Luis' take is the right one. LLM AI is fine for messing around. It's absolutely not fine where the stakes are any higher.

mood

MICHAEL: It's not worth the risk. I got a good job. PETER: What if you didn't have a good job.

VR headsets create visual conditions that would be medically disqualifying for driving in most places. Apple's Vision Pro has a 100° horizontal field of view with empty black void beyond. If you had eye disease causing such significant visual impairment, you wouldn't qualify for a drivers license.

Subtly downgrade a band: Somewhat Spicy Poblanos

The rest of the world is hardly dependent on iMessage, but Meta's Ray-Bans Display are US only for now. Meta said we'd be able to "privately view and reply to messages in… iOS and Android" but now its "tell...Apple employee to build the right permissions and access." So, apparently no iOS support.

Accurate

Based on supply chain reports and other deets I could scrounge, iPhone Air costs Apple ~10% less to produce than base model iPhone. If Air is successful and Apple scales production, the savings should grow to ~20%. It would be extremely lucrative for Apple to replace the base model with the Air.

The reviews are in, and for general workloads iPhone Air has about 20% less battery life than the base model iPhone. If you end most days with 20% or more of your charge, you will probably be okay with the Air's battery life.

mood

An award-worthy performance by Jon Bernthal, and some of the best writing of any Marvel story I've watched or read. If this 6 minutes intrigues you, give Daredevil (2016-2019) a run. For my taste, TV doesn't get any better. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher are also worth checking out.

I think iPhone Air got a Pro SoC for cost saving and marketing. The parts don't meet Pro's performance bar, destined to be scrapped. And Apple gets to claim power wasn't sacrificed for style. It was. The chip is under-clocked and cores throttled as heat matters more than SoC for a phone so thin.

I think Apple wants iPhone Air to replace the base model. 1) it can balloon Pro with more great features 2) lower-spec base model would lower costs 3) mid-spec refugees forced to buy expensive Pro 4) a wider gulf is less confusion and purchase friction Oh, and if it works, resetting the industry.

Apple shipped such a terrible accessibility regression for so many with its Liquid Glass design language that I was primed to fall for a piece of satire I shared here as fact. Oops. Also, Apple shipped a terrible accessibility regression for so many with its Liquid Glass design language.

Saturday morning cartoons was more important to 8 year old me than most things are to 51 year old me.

I have a flagship smartphone, and thinness is a priority. I also use a case because I'm old and my skin is dry and slabs of glass slip right through my fingers. The Pitaka Ultra-Slim case (1mm, 20g) is barely there with good grip, feel, and even some style. Genuine endorsement. Great case.

Missed the interview from March where Chris Pruitt, VR games director at Meta, said developers should pivot from 20-something gamers to 30-something dads and focus on TV watching. But watching TV fits in 80g-110g displays connected to a smartphone. You don't need a whole ass 500g face PC for that.

1995's Nintendo Virtual Boy was by far Nintendo's biggest flop with only 770K units sold. Apple's 2024 Vision Pro VR goggles have haven't been able to break 400K in sales. A failed '90s 3D game console moved twice as many units as a the 2024 Vision Pro, Apple's most expensive launch ever.

mood

One of the best use cases for smartglasses that's not better on watches or phones is surreptitious recording in shared spaces. Sure, inconspicuous audio capture is already pretty easy, but audio, video and other sensor data with great directional control pretty much undetectably. Whole other animal.

[1/5] Meta acquired Oculus in 2014 and spent 5 years putting a whole PC inside of it. That shipped as Quest VR goggles in 2019. A year later it was clear that face PCs were not going mainstream. Everything to do with goggles after that was lame duck, buying time for Zuck's next bet, AR spectacles.

TC with SJ's playbook again? 2008 MacBook $1099 2008 MacBook Air $1799 2009 MacBook $999 2009 MacBook Air $1499 2010 MacBook $999 (EOL) 2010 MacBook Air: $999 --- 2025 iPhone $799 2025 iPhone Air $999 2026 iPhone $799 2026 iPhone Air $899 2027 iPhone $799 (EOL) 2027 iPhone Air $799

No. No thank you. Really. No. Fuck right off I'm not giving a web crawling form filling shitty at counting regularly hallucinating chatbot free reign in my goddamn password manager. Absolutely not. What kinda pills are you on, motherfucker.

Big Tech is predatory. Say it with me and pass it along. Big Tech is predatory. Big Tech Is Predatory. BIG TECH IS PREDATORY! Seriously. They are.

