Well, it didn't take too long into the new year for me to announce a new app, huh? This is a pretty niche tool, so I don't expect most people to get value from it, but if you create a podcast (or two or three), then I think you're going to like this. **ChapterPod will likely ship later this month, and as with all my apps, it is****currently available in beta for More Birchtree subscribers****.** To put it plainly, since you’re probably already thinking it, this is the spiritual successor to Marco Arment's Forecast app, which I and many other podcasters have been using for years to add chapters to our podcasts. The app is simple and just works, which is great, but there are a few usability things I thought could be improved, and so I decided to make my own app to solve those problems. Some of those include: 1. Better keyboard navigation and shortcuts 2. Playback in app (not needing to listen somewhere else to find timestamps) 3. iPad and iPhone support 4. Import chapters from plain text 5. Export chapters as plain text 6. Generate transcripts (think Quick Subtitles lite) If you make podcasts for a living, I think you will enjoy this. ## Video demo If you prefer the video format, here's a quick 2-minute demo of this version of the app. ## The details This is what the app looks like when you're adding chapters. No, it's not terribly complex, but it's exactly what you need to get the job done. Right along the bottom you have a time code and a chapter title that you can enter. The change here is that these are much more keyboard-friendly. So you can tab between these easily. You can hit `CMD + Return` to create the chapter, and after you create a chapter, the focus shifts automatically back to the time code so you can enter the timestamp for the next chapter. Next up is my absolute favorite feature, which is the ability to bring your YouTube style chapters and turn them into real chapters in an instant. Here's how it looks. Just hit the four lines icon (or `CMD + I`) and your chapters will be right there. Confirm they look good, make some edits if need be, and boom, they're done. I've been using a version of this app for about 9 months at this point, and this feature alone has made the app invaluable to me personally. And if you're cross-posting to YouTube, for example, you can generate your chapters here and export them to text with `CMD + Shift + C`. Chris does this every week in my Quick Chapters app on Quick Stuff, and now he can do it here! You can also add images to chapters, with links hopefully coming before the public launch. ## One more thing… One of the limiting factors for Forecast is that it was Mac only. And while most people will produce their podcasts on a Mac, not everybody does, and there are times where you may want to be able to do this sort of thing from whatever device you have in your hand. That's why an important part of building this app on day one was cross-platform compatibility for Apple's devices. **ChapterPod has 100% feature parity across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of the app.** Like my other apps, this app is 100% native and built using SwiftUI. ## Pricing Pricing will have the exact same model as I have for Quick Subtitles, which is basically that the app is free to use for a set number of jobs, and then you need to make a one-time payment to keep using the app forever. Pricing is not finalized, but I will not make this a subscription app. It will be a one-time fee, and I'll make sure that whatever number is settled on will be a reasonable amount that fairly represents the value I think people will get from this piece of software. * * * Again, More Birchtree subscribers can join the beta today (under the "Perks" section), and the only things standing in the way of public release is beta feedback and any hoops I unexpectedly need to jump through in app review (there's always something for the 1.0…). I hope you like it!

This post on Twitter is notable: > This guy literally builds a full AI app from scratch in 45 mins First off, the app is not super useful and there is a lot of work to be done before this is ready for production, but hey, it’s still quite a result for 45 minutes of work. And in fairness, this is consistent with what I've experienced in developing software over the past year…it's amazing how fast you can go from "I have an idea" to "I have a functional piece of software" in a matter of minutes. What I will say is that if anyone can crank out software like this is 45 minutes, then that software is not particularly valuable anymore. This goes along with my takes on other creative work I've shared over the past couple years: people appreciate things that took effort. Also, in business, if anyone can make what you made in no time, then suddenly you have thousands of competitors, so you need to differentiate yourself from the flock, and you do that by putting in extra care and effort.

Bryan Cantrill: Love your customers > At Oxide, we believe that the best companies—the most enduring ones—love their customers, and we have made this explicit in our mission. I had a mentor years ago tell me, "don't fall in love with the product, fall in love with the problem" and that's really stuck with me years later. To build a successful product, you need a monopoly. Ahem… If you aren't fortunate enough to have a monopoly, you need to solve people's problems, and as a product or design person, you need to be obsessed with advocating for those users and solving their problems. You can consider business needs as well, of course, but if you ever lose focus on being the advocate for your customers, you're down a bad road.

Reddit user jess77x made this comment about Pluribus: > The discourse around this show is so weird. It's either a masterpiece or a total slog. And everyone is just talking past each other and calling people illiterate/TikTok brained for disliking it or pretentious shills for liking it. And it's a shame because engaging with this show, the ideas presented in it, and how the show goes about exploring those ideas (for better and for worse) could be so interesting, yet so much of this discussion is centered around this unproductive binary. They say this is a weird thing about the discourse around this show, but I'd say this is how the discourse is around every piece of media these days. I continue to think that social media warps our minds by rewarding and therefore encouraging extreme takes. You either loved something or your hated it, nuanced options like, "I didn't like all of it, but there was enough there for me to enjoy" doesn't exactly pop off on socials, you know? The only other possibility I could credit to this "it's either the greatest thing of all time or it's trash" dichotomy I see is due to the fact there's just so much media for us to participate in these days that anything short of great is not worth our time. Why would I waste my time watching a show that's "pretty good" when there are 10 "amazing" shows released each year? Maybe there's something here, but given the amount of "trashy comfort food" media we all consume, I'm not convinced by that.

Anatoly Kurmanaev and Tyler Pager with live updates for The New York Times: Explosions Are Reported in Venezuela’s Capital > While Mr. Trump said little about how the United States would be “running” Venezuela, he insisted it “won’t cost us anything” because American oil companies would rebuild the energy infrastructure in Venezuela, which holds vast reserves of oil. Every part of this is positively fucked.

Quick Subtitles has yet another update out now, which brings a few new features to the mix. ## UI tweaks First up is a slightly refreshed UI. This is mostly a new coat of paint across the interface. The iPhone UI home page, for example, now uses all the available space to make it as simple as possible to perform the main task. Also, this update removes turbo mode…or I should say, it's all turbo mode all the time. My analytics show very few people used it, which makes sense; watching the text render in real time is fun a couple times, but is it worth slowing down the whole thing? Probably not. You'll also see this in the new settings page, which gives you more of an overview of all your settings at a glance. ## Benchmark history The last update brought a benchmark feature, and this time we’ve leveled this up to be a more serious tool for benchmarking devices. The core feature here is that the app now saves your benchmark results (locally, of course) so you can go back and look at them later. This means I can present a basic chart in the app, comparing the results, and maybe more importantly, the data is downloadable as a CSV. After you run a benchmark, I'll show you a chart in the app, but you can also export the data as a CSV so you can visualize it however you want. Additionally, all benchmarks are saved locally to the app, so you can go back see how they compare. Anyway, it's pretty basic, but benchmarks are best when they're done multiple times, so making this easy to visualize was an important thing to get in there. And again, if you don't like this visualization, the data is yours, so export those CSVs and get to it! _Also, a minor update will come out soon that lets you download your full history at once in case you didn't download after each run._ ## New (and more) stats Then we're got an update on stats, which have been tucked behind a little "stats" button after a job is complete. This isn't super useful most of the time, but if you're a sicko for stats (like me) then this is fun to check out. And yes, I believe in all features on all platforms, so of course these are on the iPhone and iPad as well. * * * I'm really happy with how this app has developed so far, and I'm still amazed how much work I'm able to do on this so quickly. As a reminder, the tools to run local transcription on Apple devices was announced in June 2025 and released in September. All of this progress has happened on such a small timeline, and I'm really happy that I and a good number of other people making podcasts and videos are using this regularly to do real work.

