David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith, his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but…

With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air's 0.3%).

This is particularly interesting to me because I recently pulled some metrics on what iPhones my users were using, and this is what I got:

And here's a breakdown of just the iPhone 17 generation:

This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.

Although I will say one thing that caught my eye with my bar chart is that across every generation, the vast majority of my customers have Pro devices, except for the iPhone 12 and 13 generations. I don't have a pretty visualization for this, but those are actually primarily iPhone mini holdouts who are sticking with those tiny phones. Shout out. 🫡

We're a little over a month away from the iPhone Duo coming out, and it will surely get quite a bit of attention when it does, but I expect there will be a similarly vast difference between David and my charts a year from now. I suspect he will have a sliver of his users on the Duo, maybe more than the Air, but probably not that much more. And I would not be surprised if 15 to 20% of my users actually adopt it by this time next year.

A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser tab all day long. Maybe it's a pinned tab or whatever, but they save things that they want to read later and expect those to show up in the queue when they go back to it. However, that didn't always happen because while the queue did auto refresh, it didn't do it as frequently as was needed. Also, if you navigated to a different page, it would actually stop refreshing (a bug I hadn't noticed until today).

When I was building Nonogame, I knew that I wanted to pause the game when the user navigated away from the tab or went to a different window. Thankfully, the web supports this, so I was able to detect when the window was no longer in the foreground and pause the game automatically. As you may expect, the web also has ways for you to detect when the window comes back to the forefront, and I'm using that in Quick Reads to automatically check for new things in the queue when you navigate back to the tab.

Here's a demo of it in action a few minutes ago in production. I'm saving things from Birchfeed and a random website with the browser extension, and both of them show up effectively instantly in the UI when I go back to the Quick Reads tab. I hope you like it!

Not the main point of this post, but I've mentioned 3 of my products in here…that's synergy, Lemon.

Today I do the impossible and get through my biggest thoughts about Apple's announcements from yesterday in less than 10 minutes. Here's what I found most interesting about the new iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watches, and AirPods 5.

I've been using Samsung's latest folding phone that has a very similar form factor to what Apple just announced, and it's gotten me accustomed to what the folding phone experience is. I personally very much like it, and it's the most joy an Android phone has brought me in close to a decade. That said, I just watched Apple's iPhone Duo unveiling, and it immediately made my Samsung phone feel behind the curve.

Technically, the iPhone Duo looks very good, but candidly, I don't think it looks meaningfully more impressive than the hardware in the Galaxy Fold8. It's Apple's software where I feel a large gap has been created.

One of the key things I have complained about with the short and squat outer display on the Fold Eight is that software feels kind of cramped on it. Most apps have headers and footers that take up vertical screen real estate that I don't have to spare on a display like this.

Apple has addressed this inherent compromise by reshuffling the entire iOS app layout to move controls to the side of the screen to not only be more reachable, which by the way is a bit of a challenge on a wide screen like this, but also to give you maximum vertical real estate for whatever it is you're looking at. I don't go "holy shit" that often when watching Apple events at this age, but they got one out of me this time.

There's other stuff, like the seemingly incredibly elegant animation as you finish unfolding the display, where the left half of the screen looks like it's out of focus until you get it all the way open. It looks cool and it looks like it will feel very natural. When I open up my Fold8, it's fine, but the inner screen just pops from off to on at a certain point when I'm doing the opening process. It's an extra flourish that's not necessary by any means, and I can understand why someone would wonder why I think this is any better than what Samsung is doing, but it's the sort of extra flourish that elevates the experience. Now that I've seen it, it makes what I was used to feel old.

Apple's not the first company to make a folding smartphone. In fact, they're one of the last to the game. But what I saw today is exactly the sort of thing I want to feel when Apple enters a new category. Yes, the hardware looks excellent, but the software is where it looks like they're truly differentiating, and I am excited to try it out next month.

It's not particularly useful for me, but I really dig this little UI library.

This isn't any new insight after a year of seeing sales info, and I predicted that this would be a tough trade-off for a lot of people to make immediately after seeing the Air revealed last September. I expected it to be the worst-selling of the four iPhones that came out at the end of the year. All the indications we have from outside Apple are that this has indeed come to pass, but I don't think that means the iPhone Air is a failure.

I think the iPhone Air is taking the role that the MacBook Air took many years ago. When the MacBook Air debuted, it came out in a MacBook lineup that had the normal MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The Air was worse than the MacBook in almost every way, and yes, it cost more to boot.

For a time, Apple had the MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro. But after a few years, the technology got to a point where Apple could fit a very good consumer laptop into the MacBook Air wedge, and they discontinued the MacBook. The laptop line became the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and that's the lineup we've had for an incredibly long time, up until and including today.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this same future for the iPhone lineup. In fact, at the start of 2025, I predicted that the thin iPhone we knew was likely coming out at the end of the year was actually not another phone in the lineup, it was just the new iPhone 17. Obviously, I got that prediction wrong, but I think it's one of those predictions that you get wrong on timing, not on the final state.

