2026-01-09 06:00:23
On a recent Vergecast episode, David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song ranked nine of Apple's product categories. The episode is entertaining, although I discovered that while I really like Victoria Song generally, I disagreed with her on almost every single point in this episode. 😅
Specifying the rules for a list's rankings is super important, and here's how they describe the criteria we should be considering:
“best” is defined quite broadly: it includes a product’s inherent quality, the quality of its competition, its cultural and economic relevance, the size of its target market, and many other things. Best is not an exact science.
So basically vibes, and I'm okay with that. My primary consideration will be around how easily I can recommend the product to somebody else and whether I think Apple makes the best version of that product that you can buy. Here's the list of categories:
Respect to the Vision Pro fans out there, but how could it be anything else, right? I do own one myself, but it is the only product category on this list where I would actively warn people not to purchase for themselves. Based on my criteria above, I do think that in some ways it is technically the best product in its category on the market, but I don't think the value it gives most people remotely aligns with the price tag. And if I'm being honest, even if it was one-third the price, I still wouldn't recommend it to most people.
I think the HomePod is a relatively niche product, and the HomePod Mini is probably a bit more mainstream, but I find them to be the least essential of the eight Apple products remaining. If you want a good voice assistant, I don't see why you would get a HomePod outside of being really invested in Apple's ecosystem. If you want a good speaker, it's a better sell, but also only works with Apple's own products, and is hard to recommend over some other options out there.
I was debating whether this or the HomePod should go higher, and I leaned a little more towards the Apple TV hardware because I do find it easier to recommend to people who are thinking about getting one. All of the services you want to use are going to be here, and in general, they're going to have the best experience that you can get from any product. Yes, your TV likely has all of these apps available as well, but except in very rare cases, the experience in the native TV apps is just awful. And no matter which Apple TV you buy, you're at least going to get a fluid experience.
AirTags are the sort of product you buy and, best case scenario, never have to use. That's kind of the opposite of every other product on this list, which makes them a little hard to judge, but I think they have real utility, are quite reliable, and in the rare instances I've relied on them, they've done great.
By the criteria of this list, I think there's an argument to be made that the Apple Watch should be one position higher, but I just can't put it any higher than this. I think the Apple Watch is fantastic, and while it's not as exciting as it used to be, it's a product that is exceptionally popular among a wide swath of people. Some people buy it for the fitness tracking. Some people buy it for the notifications. Others buy it just because that's just what a watch is in 2025.
This is lower on the list than you expected, huh?
I've got the iPhone 17 Pro in my pocket now, and it's my daily driver. I'm in the envious position of being able to choose between this, an iPhone Air, a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and a Pixel 10, and for me, the best phone is the iPhone 17 Pro.
That said, I don't think it's as clean a sweep as it once was. The rest of the market has really caught up, and I'm a big fan of the Galaxy S25 Ultra myself, but other phones from Google, OnePlus, and a few Chinese manufacturers are pushing further than Apple in ways that I think real people actually like. I do think that Apple makes the best all-around phone, and they sweat the details on several things that other companies don't, but I would not feel bad at all about recommending someone buy a Galaxy or Pixel phone either. In fact, if they're already using an Android phone and are happy with it, those might be better options for them.
To be clear, the iPhone is still great, and I still think it is the best phone for most people, but the gap is not what it once was.
I think if you're looking for a laptop computer, then the Mac is unquestionably the best product on the market today. When you look at the combination of build quality, performance, and even price, I simply don't think anything else can match it. Even if you're someone who's used Windows your entire life, I would still suggest you look at a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro before committing to another Windows computer.
Oh, and if you just like macOS more than Windows, there's never been a better time to be a Mac fan. We're eating good in the Apple silicon era.
That said, I can't ignore desktop computers, which, while I think Apple satisfies most people's needs with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, there are higher-end needs as well as the entire gaming market that are underserved or completely unserved by Apple's offerings. The Mac is still outrageously good, but I do think if you're looking for a desktop computer, or a convertible computer for that matter, I do have a few questions to ask you before wholeheartedly endorsing a Mac.
AirPods, on the other hand, are for everyone, as long as they want wireless earbuds. They're the default choice for iPhone users, and I know numerous Android phone users who buy AirPods because they're, "obviously the best." There's not much more to say. The AirPods Pro especially are beloved, and I know that if you, dear reader, had your AirPods fall into the garbage disposal and get shredded into a million little pieces, within five minutes you'd be putting in a pickup order to get a new pair today.
Well, well, well, what do we have here? The guy who is frustrated by the iPad puts the iPad at number one!
Well, if we look at the criteria, which is mainly on whether Apple makes the best product in a category, I don't think there's a single product on this list that Apple leads more comprehensively in than the iPad. The product simply dominates the tablet market, a market that many companies have tried to compete in and simply haven't come close. Whether it being developer support or user adoption, the iPad is leaving the competition completely in the dust.
No, it's not a good full-time computer for most adults, but it serves so many use cases nicely. Whether you have a Mac, a Windows computer, an iPhone, or an Android phone, it doesn't matter. Having an iPad around is nice, and if given the choice between an iPad and any other tablet on the market, there's absolutely no question you're getting the iPad.
