iCloud Photos sync is a joke. So my Stuff column this week is: All I want from WWDC25 is for iOS 26 and iCloud to finally sync my photos properly. Although after I wrote this, I discovered Apple Music had eaten half of one of my uploaded digital-only albums. And that iCloud Drive hadn’t bothered to sync a column I’d written on another computer while abroad. Why is iCloud still such a disaster? Come on, Apple.

Ruark released some new speakers. That in itself isn’t news. But it made me think about the piece I wrote, because I have two of this system’s predecessors and I love them. So this is a fairly rare example of one of those “my favourite” headlines that’s actually fully genuine.

I wrote about the great outdoors. At least, using your iPhone in it. Have a read for tips, apps and gear for making it at least somewhat less likely you’ll end up lost in a forest, all alone.

I spent last week in Spain. Which, for a range of reasons I may write about later, was much-needed. We arrived in a deluge, which was surreal, given how little rain the UK saw in May. But after that, it was sunny bliss. The one negative: the THUNK of having my passport stamped. I still hate that abrupt reminder of the stupidity of Brexit. Perhaps one day Brits will, en masse, finally recognise that freedom of movement was a gift, in all its forms, and embrace it.

Doctor Who’s latest series ended. I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of the latest episodes, but I am going to gripe about the BBC website immediately throwing up a massive headline that spoiled the final twist. Yeah, yeah, SEO blah blah blah. But it’s rubbish these days that the second a show is over, major publications clamour to get on their front pages what happened. Heaven forbid people not watch shows the second they are broadcast.

Workers are losing their jobs to AI. The Guardian interviewed a bunch of folks who’ve been hit. What depresses me most about this is companies are using AI to cut out creatives rather than to deal with the boring stuff. And the UK government’s response is to try to enshrine in law no protections for said creatives, while the Lords fights back. Absurd, really, that we’re relying on an unelected house to battle elected representatives and force the Labour Party to protect a labour market.

Covid is back, says the i. Although, of course, it never went away. I got my first dose last August and it was hideous. Naturally, the UK government is doing the square root of fuck all to prepare, as it has from the time Boris Johnson’s lot declared they’d somehow beaten an ever-evolving virus and that the threat was over. I’m not suggesting we lockdown or anything. But we could prep for autumn with air filters in workplaces and schools. We could expand booster take-up and dramatically lower their price for those who can’t get one for free. We could restart proper UK-wide monitoring and encourage mask use during spikes. But no. Let’s all bury our heads and wonder why we have more and more long-term sick.

Non-shock as study shows 20mph limits result in fewer deaths. We have a few 20mph streets in my town. Years after they were introduced, entitled muppets are still screaming about them on Facebook, eradicating any notion of further changes. Astonishingly, we still have 40mph limits in some residential parts of town. But, hey, so long as people can save 23.7 seconds driving the full length of a street, I suppose that’s somehow better than reducing injuries and deaths? Gah at these people. Hashtag Team Twenty. Etc.

I’ve been watching Murderbot. It’s on Apple TV+. My recommendation is: watch Murderbot. Because it’s really good.

Apple is reportedly working on an Apple Games app. But we’ve all played this game before, and I’m not sure it warrants an extra life. So over at Stuff, my column this week is ‘What I think the Apple Games app needs to work – and why it won’t’.

Arc browser is dead. A blog post outlines the company behind it is pivoting to new product Dia. Two things. First, I’ll be sorry to see mobile app Arc Search mothballed. It was an excellent example of the potential in AI-assisted search, serving up magazine-like synopses with full source links. Secondly, when you’ve built a niche product that commands a loyal audience and pull the rug out from underneath them, what makes you think they’ll be back for more?

I asked ChatGPT to be Jimmy Carr. This in response to his arrogant bullshit about AI being better than art and design. Doubtless, he’d argue it was a joke. But, hey, people might argue that about Carr. Anyway, my thread suggested his quippy one-liners can be adequately replaced by ChatGPT. (Or can they? Probably not! But I’m not a comedian and so don’t fully know what good looks like in the context of new puns. Which is the entire bloody point. If you don’t have humans in the loop with relevant knowledge in the subject matter at hand, GenAI is mostly some level of bad.)

AI discourse needs nuance. Following on from the above, Steve Klabnik wrote about the pros and cons of AI/LLMs and how he’s disappointed in the discourse. On Bluesky, Prof. Christina Pagel suggested LLMs have benefits and that public comms arguing against them mostly comes from AI-hating journos.

