I have a love & hate relationship with the US as a country. Going to Las Vegas today for a four-day business trip falls in the “hate” part because I think we cannot have those Las Vegas cities any longer. This city is everything but real. I hate to see our resources spoiled like that.

My Five Minutes Experience With the Camera Control Button

I like the physical design, but it is too flush with the iPhone flat edge for my taste. It is easier to use with my thumb while the iPhone is in portrait mode. The required pressure to take a photo makes me shake1 which is not always good when taking a photo in low light conditions. I kind of “Digg” the UI which feels organic just like for the Dynamic Island but using multi-purposes buttons requires some time to get used to and learn the numerous modes. Apple is still working off the half-pressure mode for taking pictures and I wonder how it will affect the general use… will it make it even harder to use?

  1. Might be age-related issue, I know. ↩︎

**Apple Watch backups** are not working, they never did. This is what I see on my iPhone now, two old backups, once probably worthless because of it ridiculous small size. Another proof: after unpairing my Series 6 this morning before going to the Apple Store to get a credit for it[^1], no sign of new backups in the Watch.app. Big fail Apple. We are at Series 10 / iOS 18 for fuck sake! [^1]: I'm upgrading to Series 10.

I plan to go to the Apple Store tomorrow and see the new stuff since I can’t make it today. Maybe I’ll get the Series 10 if the one I want is available. I’ll unpair and reset my Series 6 as I’ll get $75 credit for it.

I’m rather happy to skip the iPhone 16 this year. Next year, Apple Intelligence will be more broadly available and more mature, the iPhone 17 will gain more hardware to support Apple Intelligence the newest features, too. As a blogger, Apple Intelligence writing tools are very handy and a year from now, most if not all my go-to apps will gain support for these. On the photography side, I expect more meaningful upgrades to the cameras.

The iPhone 16 this year is so iterative in nature that many YouTube reviewers separated the review into two rather short parts: the unboxing (generally less than 10 min1) and the general review (rarely more than 15 min).

  1. Oh come on, ten minutes to unbox that thing and find out that there is no sticker in the box? Really? ↩︎

Apparently, a bunch of compromised old-school pagers exploded remotely in the middle east… what an horrific event (seriously)… THAT is real programmed obsolescence (less seriously).

Currently curating my Bluesky home feed to my liking. If someone on Bluesky didn’t post since last year, when Bluesky was red-hot, I unfollow. I’m using Bluesky lists to curate my best accounts and build a custom timeline with them. I did something similar back in the day for Twitter as documented here.