The iPhone 16’s back seems prone to scratching. I saw it today at the Apple Store. But I like this year’s colors.

More crowded than usual of course. 🤗

**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).

This is the default option for user profiles on... **LinkedIn**. Did you know that? Thoughts?

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.

As a long-time Apple fan¹², I find it sad to see the downward trends surrounding Apple. It’s no longer anecdotal. Something is really going on. Apple is no longer the same under Tim Cook and since the Steve Jobs death. How could this be otherwise? Well, yeah. That’s life. Anger, ennui, boredom are just a few things that I’m noticing more and more. This super megacorp is printing money, investors are happy, but meanwhile, something is slowly rotting that will eventually trigger Apple to transform itself. Eventually.

More or less random thought: Maybe Apple won’t return to live events until Tim Cook leaves the company. When COVID hit, it may have provided some relief for Apple, as it spared Cook from direct comparisons to Jobs’ performances at live events. We all know that Cook isn’t the showman Steve Jobs was.

The fact that apparently Microsoft is not using an Intel CPU for their Cloud PC instances says a lot about Intel’s future.

If I were in charge of IT infrastructure at Apple, I would be more than happy to have a phased deployment of Apple Intelligence. This staged deployment mode allows for better control over resource allocation, performance tweaking based on demand. It is the right time to establish the baseline metrics that will help further larger-scale deployment later in the deployment schedule. People find that Apple is behind, but I say it is more of a realistic approach that makes a lot of sense from a user experience perspective.

My general sentiment towards iOS 18 is rather vastly positive but improvements come at the cost of complexity. More than ever, we need to « manage » our devices to get them work as we want them to work.

iOS 18, iPadOS 18 are coming out tomorrow. That’s cool. But you know what is even cooler? This GPT that can answer your questions about those releases. Try “What’s new in iMessage?”

You’re welcomed.

This is the second edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook, edition 2024-36. Email version coming out later today.

Working from home the coffee shop near my house… on Friday, something that I rarely do, but weather outside is so great 😀. This is my creative moment of the week.

I knew it: Trump lacks courage. He wants us to believe he can talk and fix anything in 24 hours but refuses a simple second debate. What a fake guy.

I’ve been spending more time on Bluesky in recent days, since the Apple Event. I like the feel and of this service. It’s fast, there are no ads, features-wise it’s rich and useful.

Hey, ABC News, you should be embarrassed by how you allowed that man to yell about anything he wanted. One person said he got 9 extra minutes by butting in, and they wouldn’t cut his mic.

Nine minutes seems a lot, but yeah, I’m not that impressed by the moderators.