I’m not sure that “What others have on the market is worse”

March 20, 2025
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Re-reading some of the quotes curated by Michael Tsai in the already-discussed Rotten commentary round-up, I noticed this bit by Om Malik, which had escaped my attention for some reason:

I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.

They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?

The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter. 

I agree with this almost completely, save for the part I have emphasised in bold. 

From a hardware standpoint, the gap between Apple and the competition isn’t as wide as it was when the first generation of Apple Silicon CPUs debuted in 2020. Intel chips have got better, but AMD has especially upped their game. The AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 (codename: Strix Halo) delivers impressive performance, as shown in this video by Dave2D reviewing the Asus Flow Z13 — which is, in turn, an impressive gaming 2‑in‑1 ’Surface-like’ device.

Design-wise, there are brands like Lenovo or Asus which, on the one hand offer home and business laptops with austere, iterative designs, but on the other hand get more creative in other lineups (Asus with their gaming laptops, Lenovo with their convertibles). Then there are brands like Framework: their laptops may not win industrial design awards, but what they’re doing on the modularity and repairability fronts is perhaps unmatched at the moment. And they, too, have recently upped their game with their new offerings.

Apple’s hardware design is still remarkable, but increasingly more on the inside than the outside of their machines. MacBooks haven’t changed much since the unibody chassis was introduced in 2008, and what seems to characterise them today is a notch on the top centre of their displays, which is among the most idiotic hardware design choices I’ve seen in more than 30 years.

Software-wise, well, I have a bit of a bias, having used Macs since 1989. I clearly know the Mac (and iOS/iPadOS) ecosystem and software selection far better than any other platform. But in recent years I’ve been familiarising myself with Linux (mainly Ubuntu and Crunchbangplusplus) and have been using Windows 10 and 11 on my ThinkPads, my Surface Pro, and my Lenovo Legion 7i gaming laptop. And overall it’s been a pleasant experience. With hiccups here and there, but again, mostly deriving from lack of habit or familiarity. I think Windows 10 and Windows 11 have been good examples of UI improvement on Microsoft’s part. And as far as reliability goes, I’ve been using my Legion 7i gaming laptop for more than a year now, and I’ve had zero issues with Windows 11. No weird crashes, no instability, no misbehaving apps, nothing.

I’ve also recently discovered the probably-still-niche world of e‑ink tablets, devices that are mostly used for note-taking, sketching, and reading. These devices may not compete with iPads in terms of versatility, but the fact that they don’t want to be jacks-of-all-trades is also their core strength, in my opinion. Which means they are more focused devices not suffering from identity crisis like the iPad, and in my experience (owning one of them) they actually offer a better user experience when it comes to handwriting ‘feel’, and an e‑ink display still looks more natural to me when writing and reading, especially during long sessions. Other advantages are the much reduced eye-straining, of course, and the exceptional battery life.

I know that, from a financial standpoint, suggesting you actually, extensively try different platforms may be unfeasible. I’ve done it largely by acquiring second-hand devices and computers, and even by receiving generous gifts from readers of this blog who wanted to get rid of stuff without increasing e‑waste. Of course we all ultimately have our preferences, but I think it’s healthier to have preferences without prejudices. I’ve been guilty of this myself until circa 2016. Before that, I was using Apple devices and software 95% of the time; the rest was superficial knowledge, mostly gathered through hearsay and sporadic usage of non-Apple platforms. 

And yes, coincidentally Apple had also the best UI during Jobs’s tenure, along with some striking industrial design. But it’s important to understand that the ‘good enough’ Apple offers today isn’t necessarily better than what the competition offers — everyone is ‘good enough’ in tech now, though this ‘good enough’ for some is a step up from their previous mediocrity. For Apple is a step down, especially in the UI and UX departments, where they inarguably used to excel.

Rotten for a while now

March 15, 2025
by Riccardo Mori
Software

As usual, Michael Tsai assembles a remarkable roundup of opinions and reactions after John Gruber’s recent piece Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino, where he finally criticises Apple for essentially over-over-promising and under-under-underdelivering on Apple Intelligence, especially regarding the announced improvements to Siri.

What I find involuntarily funny in this specific wave of criticism is that for some of these people this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to Apple breaking trust and bullshitting their customers and user base.

Siri is the epitome of overpromising and underdelivering in Apple’s history. 

The bullshitting isn’t recent either, though perhaps the smell is more pungent now. I love how, in my circles, whenever I ask for an example of vintage bullshitting on Apple’s part, the most remembered episode was the You’re holding it wrong ‘Antennagate’ affair at the time of the iPhone 4, in 2010. While Apple’s (Jobs’s) reaction was certainly defensive and in full damage-control mode, the whole iPhone 4’s signal reception issue was grossly exaggerated. From the Wikipedia entry: “[…] Jobs cited figures from AppleCare which showed that only 0.55 percent of all iPhone 4 users have complained to the company about the issue, while the number of phones returned to Apple was 1.7 percent – 4.3 percentage points less than the number of iPhone 3GS models that were returned in the first month of the phone’s launch.” At the time I easily believed those statistics based on personal experience and second-hand, third-hand, and fourth-hand accounts from other iPhone 4 users. I’ll add that the iPhone 4 was my daily driver from late 2010 to early 2015(!) and in that time frame I never had reception issues or dropped calls.

