2026-01-20 08:56:55
Late last year, a bunch of people, knowing that I love e-readers, asked me if I was going to try the Xteink X4, a $69 tiny, no-frills reader. Like, seriously tiny—so small that it comes with a stick-on magnet ring and will just snuggle into the MagSafe area on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
The moment I saw that the Xteink X4 didn’t have any lighting, I decided I wasn’t going to bother—I spent way too much time clipping book lights to Kindles so I could read in the dark. But in a moment of weakness (possibly fueled by several Hazy IPAs and high altitude) over Thanksgiving, I bought one. It was $69! Why not take a chance on a weird little e-reader?
When the Xteink X4 arrived, I got my answer: I was deeply unimpressed with the hardware, which has two rocker switches on the front as well as a rocker on the side and a power button and a recessed reset button. Look, I love e-reader buttons, but eight is too many. Of course, there was the aforementioned lack of lighting, meaning you need to use it outside or in a well-lit room. Also, the whole premise of this thing seems to have been that it sticks on the back of your iPhone, but that’s not true unless you have absolutely the largest iPhone available.
But I’ll give it this: it was tiny.
The software was the real tragedy, though: It was really bad. Hard to navigate (so many buttons) and, tragically, just bad at being an e-reader. I couldn’t turn off forced justification, another deal-breaker for me. I tossed it on my desk and figured I wouldn’t write about it because why kick this little thing when it’s down? (I did say some unkind things about it on Upgrade, I’ll admit.)
And then a funny thing happened: Dan Moren sent me a message saying:
Finally got my Xteink ironically after hearing you slag it on Upgrade. So I flashed it with the community-made firmware, which by all accounts is better.
I had seen several people report that the Xteink worked better with some community-built firmware, but I hadn’t tried it—mostly because I firmly believe that suggesting that someone buy hardware only to immediately replace its firmware with someone else’s fix is not really the endorsement it sounds like.1
But Dan’s message intrigued me, moreso when he pointed out that I could install the new firmware directly from a web page using Chrome. Loading a web page and clicking a button seemed like a very low-effort way to see what all the fuss is about, so I went ahead and installed CrossPoint reader.
What a difference. The CrossPoint software draws labels next to the four rocker directions on the front of the Xteink x4, so you know what each button does. It parses ePub files properly, offers font and justification control, and will even display the cover art of the book you’re reading. There’s even support for uploading books via Wi-Fi!
Is it as sophisticated as other e-readers? Absolutely not. Most readers are either Android or Android-based; this thing is an ESP32-based thing, so it’s incredibly bare bones. But it works.
Do I recommend that people rush out and get the Xteink X4? No, I don’t. It’s fun to mess around with, and if you’re looking for a super-tiny e-reader that you can keep in a pocket or bag and break out in well-lit spaces at the drop of a hat, it will suffice. It won’t sync with other readers or your phone, so consider it the digital equivalent of throwing a paperback in your purse or backpack.
What I am enthusiastic about is the potential for interesting e-readers. Amazon seems comfortable shipping Paperwhites that are boring and featureless, Kobo’s innovation seems to have slowed as well, and everyone seems distracted by the possibility of finding a new market with E Ink-based note-taking devices like the Kindle Scribe.
But there’s still room for weird. The Android-based Boox Palma is shaped like a phone, but it’s an e-reader. At $250, it’s not cheap, and it’s a bit too big, but who’s to say where experimentation with smartphone marks and E Ink screens might lead? And coming from the bottom up are devices like the Xteink X4, with basic software running on ESP32 hardware.
If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.
In the meantime, I’ve loaded a bunch of DRM-free public domain books from Standard Ebooks on my Xteink X4 and am letting it just hang around the house. I can pick up an Agatha Christie on a sunny afternoon and just enjoy a little bit of reading time. There’s a lot of potential here.
2026-01-20 06:33:44
This week we’re following up on what the Apple-Google AI hookup means and reacting to Apple’s announcement of an oddly shaped creative apps bundle.
2026-01-16 02:54:25
It might be weird to describe myself as an “authentication enthusiast,” but I guess I’ve never claimed to not be weird. I’ve written a whole lot about passwords and passkeys, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a big fan of Apple’s Passwords app. It lets you easily store your authentication details, share them with others, and even view the history of changes to your accounts.
Previous to Apple offering features like iCloud Keychain and Password Autofill, I relied on 1Password to store a lot of this information, but in recent years I’ve transitioned in large part to Passwords. But you’ll note I said “largely.” There are still a few things that I use 1Password for and while Apple is generally good about ticking off the lowest hanging fruit and leaving third parties to offer more niche products, I’d argue that authentication and security are important enough to our everyday lives that the Passwords app can afford to take on more responsibility.
So, maybe it’s time for a power user feature. cracks knuckles SSH keys! You know them, you love them. If you don’t know them, you should love them. Like passkeys, SSH keys are credentials that rely on public-key cryptography to simplify connecting to remote servers and computers without the use of passwords.
And before you dismiss this as something that’s just for those of us who enjoy diving into Terminal, lots of services and sites let you use SSH keys, from GitHub to apps like Edovia’s screen-sharing app Screens and many more. Again, like passkeys, their use helps make our lives more secure and more convenient.
