As a result, it’s now asking suppliers to prepare capacity for 10 million units of the debut version of the Neo, up from an initial estimate of 5 million to 6 million, my sources tell me. Delivery times for the laptop have ballooned to as much as four weeks as Taiwan’s Quanta and Foxconn rush to fill orders from factories in Vietnam and China.

We'll never get it but I'd love to have a peek behind the curtain to see what the MacBook Neo does to unit sales of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. IDC reported that Apple sold 25 million Macs total in 2025, so if Culpan's reporting is accurate, Apple looking to move 10 million Neos in a year is quite notable. What percentage of those 10 million buyers are new to the Mac versus how many would have bought an Air (or even a Pro) previously?

My suspicion is that the majority of those buyers are going to be new to the Mac. However at least some percentage are going to be people who would have bought an Air previously because they just wanted a Mac and now that there's a cheaper option they just found a way to save $500. I know it's anecdotal, but I still think about my recent flight where I walked past first class and there were 2 Neos out and in use among people who paid $2,000+ for their tickets.

This feels like the sort of post that can get some people to go, "well actually…", but screw it, I think there's something here. As Marques points out, in good light, the iPhone 11 and iPhone 17 are very hard to tell apart. But once you introduce more challenging lighting (night, harsh backlight, etc.), then suddenly the newer phones capture something more usable. I think a few things have gone on here.

One, for years and years, smartphone reviews have pointed out any detail lost in shadows or highlights as bad things in phone cameras. Phone makers listen to these reviews, and over the years it has moved them to deliver camera systems that move everything to the middle in terms of lighting, which is why our photos feel more sterile than they used to.

Two, smartphones have gotten so good at rescuing any photo someone might snap, that it's raised the bar for how bad a photo from your phone can be, but this "rescue everything at all cost" behavior it's also lowered the ceiling you get from the stock camera on your phone. I bring my Canon R6 to family events because it can get amazing photos, and sometimes people pick it up and snap photos with it. They all treat it like taking photos with a smartphone, and many of their photos come out pretty rough (they do get some bangers too, though). This is happening because they shoot with it like it's a phone. They point and shoot at anything, regardless of light or movement or giving the lens a quarter second to focus, and the photos don't come out how they want.

To be clear, this isn't a slight on my family members, I'm just trying to illustrate how smartphones have trained us to take photos differently and to expect a crisp photo with everything visible no matter what.

Three, I think the demands we put on smartphone cameras is impossible. We want some photos to be pin sharp without any detail lost. Sometimes we want motion blur. Sometimes we want the highlights to blow out. Sometimes the shadows should crush. Sometimes we want the focus to miss a little bit. Sometimes we want more color, other times less. I don't think we can have it all, but that's what we demand.

Part of the magic of those older photos we look back on and go "why does that look better?" is that those were literal snapshots in time from technology that was limited compared to what we have today. A disposable Kodak camera sucks compared to the phone in our pocket today, but somehow, it took some photos that make us go "damn, that's what I wish my iPhone took." Except, I don't think we really do. My camera roll is full of boring photos of things like price tags and signs and other things I simply want to document and save for later. I want maximum clarity on these, but then I take photos of my friends and family, and I want something different there. Oh, but on those family and friends photos, you better not assume I want motion blur when I don't or blown highlight, because then I'll complain about how bad this camera is on social media.

As you think about how to address those concerns, you probably get to something where the phone takes the most sterile photo possible with zero motion blur, collapsed dynamic range, and everything in focus. Then you give the user post-processing options to add those effects as they see fit. Or hell, "AI will solve this." 🥴

I think that fundamentally, if we want photos from our cameras to feel more like photos from "real" cameras or older point and shoots from our youth, we need to accept that some photos won't turn out quite as technically perfect as they do today. The randomness, the mistakes, and the luck are part of it, and I think we look back just on the old photos that turned out and think everything looked like that. I don't think this "some of my iPhone's photos literally miss focus and blow out highlights" reality is viable, and I don't even think people want it, so I get why this is such a hard thing for smartphone companies to figure out.

I was going to go point out how many popular photography apps on the App Store promised "unprocessed" photos, expressing a desire from people to get this, but this search actually turned up the opposite. In the US App Store today, there is one app in the top 100 free apps in the Photo & Video category that applies "vintage filters" to your photos, and there are 31 apps that call out "AI editing" in their name.

I saved the image to my computer to post something snarky, but it was actually something else that stood out once I had it in my downloads folder. This was a WebP image.

You can check it out as well, just use your browser's inspector on any of the promo images.

And just to note, developers are not allowed to upload WebP images. They must upload their promo images as JPEG or PNG. You can actually see that in the source URL, which is referencing a JPEG image on the server but is rendering it in the browser as WebP.

Is this a big deal? No. But as with all things supported by Google (looking at you, RCS), Apple fans have a really hard time coming to terms with the fact some of those things are good, actually, and while WebP is a good format for displaying images on the web, Apple fans have routinely told me over the years that actually it's bad and HEIF is the only new video and image format that matters. I don't have beef with HEIF, but while fanboys are battling over this, Apple is out here choosing WebP as the best tool for the job.

Apple announced that beginning today, users on iOS 26.5 will be able to send encrypted RCS messages to Google Messages users who are on the latest version of that app. Apple says that means a message that is intercepted in transit is unreadable. You’ll be able to tell if your messages are encrypted by a lock icon at the top of the screen.