So no, I wouldn’t really put Antennagate on the bullshitting list. The subtle bullshitting can be found in all instances of design/manufacturing defects or issues where Apple blatantly downplayed the problem or the number of devices (and thus people) affected by it. 

Take a look at the list of issues related to the iPhone 6, summarised in this section of its Wikipedia entry. When describing the touchscreen failure (nicknamed ‘touch disease’), the entry reads:

Initially, Apple did not officially acknowledge this issue. The issue was widely discussed on Apple’s support forum—where posts discussing the issue have been subject to censorship. The touchscreen can be repaired via microsoldering: Apple Stores are not equipped with the tools needed to perform the logic board repair, which had led to affected users sending their devices to unofficial, third-party repair services. An Apple Store employee interviewed by Apple Insider reported six months after they first started noticing the problem, Apple had issued guidance instructing them to tell affected users this was a hardware issue that could not be repaired and that their iPhone had to be replaced. However, some in-stock units have also been afflicted with this issue out of the box, leading to an employee stating they were “tired of pulling service stock out of the box, and seeing the exact same problem the customer has on the replacement”. 

The iPhone 7’s ‘loop disease’ is also worth mentioning. Here, the related bit in the Wikipedia entry is rather terse, but I remember at the time that it was mentioned frequently, and Apple acknowledged the issue only internally. Note for how long that internal memo lasted (emphasis mine):

Some iPhone 7 devices suffer from a problem that affects audio in the device. Users reported a grayed-out speaker button during calls, grayed-out voice memo icon, and occasional freezing of the device. A few users also complained that lightning EarPods failed to work with the device and that the Wi-Fi button would be grayed out after restarting the iPhone. On May 4, 2018, Apple acknowledged the issue through an internal memo. If an affected iPhone 7 was no longer covered by warranty, Apple said its service providers could request an exception for this particular issue. The exemptions abruptly ended in July 2018 when Apple deleted the internal document. Many customers have complained Apple has charged customers around $350 to fix the issue. Many customers complain the issue first appeared after a software update. 

On the Mac front, the obvious reminder is the whole butterfly keyboard fiasco, plaguing different generations of MacBooks from 2015 to 2019. It took Apple an insufferably long time to acknowledge the issue and take remediating actions, and despite the bad press, customer complaints, and lawsuits, the company always tried to downplay the issue, saying it only affected a relatively small percentage of users. I have a sizeable archive of email messages from friends, acquaintances, and readers of my blog telling me their horror stories and dreadful Apple Store experiences, like undergoing 3 or 4 keyboard replacements where only the first (or, in rare cases, the first two) came at no cost for the customer. This happened before the extended keyboard service program Apple finally launched in 2018. I have readers of my blog who wrote me at the time telling me that their MacBook with butterfly keyboard had cost them in keyboard replacements almost as much as the initial cost of the laptop itself, not to mention their forced downtime during repairs. 

And many of those who vented their frustration to me shared the same sentiment — they felt betrayed, cheated, and sometimes even gaslit when complaining at Apple Stores. Reader Kelly G. — after bringing her 2015 12-inch retina MacBook to an Apple Store for the third time with unresponsive keys — told me that they made her feel as if the cause of the issue was her mishandling the MacBook rather than a design flaw.

And all these people ultimately made the same remark in their messages: if Apple had handled the whole thing with honesty, candour, and directness from the start, they in turn would have been more understanding and Apple’s reputation wouldn’t have taken the hit it took. Dieter Bohn wrote at The Verge in 2020:

More than anything else, though, the whole butterfly keyboard saga has been a huge reputation hit for Apple.

For those who thought Apple was sacrificing functionality for thinness across its entire product lineup, the butterfly keyboard looked like confirmation. For those who felt Apple was intentionally making its devices harder to repair as a way to further lock them down and also cut out third-party repair shops, it was another data point. For those who felt Apple had stopped paying attention to the Mac, here was a prime example of a problem allowed to languish to years. For those who felt Apple is still trying to create a “reality distortion field” where everything it makes is great but the truth is much more mundane, well… you get the picture.

The butterfly keyboard hurt Apple’s reputation precisely because the outlines of its problems and Apple’s response to them lined up with some of the biggest complaints people have about the company.

Earlier, I called Apple’s attempts to save the butterfly keyboard obstinate, but a less charitable way of putting it is simply to call it hubris. For some, it called Apple’s judgment into question. How could the company fail to see — or refuse to admit — that it was shipping a bad product? 

In more recent times there was the display issue affecting 24-inch M1 iMacs. I already talked about it in this post from last September; essentially, customers who bought this iMac, about one year and half after purchase, saw the appearance of persistent horizontal lines at the bottom of the display, a problem caused by a degrading display cable, for which the only solution (due to how the iMac is designed) is to replace the whole LCD. In their reporting for MacRumors in October 2024, Joe Rossignol wrote: Some customers who contacted Apple about the issue said the company offered them an exemption, resulting in their iMac being repaired for free, but other customers said they had to pay for service. My brother-in-law was affected by the issue, and the service cost him around €705. In my post on the matter, I concluded:

Now, back to the iMac display issue, as the technician contacted by “Jotap62” explains, if the iMac’s display flex cable “has to sustain a very high voltage (around 50V) to power the LCD (this despite the iMac’s power supply being 15.9V)”, I find it hard to believe that none of the hardware gurus at Apple didn’t know that. I’m not an engineer, nor a hardware guru, but what I suspect is that those responsible of designing and assembling the innards of the 24-inch M‑series iMac were given the daunting task of fitting everything into that super-thin chassis, and something got to give. And this kind of flex cable was a compromise, the ‘okay-enough’, ‘it’ll last enough’ solution. 

