In the past, I've always had to resort to Halide or Spectre to take photos I couldn't take in the native iPhone Camera app. A lot of iPhone photographers will tell you to use apps like Moment, Halide or some other third-party app, but I've always stuck with the native app and gone towards third-party apps only when I need them.

I like noticing patterns, and I have been thinking about next year's iPhone, aka the 20th anniversary iPhone. The iPhone X was the 10th anniversary iPhone, and it was something revolutionary. Apple reinvented the smartphone with the original iPhone, and the iPhone X reinvented a lot of things about the iPhone. One such thing was the housing where the Face ID components resided. In other words, the notch. The iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 all had the notch. Then with the iPhone 13, the notch was still there, but it got smaller.

One of the callouts during the iPhone keynote about the A20 Pro chip is how this chip is really good for AI-related tasks, "double the amount of neural engine cores" is something that was said, maybe even multiple times. We all know Siri is finally a capable assistant, but it's slower compared to the Siri of yore, there is a lot more processing that happens, so when Apple spoke of these extra neural cores I thought that this might make a difference. It didn't. So I did some tests in my last YouTube video, I split the tests into three categories and here's how the tests fared:

I was going through the iPhone Duo specs and realised the inner screen has a different pixel density to the outer screen. The inner 7.6-inch folding display runs at 1878×2670 and 430 ppi, while the outer 5.4-inch display runs at 1398×2034 and 460 ppi. That's a 6.5% difference in pixel density, and Apple hasn't explained why (yet). But then I remembered this has always been the case. iPhones have always had higher ppi screens than iPads. Here's every iPhone and iPad Apple sells right now: iPhones iPhone 17: 6.3″ · 2622 × 1206 · 460 ppi…

I preordered my iPhone 18 Pro Max and got it on launch day, same as every year. I filmed an unboxing, got to the setup screen, and that's where things didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. The first screen asks you to pick your region. In previous years, it's always been set to United Kingdom by default. All I've ever had to do is tap next. This time it was set to the Netherlands. Out of habit I'd already tapped next before I noticed, so I had to go back and scroll all the way down to find United Kingdom.

Gruber has a great post on his thoughts about the 'Surprise and Shine' event, and I've been thinking about one section in particular since I read it. On the iPhone Duo's right-side-only UI layout and whether it's a problem for left-handed users, he writes: This layout puts these controls on the right not because 90 percent of people are right-handed and Apple thinks lefties can get bent, but, I think (and so I've been told in conversations with Cupertinoites), because that's the nature of a book-like shape. The arrow keys on keyboards always fall on the right, publishers don't print left-handed books, and carmakers don't make left-handed steering wheels.

Apple's $2,000 iPhone Duo feels not like a simple extension of the iPhone or the minification of the iPad, but like a new product altogether. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010 he positioned it as a device that sits in between a Mac and an iPhone. The Duo, when it was rumoured, felt like it was going to be an iPhone when closed and an iPad mini when opened, but I don't think it's quite that dual a device (excuse the pun). The changes Apple has made to the software, moving the controls and the toolbars to the right, is such an Apple thing to do, and it makes using this device feel unlike any iPhone or iPad we have used before.

I completed my iPhone 18 Pro Max pre-order earlier today, and it was the smoothest pre-order I've ever had. I've been pre-ordering iPhones for a while now, and every year I carry this anxiety about my bank rejecting the transaction. It goes back to the iPhone X. A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote about my experience with the iPhone X, I mentioned how my bank flagged the payment as fraudulent and almost got my order cancelled. I was on the phone with both my bank and Apple trying to sort it out, just to make sure I got the thing on launch day.

So the other day I made a video on whether people should buy the iPhone 17 Pro before the iPhone 18 Pro launched. My conclusion was that they should wait to see what the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max brought. Now that we know about these phones and by how much the prices have gone up, I think waiting was the correct choice and I was right. For £100 more we are getting a lot more. The 17 Pro was £1,099 and the 18 Pro is £1,199, and it's a no-brainer to just go for the 18 Pro.

