2026-04-16 20:00:00
I really loved this quote from John Linneman on a recent Digital Foundry podcast:
There was a time when they could produce games in a moderately sustainable fashion, it seems, and they didn't need to be multi-million sellers. And in fact, the big multi-million sellers could help support this wide range of content, which in turn strengthens the platform. I think this black and white thinking of "if it's not the biggest thing, then it's a failure," is extremely dangerous and slowly whittles away at the overall life and vibrancy around a platform until it fails. Like this min-maxing that we're seeing, it's not healthy and it's not sustainable.
I could not agree more.
2026-04-16 09:00:00
This post on Reddit caught my attention:
Been curious about the state of the visionOS ecosystem so I pulled the numbers from Appfigures on every app released specifically for visionOS since the platform was announced. This excludes the thousands of 2D iPad/iPhone apps that are just compatible with the headset.
The Feb 2024 launch triggered a spike of 260 native apps in a single month, the highest ever. Since mid-2024 it's settled into a steady 20 to 45 new native apps per month.
Also keep in mind these are only what's available on the public App Store. As a developer myself, most of what's actually being built today never gets published there. It's enterprise software, and it barely makes the news.
With visionOS 27 coming later this year and a next-gen Vision Pro potentially landing within two years, I think the ecosystem is a lot healthier than the chart alone suggests.
Setting aside the fact this has the "actually, there are tons of Vision Pro users, you just can't see them" argument that's all too common in the /r/visionpro subreddit, this top comment caught my eye:
What surprised me is that I don't see a boom correlated with “vibe coding.” I think I read elsewhere that there was something like an 80% jump in the App Store due to coding agents, so I’m wondering why that hasn’t happened here🧐
The agentic coding revolution has hit web and iOS dev really hard, with record numbers of GitHub projects and iOS apps being created, but it seems this has completely avoided the visionOS platform. Or maybe even worse, it has, and the 36 new apps we saw in March 2026 would have been closer to zero if this wasn't happening.
2026-04-16 08:00:00
Zac Kew-Denniss: iPadOS 26 multitasking is so bad that I’ve replaced my iPad with an Android tablet
The biggest mistake Apple made in iPadOS 26 was making all of these changes in the iPad’s default mode. I’m the go-to tech support for a large group of older family members and family friends, and the iPad has always been something I recommend. Ever since iPadOS 26 came out, almost all of those people have needed help to learn the new window management UX, with several of them feeling anxious that somehow their iPad is broken. All of these changes should’ve been made a part of Stage Manager, leaving the default behavior as it was. Instead, the product that’s supposed to “just work” and be simple to use feels nothing of the sort.
I think the windowing in iPadOS 26 is really good, and is the best version of it they've ever offered. However, 10 months into using it, I still feel like my iPad is a bit more complicated than it was before, and I do long a bit for the simpler split view I had before.
2026-04-16 07:09:15
Nick Vukotic (random person, I don’t vouch for them) on Threads
I love the decade where every major electronics manufacturer was selling mp3 players but no one was asking where the mp3s were coming from
I would love to know what percentage of the music on MP3 players back in the early 2000s was pirated, but the number has to be astronomical. According to this article, in 2005, 20% of people were downloading music via peer-to-peer networks like LimeWire and BitTorrent. It's impossible to find specifics, but the impression most people seem to have is that the vast majority of music on people's iPods and Rios and Zunes were pirated. iTunes certainly helped here, but you gotta think the damage was done.
Not to make everything a comparison to what we're living through now, but I do think that it's notable that one of the most nostalgic, good-vibes products of many of our youths was fundamentally built on stealing from artists. Maybe you didn't (and be honest, didn't you?), but MP3 players and music piracy were hand in hand.
2026-04-15 06:15:54
On this week's Waveform podcast, Marques Brownlee and crew were talking about browsers and a common topic came up:
Safari is only good for one thing, which is battery life.
And:
Commonly accepted facts.
Accepted by who? Lunatics?
I would say ask any browser enthusiast.
And:
I'm on an Apple Silicon laptop. Battery life is going to be legit no matter what or where I'm going.
No, no, it's not. That's not true.