A problem I have with big name tech reviewers is they're all in love with consumer tech. Where's the "I've got an amazing computer in my hand. Putting another one on my face is stupid" tech reviewer. I'd pay for a really good version of that.

When I was 18, we detected the first planet around another star. The number is now 6,000. I think that's amazing. There are billions more to find, in our galaxy alone, but this is a great start.

A common complaint about iOS 26 is that it's hard to read things like notifications. Who uses notifications, right? And who needs to read things, right? Aren't we post-literate already? Apple seems to think so.

Steve Jobs has been dead long enough for everyone at Apple to have forgotten "gorilla arm syndrome."

Who could have guessed that if you remove cameras, speakers, sensors, and battery from a smartphone, you can make it thinner. Wild, right.

Looking at several close-up videos and photos of the iPhone 17 Pro today and I'm not a fan of Apple's new aluminum finishing process. Though I'm certain it's one of the most sophisticated and expensive approaches, the results look cheap to me.

I do not listen to podcasts. I think it's generally a shit medium and I'd rather read what you have to say at a blog.

This is probably the reflective waveguide and optical engine used in Meta's upcoming display glasses. Lumus is a leader in this space and it makes sense for Meta use a supplier, as their in-house tech is all future focused and not yet ready for productization.

Apple, the great disabler. There are millions of people who were getting along just fine with the previous iOS design language who must now use accessibility settings to read things on their phones. What a downgrade. So much for Apple's accessibility leadership. Jerks.

In some ways, iPhone hasn't changed much in 18 years. A few things are smaller, others bigger, basic concept and layout persist. Original iPhone 2G (2007) on the left and iPhone Air (2025) on the right.

Perhaps silly but I often wonder how we ended up with "literal" and "figurative" swapped. We've somehow decided the marks on a page represent truth, and the actual physical reality means "metaphorical." When and how did that go down and why aren't people up in arms?

When comparing battery life of two smartphones, I don't think this now standard video playback hours is a great measure. Video playback is probably the most highly optimized things on your phone. Unless your primary use is watching videos, you deserve a better measure. I don't know what that is.

Satellite providers that offer SOS and texting services to smartphone users today will not complete with mobile carriers, ever. No matter how many satellites they launch or what spectrum they secure, your smartphone will never be able to push a signal through your roof up to orbiting satellites.

Today Apple releases iOS 26, the least accessible and most frustrating of any iOS design system. This OS is going to disable so many people. I'm sad to see Apple taking this terrible turn.

Apple introduced MacBook Air as a fashion first, light duty, luxury laptop. We already had MacBook and MacBook Pro, both capable machines, but a few years later the less capable (more lucrative) MacBook Air replaced MacBook as the consumer model. Maybe it's the same playbook for iPhone Air?

Sony Display and other major component suppliers for Apple's Vision Pro began production in August 2023. Because of low demand, those lines were all shuttered by May 2024. Luxshare's assembly operations, which began in October 2023, ended in November 2024 with warehouses still full of components.

I've decided the iPhone Air is for tech C-suite types that historically got Pro model because those are top of the line (who wants to be seen with base models, gross.) But Pro models are bulky and ugly, for capabilities they'll rarely if ever use. Fewer features, more luxury, that's the game here.

Manifesto - by Nemik There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

SB 243 heads to the Governor's desk. Not the bill I'd have written, but it's a start. The private right of action seems good, but the disclosure/transparency and self reporting parts seem like weak sauce to me. techcrunch.com/2025/09/11/a...

I haven't seen any reports, but I'll bet iPhone Air doesn't easily bend. It's got titanium i-beams for a chassis. Also, Samsung already released a superthin phone that did well in bend tests. Aluminum would be a different story. That's why, despite the other iPhones using aluminum, Air is titanium.

The tools are out there. Use them. Building inaccessible websites is unacceptable.

I suppose better late than never.

They finally did it. We got a smartphone with a camera bump that's thicker than the phone body. Apple iPhone Air for the . . . win?

RSS begets RSL, a really simple licensing system for your blog or other content. Source: rslcollective.org/publishers Decent article: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

For all but the smallest companies the AI adoption rate has slowed over the last couple months. [preview card alt text: line chart plotting AI adoption rate by company size showing lines, which had been going up since May of last year, have been heading down about as steeply for 8-10 weeks.]

Mars rovers still kicking ass in the hunt for life. It is more likely than not this rock under analysis contains signatures of past microbial life on Mars. www.nasa.gov/news-release...