The iPhone Air is imminent. If the rumours are right, the result is going to be an odd duck. I dig into that in my latest Stuff column, I want the iPhone 17 Air to slim down the iPhone – not dumb it down.

Secure your stuff! When it comes to iPhones and data, I outline how in the latest TapSmart toolkit. 

Wonderputt was great. And it’s now the latest entry in my long-running iPhone classics series. 

Liquid Glass is locked. We’re at dev beta 8 now with this year’s Apple operating systems, which means any changes from this point will be minimal. The visual design and UX still sucks, so much so that a print mag I occasionally write for has provided new guidelines for screenshots. Contributors must turn Reduce Transparency ON. Why? Because otherwise grabs wouldn’t be legible enough.

I’ve never seen this kind of direction before. Until now, every tech/Mac magazine I’ve written for demanded you shoot grabs with default settings. But we’re now at the point with Apple design where the default UI isn’t suitable for a long-running print publication unless a buried accessibility setting is activated. Good work, everyone! Everything is fine dot gif.

Google Pixel’s AI Zoom makes shit up. Shocker, eh? There’s a good piece about it from John Scalzi. All of which reminded me of a Stuff column I wrote in 2023: Samsung Space Zoom promised the moon but gave us an AI ‘fake’ – and I don’t care. The end bit seems rather chilling now:

In the future, everyone in a photo will smile, because that’s friendly, whether they were actually smiling or not. Litter will be eradicated and every street will be clean, unless you’re looking at the real street. You won’t be able to believe anything you see in any picture, but that’s OK, because by then the screens will be on your face. You’ll swim around in an unreality uncanny valley AR metaverse forever, while the real world is on fire. But at least the moon will look perfect.

Llamasoft is coming to Evercade. 27(!) games on a single cart. Really happy to see Jeff Minter getting some love, what with this and the Digital Eclipse effort. Great also that both of these products enable you to explore multiple versions of key Llamasoft games. What Jeff managed to get out of the humble VIC-20 is astonishing, and VIC Gridrunner is possibly still my favourite version (perhaps tied with the sadly long-gone iPad release).

Soundwave superior! For once, my Stuff column is a properly light-hearted one, rather than me griping about something. Well, apart from chastising teenage me for selling his toys, the massive idiot. Still, I get to revel in a chonky Transformers Soundwave that’s also a Lego set. YASSSSS.

Speaking of Lego, I updated Stuff’s guide to the best upcoming Lego sets and OH MY at that WALL-E and EVE kit.

The ZX Spectrum Next is a hit. There’s lots of bullshit rattling around in retro-gaming circles right now, with a certain ‘new’ company supposedly against toxic social media deciding to be toxic on social media about its rivals. Hmmm. By contrast, the ZX Spectrum Next mob all seem rather lovely about everything. And so it pleases me greatly that the third ‘issue’ of the new ZX Spectrum managed over 1,000% of its funding target, pulling in a whopping £2.6m. If this really is going to be the last ever official Next, that’s a pretty spectacular finale.

iOS 26. Bleh. I still can’t stand Liquid Glass (or, as of dev beta 6, Liquid Frosted Glass). I don’t understand what it’s for, in terms of user benefit. It just seems to be for Apple to say “hey, look at our flashy light refraction tech!” Fortunately, there are good bits in iOS 26, as outlined in my latest tips piece for Stuff.

Apps! I don’t write about apps as much as I used to (mostly because hardly any publications now want app coverage, alas), but the odd piece still rocks up. In fact, this past week, I wrote three. For Stuff, I added AudioKit Synth One J6 to the best free iPad/iPhone apps round-up, wrote a Photomator deep dive, and updated TapSmart’s best task manager apps for iPhone feature.

VPNs are bad! Apparently. In the non-shock of the week, the UK government is now mulling age-gating VPNs and arguing (wrongly) that individuals verifying keeps children safe and so people should stop using VPNs. 

Ultimately, Labour’s implementation of the Online Safety Act is starting the process of normalising mandated accounts tied to unthinking verification for any site that might have content that isn’t all suitable for children. Additionally, MPs are bigging up big UK drops in traffic to Pornhub as a victory, but with no context whatsoever. It may be people have moved to other sites, or users are now ‘invisible’. Vilifying a ‘good actor’ porn site also feels very right-wing USA…

Anyway, there’s a big Bluesky thread here that tries to unravel my response to various aspects of this. But first go and read Girl on the Net’s excellent Age verification: what’s the harm?

I hate school uniforms. Mini-G is heading to secondary in September and we’re now immersed in buying her extensive garb. It’s expensive. The number of mandated items is ludicrous. Most of them are single supplier, from a supplier that is woefully inconsistent in sizes – and that has stock issues with whatever mini-G needs. Helpfully, the school has noted it will be zero-tolerance on uniform infractions.

I’m so sick of this bullshit. There is no real evidence that uniforms are beneficial. Plenty of other European countries merely have school clobber guidance, and their kids do a lot better than Brits in school, in terms of academia and socialisation. Ultimately, our obsession with uniforms goes back to class and conformity, and it’s absurdly outdated. I’ve heard arguments it’s about ‘preparing’ children for work. But not that many companies mandate people wearing a suit these days. And I don’t see any benefit in an 11-year-old child wearing a fucking tie to school every day. Fume.

Apple finally destroyed Steve Jobs’s vision of the iPad. Good. That’s my thinking in my latest for WIRED, which explores how Cupertino has done the thing it swore it never would: turn its tablet into a full-blown window-wrangling, compromise-abandoning computer. Yes, it’s better, but lurking deep in the settings the ghost of Jobs remains.

I replaced my Mac with an iPad for an entire week. It went as well as you’d expect. This piece, also for WIRED, went all-in. I shut down my iMac and used an iPad running iPadOS 26 for a week to see if it could pass muster. And the article title? It’s probably a Rorschach test, because what happened during the week included plenty of surprises – not all of them bad.

What would you do if Google, Apple and Microsoft closed your cloud accounts without warning? My column for Stuff this week expands on my mulling over the point a couple of weeks back. In short, the cloud is great – until it isn’t. If big tech slams the door in your face, you can lose everything.

Apple’s new operating systems aren’t all bad. For TapSmart, I recommend 7 things to try first with iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.

What’s wrong with Apple? The company is insanely rich. Its hardware is phenomenally popular. And yet a prevailing narrative argues things are all going wrong. Again for TapSmart, I explore why.

I went to Iceland. First long trip in some time. Visited family. Saw some sights. Lots of time to just sit and watch the world go by, which I really needed. Naturally, I also shot dozens of photos. I’ll be sharing some of my favourites on Bluesky and Mastodon over the coming weeks. Iceland is such a beautiful country.

Google AI Mode arrived in the UK. I’m not a fan. My column for Stuff this week talks about why.

Stop-motion animation on a phone? In these days of AI prompts, putting in the effort to make animation might seem quaint – even foolhardy. But I’ve long thought it feels like magic that you can do this on a phone. I round up my favourite apps here. 

Your favourite companion! No, not the plastic and metal one. The furry one. Turns out the former can work for the latter though. Check out my pets toolkit for how. 

A playground fight within a single machine.That’s how I described the third issue of the ZX Next, which adds a C64 core. Now, the project is going a step further, chucking a CPC into the box as well – if the Kickstarter campaign hits £2.5 million. One week to go!

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.