Parakeet has long been a fan favorite local transcription model in Quick Subtitles. Apple's is slower and not as accurate, while Whisper is a little bit more accurate, but is way slower. With the combination of high accuracy and massively better speed, why go with anything else, right? Well, what if we could take Parakeet's already outstanding performance and accuracy, and make it faster? A lot faster… **TLDR: I've multi-threaded Parakeet in the** Quick Subtitles CLI**so it runs about 3x as fast as before, and is available now.** The main app will get this in a few weeks, and is currently available in beta for More Birchtree subscribers. ## The results I threw the model at the latest episode of Comfort Zone, which is 102 minutes long. Using the updated version of the CLI transcribed it in 12 seconds on the M4 Pro and 8 seconds on the M6. Eight. Seconds. These numbers are clearly outrageous, so how did we get here? ## Transcription is single-threaded I was doing some investigation into how the three transcription models I use scale. It turns out Apple's model does almost all of its work on the CPU and will utilize one performance core. Parakeet behaves very similarly, also limiting itself to whatever your fastest core can do. Whisper is a bit different, doing almost all of its work on the neural engine. This is shown in the chart above, which shows power consumption over a run of transcriptions using each model. In terms of opportunity to speed things up, I only had options on one of these. Apple doesn't allow developers to choose how many cores their transcription model runs on, so there's nothing I can do there. Whisper is powered mostly by the neural engine, which is already multi-threaded and is doing all it can. See below for what happens to transcription speed when on the Mac you force Parakeet and Whisper to run only on an efficiency core. Parakeet is mostly powered by the CPU, though, so if I could get that running on multiple cores, we might see better speeds. I dug deeper into how Parakeet works (via FluidAudio), and actually, it's already cutting up files into 15-second chunks and transcribing each chunk sequentially. By assigning each chunk to a different core, I'm able to get through the file quicker. However, as it goes with computers, once you unlock one bottleneck, the next one appears, and that's the neural engine. While the neural engine is not the main contributor in this process, it is part of the process, and I found in my testing that once you get past 4 cores giving data to the neural engine, it can't keep up and you stop getting meaningful benefits after that. What’s interesting is that I do my development on an M4 Pro Mac and I know the M6 has a new neural engine with twice as many cores, so I wondered if this would be improved on that device. I did the exact same test and surprisingly the answer is no. Here are the performance numbers when using 1-8 cores on each device. Improvements decrease with each new core, and once you get to 4 cores, you're basically capped out, as the CPU simply builds up a queue elsewhere in the system, which as far as I can tell can not presently be increased. Although let's put this into perspective, on a base M6 processor, we're transcribing up to 12 minutes of audio per second…that's pretty damn good. ## Availability I've done quite a bit of A/B testing and the results are exactly the same, so going forward, this is just how Parakeet will work in Quick Subtitles. There's no need to select a "Turbo" option, it'll just be the fastest damn version of Parakeet you can get anywhere. It is available now in the Quick Subs CLI which you can install with… brew install mattbirchler/tap/quicksubs …or by upgrading if you already have it. Those using the app will get this in the next update, which is coming in the next few weeks.

Justine Calma: Trump finalizes rule to make cars less fuel efficient > The US Department of Transportation finalized its plans today to weaken fuel efficiency standards, calling it “among the largest deregulatory actions under the second Trump Administration.” I just think there's something wild about Republicans in the US constantly advocating for things to get objectively worse. You want cheaper, cleaner energy? Nah, let's boost dirty, expensive energy production! You want better gas milage in your car? Nah, let's make sure car makers can make it worse. The vast majority of people want more restrictions on data centers? Nope, how about we make it easier for them to be built where people don't want them and also ensure they can be as dirty as possible.

Brent Simmons: That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI > Users have shown — again, I don’t need to prove this — that they don’t think about a stock Mac app vs. custom. Do they dislike Things for not having a toolbar at the top of the window that they can customize in the usual way? No. (The only people who think that way are longtime Mac developers like me.)

Birchfeed allows you to set up an email address to receive newsletters which appear as feeds in the app. However, some people (including me) would actually like to see these in their email inbox as well. Now you can enable this in the Newsletters settings in the app. For spam reasons, you can't just forward these emails anywhere, so they go to your account's email by default, and you can change it to something else, but you need to verify ownership of that email as well.

Birchfeed is fundamentally a backend service that you will mostly use through a third-party client, such as Unread, Reader Classic, or NetNewswire. I always want that primary use case to be really solid, and I think it is right now. However, one of the reasons I wanted to build an RSS sync service was that I thought there was more I could do to help people have a better experience. Since launch, the most popular feature outside of the core sync functionality has been the daily briefing, which most users have enabled. This sends you a daily email with the most notable stories across your feeds, as well as a few highlights I think are worth checking out. Maybe you don't have time to go through the hundreds of posts that have come in today, but you can see the big headlines in 15 seconds. ## Catch up Today, I've launched a new feature aimed at getting you caught up, which is called "catch up". This will appear when you have over 100 unread items, and it will try to find stories and individual articles that stand out from everything else and presents it in a landing page format. If Reddit's old slogan was "the front page of the internet", Birchfeed's can be "**your** front page of the internet". ## How it technically works Similar to yesterday's update to Best-o-Masto, this uses Jev to rank the interest of hundreds of recent articles. Then GPT-6 Luna groups them and writes quick summaries. ## Availability The catch-up feature is available for all users on a free trial or paid subscription. For now, I'm limiting this feature to two runs every 24 hours while I monitor costs, and will loosen it up if it makes sense to.

Lex Friedman: The App Store review process needs fixing > Every single app and app update released in the App Store goes through this review process, and the review process is largely a black box. Developers submit, and then wait. They are given no specific timeline or indication of how long the review will take, and it’s inconsistent. Some reviews happen in hours. Some take days. When you’re rejected, you can reply to Apple, make fixes and resubmit, or appeal — and whichever path you pick, you’re waiting again, with no specific timelines provided from Apple. The unpredictability of app review is definitely one of the core annoyances with it. I never know how long a review is going to take. Sometimes it's a couple hours, sometimes it's a couple weeks. Sometimes an app will be stuck in review for several days, and I wonder if something's gone wrong or if it's just taking a long time or if the reviewer has simply forgotten to drag their ticket to done yet. It's impossible to tell. The one thing you're definitely feeling is that no matter how long it's stuck in there, you don't necessarily want to cancel it and start over because you might have to go through this whole wait again.

Cory Dransfeldt: Become worthless (to tech companies) > I'm not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for is that, given the opportunity, you try and reduce the value they can extract from you. That's very often your data, but it can also be a direct financial relationship. Be the guy who only buys the loss-leaders.

As of today, you nerds who like to read later can do so from your terminal with the Quick Reads CLI. Install it with: brew install mattbirchler/tap/quickreads And from then on, it will update with `brew upgrade` like everything else. ## Okay, what does it do? It does a lot, actually. When you run it, it opens straight to your reading queue, just like the app and the web do. You can read whatever you want. You can add highlights. You'll see highlights already added. You can look at your to-do list and archive. You can search across your entire account. Most of the things you can do on the app/web are here. ## But why? I don't pretend to think that this will be the most common way people interact with Quick Reads. Clearly not. However, there are times where it is useful to have a command line interface. Quick Reads aims to be the most flexible and developer-friendly read-later service out there, and that means meeting people where they are, even if they're in a niche. With this update, you are able to interact with the service through the iOS app, on the web via Apple Shortcuts, directly with a fully functional API, an MCP server, or now, a CLI. That's something simply nobody else in this space can match.

