Boys will be boys. I’m not sure there’s another phrase that infuriates me quite so much. Since my daughter’s attended school, that’s only cemented the phrase’s place in making me fume.

The first specific moment was during a pre-school open day. Parents could attend the grounds. Outside, boys were zooming along on cars and trikes, directing them at girls and scaring the life out of them. A member of staff looked on, smiling. “Boys will be boys”, she said.

In infant (5–7) school, I became aware for the first time of how girls were used to moderate the behaviour of boys. Classes were broadly evenly split by gender. When possible, a boy and a girl would be paired for tasks. My daughter is now in juniors (8–11) and this continues. The argument for this pairing is boys otherwise misbehave. Throughout, my daughter has complained that most (not all) boys muck around while she’s trying to complete a task. She and other girls are regularly told off for trying to tell boys to be quiet.

At her infant school leaving event, the teachers sweetly said something positive about every child. But it was notable how many adjectives along the lines of ‘funny’ and ‘silly’ were used for boys. For girls, ‘sensible’ was far more common.

And through to yesterday. My daughter came home from school quite upset. During lunch, some boys had decided to throw horse chestnuts at a group of girls. My daughter was hit in the leg repeatedly by their spiny cases, to the degree she was bleeding and this morning has marks that look like a horrible rash down one leg from all the puncture wounds. The initial response from a teacher she told: boys will be boys.

Talking to other parents, all the above isn’t ubiquitous but it’s far from uncommon. And while I’m not an advocate of single-gender education, I can see why it has advocates. As it is, the attitude elsewhere that so often pervades is to our wider detriment. Boys are taught that they can get away with things girls can’t, and push the limits. Girls are scolded when they step out of line and for a moment are not ‘sensible’. And any response to physical harm that’s casually dismissed as ‘boys will be boys’ isn’t setting anyone up for a good future. Society needs to do better.

In 2012, I fell ill. Abrupt dizziness. I felt like I’d been drinking heavily, and had no idea what was going on.

Being a logical type, I looked at changes in my life around that time. It took a full day before I realised the only major change had been updating my Mac to OS X Lion. The full-screen animations were making me sick. Fortunately, I could avoid the worst of Lion’s effects when I knew they were the problem, and third-party apps subsequently dealt with the issue entirely.

And then iOS 7 happened. In an instant, Apple’s smartphone switched its familiar but largely static interface to a minimalist effort packed full of animations. Parallax wobbled about on the Home Screen. Folders blasted towards your face at incredible speed. Within half an hour, I realised I couldn’t use my iPhone.

I wasn’t alone. In a piece for The Guardian, I spoke to several people who were suffering, along with spokespeople for vestibular disorder societies who confirmed this was a real problem that could potentially impact millions. I received personal messages from many more folks desperate for a solution.

The piece was widely shared. Online, I faced significant scepticism. People noted I wrote about mobile games, and so how could these animations affect me? But by that point I’d rapidly learned with vestibular accessibility – in fact, any accessibility – that everyone is different.

With vestibular conditions, some people are floored by parallax, but it doesn’t affect others. Some can cope with iOS folder animations. For others, it might mean being dizzy for a few minutes – or a few days. Personally, I can enjoy motion-based entertainment where I can anticipate what’s next – roller coasters; driving games – but am knocked back by abrupt animation I cannot prepare for and that takes up a significant portion of my field of view.

The article – and presumably other feedback – must have reached suitably senior people at Apple, because fixes subsequently arrived. They weren’t total, but they also weren’t an end point. Over the years since, I’ve swapped quite a few messages with Apple’s accessibility team. One involved slide transitions for nested menus on iPhone. In my sole live WWDC, I was fortunate to attend an accessibility session where it was revealed the animation could be disabled in the Settings app. Reader, I may have shed a tear.

It’s ten years since that Guardian article was published. Accessibility remains an odd beast. Far too many people consider accessibility to be solely about helping people with vision issues to use technology. But increasingly we do see a wider understanding of accessibility, in that it needs to be for everyone – something I wrote about for the dearly departed MacUser back in 2015. That we now have accessible games controllers is a genuinely exciting development.

However, I’d still like more software developers to bake in accessibility as a default. Start with an accessible foundation, rather than plug gaps later. But I do appreciate companies from the tiniest indie to massive corporations increasingly take this subject seriously, including catering for people with vestibular conditions. And I hope if you have any accessibility concerns yourself, you’ll be met with the kindness I’ve received from Apple’s teams.

Speaking of, that action button screen on the new iPhones is a vestibular trigger. Time to write another quick email…

Some quick(ish) thoughts on Apple’s recent event, over and above anything already published in the press.

Apple’s notably been simultaneously praised and lambasted for a sketch on its green credentials. I found the sketch itself cringeworthy, but others loved it. More broadly, though, I’m glad Apple is taking action on green issues, and I hope that acts as a catalyst for more of the industry to do the same. However, claims from companies being parroted helps no-one. Yet I can’t see anyone paying for the research and journalism required to deep dive into Apple’s facts and figures. And, let’s face it, there is going to be at least some sleight of hand in there. Just the mention of carbon credits alone is enough to give people in the green industry pause. A net positive, then, but not yet a slam dunk.

Looking at the hardware, the Apple Watch line got a minor iterative upgrade, albeit with a new SIP that made developers happy (more power) and annoyed (dropping support for older models makes vocal uses angry). The new double tap gesture is interesting and appears to build on an earlier accessibility feature. That’s smart thinking from Apple, but I do sometimes think more of its accessibility settings should be surfaced in the other settings sections across its hardware – and that publications should do more to alert people to them.

