2026-06-16 22:36:47
Today, famed keyboard maker Keychron has released their first Thunderbolt dock, the Keychron Thunderbolt 5 Dock (14-in-1).
I've been using a dock for my computer for about 5 years now, and it was the single best upgrade to my desk setup I've done in years. Plugging everything from my monitor to Ethernet to accessories to SD cards into a dock, and having a single cable that plugs into whatever computer I want is brilliant. I've got a personal Mac, a work Mac, and a gaming PC at my desk, and being able to switch a single cable from one to the other and have a seamless experience is awesome.
Of course, my 5-year old OWC Thunderbolt dock uses Thunderbolt 4, which is great, but not state of the art anymore. Additionally, it's an 11-in-1 dock, of which I've used basically all it has to offer. As such, I wasn't on the verge of buying a new dock, but I was quietly curious. That's why I was excited when Keychron reached out for this review opportunity, and I said yes right away. Review unit provided by Keychron. The product was delivered as a gift, which I could choose to review or not. Keychron neither asked for, nor was given any influence over this review.
First off, it must be said that Thunderbolt 5 is still quite niche, even in the Apple world. The following Apple silicon chips have Thunderbolt 5:
I think it's important to mention this because you cannot just buy any brand new Mac today and get this functionality, you need to have a Pro chip or better from the past 2 years. Of note, you can use this dock with Thunderbolt 4 Macs, you just won't get the full speed benefits.
I'm going to briefly list out the benefits of Thunderbolt 5 over Thunderbolt 4 below, but I do think it's worth saying that I don't think most people will even notice these things have changed. I would go out on a limb and say that most of us never even come close to saturating the Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth, so these gains are not going to be noticeable for a lot of us. But let's get into them.
So yeah, there are some real benefits, but they're not really things most of us will notice. My Samsung T7 SSD and SD cards are way slower than Thunderbolt 4 already, so data transfers aren't going to be any quicker, my internet connection is about 1% of the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, so now it's just 0.5% of of Thunderbolt 5, and my 14" MacBook Pro can only accept 100W of power delivery, so the jump to 140W doesn't help me either. Of note, Thunderbolt 5 supports up to 240W of power delivery, but Keychron's dock maxes out at 140W due to the included power adapter, which is 180W.
However, the one thing that I get from this upgrade is to the improvement to display output. My 4K@240Hz monitor works great on my Windows computer connected via HDMI, but I've had to run it at 120Hz on my Mac because the dock didn't support the bandwidth for full 240Hz.
While this is a 14-in-1 dock, you really do need to look at what ports have been chosen by the manufacturer to know if it's the right one for you. Different manufacturers make different choices here, so you want to make sure you're getting the most bang for your buck. In addition to the Thunderbolt 5 port you plug your computer into, Keychron's dock comes with:
This is a fine set of inputs, but I must say that for my setup, this isn't really much of an upgrade from my old OWC dock. In fact, it's made me appreciate how perfectly aligned that OWC dock was with my needs, as even with fewer inputs, it's actually equally useful. Without listing every accessory I own, I'll just say that the headphone jack, TF slot, and both HDMI ports on the Keychron are useless to me, so this is really a 10-in-1 in terms of useful ports. When I compare the useful inputs on the OWC, I get…10-in-1 as well.
Obviously, your use case might be different from mine, but I will admit that once I got everything hooked up to this dock and realized I was equally as out of room for expansion as I was previously, I did feel a little less excited about the upgrade. As I said earlier, I really wasn't saturating any of the performance limits of Thunderbolt 4 previously, so my day-to-day experience is exactly the same as before.
But I do enjoy that I can run my monitor at its full refresh rate.
A dock doesn't need to have much said about its design, after all many people will tuck it out of sight, but I do think this is a good looking dock. Its aluminum enclosure feels premium, and it just looks nice on the whole. Mine is Command Stripped to the leg of my desk, so I don't see it most of the time, but it is a nice thing to see when I go under there to plug in an SD card.
One thing I do like about the port layout is that the port that goes out to your computer is on the back side with most of the other ports. One of my pet peeves of the OWC dock is that most of the ports were on the back, but the port you connected to your computer was on the front, which meant it was impossible to have all the cables coming out of one side. Of course, if you do use all the ports, then you're going to have them coming out both sides, but you at least have a fighting chance with this dock in a way I didn't with the OWC.
Keychron is quite competitive with their pricing, as you might expect from them. It's $349, and includes a 1-meter Thunderbolt 5 cable in the box. This is $50 less than the CalDigit TS5, which I think of as the default high end Thunderbolt dock on the market, although the TS5 has a much different selection of ports, leaning heavily into more USB-C and Thunderbolt and lacking any HDMI. Meanwhile, OWC's current Thunderbolt 5 options come in at $329 and $499, but both lose out to the Keychron in terms of I/O. In fact, I think CalDigit's $499 TS5 Plus is the dock that would be the best for me, as it leans heavily into Thunderbolt and USB-C, with 7 total inputs compared to the Keychron's 3 inputs. Obviously I'd be paying much more for that additional I/O, though.
I'm going to keep using the Keychron doc myself, but my actual advice to most people would be to not worry about Thunderbolt 5 at the moment and just find a good Thunderbolt 4 dock. I've mentioned that I've had this OWC one for years and it works great. At $229, it's notably cheaper as well, and unless you are running a 240Hz 4K monitor like me, you probably won't ever hit the bandwidth caps of Thunderbolt 4 anyway.
2026-06-15 19:32:49
Last night had a UFC fight on the White House lawn, which is…a thing…
"But Matt, why can't you liberals just enjoy this? Trump has said it's a "gift to Americans" to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday. Why can't you love America?"
Well, let's just jump to the end of the fight and see what sort of victory speech was given in this nonpartisan event:
Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?
Ah yes, that welcoming, uniting message that will bring all of us together as a nation.
"But Maaaaatt, this wasn't someone from the administration saying that, settle down."
No, you wake up. The fact this cunt felt it was an appropriate time to say something like this (racist and sexist at the same time, what a combo!) is as clear an indication I can think of that the energy for this event was anything but a "gift to Americans," it was a party for conservatives who love this sort of thing.
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.