Could Apple convince me to spend $2000 on an iPhone Fold? Probably not. But my Stuff column this week says what Apple would need to do to tempt me.

Age verification in the UK is a disaster. I predicted this in my column last weekend. But I’m nonetheless surprised by how badly it’s gone. Reddit is blocking subreddits on sexual assault and periods. Spotify is blocking access to a range of content unless you verify your age. Wikipedia is challenging the UK government in court. 

Predictably, the press and political response has been dreadful. The former are conflating porn sites and sites that “may contain pornographic content”. And Labour’s Peter Kyle suggested, in facile fashion, that every time an adult verifies their age, they are protecting a child. Meanwhile, teens are merrily installing VPNs and using Norman Reedus’s face to get around age checks.

A few months from now, everyone will act all shocked when teens are still accessing porn, British adults are blocked from an increasing amount of content, a massive data leak occurs with verification data that was supposed to be anonymous, and the entire UK is blocked from Wikipedia. Labour ministers will then be wheeled out to say on TV that’s a “small price to pay for protecting children”.

What if your cloud accounts were blocked, without warning? I asked this question on Bluesky and Mastodon after yet another report of a user’s Google account being abruptly shuttered for no obvious reason. The threads are well worth perusing for people’s thoughts and recommendations. I suspect even most folks with a robust backup system aren’t really thinking about what they’d do if Google, Apple, Microsoft or Dropbox banned them. 

Liquid Glass still sucks. I posted this shot of an unreadable iPad menu bar. Someone suggested app devs should update their UIs to make them work with Apple’s design, despite it being a moving target. I’d argue Apple should stop mucking around and just stick a solid colour behind the new menu bar.

I switched to DuckDuckGo on my iPhone and wrote about it for TapSmart. It’s been an interesting experiment. Notably, I haven’t switched back to Google yet.

Bring back Music Memos! OK, so that’s never going to happen, but my article outlines why I’d love to see its feature set integrated into other Apple apps.

There’s a new WALL-E and EVE Lego set. Lego is going to sell so many of these.

Commodore is back. Sort of. I wrote for Wired about the latest comeback from the once iconic brand, and the hurdles the new owner faces that could impede success. It’s also been interesting to compare Ultimate C64 presales and marketing to the ZX Spectrum Next. And to see ‘another Commodore’ appears ready to fight for rights to the brand.

Age verification arrived in the UK. I wrote about this for Stuff: I just proved I’m an adult online – and I’m torn about what that really means. I’m not against age verification in principle. But I question whether it will be effective and am against current implementations, which place onerous burdens on small companies and somehow manage to combine spotty coverage and massive overreach.

Think of the children has also extended to Itch.io delisting all NSFW games, as expertly covered by John Walker for Kotaku. Elsewhere, Labour is mulling legislation for screen time limits and curfews (Sky News). I’m so sick of this meddling from government. Screen time systems already exist. Parents just need to start using them. It whiffs of the same brain rot that’s behind school smartphone bans.

Speaking of Labour, it’s still anti-PR. In a disingenuous response shared on Bluesky, a Labour minister inferred we need FPTP for direct constituency links (some proportional representation systems retain this), and said the Liberal Democrats lost a referendum on scrapping FPTP. The latter is true. But what the minister didn’t mention is how neither Labour nor the Conservatives would budge on AV as the alternative to FPTP. The Libs then unwisely accepted AV as a grubby compromise. (AV is not PR – it’s a majoritarian system.) And then the Tories, the press and the Labour Party fought against change. What’s wild is Labour hasn’t shifted its position. Sure, in 2024 it won a huge majority on a low vote share. But that means others – Reform UK Party Ltd or the Tories – could pull the same trick next time, despite the UK more often than not placing the majority of its votes with relatively progressive parties. 

Fancy a 996 work week? Kate Knibbs writes for Wired about rich white folks in the US advocating people work 9am–9pm six days a week, because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates worked insane hours. Said rich white folks appear to forget that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates owned massive chunks of their respective companies and got extremely rich from their efforts. The average worker will not. Still, I suppose at least these people aren’t advocating a 996-hour work week. Although they probably would if science would permit.

It was a big week in retro-gaming. I wrote about the Amiga and Atari ST turning 40, not at all making fans angry with my best-games selections. Atari painted a 2600+ yellow for a Pac-Man edition. And Lego made a Game Boy.

Forever Notes is fantastic. I’ve been exploring this system for a while, making sense of my notes within Apple’s Notes app. I don’t use the full scope of Forever Notes, but outlined in this article how even the basics can be transformative.