Best-o-Masto is my website for finding the best stuff from your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds quickly. It's not an algorithmic feed like you'd see on something like X or Threads. It's a very simple thing that finds the post getting the most engagement in your feed and serves those first. The iOS app has had a feature since launch called "hidden gems", and the idea of Hidden Gems is that not all of the posts you might want to see are going to get the most boosts and favorites. Hidden Gems attempts to surface these interesting posts that maybe didn't get as many engagements, but you still probably want to see. That feature has been powered by Gemini since launch, and it works fine, but it's slow and costs real money to run. As such, I've always made it available exclusively as a bring your own API key situation rather than something just built into the app. But recently, a new model came out called Jev, which is not a language model – it's effectively a decision engine which can (relatively) intelligently classify things for you. It's also incredibly fast and incredibly cheap. The metrics vary by what exactly you're doing, but we're talking in the order of being 200x faster and 400x cheaper in some cases. Of note, this feature is completely opt-in for users, so if you have no interest in this sort of feature, just don't use it. The feature is in beta as I monitor costs/reliability. ## How it actually works This might be interesting because it is different from other LLMs. In a way, integrating to a large language model is the simplest API you've ever used because you just kind of toss in whatever text you want and it figures it out, giving you text back. We're about to get into the weeds, but I think showing actual code is going to be helpful here to understand how this works. Using some completely made up posts, here's an example of what the request looks like when I look for hidden gems. { "model": "typesafe/jev-1.13", "state": "POST 1\nFinally finished the quilt I started in 2019. Four moves and one pandemic later.\n[2 images, alt: A blue and white patchwork quilt draped over a chair]\n\nPOST 2\ngood morning everyone", "questions": { "p1": { "type": "score", "instructions": "Consider POST 1 only. How interesting would this social media post be to a reader who follows the author, ignoring how popular it is?", "criteria": [ "Mundane, low-effort, a bare link, a greeting, or a reply that needs missing context", "Mildly interesting but forgettable", "Worth reading: a good joke, real insight, personal story, life event, or creative work", "A standout the reader would be sorry to have missed" ] }, "p2": { "type": "score", "instructions": "Consider POST 2 only. How interesting would this social media post be to a reader who follows the author, ignoring how popular it is?", "criteria": [ "Mundane, low-effort, a bare link, a greeting, or a reply that needs missing context", "Mildly interesting but forgettable", "Worth reading: a good joke, real insight, personal story, life event, or creative work", "A standout the reader would be sorry to have missed" ] } }, "provider": { "data_collection": "deny", "zdr": true } } This sample only sends two posts, but in reality I pass in the text of several hundred posts in the `state` variable, then I pass questions where it looks at specific posts in the `state`, and it determines a score for each one. Each post can get a score from 0-3, with 3 being the most likely hidden gem. Because Jev is not a language model, it doesn't generate text in its response. All it does is take a look at the `state`, the `instructions`, and decides which `criteria` it meets. It does that across every single question provided. Here's an example response: { "model": "typesafe/jev-1.13-20260917", "answers": { "p1": { "type": "score", "score": 2, "legend": { "0": "Mundane, low-effort, a bare link, a greeting, or a reply that needs missing context", "1": "Mildly interesting but forgettable", "2": "Worth reading: a good joke, real insight, personal story, life event, or creative work", "3": "A standout the reader would be sorry to have missed" }, "probabilities": { "0": 0, "1": 0.01, "2": 0.98, "3": 0.01 }, "confidence": 0.98 }, "p2": { "type": "score", "score": 0, "legend": { "...same four lines..." }, "probabilities": { "0": 1, "1": 0, "2": 0, "3": 0 }, "confidence": 1 } }, "usage": { "input_tokens": 555, "output_tokens": 32, "cost": 0.00002331 }, "id": "gen-dec-1790707300-J2N6sJCCxL9IWgYlVnr5", "provider": "TypeSafe" } Here in the response, we can see that each question was scored. The first was scored a two, the second scored zero. You can also see that there are probabilities assigned to each score, giving you an idea for what the odds are it falls into each category. There's also a confidence score of how confident it is in its assessment. Both of these were pretty straightforward, but as you get more complex content, the answers may be a bit fuzzier. As a developer, the next step is pretty darn easy. Now I have a list of posts with scores attached to them, and I can just sort from biggest to smallest, displaying the 3s, then the 2s, and the 1s. The idea of this product is not to show you every single post in your feed, so it cuts off after the first 15. ## Future Plans I've always really enjoyed the feature in concept on iOS, although I've always felt a little bit disappointed by it in execution, largely because I require users to bring their own API key since I'm not able to absorb the costs, and it's just fundamentally slow because you're passing a lot of information into a language model and waiting for it to generate a full response with the post IDs it thinks are interesting. This has led to me personally not using this feature much. This new implementation is really interesting because the results seem quite good in my testing so far, the performance is radically better, and the cost is seemingly negligible. I'll be closely monitoring my spending to make sure it doesn't get out of control, but it looks like this is something I can just offer for free on the web. If it stays okay, it'll be something I bring to the iOS app as well.

Nonogame has become my obsession lately, and I'm happy to see hundreds of people coming back daily to play it. If you haven't checked it out yet, I hope you do. And even if you have and bounced off, I think there's a few things changed since the initial launch you might enjoy. * The iOS app is out of beta and widely available on the App Store. The TestFlight is still around if you want to get new features early. * The website behaves more like an app than it used to and does a better job of scaling to small and large displays. * The UI generally has been improved to be more satisfying when filling in puzzles. * There is a new "Lightbox" theme option (previewed above). * 150 collections have been added, and the collections page lets you more easily filter for exactly the sort of puzzles you want to play right now. * Collections now also let you try to improve your time and will automatically suggest previously completed collections we think you can do better at. I'm actually really proud of this feature, as it takes into account average completion times across the whole user base, as well as how you tend to do on this sort of puzzle. * Brain teasers have gotten a much better landing page, showing you not just your result and ranking amongst your friends, but also how you compare to everyone else across the platform. * Endless mode is now more random. Previously, there was a consistent pattern of bouncing between small, medium, and large puzzles, which has since been improved. * 116 achievements have been added. As always, free users can play the 3 daily games as well as the 2 brain teasers per week, and paid users get access to 362 collections and literally endless puzzles with endless mode. I hope you try it out!

We live in a world where sometimes you'll see an old app get revitalized, but it's not from the same people who made the original, and other times it's not even authorized. It's just picking up on nostalgia and hoping to make a quick buck. That does not at all appear to be what AppZapper 3000 is, but it is why it took me a while to write about it. This app is unbelievably rad and goes way harder than it needs to, which is kind of the point. You should just try it out for yourself with its free trial, but I also made a quick video demo showing it in action.

Brandon Vigliarolo: iPhone 18 Pro benchmark boosted by giving it a cold drink > To make a long story short, a cold can of La Croix (in Birchler’s case – the cooling potential of an aluminum can isn’t limited to name-brand sparkling “naturally essenced” water) takes an already beefy device to new levels of sustained performance by helping it shed heat and avoid thermal throttling. Shout out to The Register for linking to my weird benchmark.

Riley Hill: Galaxy Z Fold 8 Review: Worth Buying in Years > As for the crease, it’s not something you see when looking at the larger display head-on. Tilt the phone slightly off-angle, and you see it. It’s minimal, but it’s there. Not a big deal. The only slight annoyance with the crease is that you still feel it when performing swipe gestures. It ever so slightly detracts from the device’s premium feel, but I don’t want to overstate this; it’s a very minor thing. I really think a lot of iPhone owners are about to learn how a minor crease is not a big deal, and the "Apple will never ship a phone with a noticeable crease" folks will realize that a minor crease isn't a huge deal (even if it would be nice to totally eliminate one day).