This is the fifth and final in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my wearables (only Apple Watch) 2024 and 2023 report cards. * 2025's iPhone report card * 2025's iPad report card * 2025's Mac report card * 2025's Vision Pro report card * 2025's wearables report card ## AirPods We got new AirPods Pro this year, and this third generation has proven to be a little more divisive than the last couple, at least from what I can see. The functionality seems very good, and by all accounts, they are the best, easiest-to-use noise-cancelling earbuds for basically anyone (doubly so if you have an iPhone). The one issue that people seem to have with these, myself included, is the fit. For a some number of people, they just don't feel good in the ears. Personally, they are the first Apple earbuds of any variety that didn't fit my ears well. It's impossible to know the scale of how many people have actual discomfort with these, and I'm totally willing to accept that I am in the minority of users here, but I do get the impression it's the first time it's ever been a meaningful storyline about an AirPods Pro release that they are uncomfortable for people. All that said, if they fit in your ears, they're pretty awesome. Taking a moment to talk about the rest of the lineup, I think this was actually a pretty good year as well. The AirPods Pro 2 got numerous firmware updates throughout the year, including a substantial update when the Pro 3s came out which gave them the live translation feature heavily advertised with the new model. Yeah, the flagship feature of the new AirPods is also in the old ones. You love to see it. Meanwhile, we didn't get any updates to the normal AirPods or the AirPods Max. However, on a personal level, I did get some regular AirPods for Christmas, and I've been using them for about a week now. I gotta say, these are pretty great. The noise cancellation is surprisingly good for headphones that don't have a silicone tip, though obviously not as good as the Pros. They feel so comfortable in my ears and they support the head nod and shake gestures, which I appreciate. Unfortunately, while you can squeeze the stems to play/pause and change modes, you can't swipe up and down on them to change the volume. That's the one aspect of the Pros I miss when using these. As for the AirPods Max? No updates, and they remain on a very old chip, meaning no firmware updates to bring them these new features. It remains a tough spot for Apple's most expensive AirPods. ## Apple Watch Series 11 Do we have a new champion for the smallest year-over-year Apple Watch upgrade? I've scoured Apple's comparison page, and the only genuine change I see is the cellular connectivity, which upgrades from LTE to 5G. The chip is the same, the screen is the same; everything else in this device is the same as you had last year. The one thing that might tempt you to upgrade is the increased advertised battery life from 18 hours to 24 hours, but a quick look at the testing methods indicates Apple is now counting six hours of sleep tracking in that metric. Based on my use of the Apple Watch, I would suspect the old model technically achieved 24 hours as well, Apple just didn't count it because they didn't count sleep in the number. I could be wrong, but it seems as though the battery life is going to be effectively the same between the Series 10 and 11. ## Apple Watch Ultra 3 The Ultra 3 is a pretty similar situation, although there are a couple of upgrades here worth mentioning. The first is the updated display, which adopts the wide viewing angles that the Series 10 got last year. Nice, but subtle. It also gets Emergency SOS via Satellite, while the last Ultra only got Emergency SOS on traditional cell networks. Finally, it gets 5G and is upgraded to the S10 SiP that the Series 10 got last year, and the Series 11 stuck with for a second year. Similarly, the battery promise is 6 hours more than before (42 vs 36 hours), and this is similarly due to counting 6 hours of sleep tracking. This is something the Ultra 2 already achieved, it just wasn't a part of their metrics. Speaking for both the Series 11 and Ultra 3 marketing, I'm of two minds here. Number one, I think Apple has undersold the battery performance of these watches for many years, and including sleep tracking is fair, in my opinion. The problem is that this change makes it appear to customers like the battery got way better this year, even though it stayed effectively the same. ## Apple Watch SE 3 The unexpected hero of the Apple Watch updates this year is the new SE, which I think has graduated from "the budget model with big sacrifices" to my default recommendation. The upgrades begin with the chip, which is the S10, just like the Series 11 and Ultra 3. It also gets 5G, wrist temperature sensing, sleep apnea notifications, and critically, the always-on display—which the Series watches have had since the Series 6. It probably won't be a big deal to most people, but they've also bumped the internal storage to 64GB, doubling the previous SE and matching the high-end watches. And they've done all this while keeping the base price the same at $249, or $150 cheaper than the cheapest Series 11 model. There are still some things you get with the Series 11 that you don't with the SE 3, such as the improved wide-angle display, hypertension notifications, ECGs, and water temperature sensing. If you want those features, then the extra money is probably worth it (or a used Series 10). But if those don't intrigue you, then I think the SE 3 is a pretty great smartwatch for a lot of people. ## Overall score - C A C grade may seem harsh, but just a reminder that a C is average with my review scale. It's still a passing grade. Don't worry! Call it a C+ if that feels better. The update to the Ultra 3 was pretty minimal, but the update to the latest chipset and improved display are both welcome. But the Series 11 update honestly doesn't make any sense. It feels very much like they iterated the product just because they'd done it 10 years in a row and it would look weird if they didn't, but they obviously didn't have anything new of note to put in there. The bright spot in the hardware this year was the SE 3, which I think is great on two fronts. The first is that it's a genuinely good upgrade to the SE 2, so people who are using that watch and would like to upgrade have a logical and very good device to purchase. I also think it's good because it drives down the effective starting price of the Apple Watch for most people. The SE was clearly a budget device before, and I would only recommend it to people who could not afford the Series watches or for kids who just need a watch, not the _best_ watch. Now, I genuinely think it is the right choice for a lot of people, which means the entry-level price to the Apple Watch experience just dropped by $150, which is unusual in current Apple where everything needs to get more premium and therefore more expensive. On the software front, watchOS wasn't a huge update, and I think the company is still fixing some of the UX challenges they created for themselves in last year's update. So I think there's some good and some bad here. Along with visionOS, I think Liquid Glass actually works pretty well on the watch, even if sometimes it does feel a little bit odd on my otherwise rugged Ultra's physical design. I also generally like the new Workout Buddy, sleep analysis, and wrist flick features, although I do find the new workout app UI a little frustrating. The touch targets for things such as starting a workout have been made smaller, and the app is less stable than it was. This has been true throughout the beta as well as after the public release. ## What I want/expect in 2026 There's a lot of individual product lines here, so let's be quick about it. On the AirPods front, I am not expecting any new hardware for either the normal AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max. If you told me one of them was definitely getting an upgrade and I had to pick, I'd guess the Max would get a proper second generation that does more than simply swap the Lightning connector for USB-C. Again, I'm still not confident this will happen, but if we're going to get any AirPods upgrades, that's what I'd pick. On the Apple Watch front, I do not expect an SE 4, but I do expect a Series 12 and Ultra 4. How much of an upgrade they'll be remains to be seen. I think a safe bet is to say they'll get new chips for the first time in a couple of years, and the Ultra may change. Maybe the Series will even get something new in terms of materials. In terms of what I want from new Apple Watches, I'd love to see a new health sensor enter the mix, maybe something around blood sugar. And on the software front, I'd like to see my workout trainer feature become a reality. I'd love to see the workout app get improved from what they released this year. And this is a real shot in the dark, but I'd love to see Apple experiment with new liquid materials in their OS. I mentioned the odd disconnect between the lightness of Liquid Glass and the ruggedness of the Ultra 3's physical design, and I think it would be cool if they made a "Liquid Metal" UI material that behaved the same, but was opaque and had more of a silver tint than the glass material. Hell, if it works here, maybe it could come to the other platforms as well, but the scope of that change is much more manageable and low risk on the watch, so let's start there. * * * And that's that! Five report cards and about 8,700 words reviewing Apple's 2025. In general, I think it was a conservative but effective year for hardware, and a tough year for software. I do not see any evidence that the "apocalypse" some were suggesting was coming when the general public got their hands on this new design has happened (the most chronically online are the most enraged, while the normal people in my life are unbothered, and there has been nothing nearly as viral online as the Photos app redesign from last year). However, I do think that the usability problems are real and that there's a general sense that will build over time that this new design system isn't as good as what we had before. Here's to a 2026 with new iPhone and Mac form factors, with more ProMotion displays in iPads, for Apple Watch updates that feel like actual upgrades, and new software design leadership that makes serious moves to clean things up. Cheers!

