Instagram Edits App First Impressions

April 23, 2025
I played with Instagram’s latest app, Edits, which launched yesterday (22nd April 2025) after numerous delays. It's a fairly good alternative to the CapCut app owned by ByteDance, the same company that owns TikTok. It's a bit bare bones as there aren't as many features compared to CapCut, but that is not a bad thing. The 5 tabs on the Edits app The app has five tabs at the bottom of the UI, and the app feels at home on iOS. The first tab is where you can add 'Stickies', a sort of Post-it note with your ideas. For some reason…

Apple removes “Available Now” text from Apple Intelligence page.

April 22, 2025
Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors: Apple first updated the page in mid-March to indicate that the personalized Siri features are coming in a future software update. Apple then removed the "available now" text from the Apple Intelligence page in the U.S. on March 31, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The "available now" text did have an asterisk that led to fine print indicating that some of the Apple Intelligence features would be coming over the course of the next year, but the NAD said this footnote was not "sufficiently clear." Good! The whole marketing behind the series of iPhone 16s…

I’ve Used iPhones Without a Case for Years – Titanium Is a Game Changer

April 19, 2025
Ever since iPhones transitioned to titanium, there has been a significant increase in the quality and durability of these phones. I have been using most of my iPhones without a case. The last two iterations, the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 16 Pro Max, are less prone to scratches and dents compared to previous models. The stainless steel iPhones, starting with the iPhone X in February 2017 up to the iPhone 14 Pro Max, looked premium. However, if you used these phones without a case, you would know that the sides scratched easily. Apple going with flat edges…

Apple not spending on AI efforts is why Siri is what it is

April 12, 2025
Stephen Hackett commenting on the NYT article on what is wrong with Apple. I haven't read the NYT article but Stephen's comment is spot on: For a company that says it doesn’t like looking back at its own history, very often, Apple makes decisions like it’s the late 1990s and the company is on the verge of failure. That drives it to make incredible products, but it also means Apple can be incredibly stingy. To play in the AI race, you’ve got to be willing to spend piles and piles of cash. The world's richest company unwilling to spend money…

Report on The Information about the state of Siri

April 12, 2025
Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has a recap of the new report in The Information about why Siri has remained so bad. Here are some of the bits that plainly make me angry, but not surprising the state of Siri today: "Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements." "Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was apparently confident he could fix ‌Siri‌ with the right training data and better web-scraping for answers to general knowledge questions. Senior leaders didn't…

iPhone price increases

April 6, 2025
The iPhone X, launched in 2017 at a price of ÂŁ999, hasn't gone up since. You can walk into an Apple Store and get the iPhone 16 Pro for the same price of ÂŁ999 now. If I were to argue that prices of the iPhones have gone down - both in terms of increasing inflation and also in terms of the features the iPhone 16 Pro offers compared to the iPhone X 8 years ago - there wouldn't be much or any rebuttal against my argument. Every year it feels like a price increase is imminent, but the iPhone has…

Apple delaying the personalised Siri “Apple Intelligence” feature.

March 7, 2025
Apple dropping bad news on a Friday on Daring Fireball Not surprised at all, but the whole marketing point the iPhones 16 rode on was Apple intelligence and that series of iPhones 16 were the first phones “built for Apple Intelligence”. I never liked Apple marketing pushing Apple Intelligence when the phones did not launch with them and was promised that users will get the features during the year. So far we have seen Siri get a new coat of paint and a few other features and the consensus is that it’s very underwhelming. I personally like the ability to…

Why Vision Pro is the reason to bring back TouchID on iPhone.

January 20, 2025
Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9To5Mac: Face ID on iPhone does no good when Vision Pro is strapped to your face—an unfortunate detail I’m reminded of every time I use visionOS. I have been using a 6th generation iPad Mini for a couple of months now, and this is the first time I have been dealing with TouchID over FaceID (apart from my MacBook, that is). TouchID is my least favourite thing about this iPad. There are usually many discussions or debates online regarding TouchID vs FaceID, and I often thought of them as meaningless, as FaceID is always the clear…

Siri : New Look, Same Old Frustrations

December 13, 2024
Everyone has had more than their fair share of being frustrated at Siri. Apple brought the voice assistant feature to the masses by introducing Siri with the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it felt like it had never reached its full potential. There have been a few upgrades to Siri in the past thirteen years, but nothing as significant as the Apple Intelligence updates that were promised in the 2024 WWDC keynote. Apple Intelligence has been a hit and miss so far, and Apple is clever enough to still keep the "beta" tag associated with it. There have been a…

Apple releases iOS 18.2 with the best Camera Control feature yet

December 11, 2024
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/12/apple-intelligence-now-features-image-playground-genmoji-and-more The biggest news is Apple Intelligence launching in other regions apart from the US. I have been using Apple Intelligence already by setting my region to the US. I can finally change to the UK Siri voice, which is significantly better! I was not on the 18.2 beta so there are some new features too : Genmoji, Image Playground, and ChatGPT integration to name a few. I will write about them when I have tried out these features. However, the most anticipated change for me is the ability to open the camera via a single control click when the…