The iPhone 18 Pro is what I'd call an S year. From the outside the phone is identical to the previous model, but on the inside a lot has changed and that's where the upgrades are. Apple sells a lot of phones when the outside of the device changes, like the iPhone 17 Pro, which I see almost everywhere. People like to buy things, and they sure want to let the world know they have the latest. This has always been the case with iPhones. A design change is easy for the marketing department to go "hey look, it looks new" and iPhones fly off shelves.

Mark Gurman seems to be pretty confident that the foldable iPhone launching in around 6 hours today will be called the iPhone Duo. I think iPhone Duo is a much better name than iPhone Ultra. The Ultra moniker Apple uses in its other products means the most Apple Watch you can get, or the most CarPlay you can get, or the most M-series chip you can get. With the foldable iPhone not having the best camera system, having Touch ID over Face ID, it doesn't sound like it's the most iPhone one can get.

It's iPhone season and as tradition, I like to look back at how the outgoing iPhone has fared during the course of the year. I upgrade every year, and if you are in any way reasonable and sensible, and are not a content creator, there is no reason to upgrade every year, but it helps me see what has gotten better and what has gotten worse. Smartphones are a matured platform so the year-over-year gains aren't as significant as they used to be, but for people like me who upgrade every year, it helps to put things in perspective and to look back and reflect if the upgrade was totally worth it, or if it was just a vice I keep giving into.

I made a video a few weeks ago about whether now is a good time to buy the iPhone 17 Pro with the rumoured price hikes for the iPhone 18 Pro. A lot of the comments and questions that came in weren't about the 17 Pro though. They were about what the best value iPhone is right now. What should someone buy if they want to spend the least amount of money and still get a proper, modern iPhone. The answer I kept coming back to was the iPhone 15 Pro.

Tim Hardwick on MacRumors: Apple may introduce an entirely new 13.8-inch OLED MacBook model in 2029, potentially creating a new product tier between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, according to an updated product roadmap from research firm Omdia. The firm's latest roadmap sandwiches a new 13.8-inch MacBook between the projected time line for the Air and Pro models. The surprise model is said to use a single-stack hybrid OLED panel, rather than the more sophisticated tandem OLED technology that is expected in the upcoming OLED MacBook Pro models, which are set to launch either later this year or early next year.

Joe Rossignol, for MacRumors: Apple has added a new “iPhone Handoff” feature to iOS 27 that will allow you to switch between two iPhones while using the same phone number on each device. Last year I experimented with an iPhone 13 Mini for a month. I went back to the 16 Pro Max because of the battery and the camera, and the Apple Watch syncing to only one phone was annoying too. But if I had something like this, I would have had a slightly better experience. I don’t think it would have swayed me into using two phones, but this feature would have let me go out with the bigger 16 Pro Max for when I needed a massive battery and a better camera.

The new iPhones launch in a week but thanks to the leaks we pretty much know everything about the iPhone 18 Pros. One rumour that has been mentioned multiple times is the main camera lens will have a variable aperture. But will both variants of the 18 Pro — the Pro and Pro Max — get this lens, or will it be limited to the bigger phone? I looked at all the previous Pro iPhone cameras and checked if the Pro Max variant has had anything extra going for it.

Tomorrow is a new dawn for Apple. When I wrote about the CEO transition back in April, I focused on why John Ternus is the right person to lead Apple now. But on the eve of it actually happening, I keep thinking about what Tim Cook is leaving behind. When Tim Cook became CEO I remember reading articles titled “without Steve Jobs, Apple is turning into another normal tech company”. But in the last decade and a half, I think he’s proved the naysayers wrong. We’ve heard a lot of “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done that” over the past fifteen years, but that’s precisely what Steve Jobs wanted for Apple.

I Was That Guy Who Got a 3rd Gen iPad

When the redesigned M4 Mac Mini launched it was a powerful, but small computer, it started at £599 and I wrote that the price was its best feature. In June this year, Apple raised prices across almost every Mac and iPad, and the Mac Mini went up to £799. Two years later we now have the upgrade to it. The headline upgrade is the M6 processor and it starts at £899. Since the MacBook Neo's intro, Apple has had to put up prices on a lot of its products and the Neo, launching at £599, now retails for £699.