I was just on GitHub and saw the famous contribution visualization, and this really put into perspective how much more of a developer I was this year. Here's the last 4 years of contributions: 33 contributions in 2022, a bit more in 2023 and 2024, but y'all, 2025 was wild. Just a reminder, the output has been: * Quick Subtitles: Transcribe audio and video locally on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad * Best-o-Masto: See the best posts in your Mastodon feed in seconds * Quick Reviews: Review what you love in MacStories' new app of the year 😉 * Quick Notes: Dictate into your phone. Better than iOS's keyboard * Quick Stuff: A bunch of small web tools * _Upcoming Obsidian plugin that posts to Ghost, which I've been using most of the year_ * _Upcoming Raycast extension that gives you quick access to your recent Ghost posts_ * _Upcoming app for adding chapters to podcasts (like Forecast, but with some quality of life improvements)_

Kathryn Krawczyk from Canary Media: Clean energy is still winning. These 10 charts prove it. > Solar’s monumental rise is the main reason for the shift: The source more than doubled its share of global electricity production from 2021 to 2025. And while coal still remains the world’s largest source of electricity, it’s declining while solar and other renewable sources are on the rise. And: > Between January and September, power demand around the world rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all of that new demand on its own, and with a boost from wind, was able to cover all of it. That’s a huge deal for the clean energy transition. When we produce more renewable power than is needed to cover growing demand, that’s when we can start chipping away at fossil fuels. > While the vibes suggested this would be a dismal year for clean energy deployment in the U.S., it simply wasn’t. Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the grid this year through November. The continued domination of clean, renewable energies, both in the US and around the world, is still a major win worth celebrating. Solar expansion alone covered basically all worldwide energy consumption increases this year, which is huge. I've said it before and I'll say it again, a world where energy is plentiful and clean and we can use it without guilt is far better than a world where we have to ration energy because it's dirty and expensive. The energy story is one I'll continue to keep my eye on into 2026, but it feels like a quiet but significant win year after year.

Amanda Hess for The New York Times in 2018: The End of Endings > Didn’t endings used to mean something? They imbued everything that came before them with significance, and then they gave us the space to reflect on it all. More than that: They made us feel alive. The story ended, but we did not. This had been true at least since the novel supplanted the oral tradition. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin wrote that the novelist “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis.’” He continued, “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” We needed stories to end so we could make sense of them. We needed characters to die so we could make sense of ourselves. I think a factor in my general dissatisfaction with franchises and TV shows is that a key part of storytelling, the ending, isn't really a thing. Here's how they usually go: 1. Beginning 2. Middle 3. More Middle 4. Yet more middle 5. Middle 6. Somehow more middle 7. OH FUCK WE'RE NO LONGER RELEVANT SO HERE'S SOME SHIT ENDING BECAUSE THE MONEY FAUCET STOPPED SPITTING OUT BILLS Patrick Willems has a very good video out now called Let Franchises End and I highly suggest you check it out.

This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Vision Pro 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## Vision Pro, gen 2 I'm going to give myself a round of applause here, because absolutely no one this time last year was expecting new Vision Pro hardware in 2025, except me. > I would be positively shocked if I’m writing my 2025 report card a year from now and the current Vision Pro is still in stores and selling for $3,499. Well, I got it right, as we have a new Vision Pro on store shelves now. Of course, this upgrade was about as unexciting as it could have possibly been. Effectively, the only change here is to the processor, which jumped three generations from the M2 to the M5. Apple also advertised some benefits to display clarity and refresh rate, but the display hardware remained exactly the same, and the M5 just seems to have been able to push that display a little harder. I think overall it's good that Apple updated the Vision Pro, but I think even the product's most ardent supporters would admit this wasn't a super compelling upgrade. I know these people exist, but I literally don't know anybody personally who bought the original Vision Pro, loved it, and has upgraded to the M5 edition. There's just not enough value there. This was also made worse by the fact there was no trade-in program for owners of the original model. If you are a day one owner of the original Vision Pro and you want to get the second model, you got to pay full price, there's absolutely no trade-in. If I had to guess, it's likely because the resale market for this product is so anemic that even Apple doesn't want them back because they can't resell them for any reasonable amount. ## Overall score - D Is it too sensationalist to say this has been a terrible year for the Vision Pro? I guess it's been a fine year for people who already like it, but for a product that's only two years old and which has not proven to be remotely successful in the market, I feel like it made zero progress this year. This is a product that should be finding its stride. It should be a place where we see new and innovative software released that gets people on board. It should be a playground for developers to find new and interesting solutions to problems that could not be solved with 2D screen-based computing platforms. We've seen none of this in 2025. There's positively no energy around this product and no interest from the general public that I can see. Let's look at this another way. Can you name a single app that released for the Vision Pro this year? Can you name a single moment where the Vision Pro broke out of its diehard fans and got other people excited about it? I can't. Maybe you're thinking about that Marvel What If… game, but no, that came out in mid 2024. Maybe the television app from Sandwich? Nope, that was February 2024. Maybe it's that Lapz F1 app that was based on some pretty cool concept videos? Nope, that never even released. Their last updates on the blog were in November 2024, and you can no longer join the TestFlight at all. Apple's Vision Pro app of the year was Explore POV, which appears to be a collection of 3D videos from beautiful places around the world. I guess that's something, but I don't think that's a ticket to mainstream success anytime soon, and to be fair, also launched in early 2024. I still think spatial videos are kinda cool, but even those have lost their luster for me. Last year, every time a new spatial video came out, I would charge up the Vision Pro and watch it, no matter the subject matter. In 2025, I can't be bothered unless it's something I find particularly interesting. The Metallica and MotoGP ones were pretty cool, but I can't think of any more off the top of my head. Movies are a tough one too. I liked watching movies on this last year, but I think I watched a grand total of 2 on it in 2025 (and that's not a lot considering I watched 100 movies this year). I won't name names, they can do their own updates, but I know for a fact that several people who were high on this for watching movies last year have also basically stopped using it for that as well. visionOS 26 released in the fall, with widgets and controller support, which are nice. As we‘ll explore more below, the OS is not the problem, and it’s continued to improve. Shout out to the dev teams working on this. I know some Vision Pro fans will be reading this and might be upset, and I really don't want to take anything away from those who enjoy the product as it is. My point is that if the Vision Pro is only ever going to be a product made for a small slice of relatively wealthy VR enthusiasts, then that's fine. If this is meant to appeal to a wider audience, then Apple made zero progress towards making that a reality in 2025. ## What I want/expect in 2026 It’s always tough to set expectations for the Vision Pro because, honestly, I feel like I have to be vague. I really don't have a clear vision of what I even want from this product or what I think will help it go mainstream. I literally can't think of anything Apple could do to make me start using mine on a regular basis, and I certainly don't know what use case is going to get people buying a $3,500 VR headset in any sort of mainstream capacity. In the product world, we often talk about the MVP, or minimally viable product. This is usually a little rough around the edges, but it exists to prove whether there's a good market fit for the thing you're making. Once you prove people want it, you invest in polishing the experience. When I look at the Vision Pro, I feel like we’ve done the inverse of that. People often complement how nicely made VisionOS is, but I’d argue maybe that's part of its downfall. It's incredibly well thought out and well implemented for a thing that doesn't solve problems or desires that most people actually have. So with that in mind, my broad hope for the Vision Pro in 2026 is to see some sort of software experience that can only happen in virtual reality, and which I—and a decent chunk of the rest of the world—find compelling. Yeah, that's not very specific. And yeah, I'm offloading figuring out what that thing is to other people, but I honestly don't know what it is. Speaking for myself, I've spent all of 2025 identifying problems I have with the computers in my life and building solutions to those problems. Personally, none of the problems I currently have are solved by a virtual reality headset. What I'm craving is something that wins me over. Additionally, and I know this is a hard one to solve, but I continue to believe that a fundamental problem with the Vision Pro is its price. At $3,500 or more, it is simply a product that too few people could purchase, even if they loved the idea of it and desperately wanted one. You can make the product twice as good in every spec, and I still don't think it would move the needle much because the raw cost is simply too much for most people to stomach. Frankly, at the amounts we're talking about, shaving even $1,000 off the price might not be enough to move the needle meaningfully. We really need to get down to a place where this is closer to a $999 starting price. Unfortunately, everything we know from the rumor mill is that a product like that is nowhere close to happening. I guess my realistic hope for 2026 is that the M5 Vision Pro gets some sort of permanent price drop. $2,999 isn't great, but it would be something to move it in the right direction. As for hardware predictions, my honest prediction is that nothing changes, and the M5 Vision Pro remains the only product in the lineup and remains at the same price. If there is new hardware, the boring safe bet is that it's going to be an M6 version of the current product. But I think there's a sliver of a chance that will get some sort of cheaper model, either the more affordable Vision Pro (or Vision Air?) is closer to reality than we think, or they've made serious progress towards a more Meta Ray-Ban-like product that gets announced before the end of the year. * * * Tune in tomorrow for the final in the series, and thank you for reading Birchtree through 2025!

