A short one this week, because summer hols.

AirPods Pro are getting cameras. Here’s how Apple can avoid the Meta ‘pervert glasses’ trap. That’s my Stuff column this week, which explores how Apple could avoid making the same bad decisions that Meta did. Mostly, that’s down to not being Meta. In short, don’t provide video, audio and streaming capabilities to people who’d do bad things with it. Whether Apple will hold the line there is another matter.

I belatedly ‘upgraded’ to macOS 26. Scare quotes entirely intentional. For various reasons, I had to shift my main work Mac to Apple’s design disaster. I’d been using it only on a secondary machine until now. As a daily driver, it’s still awful. I can see why some people just got used to macOS 26, but it’s like getting used to being repeatedly kicked in the shins. Eventually, you just become numb to the pain. Fortunately, the ‘27’ cohort is an improvement. Look out for a piece next week from me on Liquid Glass that – shock! – isn’t entirely negative. (Mostly because it outlines how to use existing and new settings to make Macs, iPads and iPhones tolerable.)

You need more Lego. Actually, you probably don’t. I certainly don’t. But if your wallet hasn’t fled for the hills, here are 46 massive sets to buy.

Wired claims there’s an AI slop backlash. I’ve seen this among individuals, notably those who are young or in creative fields and therefore very heavily impacted. But Wired’s piece argues any AI rejection is also appearing in the form of ‘slop’ buttons on websites like LinkedIn. I’m sceptical of those, to say the least. They’re surely about companies discovering what people think is slop, in order to train their own models to output content that doesn’t read like slop – for a fee.

Rain would be nice. It was sobering today to take a stroll around a local – and usually large – body of water and see so much of it missing. This kind of thing is commonplace throughout Europe right now, and I’m sure many of us have never seen anything like it. Don’t let the idiots try to make out everything’s OK when we inevitably end up with flooding this winter. Rainfall averages working out across an entire year isn’t helpful when fields and bodies of water are scorched for months on end and then later underwater for several months.