I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago, I published my iPhone Air review and in it, I declared that the iPhone 17 Pro was the better phone for me. My plan was simple: finish the review, move my eSIM back to the 17 Pro, and carry on| Birchtree
Tim Cushing: Trump Continues to Attack Biden for All the Stuff Trump Officials Did While Trump Was Still President If there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there’s no one left with any| Birchtree
This post came across my radar, which shows Windows game support on Linux is at a new all-time high. You can see that the area in red has been constantly shrinking, at a steady pace, and this past month is no exception with this category getting very close to just| Birchtree
Joe Rosensteel: Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple? While the acquisition was announced almost a year ago in November of 2024, Apple only folded the developers in eight months ago. Prior to the acquisition, Photomator was updated monthly, often with major features. In the last eight months, the| Birchtree
Back in February 2024, Xbox held a short podcast where they reacted directly to swirling rumors about Xbox exclusive titles that were about to go multi-platform, which was giving Xbox fans anxiety. This question from host Tina Amini was right near the start: So when you are thinking about the| Birchtree
Matias Heikkilä: AI Can Code, but It Can't Build Software Coding, however, is not what most people are getting paid for. Building a production-ready app is not coding, it’s software engineering. Absolutely true. I've said a few times that the software development work| Birchtree
This morning I’m watching Candyman from 1992 and there’s a joke about how you can’t just trust everything you read in the newspaper. I grew up in the 2000s and was keenly aware that you couldn’t just trust everything you read online.| Birchtree
Mike Masnick: Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is an Attack on the Open Internet Even if you love Reddit and hate AI, you should be worried about this lawsuit. If it succeeds, it would fundamentally close off most of the open internet. And: If that’s the case, then… you| Birchtree
Here's a clip from a post on Reddit. I'm not linking to it because this could be seen as punching down, and I really don't mean it that way. I’m sure you could Google for it if you want to see the| Birchtree
There are some very negative takes out there about ChatGPT Atlas, and I think it's fair to say I agree with some of the critiques, but raise an eyebrow at a few others.| Birchtree
Quick Notes is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It's completely free with no in-app purchase. It does require iOS 26 (sorry, it makes things easier). I'm excited about this app because it solves a use case I personally have and could not| Birchtree
I recently wrote a member's post about how I don't think the iPhone Air is a good comp to the iPhone X. One response I got a few times for this was that the iPhone Air is actually more like the MacBook Air, which was a major compromise in its| Birchtree
Last year I said smartphones were in their laptop era. This made sense at the time as the iPhone 16 Pro was one of the most iterative iPhone updates we've ever had. 2025's iPhone 17 Pro is a more significant update, especially if physical design is your passion, but I| Birchtree
Anil Dash: The Majority AI View What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as| Birchtree
The thing I love about being a developer is that I can identify gaps in my own life and instead of complaining about how annoying they are, I can actually fix them. It's amazing! As I revealed to More Birchtree subscribers a few days ago, I had a| Birchtree
Back in January, I predicted that OpenAI's next big app would be a web browser. Well, their next big app was actually Sora, which I think sucks, but their browser, Atlas, is here today and I think this is the first AI-powered browser that has any chance of| Birchtree
Like most of us, I was surprised to see the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air this year. The ultra-thin design seems like it's suited to a less performant chip, but Apple pulled out all the stops and gave it the same chip as the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro| Birchtree
Another small app is in the works, and as always, More Birchtree subscribers get TestFlight access.| Birchtree
Nick Heer: The New MacBook Pro Is €35 Less Expensive in E.U. Countries, Ships Without a Charger In Ireland, the MacBook Pro used to start at €1,949; it now starts at €1,849; in France, it was €1,899, and it is now €1,799. As mentioned, the| Birchtree
Was 2015 me a genius? Probably not…but maybe…| Birchtree
How am I already eagerly awaiting for the next redesign?| Birchtree
Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI| Birchtree
Let's get through my feelings on the most corporate of corporate companies buying the browser company who said they didn't care about corporate power users.| Birchtree
Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI| Birchtree
I've been working on my next website pretty nonstop (albeit part time, we all have a day job, right?) for the last month. I'm 90% done with everything and am so close to finishing I can taste it. Now I just have to finish the job. And while I know| Birchtree
Today marks birchtree's 15th anniversary! While I don't have the complete archive going that far back, I have been writing under the Birchtree title since October 17, 2010. For some context, the iPhone 4 was still brand new at the time, and was not even available on Verizon yet in| Birchtree