I've had two incidents in the past weekend that proved to me that my iPhone was listening. We were visiting a friend out of state, and we were talking about all sorts of things we don't generally discuss, but based on what I'm seeing on my phone, it's pretty clear that my phone is listening and serving up content based on what we say. The first incident was on Friday, where our friend revealed that they never create accounts online. They have a couple accounts that they absolutely must have, but in general they won't use something unless they can do it without creating one. Not an hour later, I have this email from Railway that talks about how I can now create a new VM without creating an account. Crazy right!? And not only did it come to my email, but they wrote up a public blog post about it, emailed all their customers, and implemented it just because we were talking about it. The second event was just a day later and it was just as shocking. We wanted to go to breakfast and there was this place called Honey Bees, which they liked, but warned us that if the owner was there, they were going to make bee puns. It was a 20-minute drive or so, and we spent the whole drive making stupid bee puns and talking about bees in general. After we got home from breakfast, it was time for us to drive back home. So we packed up, got in the car, and I was excited to see a new episode of We Have Concerns had dropped into my podcast queue. Okay, this is just getting spooky. We never talk about bees. And yet, as soon as we did, suddenly there's a bee-focused podcast in my player. If you think this is a coincidence, then I don't know what to tell you: you're a sheep. * * * Of course, I don't think I fooled anyone with this post. No one actually thinks that my phone was listening to me, and therefore a marketing newsletter went out or a podcast episode that was recorded months ago was released just because me and my friends were talking about these things. However, these are exactly the sort of coincidences that people bring up all the time when talking about proof that everyone is listening to you through your phone. Genuinely, if these had been in any form of advertisement or promoted content in a social feed, there are millions of people who would immediately clock it as undeniable proof that their phone is listening and you'd be a rube if you denied their experience. How could you look at this clear cause and effect and come to any other conclusion? I'm writing this post not to present any definitive evidence that your phone is or is not listening to you – I'm not going to convince anyone today. I'm writing it simply to show that coincidences happen, correlation does not equal causation, and science is not anecdotal. If you're going to convince people that your phone is really listening to you and sharing every word you say with advertisers across the world, you need to do better than, "oh, there was this coincidence."

I'm sure someone likes this "ask Siri about active window" shortcut, but I hate it, and it conflicts with the default 1Password quick access shortcut. Thankfully, it can be disabled by going to: 1. System Settings 2. Keyboard 3. Keyboard Shortcuts 4. Screenshots If you use an alternate screenshotting tool like CleanShot, you may have been here before, so just remove that last one and you'll never see it again. * * * _Programming note: I normally don't do these sorts of SEO-bait "how to" posts, but I hate this one so much that I'll break that rule this time._

For the past four years, I have maintained that AirPods Pro 2 are the best AirPods ever made. They had great noise cancellation, all the stem controls I could ever want, good battery life, and while I didn't personally prefer in-ear earbuds, they were comfortable enough. I love these things. This is why last year's AirPods Pro 3 were such a disappointment to me, because I felt they were worse than what I had previously in every single way. The core thing for me was that they did not fit well in my ears, and after several months of trying different tips, both from Apple and third parties, I couldn't get anything that really worked for me. I've actually been using AirPods 4 since last December as my day-to-day AirPods and have been quite happy with them. However, they were not perfect and had a few gaps that I missed from the Pro line. Last week, Apple released AirPods 5, which had a couple enhancements over what I've been using, and I gotta be honest, I think these are my new favorite AirPods of any kind. More critically than anything, these AirPods fit great in my ears. I've always had great luck with Apple's EarPods and then AirPods, and whatever 10,000 ears they're measuring when they shape these, those are good ears in my book because every single one for the past 25 years has fit great. Even with the AirPods Pro 2, which fit pretty well, they would still work their way out of my ears after wearing them for a while, and they would really start to lose their place in wet conditions when working out. This either meant when I was working up a lot of big sweat or when it was raining outside. They would genuinely just slide out almost immediately. That's not a problem at all with normal AirPods. Apple's also improved the stems on these new AirPods to support volume control by sliding up and down. This was the one thing I really missed from the AirPods Pro, and I'm really glad it's here in these as well. I very much appreciate that Apple has improved the water resistance in these, matching the AirPods Pro 3 and actually surpassing that of the AirPods Pro 2. They've also improved the battery life, so I can use these for five hours straight compared to four hours with the last AirPods 4, and is nearly caught up to the six hours they advertise for the AirPods Pro 2. And all of this comes with the smaller charging case, which I have come to really love compared to the AirPods Pro case, which is still very small in the grand scheme of things, but is definitely more robust, and the normal AirPods case just fits more places more comfortably. Yes, the AirPods Pro 3 still win on paper in some ways, but for me, I'm incredibly smitten with the AirPods 5 and I'm really impressed with them. * * * P.S. You can reference my review of the AirPods Pro last year to know that I'm not someone who just glazes whatever is new from Apple and rehashes the spec sheet to you.

Michael Cripe: Resident Evil Defies Expectations as Zach Cregger Adaptation Collects $108 Million Globally After First Weekend in Theaters > It's a franchise-best opening for the horror-comedy hybrid that saw it bring in $60 million domestically and $48.3 million internationally. That's a good hunk of change more than even some healthy projections, which had most expecting a $40-$50 million domestic opening for Resident Evil. 2026 has been nothing if not a showcase after showcase of how angry (typically) right wing influencers and their social media lackeys are living in their own reality where they’re mad about things no one else is.

I put together as much of Apple's iPhone Duo documentation as I could into a skill that I'm using to audit my apps for the new layouts and features. You can get it here if you're in a similar boat.

Leading up to the iPhone Duo's announcement, I suggested that Apple's big advantage here compared to other folding phones on the market that are based on Android was the iPad ecosystem. Not all apps run on both the iPhone and the iPad, but a lot do, and so a lot of the apps you already use display different interfaces based on how much space they're given. What this means is that app developers don't have to start from square one and reconceptualize their apps for larger displays because a lot of them have already done that by supporting the iPad. Also, because of the way SwiftUI in particular works, some of these UI changes that Apple showed off for the iPhone Duo are things we actually get for free. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here are some screenshots of a few of my apps running in the simulator with exactly zero changes made to support the Duo. ## Quick Reads ## Quick Subtitles ## Nonogame ## Quick Reviews ## Chapterize * * * So yeah, they're not all perfect, and some have visual bugs I absolutely need to sort out, but because these apps were all built to work on the iPhone and iPad, they all scale up to the iPhone Duo's larger internal screen with ease. Sure, some of the buttons layout differently, and there are additional layouts you can implement specific to this device when the screen is in different odd positions, but make no mistake, these are iPad apps running on the iPhone, and that's very cool.

Quick Stuff is my website with a bunch of little utilities to get things done. There are currently 13 tools, but most people use the same one or two things every time they come to the site. I've had a few UIs for pinning or prioritizing specific apps in the list, but it's all blurred together a little bit more than I'd like. It's one of those things I felt myself as well. I use a couple of these far more than the others, and I was finding I had to take a second to orient myself on page load and make sure I was clicking the right thing. Today I pushed out an update that makes your favorited pages stand out much better from the rest. Just hit customize, drag the ones you use to the top, and everything else gets minimized in its own section. 0:00 /0:12 1×

Nonogame for the iPhone and iPad is out now, and I'm really excited about it. However, if I'm being honest, I have mostly played on my Samsung Galaxy Fold8 for the past few weeks because the experience is simply better there. It's not because the web app is better (although I am extremely proud of it), it's because the screen just makes playing so much easier on a phone. Apple released the Xcode 27.1 beta today, which gave us access to the iPhone Duo simulator, and with zero code changes, Nonogame works pretty well with no code changes, actually. Nonogame supports the iPad and scales based on device size, so this isn't a huge surprise, but it's great to see in action. For sake of comparison, this is what the same game board looks like on the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the iPhone Duo when unfolded. The phones have nearly identical heights in this configuration. However, the added width really benefits this game. Again, I've been playing the hell out of this game on my Samsung folding phone, and I genuinely cannot wait to play it on the iPhone Duo.

