2025-10-31 06:01:27
I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago, I published my iPhone Air review and in it, I declared that the iPhone 17 Pro was the better phone for me. My plan was simple: finish the review, move my eSIM back to the 17 Pro, and carry on with my life.
Except I didn’t.
I kept using the Air for another day…then another…then another. Before I knew it, weeks had gone by, and this extended time with the device revealed something I hadn’t anticipated.
To be clear, I stand by everything in my original review, but there’s one additional downside that only became apparent with prolonged use: comfort.
This surely sounds counterintuitive. Are your eyebrows raised? After all, one of the Air’s biggest selling points is how incredibly thin and light it is. It’s noticeably lighter than my iPhone 17 Pro, which should be a good thing, right?
Here’s the catch: when I use my phone, I rest it on my pinky, which bears much of the device’s weight. You’d think the lighter phone would be easier on that finger, but I found the opposite to be true.
If the iPhone 17 Pro is a butter knife, the iPhone Air is a steak knife.
Yes, it’s lighter, but it digs into my finger far more than I expected, and there are two reasons for this, as far as I can tell.
First, even though the total weight is lower, that weight is concentrated on a smaller contact point on my finger. The pressure per square inch is actually higher, despite less overall mass in the phone.
Second, the bottom edge is a problem. Because the Air still needs all the standard cutouts (USB-C port, grilles, microphone, screws), nearly every part of the bottom edge is sharper, more jagged, and more uneven.
One of my favorite aspects of the new iPhone 17 Pro design is how smooth the corners are and how soft the aluminum feels to the touch. That’s the contrast that makes the Air feel more harsh in the hand to me.
It’s a weird phenomenon, and one I didn’t expect or even notice right away. I’m open to the possibility that I’m the only person in the world experiencing this, but it’s significant enough that it became the deciding factor that pushed me to switch back to the 17 Pro.
To recap the issues I outlined in my original review, the speakers are worse, the single camera is usually fine but occasionally annoying, and the battery life, while better than you might expect, isn’t quite as good as I always need it to be.
Now, unexpectedly, comfort has become a fourth downside for me. I gotta say, I didn’t see this coming.
And just to be super clear, I think the iPhone Air is pretty cool, and I totally get why other people love it…hell, I apparently like it enough to use it after the review was done! I only say this because, for some reason, a decent number of people seem to have plonked me into the iPhone Air Haters Club. This post isn’t going to help that reputation, but hey, what the hell am I doing here if I’m not being honest?
One final note: If you use a case, this comfort issue likely disappears entirely. But I only put a case on my phone when traveling, so for my day-to-day use, it matters to me.
2025-10-31 01:00:00
Tim Cushing: Trump Continues to Attack Biden for All the Stuff Trump Officials Did While Trump Was Still President
If there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there’s no one left with any of these traits in the White House, so we get the sort of thing we’re now seeing with increasing frequency: Trump (deliberately or not) forgetting who was sitting in the Oval Office in 2020.
One of my favorite (least favorite?) phenomenons in Trump world is being irate about things that happened with Trump was in office.
It's truly over and over and over again…the things Trump sheep love to cite as the reasons they were radicalized and made them vote for Trump are thing that happened when Trump was in power. It's really a wild phenomenon.
2025-10-30 07:43:53
This post came across my radar, which shows Windows game support on Linux is at a new all-time high.
You can see that the area in red has been constantly shrinking, at a steady pace, and this past month is no exception with this category getting very close to just 10%. This means that close to 90% of Windows games manage to launch on Linux.
About 60% of games run perfectly, close to 70% work perfectly with "some tweaking or configuration", and just shy of 90% of games may not be perfect, but are playable. To be perfectly clear, this is not a case of most games being built for Linux, it's that tools like WINE and Proton have allowed users to simple download and install Windows games.
These numbers make tons of sense to me, someone who games on Linux almost every day. No, I didn't install Ubuntu on my PC tower, I'm talking about my Steam Deck! That's a Linux device running Proton which lets me install basically any game from Steam. When a new game comes out, there's not even a question whether it will work on my Linux device, it just does (or if it doesn't, it's usually because it's just too high end to run on a handheld device).
As I wrote about last year, imagine if this was the case on the Mac! Apple's Game Porting Toolkit aims to make it easier for developers to bring their Windows games to the Mac, and that seems to have helped, but I would love to see Apple bundle something like Proton into macOS so that you no longer had to wonder if a Mac version of that cool new game was coming out, you could just know you'd be able to play it.
