. It might even be beneficial if an iPhone could match Android when it comes to external display support.
Most of my devices remain on pre-26 systems, though, because Liquid Glass still has dismal usability and accessibility, regardless of what controls you turn on. There are so many holes. Yet Apple won’t deal with them because we’re now on the road to the ‘27’ systems. Here’s hoping WWDC will bring better news on the operating system UI and accessibility front than last year did.
That’s a big if. Judging by the trajectory of recent mac os updates, influences seem to go one way only – from iOS to mac. And as a professional user, I don’t care or want those things. There are very few features in the last handful of OS versions that I wanted and many I actively don’t want. Features I rely on have disappeared, and instead there’s some non-functional dumbed-down iOS integration – completely irrelevant if you don’t own iDevices. And there are plenty of professional mac users who aren’t deep into the ecosystem. Ultimately we just want stable machines to do actual work, not bells and whistles, no gimmicks and less of the nagging to join their atrocious cloud offerings.
It’s getting to the point that if certain applications ever appear on linux, professional users will jump ship, as they have with windows in droves. Tech firms need to listen to customers.