2025-10-09 10:30:15
Hank Green on the new Sora 2 app:
If you are the kind of mother fucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of mother fucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.
It's a great, short rant from Hank Green, and it 100% resonates with me. I think people who are high on Sora 2 as The Next Great Thing are giving the same energy as those who thought Clubhouse was going to kill podcasts a few years ago or that NFTs were actually a great idea and were totally not just a bubble that would immediately pop. In fact, many of them are the same people.
2025-10-07 02:24:51
Let's get one thing out of the way right up front; I am not an audiophile when it comes to earbuds. I can't tell the difference between a pedestrian-quality MP3 and a lossless FLAC file. And when it comes to AirPods, I cannot tell you the difference in audio quality between the AirPods Pro and the normal AirPods. It all sounds the same to me.
That said, I'm also someone who called the AirPods Pro 2 the greatest product Apple has made in the past decade on my podcast. I've had mine for several years, and I truly adore them. They're absolutely perfect, they always work exactly how I want to, and I really just love them. They're more than enough when it comes to audio quality, and their noise cancellation is good enough that I have completely stopped bringing over-the-ear headphones on trips because an airplane is quiet enough when I have my AirPods Pro 2 in. I've even had a couple times where they cancelled out the plain engines so well that I took them out of my ears for a second to make sure the engines were actually still running.
So, when the AirPods 3 were announced, I was interested, but there didn't seem to be anything killer for me. As I said, I was already so happy with my Pro 2s that I didn't feel an immediate need to upgrade. I preordered a lot of things right after the Apple event, but AirPods Pro 3 weren't one of them.
But then the reviews started coming in, and to put it mildly, they were over the fucking moon. It was more than just the sound quality, it was the fit, and the noise cancellation, and the overall experience, all of which just sounded incredible. So I ended up ordering them as well. I've been using them for the past 2 weeks and change, and I think I have enough experience to give them a fair review.
I regret to say, not only do I think the AirPods Pro 3 are a disappointing update for me, I think they're actually a downgrade over the AirPods Pro 2. I'm finishing this review at the airport gate, waiting for my flight to board, and the AirPods Pro 2 are currently in my ears.
The main downgrade for me is that for the first time in literally the entire history of Apple making earbuds, I lost the ear lottery this time, and these simply do not feel good in my ears. To be clear, they stay in there quite nicely, even over several hours, but if I wear them for more than 30 minutes, they become actively painful. I've tried every single tip size that comes in the box, and all of them have this issue.
I hold out some hope that the third-party market will come out with some custom ear tips that work for me, but those don't really seem to exist yet in any meaningful way, so I haven't found a good fit yet. I'm past my return window, so I'm hoping these come, but as of right now, I only wear these for short walks or runs, and anything longer like travel, working from home, or doing yard work, I'm sticking with the older model.
I'll keep this short and sweet, but I honestly don't hear much of a difference in noise cancellation compared to the Pro 2's. It's very good, don't get me wrong, but the difference doesn't blow me away. I think this aspect is impacted a bit by the above comfort issue, which colors the whole experience for me.
As I said at the top of this post, I'm not an audiophile, so maybe people more locked in on hearing the differences between headphones will notice it more. The best I can say is that the jump in noise cancellation from the original Pros to the second generation ones was clear to me, but this upgrade wasn't.
This is pretty cool, and it's the one clear win for me in this earbuds. The bugs have a heart rate sensor in them, which means you can start a workout from the Fitness app on your iPhone, no Apple Watch is sight, and get live heart rate data for the workout. I recently got a chance to use this in a real world situation as my watch had just gone on the charger, but my dog really wanted a walk. No problem, I popped in the AirPods Pro 3, started a workout from my phone, and got to walking. The whole workout can be monitored either in full screen from the Fitness app or as a live activity (for what it's worth, this live activity also kicks in when you have a Watch paired, which is something I've wanted for years, and am super happy to see it come in iOS 26). I also left my watch at home for a 5K run and it worked smoothly there as well.
I don't have any hard data on how accurate this is, but as someone who has a pretty good feel for how elevated his heart rate is during a workout, it was giving me numbers aligned with what I'd expect. I have to think this is less precise than the Watch, but who knows.