There's a new rumor out today that suggests that the iPhone 18 will not actually come out, and the iPhone Air 2 will be the non-Pro iPhone on offer. I don't know how credible that rumor is, but it's literally what I predicted a year and a half ago, and I do think that is still where we're going.

I think the iPhone Air, as it exists today, is too big of a compromise to be the "standard" iPhone Apple, but I don't think it's that far off. Give it an ultrawide camera and improve the battery life a bit, and I think you have a very competent and cool mainstream iPhone. The rumors are that the iPhone Air 2 will get a second camera, and it will almost certainly have some level of improved battery life, so I guess I wouldn't totally dismiss that idea from happening in early 2027. The safe money is probably on 2028, but who knows? Frankly, I wouldn't be enormously surprised if they did it this spring.

We're already pretty confident that the only phones we'll see tomorrow are the Pros and the Ultra/Fold/Folio, with the normal iPhone 18 coming in the spring. As I wrote in my predictions post for the folding iPhone, I think this staggered release schedule is going to push more people to buy the Pro phone this year because they'll be used to upgrading in the fall, and there won't be a non-Pro upgrade option for them. They'll say, screw it, and level up.

That makes the iPhone 18 in the spring a pretty lackluster release. Yes, I know not everybody follows the Apple news like we do, but society in general has a feeling for when new iPhones come out, and it's the fall. That's when the excitement is, and you don't get that sort of excitement for the more budget phones coming out in the spring, so I do think it will be a more tepid release.

I feel like making that release the next iPhone Air, and having that just be the new normal iPhone, would be okay. It just feels like this is a year of change with the iPhone, in terms of what phones are in the lineup, when they come out, and how much they cost. Maybe that's just one of the new changes as well. Rip the band aid off.

I'm writing this post the day before the September iPhone event, although I didn't really need to hit that deadline since we're probably not going to know the validity of these predictions for many months still. But hey, what's the point in having a blog if you don't make some predictions that will surely end up being wrong down the road?

I’m not really doing social media at the moment so I have no idea what the reaction online has been, but I watched The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time trailer today and I was blown away. The original game is an absolute formative video game in my life. I was nine years old when it came out and it positively floored me and expanded my concept of what video games could be. I’ve played the original game 5 to 10 times over the course of my life and every time I go back to it I’m reminded how brilliant it is.

With that in mind, I was simultaneously excited and anxious about the prospect of Nintendo remaking this game. That said, I think what they showed today is everything I dreamed a remake like this would be, and I can’t wait to play it in November.

One of the things I love in Birchfeed, my RSS sync service is the news stream feature. This lets you open up a window with new stories streaming into the view as they come in. It's pretty slick, and I use it on big news days (like tomorrow, for example).

Because I know a lot of nerds use the service, I also wanted to point out that there is a CLI you can use as well. You can install it with Homebrew:

brew install mattbirchler/tap/birchfeed

And you can call it as simply as entering birchfeed in your terminal of choice. You will want to run birchfeed auth the first time, paste in an API key you generated from Birchfeed itself, and then you will be good to go.

There are keyboard shortcuts listed at the bottom of the window, so you can figure this out, but you can choose whether you see article content itself in a pane on the right or if you just want to see a list of headlines. Arrow through them and hit return to open it in your browser, press c to copy the link to your clipboard, and if you have a Quick Reads account set up, press q to instantly save it to your reading queue.

Obviously, I know this is a niche feature, but hey, Birchfeed is built for RSS obsessives, so I know some people will get value from it.

The design bug caught me this holiday weekend, and I've made a few changes to Birchtree.

First off, and this will be the least important thing to anybody but me, I switched the subtitle on the headline from "designer and creator" to "developer and creator". I still have my design sensibilities, but professionally I'm a product manager, and for my own business I certainly do more development than design at this point (Acknowledging the irony of this in a post about updating the design of my blog).

The other difference you'll notice is that I have updated a lot of UI elements to be glassy. Look, I'm sure the trends will change in the future, but for now, I think Glass is relatively cool, and I'm going to go with the trend.

I've also gotten into shaders a bit and have become interested in what you can do with them. So I've updated the Pride banner at the top of the site from a CoverFlow emulator to a sort of weird test tube thing that I think is fun.

I've also taken the opportunity to pitch some of my apps. At this point, I have 10 apps I want people to know about, so if my blog can push a few more people to those apps, great! Hover over them to see a cool effect as well.

I've also made a tweak to blockquote elements, which makes sure they pop very clearly from the rest of the post.

As I write this, we're just two days away from Apple likely showing off another new hardware category, a folding smartphone. I figured, why not give it another go and officially lay down some predictions for how this product will go, not only this year but over the next few years?