I’d say there are intertwined issues here. LLM creators oversell. Consumers and managers assume LLMs can do everything and replace humans when they ultimately need expertise at each end of the process – and for those people to know what good looks like. Much of the pushback I’m seeing about GenAI/LLMs is actually from educators rather than tech hacks like me, because students are using this tech as an alternative to thinking. But also, many creators are staring aghast at LLM output making it to public eyes and asking: why? (Answer: if an LLM can churn out, say, some text that’s better than what the prompt author could write themselves, it looks good to them. And right now, that seems to be what many folks are going with. Which means a massive WOMP WOMP for writers like me who actually care about quality output.)

What we need is more nuanced discussion. GenAI and LLMs can be beneficial. They can also be terrible. Often, they’re somewhere in between. But you get way more eyeballs online when you argue something is the Best Thing Ever™ or evil incarnate. As ever: sigh.

However, Nick Clegg discourse needs no nuance. Following on from the above and the ‘above above’, Nick Clegg can go fuck himself. As can the current Labour government when it comes to AI policy. Constant whining (the latest being from Clegg, but various Labour figures have said the same) that the AI industry cannot survive if it has to ask permission to use the content it ingests and recycles (or even be transparent about what content is used) is irksome beyond belief. If your business model depends on mass copyright infringement, maybe you don’t have a business model.

Again, I feel the need to point out that the UK’s copyright laws are so strict that it in almost all circumstances remains illegal for a consumer to rip a CD they’ve bought to their own computer, for entirely personal use. Yet every single thing you’ve ever created should be freely available for a handful of AI companies, because their business model depends on that? Pfft. Anyone else up for starting a company whose business model depends on giving away Nick Clegg’s stupid book for free? Something tells me he wouldn’t be so supportive of that.

Bluesky is dying. Apparently. There was a lot of THE SKY IS FALLING this past week, with people posting stats that show the site trending towards approx minus fifty billion users by next Friday. Reality: things there seem… fine? There still seem to be many folks happily nattering away, rather than slinking back to Musk’s bosom. But author Jarrett Walker’s post caught my eye, basically being an argument that he should stay on X because 40% of his audience wouldn’t follow him if he quit. My take: if I were still posting in the Nazi bar and half my followers said they’d scoot over to somewhere else, I’d take that as a win. But then I don’t care much about numbers. 

Just as well, TBH, given my actual numbers. Then again, I’ve always thought it’s about who is reading rather than how many people. This blog’s stats will never set the world on fire, and yet my writing here is the reason I’m writing for Stuff. (An ex-editor was – maybe still is – a reader.) Over on Bluesky and Mastodon, I’m not posting there in an attempt to amass an audience that can fill Wembley Stadium. I’m just parping out random thoughts and having nice chats with lovely folks. That’s enough for me. (Unless, you know, you’re an editor who’d like to employ me. Because I wouldn’t say no to that right now.)

The Phoenix Comic reached 700 issues. A phenomenal achievement in a tough market. If you’re in the UK and have/know a kid in the 7–12 range (or fancy reading fun comics yourself), there’s a zero-risk trial that nets you six issues for a quid. Barg.

“I almost threw out all my old USB cables. This week proved why I never should” is this week’s Stuff column. It was based on (or inspired/horrified by) sagely thoughts from Tom Berry and Ian Dunt, which I duly ignored. For reasons. Judging by the Bluesky discussions, Team Cables is the bigger cohort. Sorry, chaps!

Taking back control of our digital life is Ian Dunt’s latest column for his Striking 13 newsletter. It’s always interesting to read thoughtful insights from a non-tech journo about how tech might better fit with our lives. And much of what he writes aligns with my current thinking, which is, broadly: use tech more meaningfully; minimise alerts; prioritise feeds you control (use RSS!); make more gadgets use-case specific.

But the thing that really clicked for me was Dunt’s section on clutter. So often, I see modern homes devoid of stuff. They look staged and impersonal. Our living room looks like a branch of HMV and Forbidden Planet had a baby. That’s clearly not for everyone, but I love the personality that books and CDs provide. (And, yes, we’re slowly making good on the promises from my piece about buying a CD player for the first time in years. We now just need to magic the shelving from boxes to the wall.)

What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa’s excellent post that explores a new deal for developers, better software experiences, and harder paths to growth. In a new post on my blog, I expand on the developer angle with Apple vs developers: disrespect or outright disdain?

Pocket is dead. Mozilla has killed the read-later service it bought in 2017 but that had launched a decade earlier. Pocket has been dead to me for a while now, though. The service blew up my account at some point, which was met with the support equivalent of a nonchalant shrug. All of which makes me rather glad when I wrote a read-later tutorial, I decided to go for an Instapaper deep dive.