Also on iPhone tips, I wrote about event planning apps, how to get started with Sketchbook and AI writing and research apps for iPhone.

Apple UI design is still terrible. I think I’m done with people making excuses for Liquid Glass. “It’s just a beta” does not excuse basic day-one design errors that would in my day have had my boss yelling at me to go away and do it properly. White text on white backgrounds. Black text on black backgrounds. Other UI that’s indecipherable. Tabs that look like there’s murk stuck behind them, or that flash light and dark as you scroll – to the degree I’m genuinely wondering if Apple’s flirting with photosensitive epilepsy accessibility problems.

Elsewhere, Apple is still obsessed with hiding UI; I agree with Eric Schwarz, who said: “I don’t want my browser to have less controls or usable navigation just so that we can see 1/8in more of a web page”. And I was happy to Jason Snell write that he keeps “noticing how terrible toolbars look in macOS Tahoe”. I’ve hated these since the first beta. The drop shadows make toolbar buttons the most visually prominent thing in the field of view. As with live refractions on tvOS controls, stuff like this makes a mockery of Apple’s argument these redesigns are about letting you focus on content. They distract from content. They make it harder to interact with content. Awful.

AI piracy slop hit a paywall. And then, as Clara Murray on Bluesky showed, it stopped ripping off an FT article and flipped to summarising the paywall text. Amazing. 

A big Carlos Ezquerra book is on the way. And I mean really big. He’s getting an Apex Edition that will include some of his greatest Dredd and Strontium Dog art. I own a few of these Apex Editions and they are gorgeous books. I don’t want to miss this one. But I’ve no idea where I’m going to store them all if too many more rock up.

My town’s schools just banned smartphones. I think that’s a bad idea. Which, as I’ve discovered this week, isn’t a popular take. But there’s too much blaming of tech itself rather than how it’s supplied, managed and used, and less attention paid to the benefits it can bring. The column looks at the practical ramifications of a ban, from personal security to e-waste. (Katie Spalding a while back expertly called parent pledges to ban phones themselves “abstinence only phone education”. Brilliant.)

The next ZX Spectrum will also be a Commodore 64. Seriously. Well, sort of. The third and final run of the ZX Spectrum Next, a super-Speccy that uses FPGA to ‘be’ any Sinclair machine, will now be able to become Commodore’s finest too. Which is deeply funny, because that’s basically a 1980s British playground argument in a box.

Another Sinclair wants to spark a gaming revolution. Sir Clive’s nephew launched featherweight handheld GamerCard. It’s a bizarre thing – ultra-skinny with weird controls. It’s hard to imagine how it’ll be when actually playing games – even Pico-8, for which its display is ideal. Still, it’s tempting, despite being painfully spendy.

Sony’s first portable console turned 25. No, not that one. I’m talking about the PS One, which I wrote about along with a handful of other interesting Sony console side-quest updates.

UK websites want to verify your age. The Verge reported Bluesky and Reddit are early out of the blocks. Brits on Bluesky lost their minds, apparently unaware that this isn’t about one or two sites – it’s all of them. And the system doesn’t scale, demanding account creation and age verification with each individual site, entrusting numerous third parties with your personal data. At some point, this will end in a massive data breach. I also imagine we’ll see many sites simply block UK traffic rather than deal with the hassle. And, no, “just use a VPN” is not the answer to tech overreach.

Today’s consoles are cheap. Seriously. Over at Stuff, I remark how the Neo Geo Super Pocket finally gives me the console I could never afford as a kid. The starting point for this column was remembering that my first true gaming love, the C64, cost 400 quid back in the early 1980s. That’s the equivalent of £1400 today. Blimey. Anyway, the new Super Pocket is fab – and at pocket-money prices. Grab one.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood is 40. Not the band, which formed in 1980, but the game. Rocking up just after the band’s peak, Ocean’s title – which gaming legend Julian Rignall reminisced about on Bluesky – could so easily have been a half-arsed piece of junk to satisfy a license. But creator Denton Designs went above and beyond, crafting a unique mix of adventuring, mini-games and strategy that was years ahead of its time, and still in many ways stands up today.

The basic premise finds you exploring nondescript terrace houses, looking for clues to solve puzzles. In an era of text adventures, this foreshadowed Lucasfilm point-and-click games. If you found a tape, you could insert it into a VHS deck and start a mini-game. There were ten in all. Some were topical, such as Reagan and Gorbachev spitting at each other in a surreal take on those old Wild West shooter games. Some were surreal. One was disarmingly beautiful. 

