Design is how it works. Liquid Glass doesn’t. At least, that’s the broad consensus in my latest for Wired, Liquid Glass Could Be One of Apple’s Most Divisive System Designs Yet, which includes comments from several app creators and designers.

Elsewhere, I’m seeing plenty more confirming people aren’t impressed with Apple’s latest. Matt Hill’s comments in the first link of those three are especially illuminating, because he switched to Mac in part because of its consistent design language, which Apple is busy atomising. 

Ads are everywhere – and now coming to $2,000 fridges. Good job, Samsung! I’m sure everyone wanted their expensive cooling box to feel as premium as a Kindle With Ads. I bellyache about this trend for Stuff.

I did a podcast. Marketplace Tech asked me to chat about how the new iPadOS brings Apple’s tablet greater flexibility but also kills off Steve Jobs’s original vision for the device. Hopefully I don’t sound too bonkers. 

The camera plateau isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. My column for TapSmart looks into Apple’s ‘rebrand’ of an unfortunate hardware bump, digging into why the bump itself actually a good thing.

The iPhone Air is Apple’s future, hidden in plain sight. Another TapSmart column, this time looking at the ‘compromise iPhone’ and reasons why it might exist beyond being a new shiny shiny to distract people bored with more of the same.

Speaking of, I did a search of local Apple Stores yesterday. This was launch day. I could get an iPhone Air basically anywhere. Most iPhone Pro models too. The iPhone 17? Nope. Curious.

Need a good clock app? Here are some good clock apps for iPhone.

The NES did not save video games. I don’t recall what triggered my grumping online about the ‘video game crash’ and the NES sailing to the rescue. Probably yet another misinformed YouTuber stating this as a global fact. It’s bollocks. And it’s especially irksome when British YouTubers – or the BBC – parrot this line. Doubly so for the BBC, which had its own platform at the time.

I should probably write my own take on this topic at some point, but TL;DR is that even in the US things were more complicated than Atari ET game > things go splat > NES is here > hurrah! In the UK and elsewhere, it’s revisionist nonsense. European markets, for example, were in rude health during the entire 1980s – and the NES was barely a blip on the radar there until the very end of the decade.

Pac-Man is gone from the App Store. And Google Play. This isn’t breaking news – it happened a few months back. I find this wild. I can only assume it wasn’t pulling in enough money for Bandai Namco to bother continuing to support it. But this is also why I’m often all HARD STARE at corporations bellyaching about the evils of retro game emulation. 

I mean, I get it for Switch. When games are being sold right now in stores, it’s not a good thing when emulators are inviting folks to pirate everything. But for products that are decades old? And where companies very specifically have never provided a route to legal ownership in a manner that lets you play the games how you wish? Do better, games industry! (And, yes, I know this won’t happen. Digital music being ‘freed’ from any specific platform wasn’t a lesson learnt in favour of consumer freedom. Corporations decided: we will never let that happen again.)

Alex Andreou wrote about flags. Specifically how they are being weaponised in the UK right now and making immigrants feel unwelcome and unsafe. (My county council seems completely uninterested in taking down the ones across our local area. Some of them are massive too. I suspect when one of the bigger ones comes loose and causes a pile-up, said council might think again.)

Carrot Weather has added a musical. It’s about the Carrot AI’s attempts to overthrow her maker – and the world. Which is… quite something. (And also mildly terrifying, if catchy.)

Lego is releasing a gingerbread AT-AT. That’s it. That’s the piece.

Sometimes, I think I’m going a bit mad. I’ll hear something so often that I start to doubt my own memory, before I realise that, no, I was there at the time. I’m talking about the video game crash.

You’ve probably heard about it. In the 1980s, the industry imploded, and then the NES came to its rescue. After that point, it was all sunshine and roses. Oh, and something something ET for the Atari 2600.

The tiny snag is this is an abbreviated, regional, biased take at best – revisionist bullshit that has permeated the entire internet to become a kind of approved truth. And it’s not just American YouTubers – I’ll often hear British games channels wittering on about how fortunate we are that the NES rescued an industry that was otherwise effectively dead.

Again, I was there at the time. The industry in Europe was a mess – so many platforms – and yet in rude health. And that became increasingly so as we headed to the middle of the decade and beyond. Amazing programmers were performing small miracles on ludicrously underpowered hardware, increasingly trying to one-up each other. The richness of options was insane.

Yet there was barely a NES in sight. I knew precisely one person who owned one. The NES didn’t really register in the UK until the popular 8-bit machines – the ZX Spectrum, the C64, the CPC – were breathing their last. By then, the notion of the NES as an industry ‘saviour’ was absurd, because in the UK and many other countries, gaming never needed saving in the first place.

Craig Federighi:

And if you look at the window title bar, you’ll see how the use of translucent material gives you a sense of place as you scroll your content. 

Now, these same carefully crafted translucent materials are used in the sidebars. So now, your windows take on the personality of your desktop. As you change your desktop picture, your window adapts to reflect that personality and that temperature.

And that translucency helps retain a sense of depth and place as you move your windows over one another.

The above is not a quote about Liquid Glass. This is Apple’s VP talking about OS X Yosemite, way back at WWDC 2014. 

It’s curious to see the similarities to what Apple unleashed last week. Honestly, though, these were the design aspects of Yosemite that I least liked at the time, and they aren’t things I’ve grown any fonder of over the years – especially on the Mac.