Bro, I'm a super turbo power user. I can at least get like four hours of battery life minimum.
The difference between Chrome and Safari in regular browsing for several hours is shockingly high. It's huge.
Really?
It's dramatic. This laptop is terrifyingly long-lasting battery on Safari, is average at best with Chrome.
I happened to test exactly this in 2024, and I took great care to document my process and findings. Here's what I found:
In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari.
Yeah, I found that in controlled tests where I did the exact same things in both browsers for hours at a time (across multiple test runs), and found that they were very close to each other, with Chrome using slightly less battery. As Marques put it, it sounds like Chrome halves his Mac's battery life. As someone who uses Chrome for work and spends all day in it doing work in Atlassian apps and video calls, I can confidently say it easily makes it through an 8-9 hour work day on battery. This is true of my M5 Pro and it was also true of my M1.
I asked for any sort of data from the past decade people had to back up the idea that Chrome was horrible on battery and Safari was a saint, and I got nothing sent my way in 2024. If you have it now, I'd love to see it! Hit me up on Mastodon if you've got it!
Until I get any sort of compelling data, I'm going to continue thinking that people who think this are just like people who think that religiously force closing your iPhone apps improves your phone's speed and battery. It's a shared hallucination that feels like it's true, even though it's not. Considering many Safari users can't seem to believe that Chrome is a faster browser than Safari these days either, despite effectively every benchmark showing this, I suspect the feelings will continue.
2026-04-13 02:00:00
Antonio G. Di Benedetto for The Verge: I tested three Windows laptops in the MacBook Neo’s price range — there’s no contest
Each has an eight-core processor (versus six on the Neo), 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage — the slowest of which is twice the speed of the Neo’s storage.
The article goes onto say that the Neo is a better experience for most people for most things than the similarly-priced Windows laptops, but I pulled this quote because I think it's telling. There's a class of Apple fan that puts Apple in a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Through the Apple silicon generation, Apple has been pushing the speeds of its RAM and SSDs higher and higher, typically ahead of what you'd get in mainstream PC parts. Faster computers are good, but it's led to an argument from some Apple fans that anything less than what Apple's offering at the highest end of RAM/SSD speeds is unworthy of people time and money.
In January 2024, I bought 32GB RAM for my gaming PC. It was fast, DDR5 memory, and it more than served its purpose for my needs. This RAM cost me $106, which was a tad (understatement of the year) more affordable than what it would cost to get that in a Mac, and I got a few people comment about how it was an apples to oranges comparison because the RAM in Macs was so much better than the RAM I was getting. My contention was basically, sure, but if I don't need the extra speed, then it's more than fine to get more of what I actually need (capacity and more than enough speed) than the top-of-the-line speeds MacBook Pros got us.
I don't have a personal story about being roasted for using an SSD slower than MacBook Pros, but as Apple fans have transitioned from "benchmarks don't express the experience of the product" to "this benchmark proves my Apple product is better" over the last decade, there has been plenty of obsession with SSD speeds as well.
Stating it again to be super clear, these are good things, and they push the performance of our devices forward.
That said, while Windows computers were critiqued to hell for not being exactly as fast as the highest end Macs, there was always leeway for other Macs. Remember when Macs with lower-capacity SSDs had literally half the performance of their higher end models? Remember when the M2 MacBook Air and Pro models actually got much slower after their M1 equivalents? Or, as referenced above, how the MacBook Neo has much slower RAM and SSD than not only every other Apple silicon Mac ever, but the budget Windows laptops it competes with in 2026? The sober takes today are that yes, these are not ideal, but hey, the only people who will notice are spec-obsessed critics who don't understand real users.
In short, Apple wins when they have the best SSD and RAM speeds because obviously faster is better, and they win when they don't have the best speeds because the vast majority of users don't need all that speed.
In my opinion, the only cogent position to have on this sort of thing is that clearly faster is better, but there's a line you eventually cross where most people don't really see the benefits in the things they do on a computer, and that line is below the state-of-the-art in 2026 when it comes to RAM and SSD speed. The line raises a bit every year as our computing demands increase, but we should all bring the "most people don't need absolute top of the line specs" energy to discussions of all computers, not just Apple's.