2026-09-14 08:24:38
Joe Rossignol: Apple Says iPhone 18 Pro Max Sold in U.S. Differs in One Way
Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S.
What a weird one.
2026-09-14 00:36:32
The iPhone Duo won't sell the most units this year, but I think winning apps should update for it ASAP anyway.
2026-09-13 23:51:56
Very often, we in the Apple community expect the bare minimum from Apple. We doubt they'll ever make new product lines, we assume any software feature they lack is actually a choice to omit it, and we predict when they do enter a new market, they'll phone it in. The iPhone Duo should be a wake up call that not on can Apple do more when they want to, we as a community must dream bigger.
I find all too much Apple commentary (both professional and amateur) is steeped in "nothing will change, everything will just get 5% better every year" energy. I think the touch Mac conversation over the past few years is a perfect example of this. First, it was an argument that Apple would never put touch input on a Mac because it was never going to work. Then once rumors cropped up it was really happening, the convo moved to "okay, they're doing it, but begrudgingly and they'll probably only support Apple Pencil input". Or maybe the assumption was you could swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom, but nothing else. Or maybe the Mac could toggle into a full iPadOS mode when you want to touch it…maybe even with a full device reboot. All the while, there is a growing concern that making macOS work well on a touch-capable device would make macOS worse for everyone not using a touch screen.
The iPhone Duo should make all of us think less defensively about topics like this. Apple didn't just slap iOS as is on a folding phone. Instead, they asked themselves, "now that we have an iPhone that has two screens and folds and has all of these distinct characteristics from a traditional iPhone, what can we do?" They pulled on that thread and made what looks to be a really compelling product.
Not to get on my reliable soap box, but what if we thought this way about touch Macs? What if we dared to dream instead of defaulting to timidness? Okay, you have a Mac with a touchscreen. What does that enable you to do? Does this unlock the possibility for more types of software than before? Does this unlock more interaction options than before? Does this enable new Mac form factors? I think the answers to all three of these are emphatically yes, and I would hope that this is how Apple is thinking about this as well. The iPhone Duo sure shows that they can.
I think one of the reasons the iPhone Duo hit so hard with a lot of people is because it reminded us that not everything has to be a bare minimum effort. I wrote about how this phone shows Apple at their best, and I believe we are holding the bar too low when we don't think like this as well. Frankly, it's also just more exciting commentary to dream of something meaningfully better than what we have today. Sure, most product updates will be relatively minor and predictable, but I think we've lost our spark when we can't imagine Apple doing anything more than that.
2026-09-12 05:00:00
David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith, his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but…
With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air's 0.3%).
This is particularly interesting to me because I recently pulled some metrics on what iPhones my users were using, and this is what I got:
And here's a breakdown of just the iPhone 17 generation:
This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.
Although I will say one thing that caught my eye with my bar chart is that across every generation, the vast majority of my customers have Pro devices, except for the iPhone 12 and 13 generations. I don't have a pretty visualization for this, but those are actually primarily iPhone mini holdouts who are sticking with those tiny phones. Shout out. 🫡
We're a little over a month away from the iPhone Duo coming out, and it will surely get quite a bit of attention when it does, but I expect there will be a similarly vast difference between David and my charts a year from now. I suspect he will have a sliver of his users on the Duo, maybe more than the Air, but probably not that much more. And I would not be surprised if 15 to 20% of my users actually adopt it by this time next year.
2026-09-11 21:49:08
I'm always looking for little ways to make Quick Reads better. Sometimes that means big feature updates. Other times it means subtle quality of life improvements. Today I released one of those small quality of life improvements.
A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser tab all day long. Maybe it's a pinned tab or whatever, but they save things that they want to read later and expect those to show up in the queue when they go back to it. However, that didn't always happen because while the queue did auto refresh, it didn't do it as frequently as was needed. Also, if you navigated to a different page, it would actually stop refreshing (a bug I hadn't noticed until today).
When I was building Nonogame, I knew that I wanted to pause the game when the user navigated away from the tab or went to a different window. Thankfully, the web supports this, so I was able to detect when the window was no longer in the foreground and pause the game automatically. As you may expect, the web also has ways for you to detect when the window comes back to the forefront, and I'm using that in Quick Reads to automatically check for new things in the queue when you navigate back to the tab.
Here's a demo of it in action a few minutes ago in production. I'm saving things from Birchfeed and a random website with the browser extension, and both of them show up effectively instantly in the UI when I go back to the Quick Reads tab. I hope you like it!
Not the main point of this post, but I've mentioned 3 of my products in here…that's synergy, Lemon.
2026-09-11 04:18:00
Today I do the impossible and get through my biggest thoughts about Apple's announcements from yesterday in less than 10 minutes. Here's what I found most interesting about the new iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watches, and AirPods 5.