This is an interesting case of an upgrade/downgrade. If you value being able to wear your AirPods all day long, then this is a solid upgrade for you. The buds are advertised as getting 8 hours of use when using noise cancellation, which is more than the 6 hours the Pro 2's would get in the same situation. However, while the case got marginally larger, the battery it provides is actually less than the old case. Apple advertises "Up to 24 hours of listening time with charging case and Active Noise Cancellation" with the new case, and "Up to 30 hours of listening time with charging case and Active Noise Cancellation" with the Pro 2 case.
As stated above, due to the comfort issues, I tend to wear these for shorter periods of time, meaning that for me the battery life I care about is how rarely I can recharge the case, not how long the buds last in a single session. From that perspective, I'm going to need to charge the case 20% more often than I'm used to, which I don't love.
iFixit's teardowns confirm the battery change, with the new case sporting a 344 mAh battery with the Pro 2 case having a 398 mAh capacity.
This change is very strange to me and I'm really curious what's going on in this case that has reduced the extra juice it can provide the buds.
There's not much more to say about the AirPods Pro 3. The live translation feature looks cool, but is also on the Pro 2 so it's not really a reason to upgrade on its own.
The water and dust resistance gets an upgrade from IP54 to IP57, which means these will survive more than just splashes of water, they can actually be fully submerged in up to one meter of water for 30 minutes. I have not tested this, but it makes me feel better about running in the rain with these.
Apparently the case uses an updated ultra wideband chip, which Apple says is an upgrade over the U1 in the previous case, but I'm not sure how this directly makes my experience better.
And it still sports the H2 chip that handles most wireless functions of the product, which is the same as the Pro 2 and normal AirPods 4. It is somehow still an upgrade over the AirPods Max, which are still rocking the H1.
Needless to say, I'm not thrilled about this upgrade, and in fact see it more as a downgrade on the whole. The fit is the dealbreaker for me, and the reduced battery life is a surprise pain point I somehow didn't notice in the pre-release marketing (why would you shout this out, I guess?). The heart rate sensor is a nice to have feature that will help me out in a pinch, or if I ever decide to wear a traditional watch regularly again, and the enhanced water resistance is a lovely little update as well.
Anyway, my flight is about to take off and I am ready to enjoy a couple hours using the AirPods Pro 2, which remain my earbuds G.O.A.T.
2025-10-06 00:42:55
We’re well past the era when year-over-year Apple Watch upgrades made any sense at all, and I’d argue that even if you bought the original Apple Watch Ultra three years ago, there’s still no real reason for most people to even entertain an upgrade to the brand new Ultra 3. Comparing this model to the two-year-old model it replaces leaves so little to talk about that I find myself scouring Apple’s compare page to remind myself what exactly I can even talk about in this review.
I happy to report that it wasn’t just changes to how Apple measures battery life, the stamina of the Ultra 3 is noticeably better than my Ultra 2. I’m a relatively light Apple Watch user, but I do sleep tracking every night and record 60-90 minutes of outdoor walk and run workouts everyday. I always have my phone with me, so I’m effectively never stressing the cellular functionality or pairing AirPods to the watch itself.
Apple advertises 36 hours of battery life on the Ultra 2, and I would regularly get 40-48 hours on a charge. Apple has bumped their prediction up to 42 hours in the Ultra 3, and I routinely get 55-62 hours, or about 2.5 days.
An interesting mental side effect of this is that I actually initially thought I was getting pretty poor battery life with this new watch. I was getting low battery alerts in the afternoon, which I wasn’t used to. Since the Ultra 2 got basically 2 days of battery, I was on a consistent routine of charging it before bed every other day. This behavior was backed up my watchOS poking me around 8pm reminding me it might be a good idea to charge before bed. I guess I’d gotten used to the added battery, because these new low battery alerts weren’t coming on day 2, they were coming on day 3.
I think I’ll generally have the same 2-day charging schedule with this watch since it can’t quite make it to the end of day 3 for me, but having that extra juice is nice for those weekend trips where I leave the charger at home and those busy days where I am off my normal charging routine.
The “new” display here is basically the same screen upgrade the Series 10 got last year, so it’s not the most thrilling thing ever, but it is my low-key favorite thing about this model upgrade.
The six added pixels around all 4 edges slightly reduce the bezels, but the Ultra still has chunky bezels compared to the Series and even the new SE models, so that’s no big deal to me.
The new LTPO3 display tech offers better off-axis visibility, which I was able to see when doing a side-by-side comparison, but it’s pretty minor. This was never really a challenge for me in the first place.