I did some benchmarking today and saw how the newest iPhone thermal throttles, which isn't severe, but does happen. I know from experience that if you put a cold beverage on the back of your phone, it will cool down really quick, so I thought…the test is obvious. I took a cold La Croix out of the fridge, started a new benchmark run, and put the can on the phone. When I came back, the job was done and the results were exactly what I'd hoped they'd be. That's right, if you need to do a heavy task on your iPhone that's going to take a while, pop a La Croix on the back of it (presumably a soda, beer, or whatever you like would work just as well) and the work will get done 14% faster. Go forth and when they call you crazy, you turn around and tell them they don't know what they're missing.

Apple made a big deal out of the AI capabilities in their new A20 Pro processor in their new iPhone marketing. They've doubled the number of cores in the neural engine, and this made me immediately wonder how much better that makes this device for transcriptions. This is exactly why I built a benchmark mode into Quick Subtitles. So I ran it on my iPhone 17 Pro, the 18 Pro, and just for kicks, my M4 Pro MacBook Pro. ## Testing Methodology This is using the built-in benchmark mode of Quick Subtitles using the built-in file. I used the built-in file to try to make this as replicable as possible. You could run this exact test on this exact file and see what your results are as well. I ran the test using Apple's transcription model. I let it do one warm-up, which can skew timings a little bit because loading the model the first time can be disruptive, and I let it run 20 tests in succession. The intention here was to find not only the max speed each device could achieve, but also to see what happened once they started to feel the burn. **Disclaimer:** If anything, this test is unfair to the iPhone 18 Pro, which has only been set up for about two hours and is surely still going through its process of indexing and all those things it needs to do at setup. My impression is that when a high-intensity job like this starts up, those background processes take a pause. But either way, that's worth noting, as theoretically there's more performance here, even if it's marginal. ## Results This is a pretty enormous year-on-year upgrade with a 50% jump in peak performance over last year. It took a bit longer for it to start warming up, but once it did, it actually warmed up quicker than the iPhone 17 Pro. To be clear, this wasn't just in the metrics. I could also feel the temperature difference in the hand. The 18 Pro was definitely a bit hotter. I also always think it's funny to look at the throttling for this specific task across iPhones and MacBook Pros. iPhones always start out really high, and then after a couple minutes will throttle down and settle somewhere. Not terrible, but not quite at their peak. Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro just starts going and will literally just keep in the same performance window from now until the end of time. Given how much the A20 Pro seemingly shares with the upcoming M6 processor, I imagine the new M6-powered Mac Mini will be an absolute beast for transcription.

Apple released new developer betas for OS 27.2 today, which is not quite what I expected. Us developers have been waiting for Xcode 27.1 since last week, so I was excited to see that we somehow jumped even further into the future, but my joy was tamped down when I saw this note on the Xcode downloads page: > Note: Simulator and device support for iPhone Duo will be available later this month in an upcoming release of Xcode 27.1. Got it. So I can download the 27.2 beta now, however, the upcoming older version will be available in beta later this month. Why does everything in 2026 have to be just a little weird?

There is a very specific thing you see quite often in online discourse around Apple, which is that people think Apple claims they invent everything or Apple says every little update will change your life. Apple does get excited about things that they release, and they speak highly of them, but I find this critique to be people projecting onto Apple more than Apple actually saying these things. After the iPhone Duo was announced last week, I saw countless posts on social media (even in my very brief time dipping in as I'm on a social media break) with people acting like Apple said they invented the folding phone. It's such an odd critique in particular because Apple spent so much of their presentation talking about how they were making the folding phone hardware and software better than what already exists. The specific context they were using was that you know folding phones exist and here's how theirs is better. Then today I was watching Dave2D's overall quite good video going over the iPhone 18 Pro, and he said this about the updated Dynamic Island: > It's about 25% smaller than the previous generation. […] It's not a massive difference. **I know they pitch it as a life-changing experience** – it's a little smaller, which is kinda cool. Here's what Apple said about the Dynamic Island: > iPhone 18 Pro also features an upgraded Dynamic Island. Redesigned to be smaller, more useful, and even better for seeing live information at a glance. It can now show 3 live activities and help you keep track of multiple things at once, like your flight status with Flighty, navigating with Maps, or simply checking your timer. That's it. That's the entire segment about the Dynamic Island. If it really was something they were pitching as life-changing, I'd have thought they would spend more than 23 seconds on it in an 80-minute presentation. Meanwhile, it's only mentioned once on the marketing page for the phone where they say: > **Redesigned Dynamic Island.** See up to three Live Activities at once and more information at a glance — like live sports scores, navigation, and music. This isn't meant to bash Dave in particular, he's great, but I do think that a lot of this "Apple said they invented X" and "Apple says Y will change your life" reactions out there are based on something other than what Apple actually does when pitching their products.

This is gonna be a short one, but I made a simple Obsidian theme. It's called Bircharoo and it's the theme I've wanted for myself. There are over 700 themes out there already, and surely one of them would get me close to what I wanted. But I've tried a bunch and nothing ever quite got me exactly what I personally wanted from a theme. There was always something that was off, whether it would be the button styling or the size of headings…it was always something I wished I could tweak. So I did. Here's a couple of the things I wanted to get right for my own taste in this theme. ## Heading sizing In my subjective opinion, I think headings are something Obsidian themes generally don't quite nail. More often they're not, they're huge, but other times they're inexplicably small or are all caps. I just don't love them. My headings are a bit larger than normal text, they're bold, but that's it. Of note, the theme does not prescribe any fonts or colors for you. It instead follows whatever fonts and colors you choose in your Obsidian appearance settings. I’m using MonoLisaText in these screenshots, which also happens to be the font I use on this blog. ## Buttons, selects, and tabs A good theme doesn't just make the writing and reading experiences good; it should make the entire app feel great. I haven't emulated macOS, which some other themes have tried. I've gone for something simple and clean. None of this is reinventing the wheel, but in a way that's hard to communicate in a couple screenshots, I've made it so Obsidian just feels really crisp and clean throughout with some relatively simple styling. ## A nice empty state An underappreciated aspect of a good Obsidian theme is what they do with the empty state, which is when you don't have a document open yet. I haven't gone too crazy here, but I've styled the actions to be button elements, and I've added a little SVG of a document. Again, it's not a huge thing, but it's a level up compared to what you get by default. ## Icons I really love Phosphor icons and use them in my apps and Tangerine Neue, and I've incorporated a bunch of them into the UI when you use this theme. ## Motion 0:00 /0:07 1× I like a little tasteful motion in my UIs, and that's what this theme has. The left and right sidebars both animate in and out. The settings page animates in, and buttons have very subtle motion that makes them feel a little bit more tactile when you interact with them. ## Mobile Finally, I've taken care to make sure that the app scales nicely to mobile so that people like me who actually use the app quite a bit on their phone get a good experience there as well. I did not try to emulate iOS components for the mobile layout, nor did I try to make the bottom nav emulate liquid glass. Obsidian does not use many native iOS components, and I think it’s better to lean into that rather than trying to emulate the system. It’s like people who used to theme Windows to look like macOS. It might trick you for half a second, but once you see the differences, it just feels cheap and I don’t think that’s the way to go. ## Try it out Bircharoo is on the Obsidian marketplace and you can install it directly from Obsidian.

I hit a pretty fun milestone in nonogame today: 1000 hours played. No, not by me, but by the community of people who come and play this game every day. I know this is small potatoes compared to whatever other games you can think of off the top of your head, but I'm really proud to have made this and to see how much people are enjoying it. And no, that does not count penalty time, it's real human time. If you were curious though, 293 hours of penalty time has been added. Don't worry if you're not perfect, no one is. Well… Except for one player who has solved over 100 puzzles and has not received a single penalty. If that's you, holy crap, amazing job! Another random stat for the road: exactly one puzzle has been solved in under 2 seconds. Some say that record will never be beaten.