What infuriates me is that this is the kind of problem the manufacturer certainly knows about, but they also know it won’t trigger immediately. Customers then are faced with a costly out-of-warranty replacement, where the right thing to do would be to treat this as a known manufacturing issue and offer a free replacement. (Especially considering that — and this is the other infuriating bit — even after a replacement the issue is likely to reoccur). Maybe it’s also a case of components that are below Apple’s standards or requirements, but the outcome is the same — customers shouldn’t pay for these mistakes. 

But these are hardware examples. Isn’t the debate focused on software?

Well, yes, but the problem — the bullshitting — has made its way into the company’s attitude since Apple’s main bullshit filter passed away in October 2011. Ever since Cook became CEO and scrambled the org chart of executives, the impression I’ve had is that a lot of other, less apparent things got scrambled inside the company. And the software side suffered as a consequence. 

I have given Cook the benefit of the doubt a lot of times, and I’m not putting the blame entirely on him, but for me that something in the State of Cupertino which is rotten now has been rotting for years under Cook’s tenure. 

The trajectory taken by user interface design, system software quality and first-party software production has been on a steady decline since… let’s say 2014, with the advent of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Yosemite was a visual departure from its predecessors, and the Mac OS equivalent of iOS 7 on the iPhone, with many similar controversial UI decisions — like loss of depth and contrast in the interface, loss of legibility in redesigned UI elements such as buttons and text fields, but most baffling for me was the change of system font from Lucida Grande to Neue Helvetica, something that thankfully was swiftly rectified in the following release, OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Just like the iOS releases that came after iOS 7 attempted to correct or attenuate the most radical UI changes and decisions, the same happened on Mac OS from El Capitan to Catalina. Then Big Sur was another ‘iOS 7‑like’ reset, and Monterey to Sequoia the following corrective iterations. 

But this is just the visuals, the most superficial aspect. The substance — UI and software quality — has got progressively more brittle. Solid UI foundations have been weakened by constantly ‘fixing’ what was not broken, undoing consistent and well-thought UI decisions often simply for the sake of ‘giving the place a splash of fresh paint’. Important UI elements like buttons and scroll bars have been flattened and ‘disappeared’ in the name of a questionable ultra-minimalist approach coming from a design team seemingly confusing industrial design with haute couture, or taking inspiration from Dieter Rams simply by looking at his designs and not reading about why such designs look like that.

Over the years Mac OS has become more locked-down, more dumbed-down, more bugged, more insidious to troubleshoot when things don’t go as intended. Aspects that ‘just worked’ now work more mediocrely, such as wireless connections, Disk Utility, Time Machine. 

Three years ago, in Raw power alone is not enough, I wrote:

Apple’s first-party applications included with Mac OS are mediocre at best. Their pro apps appear to be more maintained than developed with the aim of advancement, with the possible exception of Final Cut Pro (video professionals, feel free to chime in). Apps that were previously good-quality, powerful, and versatile have been neutered and have become ‘just okay’ or ‘good enough’. The Utilities folder in Mac OS has been slowly but surely depopulated over time. iOS apps with an ingenious premise, like Music Memos, are being left behind as flashes in the pan. The consensus with iTunes was that Apple should have split it into different apps so that these could be better at handling specific tasks than the old monolithic media manager. Apple eventually did split iTunes into different apps, but forgot the second part of the assignment. The result is that I still go back to a Mac with iTunes to handle my media, and I’m not the only one.

Aperture overall was a better application than Adobe Lightroom when the two apps coexisted. Apple could have kept improving Aperture and kept making it better than Lightroom. Instead they gave up. We now have Photos as sole ‘sophisticated’ Apple photo tool. Which is neither fish (iPhoto) nor flesh (Aperture).

[…] Apple’s chip and hardware advancements have inspired the competition (Intel) to do better, and that’s a great thing. On the software side, I’ve seen very little from Apple to be considered remotely inspirational.

In that piece I also talk about iWeb and iBooks Author, two applications with great potential, which ended up basically thrown in the rubbish.

iMovie, possibly the oldest prosumer first-party Mac app (it first appeared bundled with the iMac G3 DV in 1999!), kept getting better in future iterations until iMovie ’11. Everything after that was just maintenance and stagnation.

The iWork suite is another example of a series of apps that started out with the best intentions, but from a UI and functionality standpoint the first versions — from iWork ’05 to iWork ’09 — are the better, with iWork ’09 being perhaps the most mature and versatile, in my opinion. After the 2013 overhaul, things got worse. Quoting Wikipedia:

On October 22, 2013, Apple announced an overhaul of the iWork software for both the Mac and iOS. Both suites were made available via the respective App Stores. […]

The new OS X versions have been criticized for losing features such as multiple selection, linked text boxes, bookmarks, 2‑up page views, mail merge, searchable comments, ability to read/export RTF files, default zoom and page count, integration with AppleScript. Apple has provided a road-map for feature re-introduction, stating that it hopes to reintroduce some missing features within the next six months. 