What really moved the needle for me is the fact that the screen updates every second when in the always-on mode. This means you see seconds tick away on the watch face, and this makes the watch feel more like a classic watch to me in a very big way. I routinely need to track thins in seconds, not minutes, and it was always annoying to have to twist my wrist or tap the screen every few seconds to see them on older watches. Now it just acts like an old-school watch and that’s great.
One criticism I have here is that this 1-second refresh rate is not consistent across the experience. The time on the watch face updates every second, but complications still update once a minute. The Workout app gets per-second updates during a workout, but Map doesn’t when navigating somewhere. Timers tick down the seconds in their app, but as stated above, not on the watch face. I’m not horribly bothered by this, but it would be nice if Apple let me treat this more like the “ultra” watch it is and spend a little of that battery performance on enabling the new always-on refresh rate in more places where it makes sense.
Beyond that, almost nothing has changed with this model. The cellular modem has been upgraded to 5G and supports Emergency SOS just like the last few iPhones, which are nice things to have, even if they're unlikely to change my life in any way. That said, Apple markets this to people who are going out into the wilderness where this might be more practical, so for the right person this could be really good for them.
The new S10 chip powering the watch isn't meaningfully faster than the S9 from the Ultra 2 in my use.
The charging speed is marginally quicker, going from 0-80% in 45 minutes compared to 60 minutes on the last two Ultra models, although I haven't changed my watch charger in years, so I don't think I'm getting any benefit here either.
I think the Apple Watch Ultra has been a really great product right from the jump, and whether you got one today or 3 years ago, I think you've still got a very capable device. I thought the Ultra 2 was a massive disappointment as its only remotely notable update was the double-tap gesture, which I actively disliked. This upgrade, which I recognize is not "worth it" to many people, at least makes the product feel meaningfully better in my eyes. The new always-on tech makes it so the screen just always feels "on" to me, which has always been the dream of smart watches. And the updated battery performance means I easily get to a third day on a single charge, which is lovely as well.
As for the cost, $799 is a lot to ask for these upgrades, but Apple gave me $350 back for me two-year-old Ultra 2, so I was $450 out of pocket for this upgrade. I recognize that's not nothing, but considering I'll use this everyday for at least 2 more years and the changes make it genuinely nicer, it's something I can justify (if only just). As I've said, if you already have an Ultra and don't find the things I've mentioned super compelling, then you're surely fine to hold off for another year or two.
2025-10-05 02:33:31
Chris Cameron writing for The New York Times: Apple Takes Down ICE Tracking Apps in Response to Trump Pressure Campaign
Apple has removed from its App Store several programs that alert users to sightings of immigration agents after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded they be taken down.
Setting aside how this is a much more extreme case, wasn’t the whole radicalizing force behind the rightward shift of people like Rogan and Zuckerberg that the federal government was suggesting tech platforms moderate legal speech? Now the federal government is demanding legal speech be taken down and there’s nary a peep from the free speech crowd on this one. Not surprising, I guess, that's kinda their thing now.
These days, the free speech, small government crowd is largely cheering on censoring legal speech, the federal government threatening media companies the snowflake President thinks are too mean to him, and who has called his political opponents “the enemy within”, “the most dangerous” enemy of the United States, and sending the military into cities he doesn’t like with authorization to use “full force” against those that oppose them.
Meanwhile, the President has decreed that burning the American flag (a repeatedly confirmed Constitutional 1st Amendment right) is a crime via a social media post. Set aside the additional free speech trampling, and any American 4th grader could tell you that the executive branch can’t make laws, that’s what the legislature does. Of course, the feckless clowns who control Congress surely won't bat an eye at this. Their entire purpose right now is to get on their knees and do whatever Trump wants. Separation of powers is so first-249 years of the United States, now it's all about the king.
2025-10-04 06:14:39
As with all iPhone releases, battery tests began right away, with people trying to figure out how good the iPhone Air's battery performance was. Early results showed about what we'd expect, with the Air lagging behind the other phones, but not by a horrible amount.
Then this video crossed my feed and dear reader, it completely broke my brain.
The gist of this video is that the iPhone Air lasted longer than any other of the phones tested. Those are surprising results, to say the least, and it immediately burrowed in my head and I had to figure out what was going on here. I expressed some of my disappointment in how the video didn't try to explain what was going on, given the results were strange.
From my perspective, there are three things in particular about this test that I wanted to interrogate.