Apple sent out invites today for the next iPhone event. Yesterday I made a video on what I think of the iPhone 17 Pro Max almost a year later. I'll have more of my thoughts in written form soon, but here's the video for now.

GTA 6 leaks are being spread around, and I think this could have easily been preventable. The first trailer came out in December 2023. Two and a half years later, there still hasn't been a single clip of any official gameplay. Pre-orders started a couple of months ago. Rockstar could have showed off something. Instead they kept it all under wraps, saving it for a later date and for some exclusivity with Netflix. That hasn't helped. I've seen a few of the leaked clips on X. I have no interest in going looking for more.

Apple deemed the iPhone X obsolete last week and I have been reminiscing about it. I remember the hype, I remember almost everyone I knew who were on an iPhone 5 or 6 and everything in between were looking forward to upgrading to it, although it was priced at £999 (the previous year the iPhone 7 was priced at £599) and this was a massive jump but most of my friends were ready to jump on it. It was rumoured for a while that the 10th year anniversary iPhone was going to be special and there were a lot of leaks (

Aaron Perris on Twitter has unearthed AirPods with a camera in action on the macOS 26.7 RC. This has been rumoured for a while from Mark Gurman, and this leak cements it. Oops. I recently wrote about how smart glasses are not being welcomed by society, and I had to cut some bits out of that article so I didn't go off on a tangent about what Apple would or wouldn't do. But I did have thoughts. Apple is usually never first to the market with a new product, and this is one instance I was wishing they were.

I was watching Dave2D's video on the new Google Pixel 11 phones and one thing caught my eye: a feature called Magic Capture, in his own words: There’s a new mode called Magic Capture that records video. But while you’re recording, it also intelligently selects and captures still images from the footage. So, alongside the video file, you get these automatically selected photos. They’re cropped, unblurred, and tweaked to look as good as possible, all without you having to do anything. When I first heard about this feature, I thought, …

I've been using my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for at least two years now. I initially bought them mostly for taking behind-the-scenes footage of me taking photos on my iPhone, so I could create Instagram reels and all that. I eventually ended up using Meta AI a lot too, and I have kept using it because it's much better than the Siri of yore. I have another pair of Ray-Ban aviators which I've been using for nearly a decade now, which is still the classier pair of sunglasses. But I've found myself reaching for the Metas, because they are much more than glasses that protect your eyes.

The question comes up constantly, especially with the impending increase of iPhone prices. Should I buy the iPhone 17 Pro now or wait? I figured it was worth making a video actually answering it.

Yesterday I wrote about how the Galaxy Z Fold 8 sold me on the foldable iPhone's form factor. This is the part where I explain why I'm still not buying one. Every year for the past twelve years or so, the reason I buy a new iPhone is the camera. The iPhone 18 Pro is rumoured to have a variable aperture lens. And based on the current rumours and mockups the foldable will not have a telephoto lens (the telephoto is my most used lens on my 17 Pro Max). So am I ready to give up the…

Back in April I wrote that Apple's foldable iPhone had an aspect ratio that made no sense to me. Wider and shorter when closed, and I couldn't work out what that would mean for typing, or Maps, or the things I actually do on a phone every day. Now the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 is here. I've watched plenty of reviews and wanted to try one myself, so I walked into my local Currys the other day and had a play with one. I'm not worried about the aspect ratio anymore.

I pre-ordered the Clicks Power Keyboard, which should tell you how much I wanted a physical keyboard back on my iPhone. I pre-ordered mine on the 4th of January, and I got it delivered on the 24th of July. It was a long wait, and I'm still not sure it was worth it. The Wait When I pre-ordered, the Clicks website said that I should have the product shipped around the end of May, that did not happen, I got my initial "your product has shipped" email on the 15th of July.

Ryan Christoffel writing for 9to5Mac on why the iPhone Ultra sounds truly deserving of the 'Ultra' name: My main arguments against the Ultra name involve hardware features. iPhone Ultra will lack the Telephoto camera that iPhone 18 Pro offers, and battery life might be worse than iPhone 18 Pro Max. Justifying 'Ultra' when certain features don't match the 'Pro' line seems tough.