WWDC is looming. So I wrote about 7 things I want to see from Apple at WWDC 2025. One of them wasn’t iCloud. Mostly because I’m annoyed about that to the degree it warranted its own piece: Apple finally killed 64GB iPhones in 2025. Now it’s time to scrap the 5GB iCloud tier.

Wallpaper apps. Probably not the most important app category to consider for your iPhone. But, hey, a fab background can give you a bit of a lift. If you don’t fancy digging through App Store cruft, read my piece on The best iPhone Home Screen wallpaper apps.

Brass Sun is returning to 2000 AD. Finally. It last appeared back in 2018. Ian Edginton is getting a bit of a reputation for setting up amazing comic book worlds and then seemingly abandoning them. His list for 2000 AD is worryingly long. According to the linked article, Brass Sun got stuck because he was concerned he couldn’t maintain its dizzy highs. But 18 months ago, his daughter read the book and was annoyed the story just stopped. Some lessons here, I suppose. One being that there’s hope for your favourite comics on hiatus to one day roar back to life. And another being that we somehow need to convince Edginton’s daughter to read his other strips that are in limbo.

You don’t need a dumb phone. My column for Stuff this week explores simplifying your smartphone setup, but not binning it in favour of a device that will just lead to regret. And I get to gripe about Photoshop sending me a notification for no good reason. Companies, please stop doing that!

Think different about Home Screens is a kind of companion piece, over at TapSmart. It looks at the specifics of how I changed my iPhone setup, and also how I’ve largely ditched the icon grid across all my Apple devices.

Netflix will start showing GenAI ads in 2026. That’ll teach me a lesson for saying nice things about the company’s AI plans (vs Meta’s slop) in last week’s Stuff column. I won’t make that mistake again, Netflix.

Speaking of AI, tech bro entitlement is infecting everything through their GenAI inventions. At least, that’s my current frame of mind in a blog post based on a thread I posted on social media this past week.

The best Photoshop alternatives for iPhone (and iPad) is my other TapSmart piece this week. I wrote last month about how oddly redundant Photoshop for iPhone feels. This round-up looks at what it does well, where it falls short, and other apps you might try instead.

My upcoming Lego round-up received updates, with spots for new Pixar Luxo Jr., Sherlock Holmes and Batman Forever sets, and more.

Netflix’s smart AI plans expose Meta AI as an ugly dumpster fire from hell. That’s my new column for Stuff, and it probably means I’m off of Meta’s Christmas card list. The main thrust of the column is that there’s nuance in the AI space – it can be used for good. (Anyone working with tools to quickly remove blemishes from photos is making use of AI, for example.) But content created from scratch by GenAI is mediocre at best – and Meta AI is an endless feed of AI slop.

Wahhhhhhh is Marie Le Conte’s response to “I think generative AI has the power to change the world for the better” in her piece 11 things I hate about AI. It makes many great points – not least how GenAI tends to blunder into human aspects of creativity and make things worse. A lot of the things she argues align with my own thinking. Creative journeys are important. Blank canvases aren’t bad. Confidence without accuracy is bad. And her point about blogs and forums also made me a bit sad.

Apple is obsessed with thin again. Over at TapSmart, I explore why I’m not taken by the rumours about the iPhone Air, although I do outline two reasons that might explain why Apple is set to make the phone. I also very much hope at least some of the rumours are wrong, but I guess we’ll see soon enough. A single-speaker high-end phone in 2025 would be… quite something.

Zookeeper DX is dangerous. It’s the latest entry in my classic app series. And good grief at the degree to which it hooked me back in again as I tried to justify the time I was spending playing as ‘research’.

Please support our indie mag! We’re now up to issue 326 of Swipe – TapSmart’s iPhone/iPad incarnation. It’s just $2/£2 per month for two new issues and access to loads of back issues. All subs gratefully appreciated, because we’d love to keep the lights on for as long as possible!

In-flight entertainment on long-haul flights used to consist of a movie they’d project to the front of each section of the plane. On the few flights I had as a kid, I got to watch the top third of a movie, while surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Yay. How things have changed – most notably by everyone having their own devices. So for British Airways I wrote about some apps you’d want to download for offline fun before you fly. (And, natch, they’re also fab for long train journeys, camping, and just because.)

Operating systems don’t stand still. Neither do articles about them in the age of digital. By which I mean I refreshed my iOS tips and Apple Intelligence tips pieces for Stuff. Enjoy.

Lego. There’s a lot of it about. Which suits me, because I think it’s great. This past week, I refreshed my best Star Wars Lego sets for May the 4th, wrote about the new Shuttle Carrier Aircraft set, and started longingly at the pre-order button for Lego Ideas Pixar Luxo Jr.