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.
2026-04-12 22:00:31
2026-04-11 04:00:46
2026-04-09 07:13:33
Today I'm sharing a pretty simple micro-app: a Claude skill that you can use in the desktop app or in Claude Code. It lets you pass in a podcast transcript and helps clean it up for you.
The local models we have today for creating transcriptions are really great, but they aren't perfect, and they do get some things wrong, so it's helpful to clean them up. I've tried to help with this issue before. I implemented a Gemini-powered feature in Quick Subtitles that does this, and it works pretty well, but there are some things I want to improve about that feature, and it's limited to transcripts created in that app. Sometimes I have transcript files that were generated elsewhere, so I needed a more universal way to clean them up. That's where this skill comes in.
Now, I know a good percentage of my readers don't like LLMs and scoff at them as simply being fancy autocorrect, but hey, that's literally what this skill does! It's a fancy autocorrect! Obviously, you can do this without a skill, but skills are effectively shorthand to add to your prompt and to add other considerations that the skill creator may have implemented.
For example, when you use this skill, instead of having a long prompt that explains that this is a podcast transcript and lists the names of the hosts and the sorts of things that it could get wrong, you can just say "clean up this transcript," and it'll go ahead and do it. You can either directly tag the skill, or in most cases, Claude will just understand that you probably want to use the skill and will load it for you.
Proper nouns are something that LLMs can often get wrong, especially if they're not typical titles or names. I wanted the skill to be generic, so I didn't hard code anything into it. Instead, I added a memory feature that should make it so that when you first run the skill, it asks you for things like the name of your podcast and the names of the hosts, so it can look up those transcriptions and make sure those are correct. It stores that in Claude's memory, so you don't have to do it every time, although, of course, because Claude is an LLM, you can add these later at any point if you want.
As a quick aside, one of the things that critics of language models often critique is that the output can be a bit fuzzy. Yes, we want the output to be as accurate as possible, but what isn't always appreciated is the fuzzy input, which LLMs excel with. My co-host Nealeon's name is mistranscribed basically every single time by every model, and it's done in different ways. So it's really hard to know exactly what to look for to know what needs to be fixed. A simple find and replace doesn't work super well for this use case, but LLMs can understand that there's a person named Nealeon, and the transcript likely got it wrong, so it will look up possible misspellings and correct multiple of them easily. It's very effective at this, and I really appreciate that about LLMs. When you don't exactly know what you're looking for, but you know what the results should be, it does a really good job at getting you there.
This skill is available for free on GitHub if you'd like to download it, and there are instructions to install it in Claude if you're not familiar with installing skills.
2026-04-08 03:15:10
David Pierce: Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them
The good news here is, you don’t have to take my word for it. Switching browsers is hard, and maybe you don’t want to do it just for vertical tabs. But update Chrome, right-click the tab bar, and just see what happens when you select Show Tabs Vertically. I bet you’ll never go back.
And there we go, the last of the major browsers has added side tabs, validating my opinion that Arc is right up there with ChatGPT for the most influential new apps released in the past 5 years.
Editor's note: Safari technically has side tabs, although they are a weird add-on, not a replacement for the normal tabs. I'm counting it, but it's not really what we're talking about when we talk about Arc-style side tabs.
2026-04-07 07:55:00
Last month, I wrote about how Apple is working on adding support for encrypted RCS messages between Apple Messages on iOS and Google Messages on Android. At the time, I said I hoped Apple would make this work with Samsung's messaging app as well so that basically all Americans could get the benefits here.
Well, today Samsung announced they are ending their custom messaging app and are directing users to switch to Google Messages instead.
Well, problem solved.