2026-06-14 08:15:00
Before I go further let me just be clear. If the MacBook Neo is the Mac you can afford then it's a nice computer. You can build apps, edit video, and do effectively whatever you want on it. It's a Mac and that makes it immensely powerful no matter what processor is powering it.
One of the things I've been grappling with since the launch of this product is that Mac users who can easily afford and already use much higher-powered Macs were seemingly drawn to this computer. Hell, I was too! And yet as I stated plainly in my review, this is a budget computer. It is slower in every single metric, even in everyday tasks, than what we've considered the baseline in the Apple Silicon era.
And yet I'm writing this very post on it.
One of the things iPad users have talked about for years now is the idea that the iPad makes them focus in a way the Mac doesn't. The limitations of the iPad are actually a good thing in that they make them slow down and focus on one thing at a time. Writers in particular really love using the iPad for this reason. In a weird way this is what I like about the MacBook Neo as well.
Obviously it's a Mac that can multitask like crazy if I want it to but at the same time it's really not that fast and it gets overwhelmed if I try to do too much with it. As such it makes me slow down and focus on doing one or two things at a time. As a primary computer I don't particularly want this and I'm blessed to be able to afford a better computer (pun not intended) that doesn't make me do this, but as a secondary computer it is actually nice to have this sort of experience. I can do everything I want, but it's a pain once I get too much going, so it helps me focus on one thing at a time without feeling like I'm doing so because I can't do something.
This is all, not to mention that because of some of my work being based on large language models that run in the cloud, some of my work is not impacted by the reduction in power. It's gone now, but I was running Clawed Fable 5 on this machine briefly and it was just as good as running it on my much more powerful MacBook Pro.
2026-06-13 22:00:00
Joe Skrebels: XBOX Games Showcase 2026 Recap: The Return of Exclusives, World Premieres, and Anniversary Hardware
As part of our focus on the return of XBOX, we also announced that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives. These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan – we’re committed to investing in and growing XBOX both on console and beyond.
Combine this with the recent announcement from Sony that they will no longer be bringing their single-player games to PC, and as a consumer it does feel like we're exiting a golden era of gaming where we were able to play pretty much everything wherever we wanted. However, I do appreciate why this era had to end for these companies.
Sony’s drive to get their games on PC was an attempt to expand their player base. Way more people play games on PC than on the consoles, so getting their games in front of those gamers was a net win for them. There's of course some overlap, but a lot of PC gamers are never going to buy a console, so Sony probably thought they were simply expanding their customer base.
However Sony never went fully in on treating PC the same as PlayStation. Their games, such as Death Stranding 2 and Spider-Man, all released first on PS5, with the PC version coming anywhere from six months to several years later. I would suspect this was in part to try and drive sales of PS5 consoles. Yes you can play Death Stranding 2 on PC but you're going to have to wait a while. Maybe you want to get a PS5 to play earlier. I don't think this strategy is fundamentally flawed but I do think it led to some of the sales disappointments that Sony started to see with their PC releases. The first few games they released on PC sold incredibly well. I would suspect largely because of the novelty and surprise of it. Sony had never done this before and getting their games on PC was really exciting. However once it became the norm, the novelty wore off, and now these were just year-plus old games coming to PC, which wasn't as exciting.
Another wrinkle was the direction that Microsoft was going with its consoles. The ROG Xbox Ally X is already on the market and is an Xbox in name that can play games from any PC game store, which means it can play all the PlayStation Studio games as well. The rumors are strong that this is the direction Microsoft is going with their next home console as well. I'm sure Sony wasn't super thrilled about the idea of people being able to boot up PlayStation games on an Xbox.
I'm an audience of one so take this as a data point only. As someone who has a PC and a PlayStation 5, this era has basically made it so I play my PlayStation 0% of the time because I can play everything on my PC. While it is annoying to wait for the PlayStation Studios games to come to PC, it's not the end of the world and I can usually wait.
From the start of this generation of consoles, Microsoft has been in a place where they treat every first-party game as an Xbox and PC release. I don't own an Xbox Series X but I can still play every single Microsoft Game Studio release the day it comes out on my PC, and I have been able to do that since 2020. For me that's been great but it has also meant that I have precisely zero interest in even considering buying an Xbox console.
Meanwhile Microsoft's recent move to multi-platform across all of their games, including their crown jewel, Halo, has meant that basically no one has any reason to buy an Xbox console. Seriously, why would you buy an Xbox today?
