2026-01-01 03:10:45
This is the fifth and final in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my wearables (only Apple Watch) 2024 and 2023 report cards.
We got new AirPods Pro this year, and this third generation has proven to be a little more divisive than the last couple, at least from what I can see. The functionality seems very good, and by all accounts, they are the best, easiest-to-use noise-cancelling earbuds for basically anyone (doubly so if you have an iPhone).
The one issue that people seem to have with these, myself included, is the fit. For a some number of people, they just don't feel good in the ears. Personally, they are the first Apple earbuds of any variety that didn't fit my ears well. It's impossible to know the scale of how many people have actual discomfort with these, and I'm totally willing to accept that I am in the minority of users here, but I do get the impression it's the first time it's ever been a meaningful storyline about an AirPods Pro release that they are uncomfortable for people. All that said, if they fit in your ears, they're pretty awesome.
Taking a moment to talk about the rest of the lineup, I think this was actually a pretty good year as well. The AirPods Pro 2 got numerous firmware updates throughout the year, including a substantial update when the Pro 3s came out which gave them the live translation feature heavily advertised with the new model. Yeah, the flagship feature of the new AirPods is also in the old ones. You love to see it.
Meanwhile, we didn't get any updates to the normal AirPods or the AirPods Max. However, on a personal level, I did get some regular AirPods for Christmas, and I've been using them for about a week now. I gotta say, these are pretty great. The noise cancellation is surprisingly good for headphones that don't have a silicone tip, though obviously not as good as the Pros. They feel so comfortable in my ears and they support the head nod and shake gestures, which I appreciate. Unfortunately, while you can squeeze the stems to play/pause and change modes, you can't swipe up and down on them to change the volume. That's the one aspect of the Pros I miss when using these.
As for the AirPods Max? No updates, and they remain on a very old chip, meaning no firmware updates to bring them these new features. It remains a tough spot for Apple's most expensive AirPods.
Do we have a new champion for the smallest year-over-year Apple Watch upgrade? I've scoured Apple's comparison page, and the only genuine change I see is the cellular connectivity, which upgrades from LTE to 5G. The chip is the same, the screen is the same; everything else in this device is the same as you had last year.
The one thing that might tempt you to upgrade is the increased advertised battery life from 18 hours to 24 hours, but a quick look at the testing methods indicates Apple is now counting six hours of sleep tracking in that metric. Based on my use of the Apple Watch, I would suspect the old model technically achieved 24 hours as well, Apple just didn't count it because they didn't count sleep in the number. I could be wrong, but it seems as though the battery life is going to be effectively the same between the Series 10 and 11.
The Ultra 3 is a pretty similar situation, although there are a couple of upgrades here worth mentioning. The first is the updated display, which adopts the wide viewing angles that the Series 10 got last year. Nice, but subtle. It also gets Emergency SOS via Satellite, while the last Ultra only got Emergency SOS on traditional cell networks. Finally, it gets 5G and is upgraded to the S10 SiP that the Series 10 got last year, and the Series 11 stuck with for a second year.
Similarly, the battery promise is 6 hours more than before (42 vs 36 hours), and this is similarly due to counting 6 hours of sleep tracking. This is something the Ultra 2 already achieved, it just wasn't a part of their metrics.
Speaking for both the Series 11 and Ultra 3 marketing, I'm of two minds here. Number one, I think Apple has undersold the battery performance of these watches for many years, and including sleep tracking is fair, in my opinion. The problem is that this change makes it appear to customers like the battery got way better this year, even though it stayed effectively the same.
The unexpected hero of the Apple Watch updates this year is the new SE, which I think has graduated from "the budget model with big sacrifices" to my default recommendation. The upgrades begin with the chip, which is the S10, just like the Series 11 and Ultra 3. It also gets 5G, wrist temperature sensing, sleep apnea notifications, and critically, the always-on display—which the Series watches have had since the Series 6. It probably won't be a big deal to most people, but they've also bumped the internal storage to 64GB, doubling the previous SE and matching the high-end watches.