Am I biased? Sure. This is still the best overview of what's new in iPadOS this year for normal people.

Apple has just started rolling out OS 27 across all their devices, and I think they're good updates across the board. As such, I've been working on updates to a bunch of my apps to get them ready for these new updates. Some features are specific to the new OS, while others are just things I wanted to include for the fun of it. Here's everything new across my apps today. _As a quick but important note, I have created app intents for a lot of the apps, which theoretically allows you to ask Siri to do things for you. However, my experience has been that Siri is incredibly inconsistent in actually doing anything reliably. For example, I have asked it to find a specific movie review in Quick Reviews and summarize it for me, and it does it perfectly. Ten seconds later, I'll try the literal exact same request, and it will tell me it has no idea what the hell I'm talking about. As such, in the release notes below, I tend to describe these changes as implementing app intents and what actions I have added. They work great in shortcuts, but Siri is a complete wild card._ ## Quick Reads I've upgraded the sync service for the Quick Reads service itself to allow faster delta updates. This will, in some cases, radically improve the loading performance of your reading queue and archive for those with thousands of articles saved. Your reading queue can be sorted by things such as date added, title, and reading time. And now that setting syncs between the web and the app. Added support for app intents, so you can create shortcuts that save articles, archive them, open them, listen to them, search for them, and open the app directly to specific pages. Your library is indexed by the operating system, so you can find saved articles through a Siri search. Download here. ## Quick Reviews Alternate app icons are here! I still think the red heart is the best, but alternate options now do exist for those who want them. App intents are available to find reviews, open reviews, get review images, and logging a new review. Download here. ## Quick Subtitles As of the last major update, all paid users get AI features with a monthly quota. Now, instead of a hard limit being in place after you go through your monthly limit, the AI analysis and cleanup features will still function, but will be powered by Apple's model. The results will not be as good, but they tend to get the job done. _If you never want to fall back, you can still use your own API key._ The iOS version of the app will now transition to a multi-column Mac-like layout when given enough space. iPhone users today won't see any changes, iPad users will see an app that looks very much like the Mac version, and next month, iPhone Duo users will get the iPad/Mac experience. App intents have been added to transcribe files, export subtitles, get an existing transcript, and open an existing transcript. Download here. ## Chapterize There are quite a few reliability improvements in this update. iCloud Sync and the export engine have gotten notable improvements. Syncing between devices should be more reliable, and exports should have fewer edge cases. Magic Chapters is a new feature that allows you to use on-device Apple Intelligence to suggest chapter markers. Placing your own chapters will always be more precise, but this can be a really good way to get something into an episode you're working on quickly so that you can tweak to get it perfect. Once again, quite a few app intents have been added, including the ability to open a show, open an episode, add chapters, get chapters, create magic chapters, get your chapters as text, or to transcribe an episode. Download here. ## Weave for Typefully The big update here is a completely fresh design, this time leaning heavily into the glass aesthetic. Dynamic text is also now supported, improving accessibility. Your scheduled posts section now more reliably shows scheduled posts that you didn't create in the app. Previously, if you scheduled a post from the web app and then opened Weave, that scheduled post often would not appear. App intents have been added to write a post, show your posts, and see your scheduled posts. Download here. ## Yearly Run Goals I'm approaching my yearly goal that I set for myself back in January, and it made me realize that when you're in the final stretch, this app should change the UI a bit to drive home that you're nearly there. Now, once you're within 10% of your yearly goal, the app UI will more clearly display this on the main view and will try to predict how many more workouts you'll need to do to hit the goal. Your stats page will have a plain text overview of how you're doing, powered by Apple Intelligence on device. You can toggle between different years' data. Say it with me: app intents! You can log a workout, you can automatically add your recent Health Kit workouts, and you can see your current progress. Download here. ## Quick Notes This one went out a couple days ago because there was nothing specific to iOS 27 in it, but this update does feature some tweaks to the recording waveform and the processing spinner. It adds the date to the file names when you have notes automatically saved to the Files app to make them easier to sort. And not super exciting, but I have updated the data collection screen to be more accurate. When you enable the brainstorm feature, it does make it pretty clear it's using cloud AI models that the app must inherently send your notes to. However, the data collection screen did not state this explicitly, and now it does. Download here. * * * Also, it would appear that Apple is prioritizing updates over new apps at the moment, so Nonogame has been waiting for review for a while now, but that should be out of beta any day now.

As of today, Quick Reads now attempts to save all pages of the multi-page articles you save to the service. This works no matter how you save articles (browser extension, iOS app, API, or pasting into the website). For example, if you're trying to read a long iOS review, this will handle it perfectly. It won't work with every website out there, but the parser does try to be useful on as many sites as possible. 0:00 /0:10 1×

I found this report from Luminate media to be fascinating. It's called "Release Strategies for Music & TV" and it's a guide for music and TV producers how how to find success in the oversaturated media landscape we find ourselves in today. A few specific things stand out to me on the TV front in particular. > For all the criticism lobbed against the all-episodes-at-once (or “binge”) release cadence, it remains prevalent even outside of Netflix. […] The binge strategy does possess certain advantages, such as inflating first-week engagement and thus potentially securing a high spot on weekly ranking charts, which can further positive word of mouth for the series. On the other hand, binge-release viewership tends to decay quickly, whereas a weekly-release hit can remain on the charts week after week, continuously drawing new eyes. I hadn't really considered it, but of course releasing a whole season at once is a cheeky way to boost engagement on that first wee, driving you up the streaming top charts. Giving your biggest fans the opportunity to spend 10 hours watching your show in a week is quite a boost compared to capping them out at 1 hour. They also have some data on how many shows are doing each release strategy. The data over the last 3 years shows effectively no movement, with a third of shows releasing weekly, two thirds releasing all at once, and a vanishingly small number splitting their season. Notable though, when you exclude Netflix from that breakdown, we do see a notably different story. More than half of shows are weekly and that number is creeping up a few percent each year recently. > Lengthy gaps between seasons have been a persistent headache for streamers, with the annual premieres once met even by blockbuster cable series like Game of Thrones no longer standard procedure. And while megahits such as Stranger Things can still return after multiyear breaks to massive viewership, a long hiatus (more than 1.5 years) for streaming series typically leads to a reduced audience, at least in the U.S. market. Average views dropped for every title in a sampling of recent hits — even Stranger Things, down nearly 25% in its final season. I think this aligns with what we intuit about these big breaks in shows. Creators might hope that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in a world with near limitless options, absence actually makes you move onto something else. _Inset something here about me constantly talking about how video games also have this problem._

Daryl Baxter: Retroid Pocket Nova review: the best 4:3 retro handheld > The latest handheld by Retroid answers something that its users have been asking for - give us a handheld as powerful as the Pocket, but with a 4:3 display. That's what the Retroid Pocket Nova essentially is This looks rad. There's something to be said for 4:3 devices for retro gaming.

Joe Rossignol: Apple Says iPhone 18 Pro Max Sold in U.S. Differs in One Way > Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S. What a weird one.