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. * They| Birchtree
Apple Newsroom: Apple Vision Pro upgraded with the powerful M5 chip and comfortable Dual Knit Band With M5, Apple Vision Pro renders 10 percent more pixels on the custom micro-OLED displays compared to the previous generation, resulting in a sharper image with crisper text and more detailed visuals. Vision Pro| Birchtree
Apple Newsroom: Apple Introduces the Powerful New iPad Pro With the M5 Chip iPad Pro with M5 unlocks endless possibilities for creativity and productivity — with a huge leap in AI performance and a big boost in graphics, superfast wireless connectivity, and game-changing iPadOS 26 features, it pushes the boundaries of| Birchtree
Xbox Series X: long term review Game pass has literally been a game changer and I’ve played so many more games I wouldn’t have looked at before. Aside from buying the occasional plane in flight simulator the console hasn’t cost me any additional money. Looking at the| Birchtree
Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI| Birchtree
Becca's spent one year going solo and breaks down her revenue through the year. The biggest thing that stood out to me was that 75% of her revenue came from sponsors on her videos. As someone who can't be bothered to do sponsorships on his channel (which is 1/4| Birchtree
Rebekah Valentine writing for IGN: Pokémon Legends: Z-a Review in Progress If the rest of my adventure holds up (and the Switch 1 performance isn’t a disaster), we could finally have a 3D game worthy of the Pokémon franchise on our hands. It’d be about dang time. This| Birchtree
The iPhone Air has been a bit of a ride for me. I was quite impressed when I briefly held it in hand in an Apple Store when I was picking up my iPhone 17 Pro. It does feel remarkably thin in a way that an iPhone simply never has| Birchtree
Kit Maher writing for CNN: $1 Trump Coin Draft Is ‘Real,’ US Treasurer Says “No fake news here,” US Treasurer Brandon Beach post on X in response to images of the coin on X. “These first drafts honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real. Looking forward to sharing| Birchtree
If you follow similar accounts to me on social media, odds are you saw approximately 432 people post some variant of the title of this post. This comes 6 years after the launch of Apple TV+ and just as many people making the same “watching Apple TV+ in Apple TV| Birchtree
Sora 2 has made creating realistic videos trivially easy. I don’t think this means art is dead.| Birchtree
Not to steal Alec's thunder here, but apparently some of these TV show re-releases are using single-layer DVDs instead of dual-layer DVDs like their original releases, meaning they have less storage space, and meaning they have to be encoded at lower bitrates, ultimately meaning that the video quality is reduced.| Birchtree
Hank Green on the new Sora 2 app: If you are the kind of mother fucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of mother fucker who should be in charge of OpenAI. It's a great, short rant from Hank Green, and it 100% resonates with me. I| Birchtree
Let's get one thing out of the way right up front; I am not an audiophile when it comes to earbuds. I can't tell the difference between a pedestrian-quality MP3 and a lossless FLAC file. And when it comes to AirPods, I cannot tell you the difference in audio quality| Birchtree
We’re well past the era when year-over-year Apple Watch upgrades made any sense at all, and I’d argue that even if you bought the original Apple Watch Ultra three years ago, there’s still no real reason for most people to even entertain an upgrade to the brand| Birchtree
Chris Cameron writing for The New York Times: Apple Takes Down ICE Tracking Apps in Response to Trump Pressure Campaign Apple has removed from its App Store several programs that alert users to sightings of immigration agents after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded they be taken down. Setting aside how| Birchtree
An early look at my predictions for 2025.| Birchtree
Here's a timeline of the Vision Pro: * June 2023: Apple unveils the product * February 2024: Apple ships the product * RUMOR - the hardware will get a bump to the M5 processor in late-2025 to early-2026, with a cheaper "Vision Air" coming in 2027 * NEW RUMOR - The "Vision Air" project| Birchtree
Microsoft is updating Game Pass again, most notably for many that the price of the Ultimate tier is increasing from $19.99/month to $29.99/month. The $9.99/month and $14.99/month tiers remain the same price, but get new names and the perks somehow change, but| Birchtree
Tech, Apple, and the vast grey area that is AI| Birchtree
As with all iPhone releases, battery tests began right away, with people trying to figure out how good the iPhone Air's battery performance was. Early results showed about what we'd expect, with the Air lagging behind the other phones, but not by a horrible amount. Then this video crossed my| Birchtree
I happen to have a new app on the App Store that is a pretty good benchmark for a certain type of processing across Apple's devices. Quick Subtitles is a pretty simple app that uses Apple's new speech frameworks to transcribe audio and video files on an Apple Silicon device| Birchtree
My “quirk” on this blog years ago was the fact that I, an Apple fan, would try using Android and Windows devices for extended periods and share my thoughts on those products. Whenever I tried to go all-in on one of these other companies’ products, I’d look around for| Birchtree