How the folding iPhone will sell

An interesting split I've seen in the Apple community over the last year is in how people who were vehemently anti-folding-phone have shifted. When Apple wasn't making one, most people in the community would say that's because folding phones were a bad idea, the technology wasn't there, and they were way too expensive to be mainstream consumer products.

However, as it's become clear this is really happening, some people have done the thing I've talked about before, where everything Apple doesn't do is bad, and then once there are rumors that Apple is doing exactly that thing, they mentally move themselves from "they shouldn't do it" to “it'll be okay” to “actually, I'm super excited for this thing.” Meanwhile, others are sticking to their guns. I've seen plenty of people who think the folding iPhone will be a flop, that the hardware will literally fail (as in the screen will fail) within a year or two, and that Apple will discontinue it within two years of its launch.

For my part, my prediction is basically that through 2026, both sides of this debate will have data that lets them win stupid social media spats.

On the one hand, I do think the phone will be very desirable, and that there are people who will very much enjoy having this device in their life. My evidence for this is that I've been using the Samsung Galaxy Fold8 for the past month, and it's incredibly good. I'm sometimes still annoyed by the small outer screen, but I've largely gotten used to it. When you need something more like an iPad and you unfold the phone, suddenly you have an iPad mini-sized device in your hands. It's awesome.

I spend a couple of weeks every year switching to an Android phone as my main phone, and it's been pretty tough over the last 5 years or so. The software library just isn't for me, and I find it hard to stick with it for very long because I feel like I'm just using apps that aren't nearly as good as what I have on my iPhone. A folding Android phone doesn't really help with what apps are available, but it does make it especially nice to have an Android tablet on demand and to do things like play games, watch videos, or use productivity apps with more screen density and tables and that sort of thing. For me personally, a device that's very similar to this but runs iOS and has all the apps I love would be killer.

At the same time, I fully expect this to be the worst, or maybe second-worst-selling iPhone in the iPhone 18 generation of devices. I think this for a couple of reasons.

First, this device will not be able to be manufactured at the scale of other iPhones. Reports differ on exactly how severe the production challenges are, but whichever report is most accurate, it certainly seems like Apple can't crank these out like iPhone 18 Pros. This will mean that even if Apple sells every single one of them that it makes, and based on my last point, I do think there's a chance that will happen, it still won't be enough to make it one of the top phones in the lineup.

Second, despite my excitement about the experience of using a device like this, it won't be universal. For now, at least, this will be a niche device, not just necessarily because of manufacturing limits, but because a lot of people either don't want this or don't know if they want it yet. I also think that the rectangle that sits in your pocket is a pretty perfect size and experience. It's very reasonable that a lot of people won't feel that having a smaller phone that they can turn into a tablet is actually better than the greatest product form factor created in the last 100 years.

Third, there's the price. Nobody knows exactly what this thing is going to cost. I've seen leaked listings that suggest it could be around $1,600, while others are projecting anything from $2,000 to $3,000. My bullishness on this device changes quite a bit depending on where the actual thing falls in that price range. If it's $1,600, I think it's going to be sold out for months as they sell every single one they can manufacture. If it's $3,000, I think it's an absolute nonstarter.

So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don't know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well).

My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me.

On the cancellation point some are making, I'll remind you that the Vision Pro is famously a failure in the consumer market so far, and Apple hasn't discontinued it. I think those predicting that the fold will be discontinued within two years are wish-casting.

Another model

I've talked about this before as well, but I'll throw it here to document it plainly: I think there will be a larger version of this folding phone in the next year or two. I think the short outer screen is going to be a point of friction for people, and in a year or two Apple will release one with a larger screen that is more similar to its standard iPhone when folded in half.

Price

I'm just going to put my flag in the ground and say this will cost $1,999.

As I said earlier, there are rumors all over the place about what the cost will be, and I do not expect it to be cheap. However, I do think it's worth noting that Apple is not the first to this game. Samsung sells comparable devices at $1,899 and $1,999.

Part of me wonders how much of this is Apple fans not being aware of the norms in the rest of the market, such as when they acted like 120Hz and always-on displays were hyper-premium screen technologies when they had been standard fare for several years on Android devices of almost all price points.

Historically, Apple is also one who can surprise us. We all assumed the iPad would debut at $999, so it was a famously killer moment when they revealed the $499 price point. Meanwhile, we were mentally prepared for $2,00-2,500 VR headset, and then Apple dropped the $3,500 bomb when they debuted the Vision Pro.

I'm going with $1,999 because I think it's competitive in the market, and psychologically it will feel very good for Apple to be able to say this device starts at under $2,000, even if just barely. I guess I'm expecting something closer to the iPad moment than the Vision Pro moment. And hey, if there's one of those two product lines to emulate, I'd emulate the iPad. 😅

The name

Finally, there's the name. Everyone seems to think it's going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that's what I'd bet on as well.

But I just don't like it. I don't like it because it's not "ultra" in many ways, and I don't like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do…

I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there's a 99% chance I'm wrong, but hey, won't it be amazing if I'm right?