Very often, we in the Apple community expect the bare minimum from Apple. We doubt they'll ever make new product lines, we assume any software feature they lack is actually a choice to omit it, and we predict when they do enter a new market, they'll phone it in. The iPhone Duo should be a wake up call that not on can Apple do more when they want to, we as a community must dream bigger. I find all too much Apple commentary (both professional and amateur) is steeped in "nothing will change, everything will just get 5% better every year" energy. I think the touch Mac conversation over the past few years is a perfect example of this. First, it was an argument that Apple would never put touch input on a Mac because it was never going to work. Then once rumors cropped up it was really happening, the convo moved to "okay, they're doing it, but begrudgingly and they'll probably only support Apple Pencil input". Or maybe the assumption was you could swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom, but nothing else. Or maybe the Mac could toggle into a full iPadOS mode when you want to touch it…maybe even with a full device reboot. All the while, there is a growing concern that making macOS work well on a touch-capable device would make macOS worse for everyone not using a touch screen. The iPhone Duo should make all of us think less defensively about topics like this. Apple didn't just slap iOS as is on a folding phone. Instead, they asked themselves, "now that we have an iPhone that has two screens and folds and has all of these distinct characteristics from a traditional iPhone, what can we do?" They pulled on that thread and made what looks to be a really compelling product. Not to get on my reliable soap box, but what if we thought this way about touch Macs? What if we dared to dream instead of defaulting to timidness? Okay, you have a Mac with a touchscreen. What does that enable you to do? Does this unlock the possibility for more types of software than before? Does this unlock more interaction options than before? Does this enable new Mac form factors? I think the answers to all three of these are emphatically yes, and I would hope that this is how Apple is thinking about this as well. The iPhone Duo sure shows that they can. I think one of the reasons the iPhone Duo hit so hard with a lot of people is because it reminded us that not everything has to be a bare minimum effort. I wrote about how this phone shows Apple at their best, and I believe we are holding the bar too low when we don't think like this as well. Frankly, it's also just more exciting commentary to dream of something meaningfully better than what we have today. Sure, most product updates will be relatively minor and predictable, but I think we've lost our spark when we can't imagine Apple doing anything more than that.

David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith, his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but… > With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air's 0.3%). This is particularly interesting to me because I recently pulled some metrics on what iPhones my users were using, and this is what I got: And here's a breakdown of just the iPhone 17 generation: This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average. Although I will say one thing that caught my eye with my bar chart is that across every generation, the vast majority of my customers have Pro devices, except for the iPhone 12 and 13 generations. I don't have a pretty visualization for this, but those are actually primarily iPhone mini holdouts who are sticking with those tiny phones. Shout out. 🫡 * * * We're a little over a month away from the iPhone Duo coming out, and it will surely get quite a bit of attention when it does, but I expect there will be a similarly vast difference between David and my charts a year from now. I suspect he will have a sliver of his users on the Duo, maybe more than the Air, but probably not that much more. And I would not be surprised if 15 to 20% of my users actually adopt it by this time next year.

I'm always looking for little ways to make Quick Reads better. Sometimes that means big feature updates. Other times it means subtle quality of life improvements. Today I released one of those small quality of life improvements. A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser tab all day long. Maybe it's a pinned tab or whatever, but they save things that they want to read later and expect those to show up in the queue when they go back to it. However, that didn't always happen because while the queue did auto refresh, it didn't do it as frequently as was needed. Also, if you navigated to a different page, it would actually stop refreshing (a bug I hadn't noticed until today). When I was building Nonogame, I knew that I wanted to pause the game when the user navigated away from the tab or went to a different window. Thankfully, the web supports this, so I was able to detect when the window was no longer in the foreground and pause the game automatically. As you may expect, the web also has ways for you to detect when the window comes back to the forefront, and I'm using that in Quick Reads to automatically check for new things in the queue when you navigate back to the tab. Here's a demo of it in action a few minutes ago in production. I'm saving things from Birchfeed and a random website with the browser extension, and both of them show up effectively instantly in the UI when I go back to the Quick Reads tab. I hope you like it! 0:00 /0:13 1× _Not the main point of this post, but I've mentioned 3 of my products in here…_ that's synergy, Lemon_._

Today I do the impossible and get through my biggest thoughts about Apple's announcements from yesterday in less than 10 minutes. Here's what I found most interesting about the new iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watches, and AirPods 5.

I have a lot more to go through in collecting my thoughts on Apple's new products announced today, but I wanted to dedicate one quick post to the fact that I think the new iPhone Duo is Apple leaning in to what makes them special and what makes people like me really love so much of what they do. I've been using Samsung's latest folding phone that has a very similar form factor to what Apple just announced, and it's gotten me accustomed to what the folding phone experience is. I personally very much like it, and it's the most joy an Android phone has brought me in close to a decade. That said, I just watched Apple's iPhone Duo unveiling, and it immediately made my Samsung phone feel behind the curve. Technically, the iPhone Duo looks very good, but candidly, I don't think it looks meaningfully more impressive than the hardware in the Galaxy Fold8. It's Apple's software where I feel a large gap has been created. One of the key things I have complained about with the short and squat outer display on the Fold Eight is that software feels kind of cramped on it. Most apps have headers and footers that take up vertical screen real estate that I don't have to spare on a display like this. Apple has addressed this inherent compromise by reshuffling the entire iOS app layout to move controls to the side of the screen to not only be more reachable, which by the way is a bit of a challenge on a wide screen like this, but also to give you maximum vertical real estate for whatever it is you're looking at. I don't go "holy shit" that often when watching Apple events at this age, but they got one out of me this time. There's other stuff, like the seemingly incredibly elegant animation as you finish unfolding the display, where the left half of the screen looks like it's out of focus until you get it all the way open. It looks cool and it looks like it will feel very natural. When I open up my Fold8, it's fine, but the inner screen just pops from off to on at a certain point when I'm doing the opening process. It's an extra flourish that's not necessary by any means, and I can understand why someone would wonder why I think this is any better than what Samsung is doing, but it's the sort of extra flourish that elevates the experience. Now that I've seen it, it makes what I was used to feel old. Apple's not the first company to make a folding smartphone. In fact, they're one of the last to the game. But what I saw today is exactly the sort of thing I want to feel when Apple enters a new category. Yes, the hardware looks excellent, but the software is where it looks like they're truly differentiating, and I am excited to try it out next month.

It's not particularly useful for me, but I really dig this little UI library.

The iPhone Air is a really interesting device, isn't it? It's the first time I can think of where you paid more to get less in an iPhone. The iPhone Air costs a not-insignificant $200 (or 25%) more than the iPhone 17, and in order to achieve its incredibly thin design, it sacrifices two main features: battery life and cameras. Notably, these are the two features that consumers consistently name as the top things they look for when upgrading their phone (well, besides keeping the same OS they're used to). We always want more battery life, and we always want better photos. This isn't any new insight after a year of seeing sales info, and I predicted that this would be a tough trade-off for a lot of people to make immediately after seeing the Air revealed last September. I expected it to be the worst-selling of the four iPhones that came out at the end of the year. All the indications we have from outside Apple are that this has indeed come to pass, but I don't think that means the iPhone Air is a failure. I think the iPhone Air is taking the role that the MacBook Air took many years ago. When the MacBook Air debuted, it came out in a MacBook lineup that had the normal MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The Air was worse than the MacBook in almost every way, and yes, it cost more to boot. For a time, Apple had the MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro. But after a few years, the technology got to a point where Apple could fit a very good consumer laptop into the MacBook Air wedge, and they discontinued the MacBook. The laptop line became the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and that's the lineup we've had for an incredibly long time, up until and including today. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this same future for the iPhone lineup. In fact, at the start of 2025, I predicted that the thin iPhone we knew was likely coming out at the end of the year was actually not another phone in the lineup, it was just the new iPhone 17. Obviously, I got that prediction wrong, but I think it's one of those predictions that you get wrong on timing, not on the final state. There's a new rumor out today that suggests that the iPhone 18 will not actually come out, and the iPhone Air 2 will be the non-Pro iPhone on offer. I don't know how credible that rumor is, but it's literally what I predicted a year and a half ago, and I do think that is still where we're going. I think the iPhone Air, as it exists today, is too big of a compromise to be the "standard" iPhone Apple, but I don't think it's that far off. Give it an ultrawide camera and improve the battery life a bit, and I think you have a very competent and cool mainstream iPhone. The rumors are that the iPhone Air 2 will get a second camera, and it will almost certainly have some level of improved battery life, so I guess I wouldn't totally dismiss that idea from happening in early 2027. The safe money is probably on 2028, but who knows? Frankly, I wouldn't be enormously surprised if they did it this spring. We're already pretty confident that the only phones we'll see tomorrow are the Pros and the Ultra/Fold/Folio, with the normal iPhone 18 coming in the spring. As I wrote in my predictions post for the folding iPhone, I think this staggered release schedule is going to push more people to buy the Pro phone this year because they'll be used to upgrading in the fall, and there won't be a non-Pro upgrade option for them. They'll say, screw it, and level up. That makes the iPhone 18 in the spring a pretty lackluster release. Yes, I know not everybody follows the Apple news like we do, but society in general has a feeling for when new iPhones come out, and it's the fall. That's when the excitement is, and you don't get that sort of excitement for the more budget phones coming out in the spring, so I do think it will be a more tepid release. I feel like making that release the next iPhone Air, and having that just be the new normal iPhone, would be okay. It just feels like this is a year of change with the iPhone, in terms of what phones are in the lineup, when they come out, and how much they cost. Maybe that's just one of the new changes as well. Rip the band aid off. I'm writing this post the day before the September iPhone event, although I didn't really need to hit that deadline since we're probably not going to know the validity of these predictions for many months still. But hey, what's the point in having a blog if you don't make some predictions that will surely end up being wrong down the road?