And they've done all this while keeping the base price the same at $249, or $150 cheaper than the cheapest Series 11 model.
There are still some things you get with the Series 11 that you don't with the SE 3, such as the improved wide-angle display, hypertension notifications, ECGs, and water temperature sensing. If you want those features, then the extra money is probably worth it (or a used Series 10). But if those don't intrigue you, then I think the SE 3 is a pretty great smartwatch for a lot of people.
A C grade may seem harsh, but just a reminder that a C is average with my review scale. It's still a passing grade. Don't worry! Call it a C+ if that feels better.
The update to the Ultra 3 was pretty minimal, but the update to the latest chipset and improved display are both welcome. But the Series 11 update honestly doesn't make any sense. It feels very much like they iterated the product just because they'd done it 10 years in a row and it would look weird if they didn't, but they obviously didn't have anything new of note to put in there.
The bright spot in the hardware this year was the SE 3, which I think is great on two fronts. The first is that it's a genuinely good upgrade to the SE 2, so people who are using that watch and would like to upgrade have a logical and very good device to purchase. I also think it's good because it drives down the effective starting price of the Apple Watch for most people. The SE was clearly a budget device before, and I would only recommend it to people who could not afford the Series watches or for kids who just need a watch, not the best watch. Now, I genuinely think it is the right choice for a lot of people, which means the entry-level price to the Apple Watch experience just dropped by $150, which is unusual in current Apple where everything needs to get more premium and therefore more expensive.
On the software front, watchOS wasn't a huge update, and I think the company is still fixing some of the UX challenges they created for themselves in last year's update. So I think there's some good and some bad here. Along with visionOS, I think Liquid Glass actually works pretty well on the watch, even if sometimes it does feel a little bit odd on my otherwise rugged Ultra's physical design. I also generally like the new Workout Buddy, sleep analysis, and wrist flick features, although I do find the new workout app UI a little frustrating. The touch targets for things such as starting a workout have been made smaller, and the app is less stable than it was. This has been true throughout the beta as well as after the public release.
There's a lot of individual product lines here, so let's be quick about it. On the AirPods front, I am not expecting any new hardware for either the normal AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max. If you told me one of them was definitely getting an upgrade and I had to pick, I'd guess the Max would get a proper second generation that does more than simply swap the Lightning connector for USB-C. Again, I'm still not confident this will happen, but if we're going to get any AirPods upgrades, that's what I'd pick.
On the Apple Watch front, I do not expect an SE 4, but I do expect a Series 12 and Ultra 4. How much of an upgrade they'll be remains to be seen. I think a safe bet is to say they'll get new chips for the first time in a couple of years, and the Ultra may change. Maybe the Series will even get something new in terms of materials.
In terms of what I want from new Apple Watches, I'd love to see a new health sensor enter the mix, maybe something around blood sugar. And on the software front, I'd like to see my workout trainer feature become a reality. I'd love to see the workout app get improved from what they released this year.
And this is a real shot in the dark, but I'd love to see Apple experiment with new liquid materials in their OS. I mentioned the odd disconnect between the lightness of Liquid Glass and the ruggedness of the Ultra 3's physical design, and I think it would be cool if they made a "Liquid Metal" UI material that behaved the same, but was opaque and had more of a silver tint than the glass material. Hell, if it works here, maybe it could come to the other platforms as well, but the scope of that change is much more manageable and low risk on the watch, so let's start there.
And that's that! Five report cards and about 8,700 words reviewing Apple's 2025. In general, I think it was a conservative but effective year for hardware, and a tough year for software.
I do not see any evidence that the "apocalypse" some were suggesting was coming when the general public got their hands on this new design has happened (the most chronically online are the most enraged, while the normal people in my life are unbothered, and there has been nothing nearly as viral online as the Photos app redesign from last year). However, I do think that the usability problems are real and that there's a general sense that will build over time that this new design system isn't as good as what we had before.
Here's to a 2026 with new iPhone and Mac form factors, with more ProMotion displays in iPads, for Apple Watch updates that feel like actual upgrades, and new software design leadership that makes serious moves to clean things up.