I purchased a Stream Deck recently and I have been trying to set it up so it can assist me in being productive. It's been about 3 weeks and I am getting more utility out of it compared to the TourBox controller that I returned. Safari is my browser of choice, mostly because it syncs to my other Apple devices and it respects my privacy. Ever since Safari Profiles was a thing I have been a massive fan of them. I have multiple profiles for separate things, but there are three that I use a lot:

M.G. Siegler, writing on Spyglass: While Apple still didn't raise iPhone prices alongside this move, it's clearly another lever to pull getting ahead of that inevitable increase in a few weeks. Now a $100 or $200 price increase on the iPhone 18 Pro – perhaps soon to start at $1,299? – will look far less daunting when Apple can also tout the option to pay, say, $33.99/month I have always argued that Apple will not raise the prices on the iPhone 18 Pros coming this September. Mostly because the base iPhone 18s are rumoured to land next March, and an iPhone with an 18 on its name starting at $1,299 — when the 17 started at $799 — was never going to sit well with the public or Wall Street.

The next "new" MacBook is rumoured to get a touchscreen. I belonged to the camp that touchscreens are bad and MacBooks should never have one, until I started using a Microsoft Surface at my work. The Surface laptop itself, I don't have anything good to say about it. It heats up, the trackpad is bad, and the display isn't worth talking about. But I have started to appreciate the touchscreen, to the point that when I'm on my M1 MacBook Pro, I miss it. There have been moments I've actually touched my MacBook screen to dismiss a pop-up, only to realise it does nothing.

From the Sony PlayStation blog: As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format. A couple of weeks ago, when GTA 6 pre-orders went live, we already got a taste of this.

I was listening to the latest episode of The Talk Show, and John Gruber said the hardest thing is to remember to use it. He meant Siri, and he's right. There are two kinds of people when it comes to Siri. There are people like me, who decided a long time ago that Siri is bad and never really went back to check. I use it to set timers and alerts, to remind me to buy things and to turn the lights on in my flat. That's all I ask pretty much.

Apple, in a statement shared with MacRumors: The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.

Apple raised prices across most of its lineup today. The UK price increases hit Macs, iPads, HomePods, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, some of them steeply. If you've been following the news, none of this is a surprise. Most of the reporting is in US dollars, so I dug through the Wayback Machine and put together the UK numbers. Macs MacBook Neo: +£100 → £699 MacBook Air: +£200 → £1,299 MacBook Pro: +£300 → £1,999 iMac: +£200 → £1,499 Mac Studio: +£400 → £2,499 iPads iPad Pro: +£200 → £1,199…

John Gruber has a post about which camera lenses he's used most on his iPhone 17 Pro, and reading it I knew I had to check my own. My results didn't surprise me, mostly. Across over 9,000 photos, my lens usage breaks down like this: Telephoto (4×): ~47% Main (1×): ~38% Ultra Wide: ~15% The telephoto being ahead of the main lens doesn't surprise me at all. I love zooming onto things, getting that reach, and the compression that comes with it. What does surprise me is the ultra wide. I'd have expected that to sit around 8%.

I've got the iOS 27 developer beta on an iPhone 15 Pro and I haven't had any major bugs so far. And the performance, I feel, is better than my iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26. Apple could have done this ages ago, but they didn't. I am aware that this is because refinement alone doesn't sell phones, new features do. But it still makes me angry that it took iOS 27 to show what was possible. The last time we had a "Snow Leopard" year for iOS was in 2018 with iOS 12.

I wanted to play with the new photo editing tools on iOS 27 and ended up making a video out of it. I did almost no preparation. The only thing I did beforehand was pick about twenty photos to edit. Everything else I noticed while filming, and a few of those things are the reason I'm writing this. The biggest one: iOS 27 won't let you use Clean Up on a Pro RAW image. iOS 26 does this without complaint, and there's no obvious reason a RAW file should be off limits.