Some features were reintroduced later, continues the entry, but the old Apple Support document referenced by Wikipedia is (surprise surprise) no longer available.

I haven’t kept much track of these coming and going features, as I’ve been using Keynote, Pages, and Numbers very sparingly over the years, and for tasks with very limited scope. But ever since that 2013 overhaul, they have all felt pretty much the same, version after version. This is not the ‘good’ consistency, just stagnation. 

Okay, this is about software quality. But isn’t the debate focused on Apple damaging their reputation by announcing Apple Intelligence features and then failing to ship them in time, etc.?

Yes, but it is important to understand that things don’t typically happen in a vacuum. Apple’s stance towards hardware blunders, and Apple’s negligence towards their own software are all underlying currents that have been — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly — shaping the trajectory the company is currently on. And I’m just an outside observer, with almost-zero knowledge of what happens inside Apple Park, but I can’t shake the feeling that the point of origin of this trajectory has been the post-Jobs internal restructuring. 

Under Jobs, Apple was rather selective regarding the markets they wanted to be participating in. Under Cook, there’s this constant urge of being present everywhere, whether with a product or a service. Consequence: many more internal departments popping up, more managers micromanaging, more secrecy and fear of leaks probably leading to worse interdepartmental communication, more resource fragmentation. And we see design choices that seem more like the result of too many people having a say, or product directions dictated by teams not directly involved in the product, and so forth.

Of the excerpts reported by Tsai in his post, those that ring the truest to me are by Jesper, Tim Bray, and Pierre Igot.

Jesper absolutely nails it in his piece:

My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products. […]

The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn’t be in if it was not first focused on being Apple. 

Which is a charitable way of saying what I would have said — that today Apple is more focused on style and brand than on substance. And Bray’s remark, in all its bluntness, is the correct answer to the question I and many others have routinely raised: Why do Apple’s priorities seem so fucked up? — the most recent example being Apple Intelligence and the rumoured interface overhaul coming for iOS 19 and Mac OS 16.

And Pierre Igot’s observation, not mincing words either: Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10–15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.

Let’s remember these words at the next WWDC, when Federighi will tell us all about Mac OS’s ‘new look’ and superficial retouches, while we’re aching for better quality software, fixing what is indeed broken, and a more usable and useful operating system.

Switching to Android? - Second follow-up

March 9, 2025
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Some people have written to me in the past few days for different reasons, but in their communications there was also curiosity about my switch to Android and how it was going. Some asked out of genuine interest, others had a provocative tone, like, Are you missing your iPhone already?

Since three months have passed since my last follow-up, I thought it was time for an update; possibly the last on the topic, as I think that at this point there isn’t much to add. So, the short answer is: My switch to Android is going well, much better than I anticipated, in the sense that the adjustment phase happened faster than I thought.

However, I can’t package my experience in a single, monolithic block of advice and tell you that if you plan to switch from iOS to Android, things will work out as smoothly as they did in my case. 

I generally take a couple of devices with me when I’m out and about. For a while, they were my primary iPhone and an Android phone. As I explained in a previous post, my switch has been a literal switch: I still take a couple of devices with me when I’m out and about, only now they are my primary Android phone (Nothing Phone 2a), and my old iPhone. The purposes have changed slightly, though. While in the first scenario the secondary Android device served as a way to familiarise with the platform, what happens now is that my secondary iPhone is basically a camera device for taking pictures with a few photo apps I don’t feel like abandoning and for which there isn’t an Android counterpart. But to answer that question above — Are you missing your iPhone already? — well, no, I’m not. 

I don’t miss it because when I take it with me as a creative tool for shooting, it’s there. And when I don’t take it with me, it’s because I don’t need it. And there have been times when I meant to take it with me but forgot to — and it wasn’t a big deal.

(Brief aside: As I’m explaining this I’m realising I’m selling my Nothing Phone 2a short. It’s a great device that does everything I need. I’ve set it up and customised the way I want, I found and downloaded all the apps I used the most on iPhone or found decent alternatives, and I haven’t had any particular hiccup in my interactions or ‘flow’ when using this phone).

Another aspect of my relative ease in switching platforms is that in all my years with the iPhone, it has never become a device I’ve heavily relied upon for my digital life. I’ve always preferred the Mac for working, writing, reading and entertainment, and for the past 13 years I’ve always added an iPad to the mix. In such a context, the role of an iPhone becomes less central, de-emphasised. It’s the device you take with you when you go out, to use as a phone, as a written communication device (Messages, Telegram, Signal, email), as a quick way to check social media and read the occasional article, and as a tool to look up information (Maps, Wikipedia, the occasional Web or dictionary search), and as an instant camera. Apart from certain fun photo apps, there’s never been anything ‘specialised’ in my iPhone usage. And therefore, nothing absolutely irreplaceable. 