Managing these credentials, however, can be a headache. In part because they can be stored or viewed in many places: in your user’s home directory on macOS, synced via iCloud Keychain, in macOS’s Keychain Access app, the command-line ssh-agent tool, and even some third-party apps like, yes, 1Password can handle them.1
A veritable surfeit of solutions. Too many, really. I’d love to be able to have all my keys stored in a user-friendly interface like Passwords, which would hopefully work under the hood with the command-line tools as well as providing a system for more easily using the keys. 1Password seems to provide the best implementation here, where you can set it up to have requests for your key pop up a dialog box where you can use biometrics or your main password to authenticate.
Just as Apple eventually supported (or at least didn’t actively hinder) Touch ID for sudo on the command line, it’d be great to see Passwords embrace SSH key management for those of us who need it. Which, honestly, is all of us.
2026-01-16 00:48:21
The Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle announced earlier this week makes sense. We live in a world where Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office have been subscription plays for more than a decade. When Apple bought Pixelmator in 2024, it seemed like Apple really was building its own take on the Creative suite, and later this month it’ll finally arrive.
At $129 a year, it’s a lot cheaper than Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription and roughly what I pay for just Photoshop and Lightroom… but it’s obviously more expensive than Canva’s Affinity suite, which threatens a new business model of “free software, but pay for AI features.” Still, I’m old enough to remember when Logic and Final Cut cost many, many hundreds of dollars—putting them entirely out of the reach of most people. Now you can just spend $13 for a month in Final Cut or Logic to work on a project or even see if it’s the right tool for you. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
Truth be told, Final Cut and Logic are among Apple’s two most updated apps. I’ve been using them both for ages, and there are always new updates with new features—and I’ve very rarely been asked to pay for an upgrade. (The Logic Pro release notes are a sight to behold.) When a developer is committed to consistently improving its subscription product, I think it’s a fair exchange that benefits customer and developer alike.
The addition of Pixelmator also gives Apple a piece it was missing before. Pixemator combines many features found in Photoshop and Illustrator, giving Apple the design tool that it was missing previously. It’s hard for me not to look at this bundle and think that, for the people it’s designed to serve, it’s a pretty compelling offering.
But something about this announcement really doesn’t sit right with me.
Apple has chosen to roll its “iWork” apps—Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and Freeform—into this bundle. While the company has gone out of its way to assure everyone that those apps, which come free when you buy Apple hardware, will remain free… it’s also essentially converting them into “freemium” apps that have features that will only be unlocked if you pay $129 a year for the Creator Studio.
Some of the additional items do make sense as subscription offerings. Apple is offering loads of templates and themes for those apps, limited to subscribers. It’s not unreasonable to ask for money in order to access a content library, and the templates and themes seem geared at the target audience for the bundle: creators.
But it’s some of the other stuff that gives me pause. Apple is adding features to the iWork apps, and locking them behind a paywall. There’s a feature that generates a Keynote presentation from a text outline, and another that creates presenter notes from an existing slide deck. Users of Numbers will be able to have access to Magic Fill, which lets them “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.”
On the one hand, these read like they’re AI-powered features that might have actual costs attached to them. But they still don’t seem like features designed for the creative customers targeted by the bundle. They seem like regular features of Keynote and Numbers, ones that those apps’ much more general user base might want… but rather than being broadly released, they’re being withheld.
I don’t generally like the idea that Apple’s taking the free software that has added to the value of its premium hardware for a couple of decades and turning it into an upsell designed to generate more services revenue. But at least I can understand that if there’s an actual cost to running AI-powered functionality, giving it away entirely for free might not be a wise thing to do.
More specifically, this move stinks for anyone who uses Keynote and Numbers and isn’t in the target audience of Pixelmator, Final Cut, and Logic users. If Apple wanted to offer an iWork subscription for $20 a year that enabled AI features, some nice templates, and the rest, I’d… probably still complain.
It junks up the simplicity of the classic iWork concept: Apple devices come, for free, with a suite of software tools that let you get things done. Even though Apple has taken great pains to say that the iWork apps will remain free, they’re now free with an asterisk: free except for the stuff you have to pay for. Asterisks make things less simple.
But at least if Apple chose to offer iWork users a targeted bundle, it would be something understandable and reasonable. This, though? A feature to make building formulas and tables in Numbers is, somehow, limited to people paying $129 a year for Final Cut? A feature to make it easier for someone to build a Keynote presentation out of their notes is only available for someone shelling out $129 for Logic or Pixelmator?
It just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if Apple has decided that there can only be one Apple software bundle, and all of its apps are just going to be dumped into it. And I’m worried about where this potentially might lead, in terms of making the entire Mac, iPad, and iPhone buying experience feel more exploitative and gross. Apple needs to recognize that it’s in the business of selling high-margin hardware that people buy because it’s nice. The more that an expensive phone or computer is just an upsell opportunity for the real thing that requires an annual fee, the less special it is.
I understand charging an annual fee for great professional audio, video, and design tools. But for features in a free bundled spreadsheet app? It just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
2026-01-15 03:21:18
Apple’s new subscription bundle of creative apps, the single-use tech we’re bringing into 2026, how often we erase and reformat our devices, and our hopes for Gemini-powered Siri.
2026-01-15 00:00:00
This week we bundle up and talk about icons, Apple’s big Gemini deal and the company’s cowardice in the face of Grok.
