Jason Snell on Six Colors: Apple’s Immersive Video Problem Now, having seen the video, I have a few more observations. The first is that I don’t think the new video is very good. Oh, sure, the individual shots can be impressive. […] The problem is that, | Continue reading
Benj Edwards writing for ArsTechnica: “The King Is Dead”—Claude 3 Surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the First Time On Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT) for the first time on Chatbot Arena | Continue reading
Jeanna Kadlec on Threads Substack is completely gutting their business right now. Every writer I know is seeing our subscriptions plummet as our “follower” count rises. The whole value proposition of Substack is that it’s a newsletter and writer hub. This latest intervention is i … | Continue reading
Ina Fried: Axios Review: Using Apple’s Vision Pro in Real Life The Vision Pro quickly feels heavy on your face, as others have noted. But using it is also cognitively more complex than just watching TV while doing some work on a phone or laptop. I spent a | Continue reading
A short story of a broken furnace, a wealth of information, and the need for experts to save the day. Oh, and the most badass portfolio site I've ever seen. | Continue reading
404 Media: 404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feed Since we launched 404 Media in August, the most common request we’ve gotten from our subscribers is for an RSS feed that contains the full text of all of our articles. We are proud and excited to | Continue reading
Joe Rosensteel: It’s Time for a New AirPort networking underpins everything that Apple does care about. Every Mac, iPad, Apple TV, HomePod, Vision Pro, and most importantly every iPhone. The iPhone is a cellular device, but when you’re at home, you’re on your Wi-Fi | Continue reading
Well, it seems like transaction info is something people are more interested in than I expected, so I wanted to tackle one more thing. So often in App Store discussions, we talk about Apple’s 30% cut of each in-app purchase on iPhones and how that’s so | Continue reading
Apple Pay is great, but I think there is some misunderstanding out there about the details of how it works. | Continue reading
I’m no lawyer, and I’m not going to pretend I’m one, so don’t expect me to make any confident legal clams here. That said, I did read the 88-page suit (PDF) against Apple and I have some thoughts. Oh, I also haven& | Continue reading
Some thoughts about my side projects and (if you'll forgive me) how much joy they currently spark. | Continue reading
This (shockingly low res) view went up yesterday and shows what the user experience will be like for Threads users when they want to opt into the fediverse. There are so many interesting details here, and honestly I think Meta is doing a fantastic job with how this is being | Continue reading
I think Claude is an underrated contender in the chatbot wars we're currently living through, but they don't have an iOS app. That's not the end of the world as you can save it as a web app to your home screen and get | Continue reading
Abner Li writing for 9to5Google: Apple Might Use Google Gemini to Power Some AI Features on the iPhone According to Bloomberg, there are “active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone softwar … | Continue reading
I used to change the monospaced font I use everywhere on my Mac constantly. New ones seem to come out every few months, and I was a moth to a flame with them, but I haven't changed the monospaced font I use on my Mac in a couple | Continue reading
Yunqi Li writing for Wired: The Tech Behind Taylor Swift Concert Wristbands It’s funny because oftentimes people think there’s GPS in each of the devices, or there’s a lot of advanced AI technology,” says Vincent Leclerc, co-founder and CEO of PixMob in an | Continue reading
Tatiana Siegel writing for Variety: Apple’s Blockbuster Gamble On March 10, the tech giant has 13 shots to take home an Oscar via two historical epics, “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Napoleon,” which nabbed 10 and three nominations, respectively. That’s given | Continue reading
Maxwell Zeff for Gizmodo: Closing Your iPhone Apps Is a Mythical Waste of Time Apple users seem unanimously convinced that closing background apps is a good habit, but it’s more likely a waste of time A few years ago, I would have retweeted, boosted, and linked to this | Continue reading
Sean Hollister for The Verge: How Nintendo’s Destruction of Yuzu Is Rocking the Emulator World Not only did hackers find an unprecedented vulnerability in the original Switch less than a year after release but also the emulator scene managed to develop software that plays Switch … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez: Apple Has Lost Its Confidence What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to think that IAP can stand up to the competition: app developers’ websites. I don’t agree with everything in this piece but it does make me think about the | Continue reading
I’ve been using the Apple Vision Pro for a bit over a month at this point, and while I’ve gone deep on a few key use cases of using the product already, I thought it was high time I collect my thoughts on the product in | Continue reading
I really thought life would get back to normal last week, but it actually got worse. Covid is no joke and you should thank your lucky stars if it doesn't cause you much strife. | Continue reading
I love doing top 10 lists, and since movies are my favorite form of storytelling, I wanted to make a list of what I think best represents my 2023 in film. The order can change day by day, but if you had to ask me what I enjoyed this year, | Continue reading
John Voorhees writing about Arc’s latest escapades in MacStories Weekly: Issue 408It’s that intermediate layer that makes me suspicious of Arc’s motives. The company is starting to feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a browser with an interesting, pl … | Continue reading