Here's my regular reminder that if you didn't think Apple should implement RCS, you don't get to be excited about this. 😉

Seriously though, this is great to see start rolling out, and it will impact most folks here in the US since it works with Google Messages. Samsung recently announced that they were discontinuing their messaging app, and Samsung phones will now default to Google's app as well.

Support is excellent as well. Here in the US, all carriers that support RCS, also support encrypted RCS except for H20 Wireless and Total Wireless.

A few years ago, a passion project from a few Zelda fans gave us a decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which let it run natively on every platform known to man. Not only that, but it was able to run at higher frame rates, higher resolutions, and with some modern touches like autosave and updated texture packs. Or, you know, you could play it totally faithfully to the original, your call.

There have been some other projects doing these "decomps" in the years since, and today there is a new one called Dusk that is for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and does all the same things as the Ocarina of Time decomp.

For what it's worth, it's stuff like this that makes me enjoy being a PC gamer first and foremost. People with a passion are out there delivering amazing things that massive companies can't keep up with.

Do Wind Waker next!

One of the cool things about the agentic coding era is how quick it is to iterate on an idea and see if it's worth pursuing further. When I was on a run yesterday, I had an idea for the a website called The Cooldown, which was a landing page people could go to at the end of their work day to catch up on the tech news of the day. Yes, this sort of thing exists already, but I thought I could do something interesting with my personalized RSS feed collection I've built up over the past 20 years. Techmeme, but with more indie voices.

The idea was at 4PM Central, the site would pull the RSS feeds for a bunch of sites that do good tech reporting, and then use a Gemini prompt to figure out what topics and articles would be most interesting. Gemini would return the structured data to the website, which would be stored in a database and presented to visitors.

I also thought that people like to read the news over breakfast, so I also set up a second run that was at 4AM that did the same thing. That would restyle the page and would call itself "The Warm Up".

I even have a nice little animation as you move to older reports that I thought was delightful.

If this had legs, the plan would also be to add user accounts, likely with a paid tier, that let users receive these updates as an email, to add their own feeds, and maybe even let them link their Quick Reads account to instantly save articles here to their reading queue.

I have this working on my local machine, and it's technically production-ready for everything besides the user sign up. However, I'm not convinced this really is anything. As I said, other sites already exist that do something like this, and I don't think mine is differentiated enough to really catch on. Also, it must be said that if the goal is to catch up on the news, indie blogs aren't usually where that happens, so I'd still be linking to a lot of the big hitters anyway.

Maybe this will be the seed that sprouts another idea in the future, but for now, I don't think this is it.

The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.

The working group is likely to consider a number of oversight approaches, officials said. But a review process could be similar to one being developed in Britain, which has assigned several government bodies to ensure that A.I. models meet certain safety standards, people in the tech industry and the administration said.

In response to this report, Ben Thompson wrote:

The […] administration is not embracing uncertainty: it is operating from an assumption that AI is dangerous, despite the fact that many of the listed harms, like learning how to build a bomb or synthesize dangerous chemicals or conduct cyber attacks, are already trivially accomplished on today’s Internet. What is completely lacking is anything other than the briefest of hand waves at AI’s potential upside.

As well as:

The […] administration is arrogantly insisting that it ought have a role in dictating the outcomes of an innovation that few if any of its members understand, and almost certainly could not invent. There is, to be sure, a role for oversight and regulation, but that is a blunt instrument best applied after the invention, like an editor.

Although hold on a second, those posts are from November 1, 2023 when then President Biden signed an eerily similar executive order.

For the record, I was relatively neutral on this sort of government oversight in 2023, not having a strong feeling either way. And on the face of it, I don't have a huge problem with this, even though I very much do not like this administration. The fun question for me will be whether Ben Thompson continues what I think is his tendency, which is to loudly voice when he disagrees with Democrats and be quiet when he disagrees with Republicans, specifically Trump.

Ever since I was a child, my Mac screenshots have saved to my desktop. This is how macOS works by default, and it's what I kept doing when I finally made the jump to CleanShot back in 2020. It worked, it was fine, but it led to a desktop full of screenshots and videos that I needed to clean up on a regular basis.

But I didn't have to live like this, so I made the bold (some might say brave!) decision to finally have my screenshots go somewhere else. I'll hold for applause.

Holds…

Holds a bit more, gesturing in a way that implies "you're too much!"

Anyway, I made a folder called "Screenshots" in the root of my iCloud directory and I'm saving all screenshots and screen recordings there. I also added it next to my Downloads folder in the dock for easy access.

The key thing here for me was choosing to put the folder in iCloud so that it syncs anywhere. It also means I have been able to set up both my MacBook Pro and MacBook Neo to save to this same place, so that I can screenshot something on one device and then do something with it on another.

For what it's worth, I think that the macOS default is perfectly reasonable for most people, but I take literally hundreds of screenshots a week, so I'm not exactly typical in this case.

It's just such a wild break from their peer group. And it keeps getting more wild. It seems like the most binary bet imaginable. Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.

This chart from Siegler's article is making the rounds in my feeds among AI skeptics.

It illustrates something pretty clear, right? Apple's able to turn big profits with minimal capital expenditures while the rest of the industry is bleeding money on AI. Apple fanboys will say this is "the most brilliant move in corporate history".

It is certainly true that Apple has not invested in capital expenditures like the other companies mentioned here, but I also think it's worth noting that these large increases in spending from the likes of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have coincided with relatively massive increases in net income as well.

In short, they're spending more, but their profits are still going up. Don't assume that because OpenAI and Anthropic are running on huge losses that everyone investing heavily in AI is doing the same.