I'm a big fan of movies, they're my favorite medium for storytelling, and it was sometime in 2019 that I said to myself, "man, you don't watch that many movies for someone who claims to love movies." Of course, I was watching like 10-20 movies a year, which is probably relatively average in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't feel like enough for me. I was missing out of so many good stories because I just wasn't making the time for them. TV shows and video games were taking up my free time instead. Well, that was when I jumped back into Letterboxd (apparently I joined in 2012!) and started logging my movie watching, and I ramped up my movie count in 2020 and 2021, bit I set an arbitrary goal for myself in 2022: watch 100 movies. The purpose of this 100 movies wasn't just that more is better, but that if I committed to watching a lot of stuff, it would get me to stop waffling and just hit "play" on more things I was on the fence about. I wanted to get past the "hmm, what should I watch?" mode that has you browsing streaming services for 30 minutes before giving up, and just taking a chance on more things; get out of my comfort zone, if you will. And I think that has been successful! I probably would not have taken chances on movies like Shoplifters, Jojo Rabbit, RRR, The Father, or Perfect Blue if I wasn't chasing this arbitrary number. I've watched at least 100 movies in each of the last 4 years, and I think that's pretty cool. My biggest year was 2023 where I watched 149 movies, which I would say is too many movies. By the end of that year, I remember feeling like watching movies was turning into a bit of a chore. I had bounced back so much from TV and video games that I was putting off enjoying those mediums in favor of pushing up my movie count to heights I'd never seen in my whole life. As such, in 2024 I did not have any sort of goal or target to surpass the year before…the line doesn't always have to go up. I have kept that 'just watch how many you feel like" attitude through 2025 as well, and the numbers pretty clearly show that around 100 movies per year is what works for me right now in my life. This sounds like a ton, but it's basically one movie every Saturday and Sunday throughout the year, which isn't that hard for me to do. ## 2025 Stats For some fun, let's look at a little quick data analysis on the 102 movies I've watched in 2025 (so far, there's still 2 days left!) from my Letterboxd year in review. My movie frequency has ramped up quite a bit in December, as it often does. It's a combination of big movies I want to see coming out all at once, and time off of work giving me more free time to pop on a movie (or two) each day). I only rewatched 2 movies all year, KPop Demon Hunters and One Battle After Another, bot films in my top 10 of the year. Speaking of top 10…this is my current ranking based on what I've been able to see so far. A few heavy hitters remain, so this may shake up, but if you're looking for something to watch in this week between Christmas and New Year's, I'd recommend anything here. For clarity, these are: 1. Sinners 2. One Battle After Another 3. Hard Truths 4. Better Man 5. KPop Demon Hunters 6. Predator: Killer of Killers 7. Superman 8. Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc 9. Wake Up Dead Man 10. Bring Her Back 43% of movies I watched came out this year, and 88% of what I watched was new to me. I'm definitely still seeking out new stories and experiences, not just the comfort food I already know I love. This score breakdown is pretty normal for a regular person watching movies. I get to choose what I watch, so I'm self-selecting for films I'll probably like. These two options are fun…movies I rated higher or lower than most people. I don't know what I can say, Materialists resonated with me, Heart Eyes was a fun horror film in the vein of Scream, and the other 4 are widely adored, so I don't think there's anything crazy there. On the negative front, I stand by The Gorge and The Woman in Cabin 10 being some of the most bland, cookie-cutter, "did AI write this?" slop I've watched in a while. Meanwhile, The Coffee Table was just a miserable experience, even if it was well-crafted; I just couldn't stomach it. As for 2026, there are already 20 movies on my watchlist that we know are coming out, and I'm sure there will be many more that nab my attention, so it looks like another great year for the medium I love.

This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Mac 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## MacBook Pro Only one MacBook Pro got an update this year, and it's the baseline model, which was the first (and to this point only) Mac to get the M5 processor. No Pro or Max processors yet, just the base M5. The M5 seems like a good upgrade over the M4, but that's all I can say, everything else about the MacBook Pro stayed the same. I think this makes buying a MacBook Pro a bit awkward right now. Many buyers are surely looking at the Pro and Max models, but those are on an older chip generation than the base model. They may outperform the M5 model in some tasks, but the M5 beats them at some other things, such as single-core performance. If you're in the market for a new MacBook Pro right now, I'd say don't buy one unless you're getting the base model; everything else is on the way out and will likely be notably better soon. ## MacBook Air Back in March we got new MacBook Airs, which upgraded to the M4 processor and got an upgraded FaceTime camera. We also got a very nice sky blue color, which I know some people think looks like nothing, but I think it's pretty nice when I've seen it in person. The big win here is the price point, which in last year's post I suggested could go several ways. If you think back to this time last year, the M2 Air was the $999 model, with the M3 starting $100 higher. My best case scenario was that they would ditch the dual-processor lineup and put the M4 in all models while sticking with the $99 starting price, but I wasn't confident that would happen. It turns out Apple was able to sort this out, and for the first time in the Apple silicon generation, the MacBook Air has one processor family and the starting price remains at $999. ## Mac Studio Also in March, we got another upgrade which made a few people raise some eyebrows, and I get why. The Mac Studio, which lingered on the M2 generation through 2024, caught up to the rest of the line with the M4 Max and the…checks notes…this can't be right…the M3 Ultra. Repeat everything I said above about the MacBook Pro lineup being split between processor generations, because the Mac Studio is in a similar situation, although this one is less transient and is just what they have decided is the right thing to do. Don't expect an M4 Ultra ever. I don't think this is the end of the world, and people buying this computer can figure out what they need, but it is undeniably odd and not the ideal state for this product. It's all a bit odd to me, as the general discourse around the M3 generation was that it was kind of hard to make and not exactly the best generation of Apple silicon, and yet somehow it's the M4 that won't get an Ultra chip for some reason. Here's hoping the M5 generation gets to go from the base chip all the way up to an Ultra, it would be the first time since the M2 that we got that all at once. On the plus side, if you need the best M4 chip in a desktop environment, the Mac Studio will save you a bunch compared to a MacBook Pro with the same M4 Max ($2,499 vs $3,699). ## Overall score - B It wasn't a particularly thrilling year for the Mac. In fact, I'd say it was quite boring, but I guess you can still score pretty well on my arbitrary scoring system by coming into the year with what I think is clearly the best lineup of Macs ever in the history of the company. Seriously, has there ever been a point in time where Apple made so many Macs that are unanimously considered to be great computers, and where basically every single product in the lineup outperforms its competitors in the Windows space (minus some desktops)? That said, I can't give the Mac an A grade because it was just boring and a couple of their products are in weird spaces right now. The MacBook Pro only getting its base model upgraded to the M5 is a little weird, and the Mac Studio's M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations are surely not what the company would have wanted. And then there's the Mac Pro, which Apple should really just build up the courage and kill. That thing is stuck on the M2 generation with no signs of it getting an upgrade past that. A bright spot this year is the MacBook Air, which gets the processor bump in a timely manner. You get the best processor generation on the $999 model, and it's just clearly the best laptop for most people right now. ## What I want/expect in 2026 It's always hard to do these Mac predictions because for the last couple of years they've been pretty boring. Apple releases new processors every year or so, and every Mac is in a good place, so it's really just a matter of predicting when each product is going to get the new processor. That said, I do have a little spice in this year's predictions, so let's get to them. I'm a MacBook Pro guy, and I'm excited to hear that this might be the most exciting MacBook Pro upgrade we've had since the 2021 Apple Silicon switch for this lineup. The boring part of this prediction is that we'll get M5 Pro and M5 Max models early in the year, eliminating the odd mixed processor situation we have right now. The more exciting part of this is what we're going to get in the fall, which rumor has it will be an OLED model with a touch display and an M6 processor. The rumor mill will surely start grinding away on this throughout 2026, and we'll get a better idea as to what we're looking at here, but I'm excited at the prospect of this update. I am concerned about the price, which is surely not going to be the same as what we pay today, and I'm also concerned that Apple is going to be too conservative with adding touch support to the Mac. Don't get me wrong, if this happens, I'll be getting one, but I really think the vision here should be a convertible device, much like an iPad, rather than the same clamshell form factor the Mac has always had. I think we'll get there eventually, but the early rumors are that this first version is a pretty conservative device. The MacBook Air is the number one selling laptop in the world, and for good reason. It's an outstanding device with incredible performance and competitive pricing for its class of computer. I'm going to be really boring and say they'll do exactly what they did this year, and in March 2026, we'll get an M5 upgrade with no other notable changes. I think the Mac Studio will get updated this year, maybe in the summer, and it will get onto the M5 generation of chips. Yes, including an M5 Ultra. I predict the Mac Mini will get bumped to the M5 and M5 Pro in the spring, maybe at the same time as the MacBook Air. The Mac Pro will continue to linger as the $7,000 computer that ships with a 2022 chipset that's 3 generations behind the rest of the Mac line. And oh yeah, the iMac. I'm 50/50 on this one, but if I had to make a guess, I would expect this to get an M5 upgrade at some point in 2026. I'd love to know how many of these Apple sells compared to their other Macs, because this still feels like such a weird product to me. Like a relic from the past that they keep around for a very small niche of users compared to everything else they sell. That said, they've given it M3 and M4 variants, so you gotta think it'll get an M5 edition eventually. There is an open question about displays, which isn't technically Mac hardware, but it's in the same ballpark. The Studio Display turns 4 this spring, and I'm going to be a downer and say that it will not get an upgrade in all of 2026. I mean, they're selling a 2013 display panel for an insanely high price that comically pales in comparison to the specs in far, far cheaper monitors, so they _should_ upgrade it, but my money's on it not getting touched. My impression is that Apple won't upgrade this until they can make a meaningful improvement without spiking the cost, and I don't see them doing that in today's environment. It's also not strictly Mac hardware, but the macOS story in 2026 will be an interesting one. I think two main drivers will impact this release: Tahoe's reception and touch Macs. I don't expect major changes to the design, but I do expect to see some changes to the Liquid Glass design system to feel more at home on the Mac. To me, Liquid Glass feels a bit like an ill-fitting Shapeshifter skin on top of macOS's real UI, and they should do better here. On the touch front, I expect we'll see that using macOS with touch doesn't actually require much change to the UI, since as we all know, macOS isn't as small as you think, and actually the pundits who have suggested for years that major changes would need to be made were way overthinking things. And if I can take a major swing here, I'm going to say here and now that macOS will be available to run on the iPad Pro by the end of 2026. This could be officially from Apple or it could be though some clever people hacking things together to make it work, but I think if you want it enough, you'll be able to do it. All in all, I think it'll be a relatively standard year for the Mac, but I think we have the potential for some real excitement with the MacBook Pro and what that means for macOS. We'll see what happens.