I’m not really doing social media at the moment so I have no idea what the reaction online has been, but I watched The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time trailer today and I was blown away. The original game is an absolute formative video game in my life. I was nine years old when it came out and it positively floored me and expanded my concept of what video games could be. I’ve played the original game 5 to 10 times over the course of my life and every time I go back to it I’m reminded how brilliant it is. With that in mind, I was simultaneously excited and anxious about the prospect of Nintendo remaking this game. That said, I think what they showed today is everything I dreamed a remake like this would be, and I can’t wait to play it in November.

One of the things I love in Birchfeed, my RSS sync service is the news stream feature. This lets you open up a window with new stories streaming into the view as they come in. It's pretty slick, and I use it on big news days (like tomorrow, for example). Because I know a lot of nerds use the service, I also wanted to point out that there is a CLI you can use as well. You can install it with Homebrew: brew install mattbirchler/tap/birchfeed And you can call it as simply as entering `birchfeed` in your terminal of choice. You will want to run `birchfeed auth` the first time, paste in an API key you generated from Birchfeed itself, and then you will be good to go. There are keyboard shortcuts listed at the bottom of the window, so you can figure this out, but you can choose whether you see article content itself in a pane on the right or if you just want to see a list of headlines. Arrow through them and hit return to open it in your browser, press `c` to copy the link to your clipboard, and if you have a Quick Reads account set up, press `q` to instantly save it to your reading queue. Obviously, I know this is a niche feature, but hey, Birchfeed is built for RSS obsessives, so I know some people will get value from it.

The design bug caught me this holiday weekend, and I've made a few changes to Birchtree. First off, and this will be the least important thing to anybody but me, I switched the subtitle on the headline from "designer and creator" to "developer and creator". I still have my design sensibilities, but professionally I'm a product manager, and for my own business I certainly do more development than design at this point (Acknowledging the irony of this in a post about updating the design of my blog). The other difference you'll notice is that I have updated a lot of UI elements to be glassy. Look, I'm sure the trends will change in the future, but for now, I think Glass is relatively cool, and I'm going to go with the trend. I've also gotten into shaders a bit and have become interested in what you can do with them. So I've updated the Pride banner at the top of the site from a CoverFlow emulator to a sort of weird test tube thing that I think is fun. I've also taken the opportunity to pitch some of my apps. At this point, I have 10 apps I want people to know about, so if my blog can push a few more people to those apps, great! Hover over them to see a cool effect as well. 0:00 /0:07 1× I've also made a tweak to blockquote elements, which makes sure they pop very clearly from the rest of the post.

I've been covering Apple for 16 years (using Apple stuff for 31 years), and not to toot my own horn, but I think I have a pretty good success record predicting the success of their entries into new hardware categories. I'm not always right, but I'm definitely right more often than I'm wrong. I was extremely bullish on smartwatches, and the Apple Watch in particular, and that's gone on to be an enormous success. I was extremely bearish on the Vision Pro, and we know how that played out so far. I was extremely mixed on the HomePod, and I don't know how else to describe the HomePod since then other than as a product that is extremely mixed. As I write this, we're just two days away from Apple likely showing off another new hardware category, a folding smartphone. I figured, why not give it another go and officially lay down some predictions for how this product will go, not only this year but over the next few years? ## How the folding iPhone will sell An interesting split I've seen in the Apple community over the last year is in how people who were vehemently anti-folding-phone have shifted. When Apple wasn't making one, most people in the community would say that's because folding phones were a bad idea, the technology wasn't there, and they were way too expensive to be mainstream consumer products. However, as it's become clear this is really happening, some people have done the thing I've talked about before, where everything Apple doesn't do is bad, and then once there are rumors that Apple is doing exactly that thing, they mentally move themselves from "they shouldn't do it" to “it'll be okay” to “actually, I'm super excited for this thing.” Meanwhile, others are sticking to their guns. I've seen plenty of people who think the folding iPhone will be a flop, that the hardware will literally fail (as in the screen will fail) within a year or two, and that Apple will discontinue it within two years of its launch. For my part, my prediction is basically that through 2026, both sides of this debate will have data that lets them win stupid social media spats. On the one hand, I do think the phone will be very desirable, and that there are people who will very much enjoy having this device in their life. My evidence for this is that I've been using the Samsung Galaxy Fold8 for the past month, and it's incredibly good. I'm sometimes still annoyed by the small outer screen, but I've largely gotten used to it. When you need something more like an iPad and you unfold the phone, suddenly you have an iPad mini-sized device in your hands. It's awesome. I spend a couple of weeks every year switching to an Android phone as my main phone, and it's been pretty tough over the last 5 years or so. The software library just isn't for me, and I find it hard to stick with it for very long because I feel like I'm just using apps that aren't nearly as good as what I have on my iPhone. A folding Android phone doesn't really help with what apps are available, but it does make it especially nice to have an Android tablet on demand and to do things like play games, watch videos, or use productivity apps with more screen density and tables and that sort of thing. For me personally, a device that's very similar to this but runs iOS and has all the apps I love would be killer. At the same time, I fully expect this to be the worst, or maybe second-worst-selling iPhone in the iPhone 18 generation of devices. I think this for a couple of reasons. First, this device will not be able to be manufactured at the scale of other iPhones. Reports differ on exactly how severe the production challenges are, but whichever report is most accurate, it certainly seems like Apple can't crank these out like iPhone 18 Pros. This will mean that even if Apple sells every single one of them that it makes, and based on my last point, I do think there's a chance that will happen, it still won't be enough to make it one of the top phones in the lineup. Second, despite my excitement about the experience of using a device like this, it won't be universal. For now, at least, this will be a niche device, not just necessarily because of manufacturing limits, but because a lot of people either don't want this or don't know if they want it yet. I also think that the rectangle that sits in your pocket is a pretty perfect size and experience. It's very reasonable that a lot of people won't feel that having a smaller phone that they can turn into a tablet is actually better than the greatest product form factor created in the last 100 years. Third, there's the price. Nobody knows exactly what this thing is going to cost. I've seen leaked listings that suggest it could be around $1,600, while others are projecting anything from $2,000 to $3,000. My bullishness on this device changes quite a bit depending on where the actual thing falls in that price range. If it's $1,600, I think it's going to be sold out for months as they sell every single one they can manufacture. If it's $3,000, I think it's an absolute nonstarter. So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don't know if this will ever become the _most_ popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for it's first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well). My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me. On the cancellation point some are making, I'll remind you that the Vision Pro is famously a failure in the consumer market so far, and Apple hasn't discontinued it. I think those predicting that the fold will be discontinued within two years are wish-casting. ## Another model I've talked about this before as well, but I'll throw it here to document it plainly: I think there will be a larger version of this folding phone in the next year or two. I think the short outer screen is going to be a point of friction for people, and in a year or two Apple will release one with a larger screen that is more similar to its standard iPhone when folded in half. ## Price I'm just going to put my flag in the ground and say this will cost $1,999. As I said earlier, there are rumors all over the place about what the cost will be, and I do not expect it to be cheap. However, I do think it's worth noting that Apple is not the first to this game. Samsung sells comparable devices at $1,899 and $1,999. Part of me wonders how much of this is Apple fans not being aware of the norms in the rest of the market, such as when they acted like 120Hz and always-on displays were hyper-premium screen technologies when they had been standard fare for several years on Android devices of almost all price points. Historically, Apple is also one who can surprise us. We all assumed the iPad would debut at $999, so it was a famously killer moment when they revealed the $499 price point. Meanwhile, we were mentally prepared for $2,00-2,500 VR headset, and then Apple dropped the $3,500 bomb when they debuted the Vision Pro. I'm going with $1,999 because I think it's competitive in the market, and psychologically it will feel very good for Apple to be able to say this device starts at under $2,000, even if just barely. I guess I'm expecting something closer to the iPad moment than the Vision Pro moment. And hey, if there's one of those two product lines to emulate, I'd emulate the iPad. 😅 ## The name Finally, there's the name. Everyone seems to think it's going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that's what I'd bet on as well. But I just don't like it. I don't like it because it's not "ultra" in many ways, and I don't like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do… I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there's a 99% chance I'm wrong, but hey, won't it be amazing if I'm right?

