Apple
Thursday, February 13, 2025
This year’s iPhone lineup sounds like it is going to be the best one yet. It starts with the iPhone SE or what is now largely expect to be called the iPhone 16E. Apple announced that a new member of the family will be joining the fray next Wednesday and it is almost certainly the new ‘budget’ iPhone. I personally imagine that it will be quite a popular device. With upgrades having stalled, a more affordable device with Apple Intelligence, a modern design, a better display, and newer features like the action button and USB-C it’s likely to be a hit for folks still using models like the iPhone XR, iPhone 11, 2020 iPhone SE, and iPhone 12.
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Thursday, February 13, 2025
I’ve downloaded thousands of apps as an iOS aficionado since day one. But none have typically inspired me as much as the third-party social media clients that helped build the industry as we know it today. I’m talking about Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, Twittelator, Tweetie, Alien Blue, Apollo, Narwhal, Comet, among many others. These apps all found ways to offer unique experiences to users that improved upon the original product. In some of these cases, apps were acquired by the platform and twisted and reshaped into first-party clients like Tweetie and Alien Blue which became the X and Reddit apps we have today.
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Tuesday, February 11, 2025
It happened folks, Pixelmator is officially part of Apple. Pixelmator’s apps have been essential to me for more than a decade. I was both excited and mildly terrified by the announcement a few months ago that they were joining the fruit company. When Apple acquires beloved products, sometimes they make them even better and sometimes they don’t. They’ve generally been doing a great job though and I hope that Pixelmator and Photomator stick around as standalone products or are at least used as the foundations for even better new ones.
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Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Today the legendary development team at The Iconfactory finally released their long awaited feed reading app: Tapestry. I had regretted not contributing to the Kickstarter campaign, but man am I glad more than enough other folks did. Tapestry is a great app. It feels modern and new but has clear echoes of Twitterrific all throughout. Twitterrific was one of my all-time favorite apps. As someone obviously addicted to microblogging, my interest in these client apps stems way back to the earliest days of the App Store.
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Tuesday, February 4, 2025
The rumored Apple Invites app has arrived. While I obviously haven’t had much time to play with it, I have quickly browsed through the UI and wanted to share some observations. The last new Apple app, Apple Sports, already felt out of place in iOS 18. It has a more visionOS or watchOS-like design language utilizing colorful backgrounds, glassy floating UI elements, expanding buttons, and lots of layered shapes. Apple Invites takes it all even further.
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Monday, January 27, 2025
It’s lunch o’clock, so it’s time to finish this blog post. Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom when my teacher called me over to her desk to show me what I had been waiting for Apple to unveil: the iPad. There it was on the screen, the first photo I had seen of Apple’s tablet that had been long rumored and which at the time was traditionally referred to as a “slate.
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Sunday, January 26, 2025
Last week Perplexity launched their latest product: Perplexity Assistant for Android. I’ve been a big fan of Perplexity for a long time. Despite its often contentious relationship with publishers, they make a spectacularly good tool. I love them, if only for the fact that they’re the first search engine to give Google a run for its money in years. But this isn’t about the search engine game or the AI search race.
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Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Samsung held their annual Unpacked event today to formally take the wraps off of their next generation flagship phones. The Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, and Galaxy S25 Ultra are exactly what anyone who follows this industry expected. Minor hardware upgrades with a boatload of AI features that may or may not actually be useful. While these were the real entrée of today’s event, there was a fourth S25 model presented at the very end of the show.
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Sunday, January 19, 2025
It’s no secret that podcasts have become an increasingly popular medium over the past decade. However, many have also become more political and polarizing. Now, one may have expected this from business or news-focused shows, but this has also become an issue with Apple podcasts. To be clear, I am not talking about the Apple Podcast app but podcasts about Apple. And I am not limiting my use of the term “political” to consternation about the American government; I am also referring to the pessimism directed at new foundational technologies like artificial intelligence.
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Thursday, January 16, 2025
Around lunchtime on Tuesday, I heard that Apple had started to set up an elaborate Lumon office space inside Grand Central Terminal to promote the return of Severance. Thankfully, I don’t work too far from one of the largest train stations in the country, so I wandered over to see what they’d built. Upon arrival, I was immediately in awe of the Lumon computers and keyboards that us nerds have been drooling over ever since they first graced our screens a few years ago.
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Saturday, October 5, 2024
On October 5th 2011, I’d spent the day shadowing my older cousin at his high school. I remember talking with his friends at lunch about how amazing Siri looked on the iPhone 4s and getting home in the afternoon, absolutely exhausted by the prospect of high school. I really only remember this day as vividly as I do for one reason. Later that evening, I was watching tv when my iPhone buzzed.
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