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.
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.
What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa, which explores a new deal for developers, better software reliability, and harder paths to growth. It’s a great post, and the developer side of things especially gets me. I remember being at an EA meet around 2010, with a slew of indies excited about iPhone. They didn’t care about Apple’s cut, because everything else was, for them, better than what existed on other platforms, including the (relative) freedom to do whatever they wanted. Amazingly, Apple was less prescriptive than others in the gaming space. Then things all went very wrong.
Apple prioritised IAP over traditional game models, training users to want games for nothing. App Store editorial led to iPhone game sites shuttering – but they’d given new titles far more visibility than Apple ever would. And competitors quickly learned and evolved to compete with – and then better – Apple’s offering to game creators. Whereas we once saw iPhone-first titles head to other platforms, the reverse quickly became more commonplace. Elsewhere, major mobile creators like Simogo quit, which should have set alarm bells ringing – but it didn’t. Because Apple just counted the cash.
More widely, across apps and games, Apple has also found itself in a space where it’s not just showing – as Siracusa suggests – disrespect for developers as much as outright disdain. Various emails, now very much in the public domain due to emerging in lawsuits, suggest too many senior figures at Apple believe their own press to the degree they think Apple is responsible for all developer success and the success of the platform as a whole. They argue developers should be grateful to Apple and not the other way around. I have two words to counter that: Windows Phone.
I hate doing a “what would Steve Jobs do?” and it’s naive in the extreme to think his Apple wasn’t out to make huge piles of cash. But there are questions today about where Apple’s priorities lie in a whole range of spaces. Perhaps, as one developer said to me, the Jobs version of Apple only appeared to be on the side of devs because it needed to be, and now it doesn’t. So was this disdain always there or not? Was it a culture ingrained in Apple when Jobs was CEO or is it a more recent thing? Because I’d say that if it’s the former, Apple has an even bigger problem than Siracusa suggests.
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.
Rich white men feel they should have everything instantly. That now increasingly extends to skills. But also, they don’t know what good looks like. Hence the current mess we are seeing with GenAI. Worse, everyone – from managers to consumers – is now being taught the same thing.
I see an increasing number of people saying that they want to paint/write/make songs and that it’s unfair that they can’t, and GenAI is the solution. Or hear about organisations claiming they can automate such tasks to the level they no longer need creative people at all. But GenAI tools are rarely sufficient. At least, if you want good. Which requires you to be able to recognise good.
For people who want to be creative, GenAI generates a finished article for them, based on a vague idea. There’s none of ‘you’ in there. In corporate scenarios, the lack of precision, specificity and accuracy from GenAI ultimately leads to some level of slop. In either case, the result is further erosion of the creative industries to make a handful of rich white guys richer through enabling people to think they can be Picasso or Shakespeare from merely typing in a line of text. What you’re really getting is another anodyne ‘median’ remix of what’s already out there.
Just like any other type of skill, creativity is not innate. I’ve lost count of how many people in the past have inferred that people are just born artists or musicians or writers. You don’t get people saying someone was born an electrician or a scientist or a footballer. In my case, I certainly wasn’t born a writer or a musician. I got to the point I’m now at because I’ve been writing professionally for 25 years – and writing songs for even longer.
Whatever skills I do have in these fields are also the result of thousands of hours of experiments and failures and building on successes. There was no shortcut. Notably, I also, as a kid, was good at art. Today? I’m OK. I can draw quite well. Am I ‘entitled’ to more? No. I never kept at it. Increasingly, though, tech bros would argue there’s no need to keep at it because you don’t even need to start. You just need a GenAI service and a prompt and you’re good to go, ready to turn even the vaguest creative impulse into the finished article in an instant.
I’m not sure where this is leading us, but I’m certain it’s not anywhere good.
This post is based on a post originally published on Bluesky and Mastodon.
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’.
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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.