Years ago I would have added that the iPhone’s user experience was the irreplaceable variable, but that’s not strictly true anymore. The clunkiness and awkwardness of many Android versions is now a thing of the past. When I first took a good look at Android in 2014, I would have never considered switching. When I bought my first Android phone in 2019 (essentially for work-related reasons, as I was localising Android apps at the time and needed direct experience with the UI) the situation had already significantly improved. When I shared my impressions of that Xiaomi MI A2 in November 2019, in my final observations I wrote:

Five years ago, doing a complete platform switch and going from iOS to Android and vice-versa, implied a certain amount of friction that felt less problematic the more tech-savvy you were. The two experiences felt really different and, as far as I’m concerned, Android felt second-class. Even on more powerful handsets, basic stuff like scrolling and animations could end up being jerky and stutter with annoying frequency. The system looked more utilitarian than well-designed to provide an effortless, pleasant user experience.

Today, from my first-hand experience, I can say that this once very noticeable gap is essentially gone. Android has improved on all fronts, while iOS has for the most part rested on its laurels (and in certain areas has actually got buggier than it used to). The overall experience is similar between the two platforms. An increasing number of operations, interactions, and UI behaviours have become barely distinguishable from one another (share sheets, for example, look and work in a similar way). For three months I’ve been carrying both my iPhone 8 and the Mi A2 with me, keeping the iPhone as primary device, but for two weeks I purposefully inverted the roles, and I noticed that — save for a few favourite iOS apps — I could have left the iPhone at home. 

And this, in 2025, keeps being true. 

The godsend that is LocalSend

A primary concern in my embracing Android as a primary platform was the friction of not having an essential tool as AirDrop for quickly exchanging files between my Macs and my Nothing Phone 2a. But then I found LocalSend. At first glance, this service just seems too good to be true: free? open source!? cross-platform?!? But then you try it out and you immediately realise that yes, it’s that good, and the experience is that polished and seamless. There is just an additional, fractional step when compared to AirDrop. When you share a file via AirDrop, you initiate the sending on your Apple device 1, and the destination Apple device 2 automatically receives the file or automatically displays a pop-up asking for confirmation. 

When you share a file with LocalSend, you have to open the app on both devices first, then you send the file from the source device, and in the LocalSend window on the destination device you’ll have to accept the file. But that’s it. Transfer times are comparable with AirDrop’s. (Update, March 11: This is the default behaviour, but there is an option that lets you auto-accept the incoming file(s) on the destination device, streamlining the process). 

And there’s an added benefit: being cross platform means that now I can share files as seamlessly across a multitude of different devices, for example from my Windows 11 gaming laptop to my Mac mini, from my Nothing Phone 2a to my iPad, from my iMac to an old ThinkPad running Linux, from my iPhone SE 3 to my Surface Pro convertible, and so forth. It almost feels like having Apple’s Continuity everywhere.

If one of the major aspects preventing you from leaving iOS behind is AirDrop, I can’t recommend LocalSend enough.

Some days I even go ‘Android-only’

There are two other Android devices in my personal ecosystem I don’t talk much about. One is the Microsoft Surface Duo I purchased about a year ago. I still mean to write a proper article about it here, but I’ll say that despite it being considered ‘yet another Microsoft blunder’ by the tech cool kids’ circle, its digital book concept is the only way that a foldable device has made sense to me so far. Reading books in the Kindle app on the Duo is very cool and very practical because it’s like holding a physical book in your hands (or rather a slim metallic notebook, but you get the idea). The ability to display and use two apps at a time, one on the left screen, one on the right, is the most organic form of multitasking for me, and I’m happy to see that Microsoft managed to realise some of what was known as the Courier project back in 2009. 

I use the Surface Duo primarily as a digital Moleskine. It works well with styluses like the Surface Pen and similar third-party products (like my Renaisser Raphael 530 active stylus), and I can use apps like Bamboo Paper and Sketchbook to draw sketches, and Microsoft OneNote to take notes, even handwritten ones, which are quicker to jot down rather than typing them.

The second device, the most recent acquisition is an Onyx BOOX Go 10.3 e‑ink Android-powered tablet, which brings this experience of reading, drawing, and taking handwritten notes to a whole other level. First, because it’s e‑ink, which means improved reading experience right away. Second, because it’s a 10.3‑inch tablet, which means improved reading/writing/drawing experience as well. Third, because its main interface is designed around note-taking, and that means having a lot of specialised tools to write, draw, select and convert text, organise notes in different folders, sync everything in the cloud, etc. Fourth, because writing and drawing with a stylus feels very natural overall. It’s not exactly like using a pencil or a pen on a paper notebook, but close enough that you tend to forget it’s a digital support. All of this, again, in a comfortable, practical ‘digital notebook’ form factor and user experience that for me — as a writer who has used pen and paper all his life — feels better than using an iPad for the same tasks. It’s not at all like touching or scribbling on a glass surface, like it happens on an iPad.

So while I still, for the most part, take my Nothing Phone 2a and my iPhone SE 3 when I’m on the go, there are days when I leave the iPhone at home and take the Nothing Phone and the Surface Duo or the BOOX Go 10.3 as ancillary devices. It’s been a few years since I realised it’s unwise to stick to a single ecosystem or walled garden, and that it’s much more stimulating to learn what other platforms have to offer, experiment with them, take what’s useful to me, and create a sort of personal ecosystem or digital environment. It’s not a minimalistic endeavour, but it teaches you to better adapt to changes, and keeps you cognitively nimble. On a pragmatic level, it also gives you an exit strategy when the big tech company you’ve grown so dependent on ends up letting you down.