If you want everything, a PC gets it all and if you want a console experience then the PS5 gets all the Microsoft games plus all the Sony exclusives as well. Why get an Xbox when it's the only one that doesn't get anything unique you can't get on the other ones? That can make sense if you're not really interested in owning a hardware platform and you just want to be a software publisher. Clearly Microsoft is reconsidering this position, though, as the lock down the hatches.
People like to say Nintendo is not competing with Sony and Microsoft. I agree they have a totally different strategy, but I still think they're in the mix. What's notable about Nintendo is that they've been remarkably consistent in their release strategy: Nintendo exclusives never, ever touch other platforms.
Meanwhile 2017's Switch console was so remarkably successful that they've drawn tons of third parties back to the platform as well, so now you get all your Nintendo games on a Switch (or Switch 2), and basically every third party game that can fit on the portable console comes there as well. Yes, even Microsoft games, but not Sony ones.
Funnily enough, as Sony and Microsoft have fought the spec wars (something Nintendo has not been fighting since 2006's Wii), they've put themselves in a position where their new consoles cost an absolute shit ton of money in today's environment, pushing them outside the window most people are willing to spend on a game console. Meanwhile Nintendo's Switch 2 is still pretty expensive and isn't as powerful, but its cost hasn't gotten to the levels of the other competitors. Today a Switch 2 gets you all of Nintendo's games, most third party games (including sports games which were absent for literal decades), Call of Duty, and even some PC games that don't come to the other consoles. It still doesn't get you everything, but it's a pretty compelling package at a price point that feels closer to what consoles are meant to cost.
2026-06-13 09:18:05
Anthropic: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Looking forward to the "don't let the government slow down innovation in AI" folks will say about this one. Probably nothing since their team is in charge.
2026-06-13 05:00:00
Devin Coldewey: Google's new logos are bad
Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs. Companies always talk loud and long about their design language and choices, so as an antidote I thought I’d just explain why these new ones are bad and probably won’t last.
This is an article from 2020 when Google last changed all of their icons, and this was the generally shared opinion. Basically, people didn't like them because they moved from distinct icons with their own brand colors and moved to this same 4-5 color scheme.
At the time, I really thought it was disappointing, and I wasn't alone. My primary concern is what was referenced in this article, which is that by making all of your icons the same colors, it makes it hard to visually distinguish them at a glance. They went from a system where you could tell by the shape and color, and removed the color differentiator. Especially in the context of someone who works in Google Apps in a browser and relies on browser tab favicons to navigate. This was a huge annoyance and has been for years.
However…
One of the most clear facts about software design is that familiarity is the most powerful thing. Whether something is good or bad, if people are used to it, they will rebel when it's changed. Yes, even those things they don't like at first; they'll be back a few later defending them to the death.
And that's where we find ourselves once again. Just six years later, Google has revamped the icons across most of their products, and they've gone back to distinct colors and shapes for each service they offer. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them, but I think they are a huge step forward for usability. In my book, an icon has two jobs. The first is to be immediately identifiable, and the second is to be beautiful. I think that the previous set of icons failed in both regards.
I think these new ones succeed in being distinct, and the second part is in the eye of the beholder. For me, I think they look pretty nice, but I can understand why someone else might not love them. Either way, because they're more distinct, I think they're a step forward and you won't hear me complain about them.
2026-06-13 02:37:28
If I'm being honest, I have been completely underwater for the past few weeks. Work is always busy, but recently it has ramped up to an entirely new level. Without getting too into the details, the gist of it is that I have been working on a new project for the past few months. Our original plan was to start heads down work in July and deliver the whole product to customers by end of year. It was a logical, sensible plan: we would implement the simplest version of the product first to get it out the door, move on to the intermediate version, and then close things out with the most complex version. It was a solid plan, but then something happened…
We learned that one of our biggest customers needed exactly the product we were building. Suddenly, the project that was supposed to start in July and wrap up by the end of the year suddenly became a project we had to start in May, with a partial delivery in mid June and final completion in July. To say the least, that is a massive shift in timeline. To make matters worse, because this customer has a big, complex business, they need the most complex features right away. Our clean plan of starting easy and building the harder features on top as we went, was out the window. Now, we are building the hardest part first. I have described this internally as trying to build the pyramids from the top down.
