2026-03-02 22:58:55
In addition to the new iPhone 17e, Apple also announced a new iPad Air, now powered by the M4 processor. I could almost end the post there because we've basically reached the end of the list of differences. As far as I can tell, the literal only other changes are that we now get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and you know the updates are sparse when I'm telling you about the Bluetooth version bump.
What's notable about this time is that this is actually the second year in a row where I've basically been able to say the same thing. Last year's M3 iPad Air was also just a processor swap over the M2 version.
I'm not super annoyed by this, as the iPad Air is already quite good. But there are two things I think really could have used a change.
Anyway, it seems all right enough. But in my opinion, if you can get an M2 or M3 Air for a significant discount, I would highly look into that.
As I did with the iPhone 17e, I'm also comparing my takeaways from what Apple thinks are the highlights on their marketing page:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you know it's a minor release when 4 of the 5 highlights have nothing to do with this specific hardware, and one of them is that it comes in 2 sizes.
2026-03-02 22:42:51
Last year I was among the more positive people about the iPhone 16e. I spent a couple weeks using it as my primary device, and honestly, it was a pretty fine experience. No, it wasn't as good as my 16 Pro at the time, but it was also half the cost of that phone. I didn't think it was a cutting-edge device, but again, it was not sold at a cutting-edge price. The single camera was kind of annoying, although it must be said that people love the iPhone Air, which has a single camera setup, so it doesn't seem like that's a deal breaker. The 60Hz display was a bummer as well, although at the time, a $1,000 iPhone 16 Plus didn't have that either, so no one was really expecting it on this model. The one thing that really did bum me out was the lack of MagSafe, which felt like a core iPhone feature that we'd gotten used to on five generations of iPhones.
Just one year later, Apple's back with a new model, the iPhone 17e. It's a very conservative update, but here's what I think is notable.
With the exception of Ceramic Shield 2 on the front glass, everything else is exactly the same. It's the same dimensions, the same wireless modems, the same display tech, and the same advertised battery life.
I have no interest in getting one of these this year, but I do think that the upgrades, particularly to the camera, the base storage, and the addition of MagSafe make this an easier pill to swallow at the $599 price point.
In my Apple Report Card for last year, I made a prediction about the 17e:
And I would expect the iPhone 17e to be the first iPhone we get in the year, coming in the spring and sporting the A19 processor, MagSafe, and the same design as the current model. Criticisms will remain, the base storage will stay at 128GB, the colors will stay the same, and the $599 price point will be a bit too much for people.
Considering a lot of pundits didn't think we were going to get an update every year to this phone, I'll take the point for predicting that we would get this and that it would be the first new iPhone of the year. Everything else was spot on, with the exception of the base storage, which I didn't expect to increase. But hey, if I'm going to get a prediction wrong, I'm happy to have it be in the consumer's favor.
One thing that I think is interesting to do is to compare what I think is notable about the new phone to what Apple thinks is notable about the new device. I wrote the above section after pretty much just browsing the iPhone compare page on Apple's site. But if we look at Apple's marketing, what are they bragging about knowing about this phone? I'm using the "Get the highlights" section, which is something they've added to most of their device pages in recent years.
When I read this, I see Apple stressing the reliability and convenience of this phone. It will stand up to more abuse, MagSafe makes it more convenient to use with mounts and other accessories, and it has more performance in the processor and the camera, so you won't feel the need to update for a long time.
2026-03-02 21:55:31
I'm happy to announce the release of my new app, Weave. As is often the case with my apps, I built this one for myself and then decided it was worth sharing with the world. Weave is a native iPhone and iPad app for Typefully users.
For those who don't know, Typefully is a web service that lets you cross-post to different social media accounts, and I think it's really great. However, they only have a web interface, they don't have a native iPhone or iPad app.
Typefully does have an API, though, and it's pretty simple to use, so I put together a native app that lets you link to your Typefully account and publish however you like. Just go to your Typefully settings, create an API key, put it in Weave, and you're good to go.
I've tried to replicate pretty much all of the Typefully web experience, including a nice post editor that makes creating threads really easy. Weave supports media attachments with alt text, scheduling, queuing, posting to specific subsets of accounts, multiple profiles, and editing your scheduled posts. I'm also really proud of the natural language input, which is what I typically use for scheduling.
And, hey, if you don't like the green accent color, I also have a Typefully blue theme you can switch to.
Again, the app is called Weave, and it's completely free on the App Store. If you're a Typefully user who uses an iPhone, I highly recommend checking it out.
2026-03-02 21:48:00
In the second episode of the A Better Computer podcast, I talk more about how I think "killing iPadOS" is actually making everything more like an iPad. We look at why, from a developer's perspective, there's already literally no difference between iPadOS and iOS software. And then I give a quick update on my ROG Xbox Ally X, which is now running Linux and is so much better than it was when it was running Windows.
Watch on YouTube, or listen in your favorite app.
2026-03-02 21:00:33
Resident Evil Requiem came out this past week, and I was very excited to start playing it. It genuinely might be my most anticipated game of the year, and I truly relish my first time playing through any Resident Evil game, so I'm trying to really enjoy myself this first playthrough. I'm playing on PC and in HDR, and the game looks absolutely outstanding.
Anyway, because I'm playing in HDR, whenever I take a screenshot, we immediately run into a bit of a tricky situation with file formats. When I take a screenshot while playing in SDR, the image format is a simple PNG, which I can easily get onto my Mac and either share directly or convert it to a JPEG. However, when playing in HDR, to capture the high dynamic range of the image, a JXR is captured, which is not a format you may have even come across. In fact, it seems almost no one has, because most apps, and as far as I can tell, nothing really on macOS can even open them in the first place. Truly, I've googled around and searched the App Store for options, and there doesn't seem to be anything really good.
This app has got to be the most lazily created app I've made so far, but I don't need it to be complicated at all. All it does is let me drag in my JXR files. I select a destination, I hit convert, it then goes ahead and processes every file, it normalizes the color to SDR color space, and it saves the resulting image as a JPEG.
That's really it, there's no other UI, there's no settings, but it does mean that I can post stuff like this to social media, showing off the game.
Post by @[email protected]View on Mastodon
Without getting too in the weeds, I'm doing this by dropping in the jxrlib library to the project to use its jxr_decode_to_rgb() function to convert the image into RGB data, which is then used by some pretty pedestrian Swift code to wrap that in a CGImage and export to disk as the file format of my choice. In theory, I could maintain the HDR data by saving the file as HEIC, so I'll probably do that next.
I don't currently have plans to make this available publicly.
2026-02-28 21:27:37
In fact, making the Mac a refrigerator-toaster combo would reduce the number of things it's able to do.