Cheers!
2026-01-01 01:24:01
I was just on GitHub and saw the famous contribution visualization, and this really put into perspective how much more of a developer I was this year. Here's the last 4 years of contributions:
33 contributions in 2022, a bit more in 2023 and 2024, but y'all, 2025 was wild. Just a reminder, the output has been:
2025-12-31 07:00:00
Kathryn Krawczyk from Canary Media: Clean energy is still winning. These 10 charts prove it.
Solar’s monumental rise is the main reason for the shift: The source more than doubled its share of global electricity production from 2021 to 2025. And while coal still remains the world’s largest source of electricity, it’s declining while solar and other renewable sources are on the rise.
And:
Between January and September, power demand around the world rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all of that new demand on its own, and with a boost from wind, was able to cover all of it. That’s a huge deal for the clean energy transition. When we produce more renewable power than is needed to cover growing demand, that’s when we can start chipping away at fossil fuels.
While the vibes suggested this would be a dismal year for clean energy deployment in the U.S., it simply wasn’t. Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the grid this year through November.
The continued domination of clean, renewable energies, both in the US and around the world, is still a major win worth celebrating. Solar expansion alone covered basically all worldwide energy consumption increases this year, which is huge. I've said it before and I'll say it again, a world where energy is plentiful and clean and we can use it without guilt is far better than a world where we have to ration energy because it's dirty and expensive.
The energy story is one I'll continue to keep my eye on into 2026, but it feels like a quiet but significant win year after year.
2025-12-31 06:02:40
Amanda Hess for The New York Times in 2018: The End of Endings
Didn’t endings used to mean something? They imbued everything that came before them with significance, and then they gave us the space to reflect on it all. More than that: They made us feel alive. The story ended, but we did not. This had been true at least since the novel supplanted the oral tradition. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin wrote that the novelist “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis.’” He continued, “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” We needed stories to end so we could make sense of them. We needed characters to die so we could make sense of ourselves.
I think a factor in my general dissatisfaction with franchises and TV shows is that a key part of storytelling, the ending, isn't really a thing. Here's how they usually go:
Patrick Willems has a very good video out now called Let Franchises End and I highly suggest you check it out.
2025-12-31 05:32:31
This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Vision Pro 2024 and 2023 report cards.
I'm going to give myself a round of applause here, because absolutely no one this time last year was expecting new Vision Pro hardware in 2025, except me.
I would be positively shocked if I’m writing my 2025 report card a year from now and the current Vision Pro is still in stores and selling for $3,499.
Well, I got it right, as we have a new Vision Pro on store shelves now.
Of course, this upgrade was about as unexciting as it could have possibly been. Effectively, the only change here is to the processor, which jumped three generations from the M2 to the M5. Apple also advertised some benefits to display clarity and refresh rate, but the display hardware remained exactly the same, and the M5 just seems to have been able to push that display a little harder.
I think overall it's good that Apple updated the Vision Pro, but I think even the product's most ardent supporters would admit this wasn't a super compelling upgrade. I know these people exist, but I literally don't know anybody personally who bought the original Vision Pro, loved it, and has upgraded to the M5 edition. There's just not enough value there. This was also made worse by the fact there was no trade-in program for owners of the original model. If you are a day one owner of the original Vision Pro and you want to get the second model, you got to pay full price, there's absolutely no trade-in. If I had to guess, it's likely because the resale market for this product is so anemic that even Apple doesn't want them back because they can't resell them for any reasonable amount.
Is it too sensationalist to say this has been a terrible year for the Vision Pro? I guess it's been a fine year for people who already like it, but for a product that's only two years old and which has not proven to be remotely successful in the market, I feel like it made zero progress this year. This is a product that should be finding its stride. It should be a place where we see new and innovative software released that gets people on board. It should be a playground for developers to find new and interesting solutions to problems that could not be solved with 2D screen-based computing platforms. We've seen none of this in 2025. There's positively no energy around this product and no interest from the general public that I can see.