Long story short, I ordered an iPhone Air and had it in hand the next day.
Let's get one thing out of the way, this is not a "clinical" battery test. While I did control quite a bit, I also did a few things that you wouldn't do in a lab. Instead, I performed what I would consider a "realistic test". This test aims to use phones generally how they're used in real life and to see if there are radical differences. Don't expect me to say "the iPhone Air gets exactly 3% less battery life than the iPhone 16e".
My primary phone, an iPhone 17 Pro, was used as is, and the 3 other iPhones were wiped and restored from the same backup of my 17 Pro. Each iPhone was given 36 hours to "settle in" and a tour of core apps on the devices and network traffic showed no unusual behavior. All 3 phones were plugged in the whole time, maximizing their ability to index the stuff iOS indexes after being setup for the first time.
The Galaxy Ultra was not restored from an iPhone backup of course, but it was recently set up as closely as possible to my iPhone as it was my primary phone for a month recently.
Here's one that might cause consternation…all phones had auto-brightness turned on. I was in the room while these were running and I noted the brightness across the board, and it looked quite consistent, which makes sense as the iPhones at least were all trained with my preferred brightness setting from the restore, so they always looked effectively identical. The Samsung may have varied a bit more since it's a different manufacturer, but to the naked eye, it looked the same as the iPhones and I never felt the need to adjust it.
Bluetooth was left on for all tests, although no devices were paired to them. When testing my daily driver (iPhone 17 Pro) I turned off my Apple Watch as well. Again, a lab might turn it on, but a real person is likely going to have Bluetooth turned on.
All phones report 100% battery health. I have owned the iPhone 16e for about 6 months, and it has gotten light use, so consider that it may be slightly underperforming compared to its absolute peak.
This set of tasks was created to try and generally replicate what I do on my phone and since I was curious about the modem performance, leaned on things that would constantly be using the network.
All in, that's 6 hours of constant phone use, and near constant network consumption. That's one hell of a single phone session, and that's surely not exactly how you spend your time, but no single test is going to capture that.
Because there is some variability, I ran these tests 4 times on each phone (details below).
Because the new Apple-made cellular modems in the iPhone 16e and Air were of interest given the test at the top of this post, I wanted to test each phone with cellular data and on WiFi. That meant running the full test 4 times on each phone. Two times with all phones on a cellular connection (Visible is the provider) and two times using WiFi. On the WiFi tests, I left cellular on, since that's more realistic to how people use their phones. If you happen to turn your cell connection off the moment you walk into your home, that's great for you, but this test ain't checking for that.
Again, I'm going for realistic uses, not contrived lab tests.
While I did try to test these phones under realistic conditions, there are some elements that I simply do not capture in this testing suite, including but not limited to:
This first chart has all 16 tests muddled together, and I think this alone shows some notable findings.
First, while the phones were generally consistent with how they chew through battery, there is some real variability in tests, so I'm glad I ran them several times. The iPhone Air, for example, ended up with 51% of it's battery remaining in one test, and 39% left in another.
Second, each phone performed consistently better on a WiFi or cellular connection, but which one was better varied from phone to phone.
Third, as expected, the iPhone Air's 4 tests reported the 4 worst performances, but it's not outrageous. Let's not forget that this test includes a few absolute top performers in the market for battery life, so being within spitting distance of these phones is a win on its own.
Four, just as I saw when testing Mac battery life, Apple devices tend to report 100% battery life for longer than any other number. In several tests, the iPhone 17 Pro reported 100% battery after more than an hour, for example. Meanwhile, Samsung always reported a drop to 99% within the first 30 minutes.
Looking at just the WiFi tests, we see something pretty well aligned with what I was expecting to see. The iPhone Air is clearly the worst performer, and was the only phone to drop below 60% at the end, dropping all the way down to 39% remaining in its worst result. Of note, the Galaxy S25 Ultra has a rated 60% (or so) more battery capacity than the Air, and the Ultra's worse result was 61% better than the Air's worse, so these are performing almost exactly as you'd expect from their battery sizes.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 Pro was not only the winner here, it was unbelievably consistent between its two runs, never being more than 1% different from run to run. This was also the phone that had the most linear line, seemingly just as unfazed running a high end 3D game or just streaming music.
Interestingly, the iPhone 16e actually outperformed the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra for the first 3 hours, but fell behind in the second half. Still, as I found when I used it as my phone for a month earlier this year, I think its battery life is properly impressive for such a small phone.
