Some thoughts from watching Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” event yesterday:
With all the leaks beforehand, the surprise element the name promised was non-existent. I very much miss when there was at least something you weren’t expecting.
Calling it an “event” is just taking the piss. Ever since they started pre-recording the whole thing during Covid, it’s really just a 75-minute-long commercial.
I literally fell asleep during the iPhone 18 Pro presentation. CPU cores, blah blah, GPU, blah blah, Neural Engine, blah blah 💤 The camera seems nice, though.
The iPhone Duo with its unfoldable screen seems technically very impressive. However, making it wider than the Pro Max, where I already can’t reach things with my thumb, seems like a wrong move. All in all, the whole concept feels like a compromise when it comes to the device you use all the time, just to be able to unfold a bigger screen you might use once in a while. It will no doubt get many fans, but it’s not for me.
I’ve been an Apple fanboy for more than 20 years, and still am. I’m not going anywhere, but we’re definitely on a plateau at the moment. Technical specs keep getting more and more impressive, but there’s nothing genuinely new or exciting.
It feels as if it’s time for them to think different™ again.
After using DuckDuckGo for a while, I’ve decided to take Kagi for a spin instead.
As opposed to DuckDuckGo, Kagi is completely free from ads, and there’s no AI summary unless you ask for it. If it works, I’ll happily pay the $5/month they charge.
I thought I was nostalgic for ZX81 graphics but looking into it, they were even more simplistic than I remembered. This may not have been when computers peaked, after all.
I’ve been finding Grammarly extremely useful for keeping an eye on my grammar when I write. However, once my half-price offer ended, it’s just way too expensive for what it is.
For that reason, I’m now trying LanguageTool instead. I’ll let you know how it goes.
One sad thing about the state of the internet in 2026 is how SEO means that it’s genuinely rare to find anything useful on the first page of search results when googling a problem 🤬
If anyone launches a search engine that punishes so-called good SEO practices, I’ll be the first in line to sign up for the waiting list!
Encouraged by a colleague, I’ve switched to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine instead of Google.
It’s not even about privacy for me, and only a little about avoiding the ads. Instead, it’s all about getting rid of the nonsense AI response at the top of the results.
There’s been this example floating around the web for months. If you ask Google if it will be 2027 next year, it confidently tells you:
It is 2026 right now, and will be 2028 next year, followed by 2027.
After several months of people posting screenshots and poking fun at it, Google’s AI is just getting more convinced, using those posts as a reference. Someone said so on the internet, so it must be true!
This is the most blatant example, but for most other things, the primary source seems to be either a random bloke on Reddit saying something or some page that, when you click through to it, says nothing about the topic at all.
So, no thank you. I’m quite happy getting real search results instead.