Goodbye iPhone SE, hello insipid rebranded iPhone SE

February 21, 2025
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

I was going with reblanded in the title as a provoking wordplay, but then I was reminded of that special portion of my audience chronically lacking in sense of humour and sending me messages and emails like, There’s a typo in your title etc.

Oh well. What an intro, eh?

In 2019, Samsung launched the Galaxy S10 line; there were two flagship models, the S10 and S10+, a bigger premium S10 5G, and later in 2020 Samsung introduced the S10 Lite, a midrange version of the S10. But this line also featured another model, perhaps the most interesting — the S10e. It wasn’t a ‘lite’ version of the S10, just a more compact variant which didn’t really skimp on features apart from having a slightly-lesser-quality display, a smaller battery, and lacking the telephoto camera. It had personality; it was the S10 for those who wanted a smaller phone. The title of The Verge’s YouTube review of the S10e sums it up pretty nicely — “Smaller, cheaper, better”. It is perhaps the last good small smartphone with a headphone jack. 

I don’t know whether that ‘e’ meant something for Samsung. It’s the only occurrence of such suffix in the Galaxy S line. I don’t know why, but this kind of suffix always suggests ‘economy’ to me, in the air travel sense. But while the Samsung S10e did cost less than the other S10 flagships, it wasn’t a ‘cheap’ phone from a hardware quality standpoint.

The iPhone 16e isn’t either.

The Samsung S10e’s essence was probably best encapsulated by Engadget’s title for their video review: Smaller, but not lesser.

What is the iPhone 16e? To me, it’s confusion. I would add ‘aimlessness’, but then I’d have to read several rebukes in my email messages, from people who would tell me that Apple has a plan, a strategy behind it, like the company always has in everything they do. And yes, of course there is strategy here somewhere. But this latest iPhone, this new ‘addition to the family’ — a family made up of many models with too little differentiation — seems rather confusing to me.

And to Luke Miani, who in his first-impressions video on the iPhone 16e, visibly shares the same kind of puzzlement. This is what he concludes, in a breathless exposition tour de force:

You or I [technology enthusiasts] might be able to sit here and go, “iPhone 15 has a mute switch, 16e has an action button, and 16 has an action button and a camera control. The iPhone 15 is on the A16 chip, the iPhone 16e on the A18 chip with one less GPU core than the iPhone 16 on the also A18 chip with an additional GPU core. iPhone 15 has a Dynamic Island, 16e doesn’t; the iPhone 16 does again, but the iPhone 16e without the Dynamic Island has the better battery life of all three phones, better than the 15 and the 16″. 

The average consumer is going to be so freaking confused by this. Why is the cheapest phone better and worse than the newer and older more expensive phones? It’s just too much; it’s too much, dude… I don’t really know how to describe it, other than Too Much. The benefit of the iPhone SE was that it was cheap. You didn’t buy it because of features; you bought it because you wanted an iPhone that would get software updates for years to come at the lowest possible price, and the iPhone 16e is not that. It is yet another midrange iPhone with a confusing suffix and a list of features that doesn’t make sense to most people. 

It’s not a back-to-basics smartphone that you buy when you don’t know what else to get — it’s just another confusing addition to the middle ground, the $500–800 smartphone range, and frankly I think that this was a bad move. I don’t know, I really want to get my hands on this phone ’cause I think [that] as a phone it will probably be very good, but as a part of Apple’s iPhone lineup, I think it just adds confusion. 

Miani speaks of the now-defunct iPhone SE line in pragmatic terms, an iPhone model targeted at pragmatic, budget-conscious customers. But what I liked of the SE line was that, conceptually, it was a standalone line with its own release schedule and its own peculiarities. Whether you liked it or not, it maintained a sort of quaint distinctiveness through its first three generations.

In my October 2024 article on the iPhone SE trajectory, I mused: 

Now, imagine a hypothetical fourth-generation iPhone with an A18 Bionic chip (or perhaps a specially-designed A17 Bionic, sort of a nerfed-A18?), the single-camera setup and technology of the iPhone XR, and of course the external design of the iPhone XR, featuring a 6.1‑inch screen (maybe with a slightly updated display technology), Face ID, etc. Let’s say it would replace both the third-generation iPhone SE and the iPhone 14 in Apple’s current offering. Its trade-offs battle would be against the regular iPhone 15. And it would be a tough one. Yes, it would have a better chip, but given how recent performance gains in iPhones have become basically imperceptible in everyday use, would such an iPhone SE 4 be a better proposition over the 15 when all it had would be same or better CPU speed and a lower price? The display would have the same size, the display technology would be worse, it would feature a notch while the iPhone 15 has a dynamic island, it would feature a decidedly worse camera setup… Sure, $429 would be a bargain compared to the $699 of the iPhone 15. But its form factor is too similar and, apart from the CPU, all the rest would be the same stuff but worse in all respects. Unless Apple is planning to do some unexpected changes, like offering a single-camera setup but with a better camera than the XR’s 12-megapixel affair, to make the next iPhone SE more appealing, I don’t see anything particularly special or worth considering in it. […]

But you know what I think would make more sense? I know I come from a biased position, but to me it would make more sense if the design and form factor of the next iPhone SE would be those of the iPhone 12/13 mini. Maybe the 13 mini, since it has a smaller notch on the front and a better battery performance. […]

Overall, it would still feel like a ‘Special Edition’ phone: compared to the mainstream iPhone lineup, it would be different/special enough, appealing enough, modern enough, all the while maintaining that classic, truly iconic design that harks back to the lines of the iPhone 4 and 5. Apple could even sell it at $499 instead of $429.