It is notable, however, that Federighi uses the term “carefully crafted”. And the translucency was relatively subtle in Yosemite. For me, much of the problem with Liquid Glass stems from how overbearing it is: as I said in my piece for WIRED, rather than helping you focus your attention on what you’re doing, it demands attention for itself.

The iPhone Air reveal was a load of hot air. That’s the central premise of my column for Stuff, which explores what Apple said and what it delivered. Now, it’s not like Apple isn’t prone to hyperbole. Yet for this phone, the gap between spin and reality was greater than we’ve seen in a long time. And of all the compromises Apple made that I mention in the piece (and there are many), I didn’t even mention that the Air has a single speaker, like a budget Android blower from five years ago. I regret the omission. (Apple probably doesn’t, given that it wasn’t even mentioned during the launch keynote.)

The iPhone 17, however, is boring. Yet in another column, I argue why I reckon it’s the best option for most people this year – and (surprisingly) even closer to the iPhone Pro than ever.

The iPhone 16 cannot be upgraded. Which is quite funny. Last year, Apple provided a couple of storage upgrades for the 15. But if it had done the same today, potential buyers would end up with the option of a 256GB iPhone 16 or a 256GB iPhone 17 for the same price. It’s strange. Last year, the 16 seemed like solid value. Now, 12 months later, it’s not worth considering.

Spotify Lossless hi-fi audio won’t cost extra. Good. That’s the only way I’d ever use it. I outline why over at Stuff, in a column guaranteed to eject me from Spotify’s Christmas card list – and that of those types of audiophiles.

Replacing your Mac with an iPad? I did that. And, last week, I chatted about it for Marketplace Tech.

iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 are out on Monday. My sympathies to anyone who has to use them. But if you do, here are some tips to make the best of them.

Love books? Can’t remember what you own or have read? Then you need Book Tracker, a top-notch app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. I dig into its excellent feature set for TapSmart.

The UK government is looking to expand the Online Safety Act. Because of course it is. Again, it’s hard to argue against the premise. Of course no one wants vulnerable people to be able to access content that encourages self-harm. But there is no magic wand that will make all this go away. Although Labour appears to think one exists, by saying it is “compelling platforms to use cutting-edge technology to actively seek out and eliminate this content before it can reach users and cause irreparable harm, rather than simply reacting after someone has already been exposed to it”. So it was never about porn. It was never about children. And I do wonder what will be next on the list.

Apple Music can’t get any worse, right? Wrong. [Edit: I’m told this isn’t new. I hadn’t noticed because I use Reduce Motion. But still… yikes.]

I never liked OutRun much. Sorry. I thought it was a quite clunky racing game, despite the lovely visuals and excellent music. The sequel, however, remains my favourite racing game ever. If anything might change my mind about the original, it’s people doing amazing things with the concept, squeezing it into places it shouldn’t go, such as a C64 PETSCII version and this amazing fan effort for the Game Boy Color. Do-do do-do-do-do do-do-dooooooo!

Subscribe to Design Thinking. It’s an ace comic strip about being in the world of design. But when the creator asked if maybe people might chuck him some cash over Ko-Fi, he lost subscribers. Too many people are entitled. If you’re not one of them, please show this cartoonist some love.

My camera is an iPhone. It has been for years. And so with new iPhones – with new camera systems – arriving early next week, I decided to explore what was coming next in my Stuff column, ‘Zoom and gloom: The iPhone 17 Pro camera rumours I love – and hate’.

Longplay is great. If you have an iPhone, iPad or Mac and a love of the album as a distinct musical unit (vs having Spotify or Apple Music turn your entire music collection into a massive jukebox), it’s a must. Over at TapSmart, I outline why I think Longplay is the best music app for iPhone.

Two-factor authentication is a must. Increasingly so. Which is why I dug into my favourite 2FA apps for iPhone.

Mac devs are revolting. In the sense that they’re pissed off at Apple. Marco Arment argues Apple’s attempts to harmonise its operating systems “solve a problem no Mac users had”. Craig Hockenberry fumes that one size does not fit all in a blog post that dismantles Apple’s current Mac approach. They’re not alone, and I wonder if the real fallout of the ‘26’ operating systems won’t be so much Liquid Glass, but Apple finally breaking long-term, vocal, important Mac advocates to the degree they just don’t care anymore.

Mac apps no longer feel native. That’s the startling conclusion from Steve Troughton-Smith. And it’s hard to disagree. Things were already quite bad. But macOS 26 makes everything significantly worse with interface design forced on it from mobile platforms. By contrast, although the UI design for iPadOS 26 is poor as well, the functionality improvements from the new windowing system – which I wrote about for WIRED – tip things to positive on Apple tablets.

macOS 26 creates a squircle jail. I remember when Android started experimenting with round icons and shoved existing ones inside of a circle. It looked crap. But, hey, Android! Today, though, Android looks (and often works) better than the upcoming iOS 26, and macOS is now busy forcing distinct icon shapes into identical squircles. The arrogance is breathtaking, as is the total lack of respect for app creators. Bizarrely, some of Apple’s own apps are caught in the mess, although I assume that will be fixed next week. Unlike, you know, the rest of the utter disaster that is Liquid Glass and Apple’s botched UI and UX ‘harmonisation’ of its operating systems.