I oversee about 12 products (13 now that this new one is active). Two of those products were already designated as our top company priorities for the fall, and now this project has jumped right up there alongside them. We are not a small company, so having three of these major priorities on my plate is either incredibly good or incredibly bad luck, depending on how you look at it ("the only thing worse than having everyone care about your work is no one caring about it"). The end result is that my workdays are jam packed with meetings to keep everyone aligned, and I'm left with scant, fleeting minutes here and there to do the actual work I need to do, like working on design and thinking through critical decisions.
This schedule has made it incredibly difficult to keep up with anything outside of work. This happens to be the week of WWDC, which is usually one of my biggest writing weeks of the year for Birchtree, but my output has fallen off compared to previous years. I have managed to write a few things, but I have so many more ideas that I simply have not had the time to put to paper. Between Monday and Tuesday, I did manage to record an episode of my podcast, Vision Pros, and an episode of Comfort Zone, but today is Friday, our usual recording day for Comfort Zone, and I will not be on the episode. In a first for me, I am missing the recording not because I am traveling, but simply because I do not have the time. I know Chris and Niléane will do a great show without me, but I really wish I could be there.
Last night, the universe decided to just start messing with me; some tornadoes blew through last night. Having lived in Illinois my entire life, I am used to this. We get half a dozen nights a year with a tornado watch, and a couple that turn into warnings (which means a tornado has been confirmed on the ground). Usually, these warnings last about 30 minutes, and the storm inevitably weakens or passes right around us. Last night started with a standard watch, and it looked like everything was tracking south of our area.
Then, suddenly, every device in the house started blaring the emergency alert system. I opened Carrot Weather on my phone and saw a brand new storm cell had materialized right on top of us. I pulled up the local news to watch the weather report, and not only were we in the warning zone, but the meteorologists started to list street names where the cyclone was headed. They reported that the tornado was positioned between two specific streets, which happened to be the exact streets I live between. They are not far apart.
Suddenly, my wife, our dog, and I were huddled in our bathroom, watching the news on our phone and listening intently to the outside world. We heard intense winds hit the house, and I genuinely worried that we were about to sustain real damage or worse, be put in actual physical danger. Thankfully, the roaring noise started to die down, and when I looked outside after it passed, there was no significant damage to our home. There are some incredibly large tree branches down in the neighborhood, but our house and our neighbors' houses are okay. It seems the tornado weakened just before it reached us and we ended up just getting significant winds and rain.
Today looks like a beautiful summer day with no storms in the forecast, and it seems like we are going to have a really nice weekend. Yet, as I write this on Friday morning before work, my mind immediately shifts right back to my schedule. I opened my calendar this morning only to see 8 meetings scheduled for today. It is time to get back to it, but during at least one of those meetings, you can be sure I will be quietly checking to see when I can take a vacation in the very near future.
2026-06-12 22:31:08
One of the big problems with the glass redesign in OS 26 was that it was really optimized to look good when specific content was underneath it. This famously resulted in illegible text in buttons when complex content was behind it, and social media is full of examples of that. But the quieter problem was when there was nothing under them, they looked kind of dead. On macOS especially, Apple made these buttons stand out a bit from the background by placing an enormous drop shadow behind them as well, which I thought looked absolutely garish.
But the glass effect in OS 27 has a subtle change that I think goes a long way to making them feel better. At the top of this post, I have a comparison from my app, Yearly Run Goals, which has three buttons inside a single glass pill. In addition to getting a peek at some of the changes to SF symbols in the new update, you can also see that the glass element the buttons sit in has a subtly different look that I think looks really sharp.
I don't know if it really comes across in a screenshot like this, but when you're using the device, I think glass buttons feel a lot better on everything from my iPhone to my iPad to my Mac.
I mentioned the Mac specifically earlier, and let's take a look at Finder.
This is what the Finder toolbar looked like in OS 26, which is very low contrast and has again these garish background shadows that I think look really weird. Here's what the same thing looks like in OS 27.
It's still not the most contrasty thing you've ever seen, but Apple's made a couple of changes that I think help here. The enormous shadows are basically gone because the new button outline lets the buttons stand out a bit more from the background. Apple's also gone further by making the buttons use a solid black color rather than a gray, as they did in Tahoe.
It's a slightly different thing, but a related change that I very much welcome is that toolbars get a background in OS 27. Here's the mess you saw when scrolling in OS 26:
And here's what it looks like in OS 27:
Ah, visual structure…what a concept!