Let's look at this another way. Can you name a single app that released for the Vision Pro this year? Can you name a single moment where the Vision Pro broke out of its diehard fans and got other people excited about it? I can't. Maybe you're thinking about that Marvel What If… game, but no, that came out in mid 2024. Maybe the television app from Sandwich? Nope, that was February 2024. Maybe it's that Lapz F1 app that was based on some pretty cool concept videos? Nope, that never even released. Their last updates on the blog were in November 2024, and you can no longer join the TestFlight at all. Apple's Vision Pro app of the year was Explore POV, which appears to be a collection of 3D videos from beautiful places around the world. I guess that's something, but I don't think that's a ticket to mainstream success anytime soon, and to be fair, also launched in early 2024.
I still think spatial videos are kinda cool, but even those have lost their luster for me. Last year, every time a new spatial video came out, I would charge up the Vision Pro and watch it, no matter the subject matter. In 2025, I can't be bothered unless it's something I find particularly interesting. The Metallica and MotoGP ones were pretty cool, but I can't think of any more off the top of my head.
Movies are a tough one too. I liked watching movies on this last year, but I think I watched a grand total of 2 on it in 2025 (and that's not a lot considering I watched 100 movies this year). I won't name names, they can do their own updates, but I know for a fact that several people who were high on this for watching movies last year have also basically stopped using it for that as well.
visionOS 26 released in the fall, with widgets and controller support, which are nice. As we‘ll explore more below, the OS is not the problem, and it’s continued to improve. Shout out to the dev teams working on this.
I know some Vision Pro fans will be reading this and might be upset, and I really don't want to take anything away from those who enjoy the product as it is. My point is that if the Vision Pro is only ever going to be a product made for a small slice of relatively wealthy VR enthusiasts, then that's fine. If this is meant to appeal to a wider audience, then Apple made zero progress towards making that a reality in 2025.
It’s always tough to set expectations for the Vision Pro because, honestly, I feel like I have to be vague. I really don't have a clear vision of what I even want from this product or what I think will help it go mainstream. I literally can't think of anything Apple could do to make me start using mine on a regular basis, and I certainly don't know what use case is going to get people buying a $3,500 VR headset in any sort of mainstream capacity.
In the product world, we often talk about the MVP, or minimally viable product. This is usually a little rough around the edges, but it exists to prove whether there's a good market fit for the thing you're making. Once you prove people want it, you invest in polishing the experience. When I look at the Vision Pro, I feel like we’ve done the inverse of that. People often complement how nicely made VisionOS is, but I’d argue maybe that's part of its downfall. It's incredibly well thought out and well implemented for a thing that doesn't solve problems or desires that most people actually have.
So with that in mind, my broad hope for the Vision Pro in 2026 is to see some sort of software experience that can only happen in virtual reality, and which I—and a decent chunk of the rest of the world—find compelling. Yeah, that's not very specific. And yeah, I'm offloading figuring out what that thing is to other people, but I honestly don't know what it is. Speaking for myself, I've spent all of 2025 identifying problems I have with the computers in my life and building solutions to those problems. Personally, none of the problems I currently have are solved by a virtual reality headset. What I'm craving is something that wins me over.
Additionally, and I know this is a hard one to solve, but I continue to believe that a fundamental problem with the Vision Pro is its price. At $3,500 or more, it is simply a product that too few people could purchase, even if they loved the idea of it and desperately wanted one. You can make the product twice as good in every spec, and I still don't think it would move the needle much because the raw cost is simply too much for most people to stomach.
Frankly, at the amounts we're talking about, shaving even $1,000 off the price might not be enough to move the needle meaningfully. We really need to get down to a place where this is closer to a $999 starting price. Unfortunately, everything we know from the rumor mill is that a product like that is nowhere close to happening. I guess my realistic hope for 2026 is that the M5 Vision Pro gets some sort of permanent price drop. $2,999 isn't great, but it would be something to move it in the right direction.