This is the second in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my iPad 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## iPad Pro In yesterday's post, I talked about how the smartphone is in its laptop era, and boy howdy is the iPad Pro in that era as well. After spending six long years on the same industrial design, the Pro model finally got a design and screen upgrade last year. With that in mind, it wasn't surprising that the upgrade in 2025 was a simple spec bump. The closest thing to a surprise is that we got an update at all, as the Pro routinely goes over a year without being touched. As for this upgrade specifically, the only real thing of note is the M5 processor upgrade, which makes everything a bit faster. Other than that, it's exactly the same iPad Pro as last year. I don't say that to belittle it, I just say it to reiterate that this is a laptop-style upgrade and it really only makes sense to people who need the performance bump. ## iPad Air Speaking of spec bump upgrades, the iPad Air was upgraded to an M4 this year. I'm happy to see these iterative updates across the iPad lineup, but there's not much more to say here. It's a bit faster version of the iPad Air we had before. The one thing I will mention is the display, which is plenty sharp and bright, but is criminally still running at a locked 60Hz refresh rate. All of Apple's premium iPhones do 120Hz now, and I think it's absurd that a tablet that's expensive is stuck in 2017 refresh rates. For the cheap iPad, sure, whatever, but when you're spending $600-$1,300 on a tablet, it's not exactly a budget device by anyone's definition. ## iPad Say it with me…it's a processor bump! This went from the A14 to the A16, which was a bit of a surprise, as this is the only new product in Apple's computing lineup with no support for Apple Intelligence. On the plus side, they did boost the base storage from 64GB (which was a crime) to 128GB, so that's something. ## Overall score - C This is probably the most divisive product line in 2025 from Apple. Was it great? Was it good? Was it awful? If you read enough blog posts from iPad users, you'll surely get all three answers. For my part, I think the iPad has some really good stuff going for it, and if you're a certain type of user, it's never been better, but something still feels off about the whole iPad situation. In terms of hardware, I think getting refreshes to 3 of the 4 models in the lineup is pretty good, especially since the only one to miss out (the mini) was upgraded in October 2024, so it's not criminally outdated or anything. Yes, these were all spec bumps only, but I'm not super bothered by that when the hardware is mostly really good. The iPad Pro hardware is basically perfect in my book, but lingering screen issues in the other 3 models continue to frustrate me: * iPad's non-laminated screen looks like shit (other iPads got this in 2014) * iPad Air's 60Hz screen is absurd on a premium tablet * iPad mini's jelly scroll and 60Hz combo Then there's the software, which has been divisive to say the least. For many years, iPad fans would dismiss the complaints of those who didn't like the iPad for work by saying, "just get a Mac". For the last couple years, though, it seems like Apple's software design strategy for the iPad has turned into "just make it work like the Mac". Some people love this, but I've seen more than a few vocal iPad proponents go, "ruh roh" at this year's iPadOS 26 update. I'll be honest, as a more casual iPad user these days as well, I actually agree with the critics on this one; my iPad experience is a bit more fiddly than it used to be, and the new windowing system is to blame here. Forcing me to choose between a free windowing system and never opening more than one app ever again in my life is an annoying choice to make, but it's one you need to make when upgrading to iPadOS 26. To their credit, Apple has improved the situation in subsequent point updates this year, bringing back Slide Over and improving the gestures to enter Split Screen mode, and my Comfort Zone co-host Chris has argued that you can still do all the things you used to be able to do with split screen, but it's still more fiddly. I still find myself resizing windows to split the screen, and having the windows stick to that size when I open them on their own later and needing to tap a couple things to get it back to full screen. This isn't the worst thing in the world, and of course it does come with the power-up of being able to freely resize windows, but as an 11-inch iPad user who never uses their iPad with an external display, the multi-window feature isn't actually useful for me, so I get the minor usability downgrades to give benefits to other people. And it's not just the Pro lineup that got these new features, it's every iPad. So even iPad mini users who can't dock their iPad to a display and who would literally never get a benefit from free floating windows also get these little paper cuts to usability without any real gain. This is a long-winded way for me to say that I understand why there's some angst in this update. ## What I want/expect in 2026 You'll have to forgive me, but a few of my software predictions are going to be a bit vague (I can never quite guess what they'll do next with iPad software), but I think I can see the shape of things to come. First, just like for the last few years, the flagship updates to iPadOS 27 will be features that quite literally bring the Mac way of doing things to the iPad. Second, I think the feedback they've received from iPad users on the new windowing system will make them bring back a dedicated split screen mode that lets users get split screen and slide over without needing to adopt the free windowing mode. Third, this isn't the Mac article (that's tomorrow), but given the rumors that the first touch-capable Mac is coming in 2026, it feels like there's something there for the iPad to be involved in that story. I'm not saying we're going to get to install macOS on an iPad Pro, but I'm also not _not_ saying something like that is happening. On the hardware front… * The iPad Pro will get a late-year upgrade to the M6 and no other notable hardware updates. It seems like the iPad Pro is now the default device that Apple ships their new silicon generations on day one at this point, so I think the most likely way I get this wrong is the M6 simply doesn't make 2026, but I think it'll get there. * The iPad Air will get an M5 bump, once again briefly causing "why does the iPad Pro exist?" discourse as they both have the same processor. This will frustrate me as someone who will still be annoyed the Air has a low-refresh rate display and it will frustrate Chris who values the Thunderbolt port. * The iPad mini will get an upgrade to OLED with ProMotion and will increase in price, making it a better, but somehow even more premium lil' tablet. * The base iPad will not get upgraded, landing it squarely in the "don't buy!" section of buying guides. If it does get an upgrade, I expect it to get a spec bump to a chip that supports Apple Intelligence, and this may be wishful thinking, but I also think the next upgrade will bring a laminated display to this model. I don't think I'm particularly good at predicting iPad things, so this all could be way off. We'll see!