Comfort Zone, the podcast I do with Chris and Niléane is coming back later this month! We've had a little time off, which actually was nice, maybe we should take a break every year for a bit…anyway 😅 Our new website, comfortzone.rocks says it all: Comfort Zone rocks. You can listen to the most recent episode there. You can learn 3 cool facts about each of us. Our entire archive has come along for the ride (thank you to the MacStories team for letting us take the whole show with us), and you can search the transcripts to find when we talked about things. Anyway, we're really excited about having the show back, and we hope you take this opportunity to subscribe. If you're already subscribed, you should be good, but if not: * Apple Podcasts * Spotify * YouTube * Overcast * RSS

Have you ever wanted to play a game of Snake where instead of eating fruit, you took control of a white guy arresting and reporting brown people? Well, the White House website has that for you on their new arcade! The website is just a bunch of knockoffs of other games that I'm sure some intern vibe coded. Anyway, I think it's the casual cruelty of this administration that is the core of what makes me despise it so much. Just yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance said this about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary: > As you guys can probably guess, I'm really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden. I'm sure we'll have many many intense intellectual conversations. We'll have a great time. Nobody brought up Biden (who is undergoing cancer treatment right now by the way), Vance's cruelty just can't hide itself. Why not take a shot at the previous POTUS to make yourself feel big and strong.

Casey Liss on this week's ATP: > To my memory […], this is the best iPhone lineup I think they've ever had. I completely agree with this. The Pro phones are positively outstanding, the 17 normal got some really good updates that were years in the making that elevated it quite a bit, and the Air served its purpose of being the novelty phone in a way we haven't really seen in the iPhone lineup before. I do think there is room for improvement as the 17e remains a little lacking compared to what it could be.

I officially launched Quick Reads 135 days ago, and to say I've been working hard on it since is an understatement. Obviously, PRs aren't a perfect measure for productivity, but each PR is an instance of me wanting to add or change something, and in less exciting moments, to fix something. Ideally, each change makes the product better. Visualized by week, it definitely shows that after a reasonable pace, but ramped up through the summer. If I could give a bit of a peek behind the curtain, I would explain this as Quick Reads having a solid launch, which had me fixing bugs and improving parts of the user experience here and there for the first couple months. Then the service got a little more traction and people started to ask for more, or they expected certain features to work a different way. I genuinely want this to be the best read-later service out there, and I've ramped up my work to try and make this a reality. Try it out today if you'd like a seriously maintained, exceptionally developer-friendly real later service!

Jamie Hore: Are We Really Witnessing the "Downfall" of Arc Raiders? > That’s according to a 9 August 2026 Twitter post from content creator ‘Adio’. The post was reacting to the hit extraction shooter’s decline in player count on Steam in recent months, and several more similar posts from notable social media accounts followed in the subsequent days. I gave ARC Raiders a try when it came out and bounced off it pretty quick. The game seemed very well made, it just wasn't a genre that I have any interest in personally. The one thing I did know was that it was a huge success and people really loved it. It seemed like it was going to be the next big live service game. Now look, I know a lot of people seem to spend most of their time online tracking things that they don't like so they can complain about them, but I simply stopped paying attention to this game once I stopped playing it myself. It wasn't until today when I saw this news story that I checked in, and wow, the drop-off is pretty severe. The notable thing for me compared to other live service games is that the two notable updates in February and April seem to have done nothing to cause a spike in users. Sometimes people will post these Steam charts for single-player games, and I just think it's so stupid. Of course, there's a spike when the game comes out, and then fewer people play it after that. It's a single-player game. You're not going to play it forever. However, live service games rely fundamentally on people playing them for as long as possible. I bring this up not to dunk on Arc Raiders. Like I said, it seems like a really good game that a lot of people loved, especially when it was new. I am going to take this as an opportunity to dunk on Sony for going all in on a live service strategy several years ago that I think has been monumentally unsuccessful. They've had their best studios waste years of development time on projects that either get canceled or release to absolutely zero interest. They've shut down studios that were really good at making certain types of game and then were made to work on some live service God of War bullshit that was never going to work, and now the studios are gone. Frankly, I think this massive chase for the next big live service game is a fool's errand. I just feel like a few games figured this out a long time ago, and we really don't get hits like this anymore. When I look at the most played games on Steam, a lot of them are live services, but the top game is Counter-Strike 2, which released in 2012. Then there's Dota 2, which released in 2011. There's PUBG, which released in 2017. There's Apex Legends, which released in 2020. And while it's not on this list since it's not on Steam, Fortnite is a big success everyone's chasing as well, and it was also released in 2017. I'm not saying there haven't been smaller success stories over the years, but I do think it's notable that the games listed above are the ones that companies like Sony want to have, and only 1 of them is from the past 9 years. I think it's fine for these games to keep being made, and even if they're smaller successes, those can be big wins for the companies who make them. But I find the obsession with creating the next game like this foolish. The odds of achieving something like this are so low, and betting the company on it is not a risk I think worth taking.

Ben Thompson: Nvidia Earnings, Dollars Per Gigawatt, Open and Hugging Face > Nvidia right now continues to be like Apple in the early years of the iPhone: for years forecasting was easy and reliable, because the company’s revenue was a function of how many phones they could make and how many carriers they supported; we didn’t truly know what iPhone demand was until the iPhone 6S generation, when supply was sufficient and every carrier had the iPhone. > > We’re seeing the same story here: Nvidia’s earnings really ought to be quite boring, because the top-line revenue number is a function of how much supply the company will have in terms of components; we won’t know what demand truly is until supply is abundant. It is fascinating to see this phenomenon happening again. Years ago, Apple's iPhone revenue wasn't so much based on how much demand there was in the market, it was literally how many iPhones they could manufacture. Today, NVIDIA is in the exact same spot. Their hardware revenue is capped at how much they can build, not how much people will buy. Technically, that's a business problem, but it's the sort of problem you're lucky to have.