It’s Oscar weekend, so here are the very serious Birchtree awards for movies I watched in 2023 that didn’t come out in 2023.Biggest Emotional Gut Punch That Makes You Think Deeply About Your Life and Loved OnesMacrel the Shell with Shoes OnBiggest “ | Continue reading
iA: AI Videos: ******* PsychoticComputer-generated imagery is not bad in its every fiber. There certainly are great ways to use AI in a creative process. The more you control your tool and the process, the more mindful the product, the less it qualifies as “AI”. Thi … | Continue reading
Benjamin Mueller for the New York Times: After 217 Covid Vaccines, Man Had No Side Effects and Robust ImmunityBy the time the doctors first saw him, the 62-year-old man had received 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they said. Flouting their pleas to stop, he received another two … | Continue reading
Amanda Marcotte: Trump Is Degenerating Before Our Eyes — MAGA Voters Don't Notice or Don't CareAround lunchtime on Monday, all three cable news networks cut to Trump awkwardly accepting the Supreme Court nullifying the 14th Amendment on his behalf. After a few se … | Continue reading
Listen, everyone lives different lives so I can’t speak to anyone else’s specific situation, but the biggest hurdle I currently have with using the Vision Pro is that I can’t use it while I’m around my wife. I can hang out with | Continue reading
It’s been a hell of a few weeks over here at Birchler HQ. It’s easy to forget that good health goes such a long way to making every other part of your life better. | Continue reading
A history lesson for each major computing platform Apple has released since the turn of the millennium:Apple released the first iPod in November 2001, and they released the second one 10 months later.They released the first iPhone in June 2007, and the iPhone 3G 12 months later.T … | Continue reading
Dan Moren: To Embrace Gaming Apple Needs to Level Up Its Game Porting ToolkitIf Apple really wants to jumpstart gaming on the Mac, it should bake the underlying technologies of the game porting toolkit directly into the system. Make installing and running a PC game as easy as if | Continue reading
Before we get going, I'll mention to those who aren't following along that this is one in a long series of posts about using the Vision Pro. This post does not contain all of my thoughts on the product, and I've included some links | Continue reading
ThrillSeeker is a must follow if you’re into VR, and his most popular video of all time was on his experience using the Varjo XR-3. At the time, that was a $5,500 device plus a required $1,500/year subscription. Oh, and it needed to be connected | Continue reading
Listen, you don’t want 2,000 words on a travel case and I don’t particularly want to write that much about a case. Agreed? Excellent, let’s go quick!The visual design is awesomeI love the look of the case. It looks like it& | Continue reading
Does the Vision Pro look like it's going to replace the Mac or the iPad? How about our phones? Maybe…possibly…in many years, but it's more likely to be yet another computer in our lives. It *can* happen, it's just rare. | Continue reading
Zachary Small writing for The New York Times, citing this study:Less than 2 percent of console video games include L.G.B.T.Q. characters or story lines even though 17 percent of gamers are queerTo be clear, this isn’t 2% of console games having a | Continue reading
Sarah Nassauer for The Wall Street Journal: Walmart in Talks to Buy TV Maker VizioThe retail giant is in talks to buy smart television-manufacturer Vizio for more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the situation. The move would give Walmart more places where it ca … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez for TechCrunch: Over Half of Vision Pro-Only Apps Are Paid Downloads, Far More Than Wider iOS App StoreAccording to a recently released report from app intelligence firm Appfigures, over half of Vision Pro-only apps (52%) are paid downloads — a surprising perce … | Continue reading
We're very much in the early days of visionOS. As I told Chris Lawley on Mastodon, "this is definitely the closest I've ever felt to using what feels like an internal version of an Apple product." Which means I don't isn' | Continue reading
2 short months ago Google announced Gemini (apparently Gemini 1.0). It came in 3 variants:Gemini Nano, which runs locally on devices as small as your phoneGemini Pro, which runs on a server and was the back end for BardGemini Ultra, which didn’t run anywhere | Continue reading
How does one afford a Vision Pro? Sacrifices had to be made. | Continue reading
Jen Glennon for Kotaku: Bummer: PS5 Entering 'The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle,' Sony SaysSony execs also said that its current-gen hardware, the PlayStation 5, is nearing the end of its life cycle.I think the PS5 and Xbox Series console generation will go down as | Continue reading
I brought the Vision Pro to the office today to show a work friend since he's into tech, although he's definitely more cautious when it comes to jumping on new things. He's done a little VR before, as well.He was immediately struck by | Continue reading
Alex Heath for The Verge: Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is “the better product” vs. Apple’s Vision ProHe says the Quest has a better “immersive” content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a | Continue reading
If you handed me the iPhone 16 Pro today and told me that I needed to have a written review of it done by tomorrow that helped people understand if it was a phone worth upgrading to, I could do it no problem. I’d have to leave out | Continue reading
Emilia David for The Verge: I Love My GPT, but I Can’t Find a Use for Anybody Else’sThough I’ve come to depend on my GPT, it’s the only one I use.I’ve had the exact same experience. I fully | Continue reading
Once a year or so I seem to write something that gets a good chunk of pushback. In 2023 that article was my immediate reaction to the Vision Pro’s announcement at WWDC, which wasn’t as over-the-moon excited as many other people were. My favorite reaction was | Continue reading