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and wearables). You can also read iPhone 2024 and 2023 report cards. ## iPhone 17 Pro I know this new Pro model isn't universally adored, but I think it's great. I would agree with the critics that it's not as beautiful as the previous Pro models, but I do think it has a unique charm and is a very practical device (shout out to everyone who demanded a more opinionated design, and when they got it, complained that it wasn’t universally adored). Add on to that the fact that battery life has improved to the point where I was able to purchase the smaller Pro phone this year and be completely happy with it in terms of battery life. That hasn't been the case since maybe the iPhone 13 Pro. From a technical perspective, I think these are really strong updates across the board as well. The A19 Pro is incredibly performant, as you might expect. The new telephoto camera is a step in the right direction, and it fills out the camera system to feel pretty great across the board. Add onto this the front-facing camera, which is now a square sensor that lets you take landscape or portrait selfies with the phone in whatever orientation you prefer. Genuinely awesome stuff. We're still early days on this phone, but I think it is shaping up to be one of the best Pro generations we've ever had. ## iPhone Air Also relatively divisive, the iPhone Air came onto the scene with a mix of desire and confusion. As I've said a few times, the passionless, objective pitch for this phone is pretty rough: "would you like to pay $200 more for less battery life, fewer cameras, and worse speakers than your current iPhone? No? Really???" But of course, the draw of the Air is not that it's a worse phone on the metrics we've long used to judge phones, it's that it's really fucking thin. I'll be the first to admit that it is striking how thin and light it is in hand, to the point where even though I personally get more value from the Pro model, I find myself using the Air now and again because it is so cool. I'm lucky enough to be at a point in my life where I have my pick of the best phones and I can just use what I like the most, and I think it says something that this phone has a draw on me even though it's objectively worse on several metrics. Also, I can't say this enough, this is a different sort of new phone than the iPhone X was in 2017. Check out the Apple compare page to see how the iPhone X was an upgrade in every single way over the other iPhones on the market at the time. It wasn't paying more to get a cooler design with compromises, it was paying more to get a cooler design _and_ better specs across the board. Finally, one real draw for this phone for me is that the screen size is in a really happy medium between the Pro and Pro Max models. 6.5" in a fatter screen is really nice for me, and the iPhone Air gets me that. ## iPhone 17 The absolute glow up of the year, the iPhone 17 is a real banger, and it all comes down to the screen in my opinion. All three flagship iPhones got the same ProMotion display, and I can't stress how much this makes the lineup feel more premium this year. Add onto that a 36% YoY battery life jump (that's huge), the same square selfie camera as the Pro and Air, 48MP ultra-wide camera, doubled 256GB base storage, smaller bezels, and all this without a price increase, which many of us were expecting. Great "standard" iPhone this year, even if the Pro models continue to be the best-selling model line. ## iPhone 16e The red-haired step-child of the iPhone released this year, the iPhone 16e has been razzed all year long, but I stand by my initial assessment that it's a very strong base iPhone for people who want an iPhone that will last for a long time, but don't want to spend top dollar. Did you know the iPhone 16e was the 4th best-selling smartphone in the world in Q3 2025? Yup, bigger than every single Android phone made by anyone. That said, I do understand why it felt a little too stripped-down for the price. The lack of MagSafe is the one that puts it over the edge in my opinion, and rumors of that coming back to the 17e is encouraging. That said, compared to buying an older iPhone 15 or 14 Pro for similar prices come with some upgrades such as cameras and displays (at least on the 14 Pro), but those also come with trade-offs (2 generations worse performance, less battery life, Lightning on the 14 Pro, weight, no Apple Intelligence) as well. All that said, it's not the best phone, and it's not the phone for me, but it's the first time in many years that I've been able to look at the "SE" phone in Apple's lineup and actually say it's a reasonable purchase. ## Overall score - A I think you could argue this is a B year for the iPhone because outside maybe the iPhone Air, there wasn't anything exceptionally innovative in the lineup, but in my book, smartphones are past their pure excitement era and are in their "laptop era". Each update is more iterative than before, and that's okay. We're 18 years into the iPhone era, and it honestly would be insane if the hardware and software changed as much year-on-year as it did at the beginning. Obviously we're not at the end of the line and there is innovation to come, but as far as slab-style phones go, we're filing down rough edges and creating change for the sake of change (aluminum is the best! Now steel is the best! No, titanium is the best! J/k, aluminum is the best again!). In that world, the fact we got 4 new iPhones this year and all of them were meaningful upgrades over what came before, is pretty impressive. Rumors have it that we're going to get a folding iPhone in 2026, and that will surely shake things up, but right now all I can think of is Jony Ive in the iPhone 8 introduction video describing that phone as the final, purest form of the original iPhone design. I feel that way about the latest iPhones for the iPhone X generation of phones. We may be on the cusp of something new, but that just means that we're really freaking good at making the old stuff, so I think any of the iPhones released in 2025 are great buys no matter what iPhone you're coming from or what your budget is. ## What I want/expect in 2026 I hope 2026 is the year of new form factors for Apple products, and the folding iPhone would be the biggest move Apple could make in that regard. Now, Samsung has been shipping folding phones to the public since 2019 and I know several people who have used them and loved them for several years, so it's not like Apple is first here, but I'm fascinated to see how they handle the UI on this sort of device. The recent rumors that it's going to be a quite small folding phone also intrigues me, and wonders if the wealthy people who loved the iPhone mini will finally have something that they can enjoy again. This might be a dangerous assumption, but if we do indeed get a folding iPhone this year, I think the rest of the lineup will be more boring (again, in the laptop era, that's not a terrible thing). Frankly, the updates this year set this up nicely. The Pro models got a design refresh, so they'll probably stay the same, but get new colors (my money's on a deep purple model as well as the return of a space black model). The iPhone Air doesn't have a number attached to it, which everyone has assumed meant it would not get annual updates (for now), and I would agree that we won't see a new model in 2026. Similarly, I agree with the rumors that suggest Apple will split the iPhone 18 and 18 Pro launches, with the Pros coming out in September and the non-Pros coming in early 2027. I'd expect this to lead to the Pro line selling an even higher proportion of the overall lineup as people who can't wait for the spring will just spend a bit more and get the Pro for the first time in a while. I know it’s not quite the same as it once was, but this would mark the first time since 2006 that a “standard iPhone” wasn’t released. And I would expect the iPhone 17e to be the first iPhone we get in the year, coming in the spring and sporting the A19 processor, MagSafe, and the same design as the current model. Criticisms will remain, the base storage will stay at 128GB, the colors will stay the same, and the $599 price point will be a bit too much for people. As for the folding phone, all I can do are make guesses, so here's some shots in the dark: * The name will be iPhone Ultra (or maybe the Folio if they’re feeling wild) * The phone will fold like a book, not like a flip phone * The outside display will be the smallest iPhone display since the iPhone 13 mini * The internal display will allow split view and picture-in-picture (no slide over, no free windows) * No Apple Pencil support, but there will be a new stylus specifically for the iPhone * The crease is still visible, but it’s marginally better than the current Samsung standard * Starting price $1,999 * Storage will start at 256GB * There will be 2 cameras on the back, wide and ultrawide * Battery life has 2 advertised numbers from Apple, one for screen open and closed. One of them will be "the best battery life of any iPhone ever" * Camera Control is here, but lacks sliding gestures (applies to all iPhones going forward) * Apps run in iPad layouts on the internal display, further blurring the lines between what iPhone, iPad, or Mac apps are Now, if the folding phone doesn't happen this year, I guess they'll have to spice up the rest of the lineup, but I think this is actually the year of the folding iPhone.