Nicole Nguyen and Rolfe Winkler writing for the Wall Street Journal: Apple isn't immune to soaring chip prices, Chief Executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. When asked which devices would be getting price increases and when, Cook responded, "We're still working through that." We're likely to find out more this September, when the next iPhone and other devices are expected to arrive. So for now, we decided to make an educated guess at how much more Apple hardware will cost, using the anticipated but as yet unannounced iPhone 18 Pro.

Last year when Apple showed off iPadOS 26 with its new Mac-inspired multitasking features and Liquid Glass, I was surprised that it had support for the 2018 iPad Pros. But this year is the year that it got the cut, and I had been meaning to write about it. But Riley Hill got to it before I did on his blog, Slatepad.org. The whole article is definitely worth reading, but the part that stayed with me most was the ending: After getting eight years of OS support, I think it’s worth briefly reflecting on this landmark iPad.

Apple initially marketed the iPhone 16 series with the tagline ‘Hello, Apple Intelligence’. Later on, this became ‘Built for Apple Intelligence’. The world has moved on from the iPhone 16 series to the iPhones 17, and now even to the rumoured iPhones 18. But the 16 series of iPhones still haven’t got the full iPhone 16 Apple Intelligence features that were promised. The features shown off during WWDC 24 weren’t really ready, and the last two years have been embarrassing for Apple. Apple had to pull their ads, settle a lawsuit, and arguably occupied the last spot in the race to figure out AI.

Apple’s iOS 27 keynote was essentially an hour of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Which is fine, that’s the story they wanted to tell. And honestly, spending time on these smaller changes would have felt like filler in an otherwise tight event. I bought a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro specifically to run the beta on, which I did the day the developer beta dropped. I also signed up for the new Siri waitlist, but it took over 96 hours for it to come through. Four days. So in that time, I went through the beta and found features Apple hadn’t spoken about.

WWDC 26 felt different. Usually WWDCs in the past have been structured in a way where you get to see what each of the operating systems from Apple are getting. This year Apple decided to break free of that tradition, talk about platform improvements, talk about trust and safety, and then talk about Apple Intelligence that is available across almost all operating systems (tvOS 27, where art thou?) I felt like this change of pattern in talking about the latest developments was a tad boring, but boring is what I wanted when I…

My iPhone 17 Pro Max 8-month review is up on YouTube. I wanted to get this video out for two reasons: WWDC is tomorrow, and I haven't been giving the channel much love. This is me starting again and trying to be consistent. Battery health is at 97% after 223 cycles. The camera is still the best I've had in my pocket. iOS 26 is getting there, slowly. And Siri is still bad.

I just bought an iPhone 15 Pro to put the iOS 27 betas on when they release. When it arrived, I realised it still had iOS 18 on it (not the latest iOS 26). I already had an iPhone 3GS I got off eBay for nostalgic reasons, and the same iPhone 4S I took to Lisbon. I have my 17 Pro Max that I use daily. Between the four of them, I had a phone representing each major era of iOS design: skeuomorphic, flat design when it started, flat design when it ended, and the latest Liquid Glass.

Akash Wadhwani has put together a beautiful piece of work: a full visual history of every WWDC invite, going all the way back to the beginning. With WWDC just two days away, the timing is perfect. The only thing I did not like about this was the dickover asking for my email address mid-scroll. But that doesn't take away the effort put into this.

Siri popularised the idea of a voice assistant. When Apple introduced it with the iPhone 4S, it felt like the future. And then, slowly, it became a bit of a joke. Google Assistant got better. Amazon's Alexa got better. Siri didn't stay where it was, it felt like it regressed. Then ChatGPT arrived around 2021, and Siri, already the weakest of the major assistants, looked even worse by comparison. At WWDC 2024, Apple promised a lot. I wrote this at the time: Apple cannot afford to fail when they are the only company that people trust, and possibly the only company out there that can bring personal AI to the masses.

I was clearing up space on my iPhone and accidentally hit the "offload unused apps" option. This feature works well as expected, but what iOS considers unused is not how I'd consider them. iOS considers an app unused if it has not been opened for a while, sounds good right? Except that I do "use" apps that I don't open. I am talking about apps that I use the widget to display some information, but never have to open the app. The example in my case is a Quran Quotes app.