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
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!
2026-06-12 06:00:00
As someone who has been covering this ecosystem for nearly twenty years, the biggest shift this year, and my single biggest takeaway from the keynote, was a fundamental change in how Apple presented their software updates.
For many years, WWDC keynotes followed a highly predictable format. After a brief introduction, Apple would put up title slides for each operating system and cover the changes specific to that individual platform. In recent years, that structure has started to feel a bit awkward. More and more, every major feature seems to make its way to every platform. As I have written about previously regarding the Mac-ification of iPadOS, these features now look and work almost exactly the same way regardless of the device. While a new feature might be demoed during the iOS segment of a keynote, there is a very good chance that it exists and functions identically on iPads and Macs as well.
This trend was ratcheted up a level last year when Apple introduced a major redesign that made every operating system look and feel virtually identical, tossing aside many of the visual elements that used to make them distinct. From that perspective, this year's move to simply talk about all software changes at once, while setting the expectation that they apply across all of their platforms, makes perfect sense.
You can see this strategy reflected on Apple's website. While you can technically still filter the preview pages by operating system, the individual pages are nearly identical, and the main page (apple.com/os 👀) talk about the "OS Overview". And honestly, I don't blame them. Over the past year, I've reverted to just saying OS 26 when talking about Apple's platforms.
My podcast co-host, Christopher Lawley, has pushed the idea that Apple is moving toward something like appleOS, a unified operating system that runs across phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. I can already see some readers searching for the famous screenshot of Craig Federighi saying "no" to this concept (saved you a search), but I think the idea is less crazy by the day. I'm still skeptical this will happen anytime soon, but I think it's plain to see for anyone paying attention recently that the unique aspects of each platform are being reduced as the company normalizes UI and interactions across everything that it can.
I also can't not bring up the elephants about to enter the room this year, which are Macs that you can interact with like iPads and iPhones as big as iPads.
This brings me back to my most controversial prediction of 2026 so far, where I argued that the iPadOS name would eventually go away and both iPhones and iPads would simply run iOS. Of course, you can go to Apple's website today and see that iPadOS 27 is indeed a thing, so they are not killing the name this year. Still, I am not willing to admit defeat just yet.
If we look back at Apple's history, the operating system that iPads run has changed names several times. The first instance was notably just a year into the product's life cycle, as the original iPad shipped running iPhone OS. It was not until the following year that they renamed the operating system to iOS, which better aligned with the idea of software running across multiple device types.
If history repeats itself and they eventually make the move I expect, I think there is a chance that at next year's WWDC, Apple will announce this change and point to their updated hardware lineup, which again features iPhones as large as iPads and Macs that you can use with touch. We will have to see if this presentation format continues, but if they do make this name change next year, it is entirely possible they won't even mention it in the keynote. It might be something we only learn when we visit Apple's site afterward and notice the iPadOS section has quietly disappeared. There is definitely some smoke here, and while I am not entirely sure what it indicates, Apple is clearly de-emphasizing platform names and differences.
As one final note, I think the thing that made this WWDC feel a little flat for people like me is that the segment on software updates was incredibly short. Typically, we get an hour and a half of updates detailing all the usability improvements made to the platforms. This time, we got it all blended together in a single 11-minute segment.
I don't think the blending itself is a problem, but it was so brief that I felt like I didn't come out of the keynote knowing how my phone or Mac would actually feel different in daily use. As is tradition, Apple posted their Developer State of the Union shortly after the keynote ended, which dove into a bunch of technical details for developers. It almost made me wish they would also host a "State of the Union for Nerds," where they would spend another hour diving into all the little details, tweaks, and quality-of-life changes they made to their platforms. We lost that detailed exploration in the main keynote this year, and it would have been a lot of fun to have a dedicated space for those smaller updates.