Today I learned something amazing: Safari supports higher than 60Hz refresh. It's the only mainstream web browser that doesn't, and I have never understood why, but apparently as of the end of 2025 in Safari version 26.3 (and maybe earlier) you can enable it. Here's how to do it. _Disclaimer that this may cause issues, but I can't imagine what. The entire web has already run at higher refresh rates for years, so unless this breaks something in Safari specifically, you should be fine._ ## Mac Go to Safari's Settings (via the menu or with `Command + ,`. Make sure developer mode is enabled (this won't break things, it just exposes some more UI, such as the very basic ability to inspect HTML, like every other browser). Go to Feature Flags on the far right. Search for "60fps" Turn off the "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps" feature. Restart Safari. When you reopen it, website should render at up to your display's max refresh rate. ## iPhone and iPad This is very similar to the Mac flow, except you don't need to enable developer mode. 1. Open the Settings app 2. Tap "Apps" (hear the bottom) 3. Tap Safari 4. Tap "Advanced" (bottom) 5. Tap "Feature Flags" (bottom) 6. Scroll to "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps" and disable it 7. Force quit Safari and reopen it Find Apps in SettingsGo into Safari's settingsAdvanced is at the bottomFeature Flags is at the bottom as wellFind the setting and turn it off

Andru Marino writing for The Verge: It’s finally time to retire the word ‘podcast’ > In 2026, instead of trying to define what a podcast is, I think we need to stop using the word altogether. “Podcast” is becoming an outdated or even a potentially cringe internet relic, similar to how the phrase “web series” faded from use online. Honestly, I don't disagree with this. I've found the "_actually_ , if it's not audio-only and available via RSS for free, it's not a podcast" argument exhausting for as long as it's been happening. Marino posits that "shows" is a better way to describe these things, and I agree. It's a more broad term, but I think it better captures what is happening in the space. Here's an example of how annoying I find the current "podcast" argument. Every week, Niléane, Chris, and I sit down and talk for about 90 minutes, cameras and microphones recording every moment. Chris edits it, and exports it twice: once as a video file and once as an audio file. The audio file gets uploaded to our podcast host and the video file gets uploaded to YouTube. We unquestionably recorded one piece of "content" and Chris edited one "show" but what were we doing when we recorded? Were we podcasting? Were we doing something else? To me, we'e making a show, and that show can be enjoyed (or hate-listened to, if you're nasty) in podcast apps, in video on YouTube, or even in audio on YouTube…it's all fluid. I'm fine with it staying "podcast" as well. After all, we all have a "phone" in our pocket, even though that's a pretty old fashioned way to describe the function of that product as well.

From the Anthropic blog: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size > It remains unclear how far this trend will hold as we keep scaling up models. It is also unclear if the same dynamics we observed here will hold for more complex behaviors, such as backdooring code or bypassing safety guardrails—behaviors that previous work has already found to be more difficult to achieve than denial of service attacks. I'm sharing this because I've seen it posted a few times on social as proof that LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but reading past the headline reveals a much more nuanced finding. Basically, this is something to be aware of if you're building LLMs and to protect against, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker.

Last Friday, Paris Buttfield-Addison posted 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple, which kind of blew up. > A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Yeah, effectively, they got a $500 Apple gift card, tried to add it to their account, and this triggered a high enough severity fraud alert in Apple's system that it automatically locked their Apple account. Not good. The post is a good reminder of how tied to these large companies we really are. I assume most people reading this post have an Apple account, and it's a good exercise to consider how much of your digital life would become inaccessible if you suddenly lost access to that account. Would you lose all your photos? All of your contacts? All of your files? Obviously, the odds of you losing access to your Apple account are exceptionally low, and Buttfield-Addison's experience is the exception, but I think it is a good reminder that completely benign behavior can occasionally lead to serious consequences you would not see coming. This leads me to three main thoughts on the topic. First, companies like Apple and Google have over 1 billion users, and their automated systems are likely correct far more often than they are wrong, and I don't think they need to go away. However, a good appeals process is necessary to have, and what happened in this person's case is not ideal. How would someone without a blog and ability to reach an audience have gotten this solved? Second, when you're locked out of your Apple ID, you should be able to download effectively everything from your account. This would mean that if I was locked out of my Apple ID, maybe I wouldn't be able to use it or add new data to that account. But if I still was able to authenticate, I should be able to download my photos, my files, and other relevant information that I may want to get out. This would make it so that even if I wasn't able to get the attention that this person did and resolve the issue, at least I could still get a backup of my information. And third, I strongly think that everyone should have some level of redundancy in as much of their digital life as they can. Photos are the big one that I think everyone should be considering. A lot of the things on my computer can be replaced or recreated if they're lost, but not my photos; I can never recreate those moments that I've captured. I personally treat Apple Photos as my de facto photo library, and it works great, but for many years, I had Google Photos also backing up those images, which gave me a second online backup. In the event that my Apple ID was locked, I would still have all of my photos in Google. Since getting a Synology NAS last year, I've actually switched that to having the Synology Photos app automatically back up my photo library to the NAS so that I have local access to all of my photos. Now those photos aren't tied to any online account, they're literally on a hard drive in my house. Consider what's important to you and figure out a solution that works for you. * * * This story has a happy ending, with Buttfield-Addison posting an update yesterday: > We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Great news, but again, would someone without a blog and a few thousand social media followers have been able to get here? I don't know…

Stephanie Vee: Delete Spotify? Sure, But Don't Just Replace it With Another Subscription > streaming music sucks for almost everyone involved. I believe we only do it because we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that renting music indefinitely is cheaper than purchasing it outright – especially since streaming companies grant us the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet with our subscriptions. Spoilers for an upcoming Cozy Zone episode, but I've come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we're paying for music when we're actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away. > To me, a music streaming subscription only really makes sense if you’re at that impressionable stage of your life where you still live and breathe new music – or if you’re one of those rare people who continue to seek out new music as you age. As for the rest of us? I think we should maybe just own our shit and stop paying tech CEOs to rent it. Chances are, I’ll still be rocking out to Hot Fuss in my retirement home, so why should I rent it from the likes of Daniel Ek for the next four decades (or longer)? As one of the seemingly rare 40-year-olds who still checks the new music releases every week, this resonates with me as well. I kind of feel like I want to buy all of the music I listen to in 2026…we'll see.