The iPhones were suitably souped up. You can see with the iPhone 15 where Apple believes users will and won’t care about things, in trade-offs regarding profitability and features. It having a 60Hz display when a slew of cheaper Android blowers are way beyond that is strange to me. But perhaps not enough people outside the geek sphere give two hoots. And, to be fair, while once I went ‘Retina’ I couldn’t go back, the switch between 60 and 120Hz displays isn’t nearly as pronounced.

Dynamic Island now being a default feature of the latest iPhones is a good thing. I imagine eventually Apple will figure out how to hide its front camera tech beneath the display, but until then I still think this is a smart compromise, making a feature out of what would otherwise be a negative. However, it’s underused. There has been developer interest, but not as much as Apple would have hoped for – and that must come down to it until now being exclusively part of the iPhone Pro models. The risk was another Touch Bar. This latest change should counter and end such concerns.

Beyond that, the new iPhone colours all seem dull and muted, presumably because that’s what people will buy. The new camera system in the iPhone 15 is welcome. The Pro using titanium suggests it’ll no longer be a finger magnet. Those phones being lighter is extremely welcome, as is the custom side button. The Pro’s positioning as a gaming powerhouse now needs to be matched by Apple itself having a cultural shift at the most senior level to support such efforts. And, for once, seeing pricing drop for iPhones in the UK was rather fun. (Apple’s gymnastics in the US – that the iPhone Pro Max isn’t more expensive because it’s the same price as that memory tier was last year – aren’t needed in the UK, where the base price is unchanged. Which means here the low-end Pro Max nets you an 128GB of additional storage for no extra outlay.)

Still no Home indicator off switch, mind. Gnash.

Hello. Rant time. I hate iCloud. I’m so sick of it. Of everything I’ve ever used by Apple, there’s no single other thing that’s this awful. And that includes Game Center, which literally didn’t work for months, because Apple apparently forgot it existed. (Games didn’t – they failed to load when Game Center itself failed.)

iCloud is great when it works. Seamless. You don’t notice it’s there. But it’s dire when it fails. Last year, it broke for a whole lot of people. Widgets and apps stopped working. And because iCloud is opaque, it wasn’t possible for users to do anything to fix the problems.

During that period, I suffered unrecoverable data loss for the first time in over a decade. I now cannot trust iCloud to house documents created by one of my key daily driver apps. It’s just too risky.

There are other niggles. Last week, iCloud populated my shared Downloads folder with dozens of empty folders, making me temporarily freak out until I found they were folders I’d deleted months ago. (Thanks, Time Machine! At least you work.) When you move a folder, iCloud sometimes (not always) inexplicably updates its creation date. And then there are times when it just won’t sync data.

I had that happen this morning. I was happily populating an app with a bunch of data, and the iPad and Mac versions were oblivious to this. And also each other. The solution? Turn iCloud off and on again for all those apps, which naturally nuked the new data. It was only half an hour of time wasted, but this shouldn’t happen. It should just work. Why iCloud is still as flaky as it is, despite being the backbone of dozens of Apple services – and instrumental to countless Mac and mobile apps – baffles me.

‘Threads is doomed’ articles are doing the rounds, based on sometimes questionable stats around how many users the site’s lost since its dramatic debut. Mastodon has gone through the same story at least twice. Although, bizarrely, some folks on that platform crow about Threads’ misfortunes, missing that the basic ‘Twitter and closed will still win’ narrative affects that service too.

The more interesting numbers in Time’s Tech Brief come from people who abruptly stopped posting. Again, the same happened on Mastodon. There was a huge influx of people, many posting there because they claimed staying on Twitter didn’t align with their integrity. And then they inevitably mostly scurried back to Twitter. Why?

Much of this feels like entitlement. They expected everyone to follow them, instantly, to somewhere new. And when they broadcast and realised the audience wasn’t there, they didn’t want to build again and so returned to the House of Musk  – even though the audience there is diminishing.

I get it. Starting again is hard. It can feel too much. Doubly so if your career/income in some way relies on a larger audience you’ve spent years painstakingly building without the brand/visibility advantage afforded to a major celebrity. And if you’re used to engagement, it can be quite humbling to suddenly be surrounded by silence. I found this myself when I first joined Mastodon in 2018. Since then, things have changed, in part because I invested time in the service, but also because I wrote a piece on Mastodon that was widely shared. I don’t see the same thing happening on Threads, where, I dunno, B-list tech journo doesn’t exactly give you any creds with the algorithm. But whatever. I still have the occasional nice exchange with folks there. That’s enough.

What I miss more is the diverse and fun group of people I read and chatted with on Twitter. Mastodon covers part of that and is good in its own right, but it’s not the same. I miss comics artists and comedians, news anchors and specific creators of oddball little projects. Then again, nothing is going to be the same as Twitter – perhaps ever again.

Twitter was a strange one-off where lots of different people came together from a huge range of fields, and that was combined with breaking news and brands wanting to help you (via DM) rather than just sell to you (as on Threads). Now, Twitter is increasingly a hideous bloodbath of extremism, Mastodon is a haven for geeks, creatives are over at Bluesky, various folks are trying to make the best of Threads, and so on.

I don’t think any of these services is doomed. Some might not last. What is doomed is the notion that Twitter can be replaced, because it can’t – not even by the current Musk incarnation of Twitter.