As for hardware predictions, my honest prediction is that nothing changes, and the M5 Vision Pro remains the only product in the lineup and remains at the same price. If there is new hardware, the boring safe bet is that it's going to be an M6 version of the current product. But I think there's a sliver of a chance that will get some sort of cheaper model, either the more affordable Vision Pro (or Vision Air?) is closer to reality than we think, or they've made serious progress towards a more Meta Ray-Ban-like product that gets announced before the end of the year.
Tune in tomorrow for the final in the series, and thank you for reading Birchtree through 2025!
2025-12-30 22:52:11
I'm a big fan of movies, they're my favorite medium for storytelling, and it was sometime in 2019 that I said to myself, "man, you don't watch that many movies for someone who claims to love movies."
Of course, I was watching like 10-20 movies a year, which is probably relatively average in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't feel like enough for me. I was missing out of so many good stories because I just wasn't making the time for them. TV shows and video games were taking up my free time instead.
Well, that was when I jumped back into Letterboxd (apparently I joined in 2012!) and started logging my movie watching, and I ramped up my movie count in 2020 and 2021, bit I set an arbitrary goal for myself in 2022: watch 100 movies.
The purpose of this 100 movies wasn't just that more is better, but that if I committed to watching a lot of stuff, it would get me to stop waffling and just hit "play" on more things I was on the fence about. I wanted to get past the "hmm, what should I watch?" mode that has you browsing streaming services for 30 minutes before giving up, and just taking a chance on more things; get out of my comfort zone, if you will. And I think that has been successful! I probably would not have taken chances on movies like Shoplifters, Jojo Rabbit, RRR, The Father, or Perfect Blue if I wasn't chasing this arbitrary number.
I've watched at least 100 movies in each of the last 4 years, and I think that's pretty cool. My biggest year was 2023 where I watched 149 movies, which I would say is too many movies. By the end of that year, I remember feeling like watching movies was turning into a bit of a chore. I had bounced back so much from TV and video games that I was putting off enjoying those mediums in favor of pushing up my movie count to heights I'd never seen in my whole life.
As such, in 2024 I did not have any sort of goal or target to surpass the year before…the line doesn't always have to go up. I have kept that 'just watch how many you feel like" attitude through 2025 as well, and the numbers pretty clearly show that around 100 movies per year is what works for me right now in my life. This sounds like a ton, but it's basically one movie every Saturday and Sunday throughout the year, which isn't that hard for me to do.
For some fun, let's look at a little quick data analysis on the 102 movies I've watched in 2025 (so far, there's still 2 days left!) from my Letterboxd year in review.
My movie frequency has ramped up quite a bit in December, as it often does. It's a combination of big movies I want to see coming out all at once, and time off of work giving me more free time to pop on a movie (or two) each day).
I only rewatched 2 movies all year, KPop Demon Hunters and One Battle After Another, both films in my top 10 of the year.
Speaking of top 10…this is my current ranking based on what I've been able to see so far. A few heavy hitters remain, so this may shake up, but if you're looking for something to watch in this week between Christmas and New Year's, I'd recommend anything here. For clarity, these are:
43% of movies I watched came out this year, and 88% of what I watched was new to me. I'm definitely still seeking out new stories and experiences, not just the comfort food I already know I love.
This score breakdown is pretty normal for a regular person watching movies. I get to choose what I watch, so I'm self-selecting for films I'll probably like.
These two options are fun…movies I rated higher or lower than most people. I don't know what I can say, Materialists resonated with me, Heart Eyes was a fun horror film in the vein of Scream, and the other 4 are widely adored, so I don't think there's anything crazy there.
On the negative front, I stand by The Gorge and The Woman in Cabin 10 being some of the most bland, cookie-cutter, "did AI write this?" slop I've watched in a while. Meanwhile, The Coffee Table was just a miserable experience, even if it was well-crafted; I just couldn't stomach it.
As for 2026, there are already 20 movies on my watchlist that we know are coming out, and I'm sure there will be many more that nab my attention, so it looks like another great year for the medium I love.