In a way, I think this is both a compliment and an insult to the iPad. It's obviously a compliment if I think it's number one on this list because it absolutely demolishes the competition. However, the only reason it does that is because I'm considering the competition to be cheap Amazon Fire tablets and whatever Samsung and Google are trying these days to make work with software that simply was never meant to run in a tablet form factor. I'm not considering this in the same category as a Mac or a Windows computer or even a Microsoft Surface.
So that's that! I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree with me. If you disagree, the best way to respond would be with a blog post of your own! Tell me what I got wrong!
2026-01-09 02:00:58
2026-01-08 22:38:36
Here's some news from our latest occupation:
U.S. President is reaffirming the American commitment to keeping American troops in the country even after the country returns to self-rule, now expected by the middle of next year.
The President says next year's formal end to the U.S. occupation of the country will not amount to an exit strategy. Nor, he said, will it mean the end of the U.S. military presence in the country.
Oh wait, this is a slightly tweaked version of a report from 2003 when the US invaded Iraq for falsified reasons, forced a leadership change, and initially swore it would be fast and easy. Cut to today:
“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
Also, shout out to the people in my DMs telling me this wasn't at all about oil when I wrote about it last week. You nailed it! Not about oil at all 😵💫
2026-01-08 21:00:00
I took a look through NVIDIA's last 4 years of financial reports with a goal of understanding how much of their business was from gaming and how that's changed in recent years.
In short, gaming revenue has bounced back from the COVID bump and is on a constant rise. If this was any company's revenue over the last 4 years, they'd be pretty pleased.
But now let's look at NVIDIA's overall revenue over that same time period:
That's a heck of a line, huh? Finally, let's show what percentage of their revenue came from gaming over this time period:
It gets harder to do apples-to-apples comparisons to their financials before 2023, but in Q4 2021, gaming made up over 50% of their revenue, and they were best know for their graphics cards shipping to consumers. 5 years later and they're unquestionably an AI company who happens to make awesome GPUs for personal computers (gaming makes up less than 10% of their revenue today). Wild times.
2026-01-08 06:01:06
Robb Knight: App Defaults 2026
It's been a couple of years since my first post in this series. In 2024 I did an "updates only" list but I think it's worth going for a full list again this time.
It's back! I did mine back in 2023 and 2024, and while I'm late, here's my 2025 list:
2026-01-06 21:00:10
Well, it didn't take too long into the new year for me to announce a new app, huh? This is a pretty niche tool, so I don't expect most people to get value from it, but if you create a podcast (or two or three), then I think you're going to like this.
ChapterPod will likely ship later this month, and as with all my apps, it is currently available in beta for More Birchtree subscribers.
To put it plainly, since you’re probably already thinking it, this is the spiritual successor to Marco Arment's Forecast app, which I and many other podcasters have been using for years to add chapters to our podcasts. The app is simple and just works, which is great, but there are a few usability things I thought could be improved, and so I decided to make my own app to solve those problems. Some of those include:
If you make podcasts for a living, I think you will enjoy this.
If you prefer the video format, here's a quick 2-minute demo of this version of the app.
This is what the app looks like when you're adding chapters. No, it's not terribly complex, but it's exactly what you need to get the job done.
Right along the bottom you have a time code and a chapter title that you can enter. The change here is that these are much more keyboard-friendly. So you can tab between these easily. You can hit CMD + Return to create the chapter, and after you create a chapter, the focus shifts automatically back to the time code so you can enter the timestamp for the next chapter.
Next up is my absolute favorite feature, which is the ability to bring your YouTube style chapters and turn them into real chapters in an instant. Here's how it looks.
Just hit the four lines icon (or CMD + I) and your chapters will be right there. Confirm they look good, make some edits if need be, and boom, they're done. I've been using a version of this app for about 9 months at this point, and this feature alone has made the app invaluable to me personally.
And if you're cross-posting to YouTube, for example, you can generate your chapters here and export them to text with CMD + Shift + C. Chris does this every week in my Quick Chapters app on Quick Stuff, and now he can do it here!
You can also add images to chapters, with links hopefully coming before the public launch.
One of the limiting factors for Forecast is that it was Mac only. And while most people will produce their podcasts on a Mac, not everybody does, and there are times where you may want to be able to do this sort of thing from whatever device you have in your hand. That's why an important part of building this app on day one was cross-platform compatibility for Apple's devices. ChapterPod has 100% feature parity across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions of the app.
Like my other apps, this app is 100% native and built using SwiftUI.
Pricing will have the exact same model as I have for Quick Subtitles, which is basically that the app is free to use for a set number of jobs, and then you need to make a one-time payment to keep using the app forever. Pricing is not finalized, but I will not make this a subscription app. It will be a one-time fee, and I'll make sure that whatever number is settled on will be a reasonable amount that fairly represents the value I think people will get from this piece of software.
Again, More Birchtree subscribers can join the beta today (under the "Perks" section), and the only things standing in the way of public release is beta feedback and any hoops I unexpectedly need to jump through in app review (there's always something for the 1.0…). I hope you like it!