What Apple managed to assemble is a sandwich of uninterestingness and raise its final price to $599. They discontinued a line of iPhone models that was ‘midrange with personality’, and released something that isn’t distinctive in any way, its price positioning makes it difficult to recommend, and finally its name ties it to a specific iPhone release — so you’re left wondering, Is this 16e a one-off thing, like the Samsung S10e was six years ago, or are we to expect an iPhone 17e, 18e, and so on?

I’m also left wondering, Who is it for? What was the reasoning behind this iPhone? But if there’s a device that best encapsulates the overall state of Apple today, it is, without doubt, this iPhone 16e.

People and resources added to my reading list in 2024

February 18, 2025
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Welcome to the twelfth instalment of my annual overview of my most interesting discoveries made during the previous year. Traditionally, the structure of this kind of post includes different categories of resources: blogs, YouTube channels, cool stuff on the Web, and so forth. Such structure isn’t going to change, but if my previous instalment was perhaps unusually brief, I’m afraid the current one is going to be even briefer. There are a few reasons as to why:

One. For more than half of 2024, my attention was primarily focused on personal matters. Having to find a new place to live, the process of purchasing such place, the move, and finally settling in the new apartment was a time and energy sink for both my wife and I. My time online was mostly spent working and engaging in some light social media activity, and not much else.

Two. What I wrote last year speaking about 2023 didn’t change much in 2024: I’ve often mentioned this low tide brought up by a general feeling of ‘tech fatigue’; as a consequence, [during 2023] my interest in adding technology-related sources to my reads was rather low. I even neglected to stay up-to-date with the people and blogs I was already following. That feeling of tech fatigue started receding a bit towards the end of 2024, when I received a Nothing Phone 2a as a birthday gift — an event that gave me the final push to switch to Android as my primary phone platform, leaving my iPhone SE 3 as a secondary device.

Three. Another thing I wrote in the previous instalment of this series, was this:

This exhaustion stage, this tech burnout, is necessary as well. I’m more and more convinced that more people ought to reach this stage, to then try to approach tech in a different — hopefully healthier — way. Because the next stage is to focus on whatever good remains out there after the squeeze. That’s why I’m trying to approach 2024 with the goal of finding out who and what’s really worth following, who and what is truly distinctive, who and what is ultimately worth my (and your) time. Mind you, it’s what I’ve always been trying to do when compiling these yearly overviews; the only little thing that has changed is that from now on I’ll try to be even more selective. 

You know what happens when you get even more selective? That maybe you follow a link to a blog article, and you like the article, but then you explore that blog further and you realise that such article — and perhaps a couple more — is the only highlight of that blog, and you start wondering, Is this website worth adding to my RSS feeds, or should I just share the link to that specific article and let others decide?

In most cases, I’ve ended up bookmarking & sharing articles instead of adding blogs to my reading list. But what if it turns out to be a mistake and I miss out on some good writers/bloggers? Well, if I bookmark something, chances are I’ll return to that article and website at a later date, and if I find enough stuff I like on my subsequent visits, I may decide to recommend the whole package. Also, if the author keeps writing good stuff, it’s very likely I’ll get other recommendations about them, so I don’t really miss out on anybody. And even if I do — let’s be real for a second — time is a finite resource; I’ll never be able to read or watch everything from everyone I cross paths with. 

Another thing that happens when you get more selective is that you start looking harder and harder at the resources you’ve already discovered — all those RSS feeds, all those YouTube channels, etc. — and you reassess them with a fresh pair of eyes. This is why, during 2024, I’ve been subtracting rather than adding to my resources’ reservoir, so to speak. Interests change, people change (or don’t — and that, sometimes, can be a problem), the quality of a blog or YouTube creator’s output may become less consistent or patently decline… And so it’s time for some pruning and tidying up.

Blogs

Just two:

  • Passo Uno, by Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti. Fabrizio is a technical, UX, and programmer writer, and that should give you an idea of the main topics he covers in his blog. I like his clear, efficient writing style, and even when he talks about stuff I’m not super familiar with, I often feel stimulated to learn more about it. As for the blog’s name, as Fabrizio states in the About page: ’Passo uno’ is Italian for ‘stop-motion’. It also means ‘step one’.
  • The blog of Vitor Zanetti. I discovered it when Vitor started following me on Mastodon, as I’m always curious to check out other people’s profiles and websites when they follow me on social media. Vitor’s blog doesn’t seem to have a main focus: he may talk about technology in one post, then muse about design in another, or share observations sparked after watching a particular film. Like me, he doesn’t post frequently, but I find his writings to be inspiring and thought-provoking, and perhaps you will too.