From last year's post:
And don’t think of it as some sort of complex tool for nerds; I’d compare it to using Rosetta 2 on the Mac. Is that random app you use running natively on Apple silicon or being emulated from an x86 binary? Who knows and who cares?
It's honestly very Apple.
2025-10-29 05:23:01
Joe Rosensteel: Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple?
While the acquisition was announced almost a year ago in November of 2024, Apple only folded the developers in eight months ago. Prior to the acquisition, Photomator was updated monthly, often with major features. In the last eight months, the only updates have been “bug fixes and improvements.” The last one of those was five months ago. There haven’t been any updates to incorporate anything involving Apple’s new operating systems.
Pixelmator Pro has received one major update, three months ago. It featured new support for… Image Playground and Writing Tools (what?!), along with more reasonable features like improved RAW support and accessibility improvements. But again, no macOS Tahoe feature additions, right down to the fact that the Pixelmator Pro icon still resides in gray squircle jail.
I'm so glad Joe wrote this article because I was starting to think something similar myself, and now I can just link to his dive into the details.
I'm not a massive user of Pixelmator Pro myself, but I do use it to make the thumbnails I post on YouTube, as well as the occasional header image for this blog (like the one at the top of this post). I've always found the app to be easy to use, yet powerful, and it absolutely flies on every Mac I've ever used it on. I've also really appreciated how good the company was at keeping the app up to date, consistently adding new features that were interesting. As he lays out in the linked post, updates have really dried up since the acquisition announcement one year ago. While the app still technically works fine, it hasn't added anything user-facing, and it is one of the few apps on my Mac stuck in "squircle jail".
Another app that was quite popular, got constant updates that users loved, and then suddenly stopped: Arc. The difference, of course is that Arc was very publicly abandoned by it's developer. It's not a great look if the difference between an app that was fully abandoned and one that was acquired by Apple is indistinguishable.
Here's hoping the future is bright for Pixelmator, even if it's not clear to the outside world what the future looks like just yet.
2025-10-28 09:27:45
Back in February 2024, Xbox held a short podcast where they reacted directly to swirling rumors about Xbox exclusive titles that were about to go multi-platform, which was giving Xbox fans anxiety. This question from host Tina Amini was right near the start:
So when you are thinking about the future and this concept of live service games, games that can benefit from bigger audiences, new audiences, How does that apply to future titles and how you're applying that criteria there?
To which Phil Spencer replied:
Yeah, there's really no fundamental change to how we think about exclusivity.
And just before that, Amini asked:
Can we say if either of those titles are Starfield or Indiana Jones? They are not Starfield or Indiana Jones.
And Spencer assured the audience:
They are not Starfield or Indiana Jones.
Now, Spencer didn't lie here by any means; neither Starfield nor the new Indiana Jones game (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is spectacular, by the way) were in the 4 games that were imminently to be released on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. However, paired with the first quote about there being "no fundamental change to how we think about exclusivity" gave the impression to many that Xbox was okay with some games, specifically smaller and multiplayer games going multi-platform on a per-game basis, but the big hitters would remain Xbox and PC exclusive.
However, since that podcast, more games have gone multi-platform, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which released on PlayStation 5 just five months after the Xbox version, and the DLC for the game came out on both platforms on the same day last month.
Back in May, the first iconic Xbox franchise made the full jump to PlayStation with the Gears of War remaster getting announced for a simultaneous release on Xbox, PC, and PlayStation.
Then on Friday last week, we got the big one: Halo is coming to PS5 day-and-date with the Xbox release.
For those not as clued into the gaming space, this is similar in scale to when Sega first released a Sonic game for Nintendo, or if Nintendo ever released Mario Kart for PlayStation. Xbox is Halo, Halo is Xbox, they're impossible to separate in the long history of gaming, and yet the world has changed enough that Microsoft thinks its best move is to give Halo to everyone.
Crazy times.
2025-10-28 09:20:50
Matias Heikkilä: AI Can Code, but It Can't Build Software
Coding, however, is not what most people are getting paid for. Building a production-ready app is not coding, it’s software engineering.
Absolutely true. I've said a few times that the software development work I do now looks a hell of a lot like what I did a couple years ago, I'm just physically typing out the exact code a lot less. I'm still thinking about the product experience. I'm still thinking about scalability. I'm still thinking about what technologies are right to use. I'm still thinking about structure. I'm still thinking about pretty much everything I was thinking about before. My ability to write a specific function is less important than my ability to understand why that function needs to exist in the first place or how it will impact other parts of the application.
Maybe LLMs will eventually get to a place where I can totally step aside and let it do all the software engineering for me, but color me skeptical that we're going to get there anytime soon.