There was so much more too, from a murder mystery to solve to a cat to feed. The extreme to the mundane. All to create a game about a pop band. If nothing else, Frankie Goes To Hollywood – on the 8-bit platforms that had 64k or under to play with – serves as a fantastic reminder of the magic that can happen when dev teams go above and beyond. Watch a video of the C64 version.

Accessibility and Apple: dizziness edition. I’m still concerned about the dev betas and how they’ll be this September. So I wrote about it, outlining Apple’s approach to vestibular accessibility (better than most, but still falling short), and responded to the three types of feedback I usually receive for these posts.

Also, I still hate Liquid Glass. We’re weeks into beta season now, and to me it still looks like a knock-off Android skin. It’s the first Apple OS I vehemently dislike to the degree I don’t want to use it. But on the Android thing, a thought struck me. I have the Android 16 beta on my Pixel, and this is the first time I’ve found I like Android’s visual design a whole lot more than the iPhone’s, but also where I’ve been frustrated about shortcomings in the flexibility and customization of Android compared to iPhone. Notably (and I know Android folks may disagree), I much prefer iOS widgets. And Control Centre is still far ahead of Quick Settings. I’m not saying the two operating systems have ‘switched places’; but it is interesting that Apple is no longer the obvious leader in terms of design, and Android isn’t always out front regarding flexibility.

Want to write on an iPhone? Probably not. But it’s a device millions of people always have on them. So when inspiration does strike, use the tips in my updated writing toolkit.

Social media is a mess. So here are some of my favourite iPhone apps to help you consolidate social media and your wider reading.

Why is Mail still in the Dark Ages? This column looks at the current Apple operating system betas, does a happy dance in the direction of Phone and Messages triaging spam, and then asks why Mail is so pitiful at doing the same.

Dark Nebula joins my iPhone classics series. I always loved this game, which is like if Bounder and Marble Madness had a baby. I’d love to see an updated version of it and the sequel on Apple Arcade. HINT HINT ETC.

One device to rule them all‽ That’s the subject of my Stuff column this week: I’ve used Android 16’s desktop mode – and now I’m frustrated with my iPhone. I’ve written about ‘phones as desktops’ before, and it’s a subject that somehow manages to annoy just about everyone. But I really like the idea of a phone that can become your primary device, plugging into accessories as and when it’s necessary. But even if that doesn’t work for you, Google’s efforts with Samsung are important for at least two reasons. First, in baking a desktop mode directly into vanilla Android, devs will be encouraged to make apps that are more flexible, and they will thereby better support more varied devices, such as foldables. Secondly, maybe – just maybe – it might prompt Apple to bring its really rather good iPad windowing model to iPhone. Although I’ll be bloody amazed if that happens any time soon. Apple doesn’t want you buying fewer Apple devices, after all. The notion people could just buy one would give Apple’s entire finance team heart palpitations.

Need a widget wizard? Probably not, but if you use an iPhone or an iPad, app Widget Wizard might be worth a look. In my deep dive for TapSmart, I outline how I use the app myself. The agenda widget is especially handy.

Google search AI results continue to suck. I’d naively thought people would push back against this feature, after all the terrible press. But Google just manually weeds out the worst cases, which means millions and millions of slop answers are copied and pasted daily. I recently watched online as people started arguing about the specs of a device that had ostensibly received an update. In reality, it was a new model but had the same guts. Google AI didn’t know this, because it doesn’t ‘know’ anything and duly served up some hallucinations a fan of the brand pasted into a forum thread – and then doubled down on. Absurdly, this convinced a couple of people to spend actual money. I suspect they’re not going to be so thrilled when they find they own two devices with identical specs but slightly different shells. Sigh.

Em dashes aren’t evil. Over on Bluesky, Leena said she won’t change how she writes in case someone might doubt she’s human. Her thread adds that some GenAI tropes exist because the tech mimics good human writing. The thing is, editors are already getting twitchy. I’ve had two more or less ask me to omit em dashes from my own work, because they’re concerned about people claiming copy their orgs run may in any way be AI-generated. Thing is, at some point the tech bros will tweak the algorithm (“Use fewer em dashes!”) and then what? So to fight this stuff, we just have to be better. Which in the case of most GenAI writing means not sounding like mediocre marketing copy (or, for socials, not overusing bullet points and spraying emoji about like confetti).

I met a cow. It was a nice cow, in a place cows are not supposed to be. Top tip: if you meet a cow, be kind to the cow. Avoid the cow. Give the cow space. Don’t, say, like people I saw that day, almost sneak up on the cow from behind because you “like cows”. Doubly so when said cow has massive horns that might puncture human flesh. (That didn’t happen in this case. And the cow was shortly ‘rescued’ by local rangers and returned to her field. But good grief at some people.)