Newsletters

I’m not typically a fan of the newsletter format; I can’t exactly explain why. The fact that, once you subscribe, the newsletter is something that comes to you instead of you going to it should be a convenient and preferable dynamic. Instead, I often end up treating it like advertising email, and ultimately ignore it or just skim the part that’s visible in my email client. Over the years I’ve subscribed to many newsletters on a whim — they were genuinely interesting and well written — but I’ve also ultimately unsubscribed from most of them due to lack of time and engagement.

The sole exception I made in 2024 was for Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At? which I basically treat as a long-form blog. I receive the email updates, but I’m also subscribed to the feed. If technology and the tech industry are your main interests, you should already know who Ed Zitron is. But if you don’t, well, it’s best if I link to the newsletter’s About section. You’ll find everything you need to know. I really, really recommend Ed’s newsletter. Each instalment is generally a long read, but very worth your time.

I started following Ed on pre-Musk Twitter years ago, and was reminded of his work again in recent times when I was looking for materials and information about ‘AI’. And I found out that Ed and I share basically the same (negative) views about it, only Ed has the know-how to talk about it with much more clarity and authority that I have on the subject. A lot of people have asked me to talk more often and more at length about ‘AI’, LLMs, the industry, and why I think it’s largely bullshit. My advice is to subscribe to Ed’s newsletter if that’s a subject of particular interest to you. You’ll find a lot of information, and you’ll know that Ed and I are on the same page. 

YouTube channels

Around September 2024 I looked at my YouTube subscriptions list and was horrified to realise that I was following 136 channels. Yeah, things had got rather out of hand, and so I started unsubscribing from a lot of channels I had added simply after discovering a single video or following a recommendation for a single video. Despite being a mature platform, I’m routinely baffled by how rudimentary YouTube’s tools are for organising content. For instance, I’d love to have the ability to categorise my subscriptions and put them in separate folders, like one does with RSS feeds, so that I can more easily get to those creators whose content could be filed under ‘photography’ or ‘tech’ or ‘gaming’ or ‘lifestyle’ or ‘cooking’ or ‘architecture’, and so forth. Instead, all YouTube offers is an unsorted list on the left sidebar of the home page, vaguely organised by creator activity/frequency of uploads. It gets messy, fast.

After spending the best part of an afternoon reviewing my subscriptions and mercilessly remove a lot of unwanted or uninteresting ones, I ended up with half the initial amount — which is still a lot, but becomes way more manageable. Again, follow my self-imposed Be more selective guideline, the only discovery really worth sharing is, in my opinion, Howtown.

The channel description is perhaps a bit terse: The “How Do They Know” show from journalists Adam Cole and Joss Fong. So it’s better if you watch their short introduction video. Essentially, Cole and Fong create video essays on different subjects to answer the question How do they know or How do we know about this particular fact or topic? In their words:

We want to tell you our guiding principles so you can hold us to them. First, we approach our stories with curiosity above all. So this isn’t a commentary channel. We’re here to make sense of the evidence. We rely on primary sources and interviews, and we’ll share those sources with you with each video. If we make any factual errors, we will post corrections that explain exactly what we got wrong. Finally, we never take money in exchange for coverage. Our sponsors don’t have any control over what we make. 

I find Cole and Fong to be entertaining, personable, and likeable; their videos are well researched and produced, and the fact that they don’t upload content frequently is a good sign in my book, because it means they’re taking time to do their homework before presenting a new essay. If you’re an intellectually curious person as I am, I think you’ll like their channel.

Podcasts

Another year, another round of copying-and-pasting the same quote from a few years ago:

In 2019 I unsubscribed from all the podcasts I was following, and I haven’t looked back. I know and respect many people who use podcasts as their main medium for expression. My moving away from podcasts is simply a pragmatic decision — I just don’t have the time for everything. I still listen to the odd episode, especially if it comes recommended by people I trust. You can find a more articulate observation on podcasts in my People and resources added to my reading list in 2019.

If you’re wondering why I keep the Podcast section in these overviews when I clearly have nothing to talk about, it’s because to this day I receive emails from people un-ironically asking me for podcast recommendations.

My RSS management

Yet again, nothing new to report on this front. I’m still using the same apps I’ve been using on all my devices for the past several years, and I haven’t found better RSS management tools / apps / services worth switching to. In my previous overviews, I used to list here all the apps I typically use to read feeds on my numerous devices, but ever since I broke my habit of obsessively reading feeds everywhere on whatever device, I’ll only list the apps on the devices I’ve used over the past year or so. If you’re curious to read the complete rundown, check past entries (see links at the bottom of this article):

  • On my M2 Pro Mac mini running Mac OS 13 Ventura: NetNewsWire.
  • On my 17-inch MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.14 Mojave, and on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire 5.0.4 — A slightly older version of this great RSS reader.
  • On my other Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
  • On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit.
  • On my Android phones — Nothing Phone 2a and Microsoft Surface Duo: the Feedly app.
  • On my iPhone SE 3, iPhone 8, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread. (Though on the iPad 3 Reeder seems to be more stable and less resource-hungry).
  • On all my more recent Windows machines I use FeedLab. It’s not a bad app at all, but I’m still looking for something more elegant visually. Nextgen reader used to be a great client, but development appears long discontinued.

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email, Mastodon, or Bluesky. Thanks for reading!