Of note, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air have Apple's new N1 chip which is used for WiFi, Bluetooth, and Thread. I don't think Apple lauded it for its efficiency, and based on these results, it doesn't seem to be a major uplift here (although I didn't compare to previous iPhones, so maybe it's doing something).
This chart is absolutely fascinating to me. We had a healthy spread of battery capacities here, from the Air's tiny ~3,100 mAh to the Ultra's beefy 5,000 mAh power banks, but despite this 60% or so capacity advantage as mentioned in the WiFi test above, the best Ultra score was just 15% better than the Air's best showing.
The obvious thing to look at here is the new C1X cellular modem in the iPhone Air this year. Apple touted the efficiency of the chip compared to other iPhones, and given how much closer it performs here than on the WiFi test, I'm inclined to believe them. Meanwhile, the iPhone 16e also has a C1 chip, which is also likely giving it a significant uplift to the point it's actually performing just as well on cellular as the iPhone 17 Pro and Galaxy S25 Ultra. Have I mentioned how nice it is for the cheapest iPhone to finally have a good battery?
Now we're just breaking down each phone's 4 tests so you can get an idea for how they did compared to themselves. As you can see here, the iPhone Air was consistently better when relying on its cellular modem rather than WiFi. I can’t imagine there are too many phones where that’s the case.
Old consistent over here! The iPhone 16e is an absolute champ, with the smallest deviation across its 4 tests. In its best case, it ended at 62%. In its worst, it was 58%. The other 2 were both 60%. This thing is reliable as hell.
We had a more significant gap here, with WiFi doing a 10% or more difference at the end of the test. This phone was screen on at around 60-70% brightness and doing all sorts of things for 6 hours and it was still over 70%. Good lord.
Samsung's entrant in this comparison was also quite consistent, regardless of WiFi or cellular.
Performing 4 battery tests on these phones really made it sink in how you really need to take all battery tests you see online with a grain of salt (including this one!). Each test is a data point, but none of them tell the whole story on their own. There are a million variables at play, and the same test can return different finishing orders if you run it a few times. And as I said above, this test doesn't capture all the variables that go into a real day using a phone.
That said, if we focus on the iPhone Air, which is what spurred this whole investigation to begin with, I've got a few things I feel pretty confident saying now.
One, I do believe the iPhone Air has the worst battery performance of the newest iPhones, and it's by a pretty clear margin. Not atrocious, but not as good as what someone with an iPhone from the last couple years would be used to. This aligns as well with some private chats I've had with Air buyers who have said some variant of, "okay, after the first few days I have noticed the battery is worse than my old phone." If it's enough for you, then don't let this stop you from enjoying the super-slim form factor, though! The worst in this test could still be perfectly fine for your usage patterns.
Two, I think the C1X is the real deal when it comes to efficiency. The iPhone Air is still not lasting as long as the iPhone 17 Pro with its much bigger battery, but it's closer than you might expect it to be. I can only wonder what it will do to the Pro phones' battery on cellular when a future version of it comes to the top of the line as well. I know they'll want to get millimeter wave in there to get maximum speeds, and I don't know how much that will reduce the gains we see here, but I have to think it will move the needle.
Three, I understand how the text way at the start of this post got the result it did. It was truly the best case scenario for the Air compared to the other iPhones: it was a cellular test, which it over-performs in, and it was compared to the European version of the iPhones, which have a 6% smaller battery than the eSIM-only version we get here in the US (the Air is eSIM only everywhere). If we take the best Air result from my tests (53% remaining) and take 6% off the worst 17 Pro result I had (57% remaining), the Air only loses 53% to 54%, which is well within the margin of error, and could swing the other direction since we've seen variability between tests.
All things said, I'm glad I did this test! It was fascinating to see the cellular verses WiFi results be so divergent on the iPhone Air, which in my eyes lends credence to the idea that the new C1X modem in that phone was essential to get this product out the door.
It also makes me more comfortable that my choice of going with the 17 Pro was the right one for me. The iPhone Air is quite striking in the hand, and the weight especially is quite refreshing. That said, as someone who spends most of their day on WiFi and who doesn't like to have to think about his battery unless it's a particularly busy travel day, I don't think it's the phone for me. It is pretty rad, though.
2025-10-02 19:00:31
An early look at my predictions for 2025.