I didn't really set out to do it, but my Quick Subtitles app actually makes for a pretty interesting benchmark tool. Back in October I compared sustained performance between the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air by using the app's batch feature, but it wasn't much work to tweak that feature to build a bespoke benchmarking mode into the app, so that's what I did. ## The test This benchmark is pretty simple, you give it an audio or video file and it transcribes the file using Apple's on-device language model over and over and over again. I maxed everything out by giving it a Cozy Zone podcast episode to transcribe 20 times in a row. After each run, it logs how many words per minute it transcribed in that specific run, and begins again. To be clear, this is a very specific benchmark that tests the performance of a combination of features of the system on a chip, including the neural engine, CPU, and memory. This is not a wide ranging, general benchmark. But that's not what I'm using it for, I'm using it in this case to test thermal throttling. See, whatever combination of components this tests, it generates heat…a lot of heat. **I wanted to know how quickly each device would thermally throttle. When it did throttle, how much performance did it lose?** ## **iPhone 16e** This is the one you're probably least interested in, but here's our baseline. * A18 processor, 6-core CPU and 4-core GPU As we can see, the first transcript hit 170 words per second, and by the 4th one we were about as throttled as we could get. Performance was around 66-70% of the max performance most of the run. ## iPhone Air The iPhone Air is where things get more interesting. * A19 Pro processor, 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU This one was basically the same exact story, just with a higher starting point. We started at a very good 208 words per second to begin, but by the 4th run we were bottoming out around 130 words per second, or about 62% of the max performance. ## iPhone 17 Pro Here's where we get to see the benefit of a vapor chamber. * A19 Pro processor, 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU This one starts at a highest-yet first run of 217 words per second, dropping to 151 in the 20th and final run. That's a drop to 70% of the performance, but you can see a pretty linear trend as it gets marginally slower each time. What this tells me is that the vapor chamber is doing some good work, but since it's not active cooling, it's just passive cooling, eventually we still get pretty darn hot and need to throttle. These last two were especially interesting because back in October I did a similar test, and I suspected that the Air was indeed throttling due to worse thermals, but I didn't have enough granular data to prove it. I think this test shows pretty conclusively that its raw performance at this workload is comparable to the Pro phones, but only for a couple minutes. ## MacBook Pro Now let's get kind of unfair and bring a freaking laptop to the shootout. * M4 Pro, 14-code CPU and 20-core GPU There are a couple notable things with this test. First, in terms of throttling, buddy this thing doesn't throttle. Outside of the first run, which was oddly a bit slower than the rest, every single other test was almost exactly 227 words per second. And second, while this is objectively faster than the iPhones, it's not that much faster. Its fastest time was only 5% faster than the iPhone 17 Pro's best time, which is pretty remarkable for the phone. Basically, if you need to transcribe a one-hour podcast, your phone and Mac will be about the same speed doing it, but if you need to transcribe a season all at once, do that on the Mac. * * * Benchmark mode will be in a Quick Subtitles which should be out before the end of the year. Shameless plug…More Birchtree subscribers get beta access to all of my apps, and it should be in the beta in the next day or two (depending on App Review time, which yes, also impacts TestFlight).

The Information had a new report out this week that has a bunch of info about some upcoming Apple products. I'm not one to shy away from paying for news, but I still haven't been able to justify $1,000 per year, so thankfully MacRumors summarized the news for me. Here's my quick reactions to each item. ## iPhone 17e > Specifically, the report said the iPhone 17e will support "magnetic wireless charging," which implies that the device will feature MagSafe for faster, magnetic wireless charging I'm an iPhone 16e defender, but I think that MagSafe is the straw that broke the camel's back on this thing for a lot of people. The notch and single camera are sacrifices, but in my opinion, it's the lack of MagSafe that really pushed this over the edge to make a lot of people consider it a bad deal. The price might still be a bit high, but I strongly feel that the lack of MagSafe made this phone _feel_ cheap. ## Folding iPhone > Apple's first foldable iPhone will be equipped with a 7.7-inch inner display, and a 5.3-inch outer display Now this is interesting. Both the Samsung and Google folding phones have 6.5" external displays and 8" internal displays. That means their external displays are very much like a normal phone (the iPhone Air is that size). Apple going with a 5.3" external display is really, really interesting. The iPhone 13 mini had a 5.4" screen, and it felt like an absolute baby, and apparently this one will be marginally smaller. Yikes! Those who love small phones for their deep pockets, this might be a dream device. ## iPhone Air 2 > Apple is apparently considering adding a second rear camera to the device And: > the report said Apple is considering lower pricing for the iPhone Air 2 I think both of these would help this phone immensely. The sales pitch for the iPhone Air is quite literally, "pay more to get less," and I don't think anyone should be surprised to hear that isn't the most compelling pitch to most people. And again, this is totally different than the iPhone X, which was an upgrade over the cheaper phones in literally every single spec from display to cameras to battery life: you paid more to get more. As I I've been saying for a year now (I predicted it on Comfort Zone), I don't think the iPhone Air will be a middle ground iPhone for long, I think Apple's vision for it is to be the "normal iPhone" and they want to work the base iPhone out of the lineup. The only reason it wasn't that this year is because they couldn't get the features and price where they needed them to be (aka literally the situation the MacBook Air was in before it took over the MacBook's position as the entry-level Mac laptop). These changes would get them closer to being able to do that with the iPhone. ## Camera Control > Apple plans to remove touch sensitivity and haptic feedback from the Camera Control on the standard iPhone 18 model, which suggests that it will be removing the button's capacitive layer. The report did not say if this change will extend to the iPhone 18 Pro models, but it seems likely for consistency. This was already a rumor floating around out there, and the more we hear it the more likely it seems. I think Camera Control will go down much like 3D Touch: a cool, over-engineered feature that some people like, but most people find to be way too much and therefore will be retired shortly after being introduced. Cards on the table, I was a 3D Touch fanboy, and I actively dislike the Camera Control gestures.

Quick Reviews just won the MacStories Selects Best New App award, and I'm over the moon about it! I honestly didn't seen this coming at all, and I genuinely teared up just a bit when I saw the news. Yes, yes, awards aren't the end-all-be-all and there are plenty of great new apps this year, but it's so nice to see an app that I made mostly for myself has made other people happy as well. I like Jonathan Reed's writeup on the blog: > Like Matt’s other apps, Quick Reviews is a simple concept that’s well thought out and executed, making it a joy to use. It’s now part of my movie-watching ritual, and I suspect that’s the case for many others. It’s a pleasure to be able to name Quick Reviews the Best New App of 2025. And I also appreciated this from Federico and John on AppStories: > Federico: I think what's especially nice about it is that it is the kind of utility that is focused, that is made by a new indie developer for Apple platforms, and is focused on people…on people enjoying art made by other people. > > John: Which is a positive spin that can be shared on social media. The thing I think is too easy on social media is to share hot takes, complaints, and gripes, and with Matt's app, you can share things you love, which I really think makes all of social media a better place for everyone. Well, this is where I remind you to check out Quick Reviews for iOS here. It's free to use, but $10/year gets you Magic Mode which autofills a bunch of metadata for you, (one-way) Letterboxd sync, and a simple year in review image generator.

In what might be a first for the platform, Jonathan Hoefler posted an insightful thread on Threads about a topic in which he is an expert and didn't make it vapid engagement bait. It's about the Times New Roman vs Calibri debate and how asinine basically all of it is, but it ends with this bit that I love: > if there _are_ circumstances in which one typeface is easier to read for immigrants with disabilities, chances are it will be equally beneficial to middle-aged white guys with fancy eyeglasses. This is the message I try to share are widely as possible. I hate it when people say that "some people need accessibility," which is something I heard a lot this summer in the liquid glass discourse. Accessibility is not putting white text on a white background…how dark you need to make the text to be legible varies from person to person, but there's no point along the way where you go from "normal people" to "people who need accessibility features". Proper text contrast lets everyone read easier. Keyboard shortcuts allow anyone to navigate interfaces how they want. Consistent, obvious UI helps everyone understand how their software works. * * * On a related note, I liked this post from Steven Aquino: **Times New Rubio:** > Typographical nerdery notwithstanding, however, what I take away from Rubio’s directive is simple: he cares not one iota for people with disabilities, just like his boss. Whether Times New Roman, Calibri, or something else is the best font for the most people in official documents is interesting, but come on, inclusivity isn't exactly a top priority for this government.

Idan Dardikman writing on the Koi blog, 8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions, documents how "Urban VPN Proxy" is potentially harvesting your chats with 10 major LLMs. The extension is used across millions of users on Chrome and has 10k reviews on the iOS App Store (the post covers the Chrome extension, but there's no reason this wouldn't work on iOS as well, they just can't inspect what's happening on iOS like they can on the web…another point for the open web 😉). Setting aside the contrived setup they had for this post, from what I can tell, it's a good case study in what software is capable of doing on your computer. Also that you don't just get privacy just by installing a VPN…at best, a VPN just means you're trusting your behavior with the VPN company. Also, I gotta say, it's yet another example of a problem framed with AI, but it really an issue with traditional software. Just sayin'.