I have my new iPhone 18 Pro Max. It’s an all-round solid upgrade, and the only nits I can pick are the extra 20 or so grams of weight and the slightly worsened lens flare in dark conditions (the former I can feel, the latter I have only seen in online reviews). For a brief moment after preordering, I regretted not giving the new Glacier color a try this year, but that soon passed and I think this year’s Silver looks great. The white roundrect glass panel on the back of last year’s model was a seriously weird move.
There’s some doubt online about how big a deal the new wider maximum aperture (f/1.48) actually is, but I’m here to tell you that Bayer RAW photos have significantly less noise and an overall better appearance in low light scenes! On the past few iPhones, RAW (not to be confused with ProRAW) has been nigh unusable at night, with lots of weird purple color fringing around clumps of copious sensor noise. Color noise is still present, of course, but the overall aspect is smooth and high fidelity. This is on par with or even better than regular compact cameras, I think. (Edit: there’s a chance this may actually be down to the new RAW 9 engine in iOS 27.)
Style: Natural + Film
The new “Photographic Styles 3” image processing engine with texture controls, such as film-like halation and skin smoothing, appeared to be an exclusive feature for these new phones — after all, the last upgrade to Photographic Styles on the iPhone 16 was not retroactively made available to the iPhone 15 — but I spied a footnote in the press release that suggests it will be coming to older models at some point. Very unusual, and very unlike Apple. After all, the Pro manual controls in the default camera app are exclusive to the 18 Pro for no apparent reason. For anyone sitting out this year’s upgrade, it should be very welcome news these new options are coming to breathe new life into the camera experience.
Side note: The Apple Watch Series 12 is noticeably thinner and wider coming from a four-year-old model. The cover glass/sapphire crystal now reaches so far down the sides that you can barely see the metal. I reckon this year it makes the least difference whether you choose an aluminum or titanium body; you’ll hardly see it. The effect you get when looking at it straight on is that the watch is all glass and display. This is probably a precursor to the design concept of next year’s iPhone which should have the thinnest titanium frame ever: a glass sandwich with very little filling. Most of the Watch’s other benefits are invisible in everyday use, from better round-the-clock sensing to AI features that have yet to ship in software. I’m looking forward to Siri Recap in particular, and plan to hold conversations with myself doing different funny voices all day.
Silver goes with everything
I wish I could say that I’ve had a painless migration to the new phone, but it’s been terrible. And that’s all to do with telcos, not Apple. If you recall, I switched to M1 Maxx last week and marveled at how they could offer such incredible value for $12, naively forgetting to ask what the catch was.
The problem with eSIMs is that they can’t be popped out of one phone and chucked into another the way a physical card can. In order to be issued a QR code for installing the eSIM on my new phone, I had to go down to a physical store and wait in line to speak with a human. With Maxx being M1’s budget brand, they only opened up one service counter so the staff could stand around laughing at the broke people wasting their lunch break, while the rest of the store remained relatively empty. I waited a total of an hour. I was glad to have done this on Thursday because the line would surely have been many times longer after Friday’s launch.
Well it turned out that I couldn’t install it on Friday anyway, because their system didn’t register my old eSIM as deactivated after I’d done it. And these QR codes can literally only be scanned once — it seems that scanning and getting an error counts as once — so it became invalid after, necessitating another trip down to town to wait in line again. No fucking way, my friends. My solution: signing up for a new telco and porting my number away from M1 Maxx, just to get a working eSIM immediately. Total loss to this point: just $12 and several hours of my time.
But guess what? The new telco had problems too. SMSes either didn’t arrive or arrived hours after they were sent to me. This delay meant I initially couldn’t sign into any of my banks without my old phone, because logging into the apps on a new phone requires, yup, receiving an SMS. Later in the day, they started arriving 15 minutes late, and now on Day 2 they’re finally arriving on time. What irks me is how archaic this reliance on SMS is — why can’t companies use TOTP authenticator apps or email or (I can’t believe I’m saying this) WhatsApp? All local institutions should at least default to our national identity verification service, Singpass.
Shut up and take my freedom!
This sounds like a real first-world problem but that’s what it is — we’ve built an environment where it’s hard to live when you can’t access banking apps, PayNow, and Apple Pay. I’m not saying cash is the solution — because germs — but these accounts should just be biometrically tied to us or something. I used to think the Chinese system where you can pay with a palm scan was too invasive, too dystopian, but not anymore. I’m ready to sign over my rights in exchange for device-agnostic convenience. At time of writing, I still can’t activate FaceTime and iMessage using my phone number. God help me, I might be switching telcos for the third time next week.
You know what works well? Services that let you sell off your used devices, like Mister Mobile, CompAsia, and SellUp. In just a minute, you can arrange to have someone come to your doorstep and give you cash in exchange for your old phone. Let me walk you through the boy math I alluded to last week: A 512GB iPhone Pro Max loses about $500 in value if you keep it for two years instead of one. That means delaying an upgrade actually costs you money. So, take the price of that new phone, deduct the $500 of avoided depreciation, subtract the doorstep trade-in cash, and toss in the pro-rated refund from canceling your unused AppleCare+ plan, and upgrading annually might even provide better returns than investing in AAPL stock, and that’s saying a lot.
At least it wasn’t a total waste of time going out for the eSIM QR code on Thursday. I visited my favorite curry spot after, then dropped in on Jussi and Brian at their co-working office. I had my once-yearly pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, and sadly have already forgotten what it was like.
After seeing tons of hype for the new Korean film, Hope, which is distributed by Neon and MUBI and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I’ve been anxiously waiting to see it in theaters here. That day came on Tuesday, and… I have no idea how anyone could recommend this stinking mess. Just another example of the West glazing Korean cinema, I guess. It has some positive qualities, like the first act where mysterious events steadily unfold with the action ramping up quickly; and the sudden appearance of leading lady Hoyeon (of Squid Game fame) about 40 minutes in, photographed so jarringly model-beautiful and flawless compared to everyone else in the podunk town setting, wielding an over-the-top weapon (whose origins are never explained) with utter seriousness, that the moment collapses into unintentional comedy. Unfortunately the rest of its 156-minute runtime is trash, the ending is one of the dumbest I’ve ever seen, and Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander may never live down their involvement in this. 2 stars, at best.
The National Library has a month-long ReadSG reading campaign underway and citizens are encouraged to log their daily reading sessions on a CrowdTask website, where meager rewards can be won but more importantly, a sense of community might emerge from trying to collectively hit 7.5 million reading minutes. For my part, I’m up to 51 books this year, the last two being Neuromancer and Lily King’s Heart the Lover. Then Kim showed me this Instagram Reel from Seoul, Korea, and I couldn’t help but wish our reading festival went all out like this. It’s aspirational, romantic, and makes reading look like something you’d gladly do with your friends instead of doomscrolling together in some cafe.
I knew going into this week’s Apple Fall Event that I’d find the iPhone Duo impressive but wasn’t likely to buy one because it wouldn’t have a telephoto lens. Now that it’s been shown, that sentiment hasn’t changed but boy, it’s a very fetching device and the design team has done some incredible work to redefine the foldable smartphone — it’s full of thoughtful user experience innovations that have been lacking in Android foldables. Those guys have been doing this for over five years but without the pressure of competition, and so there aren’t even graceful transitions from one screen to the other. I didn’t know how bad things were until Cong shared screenshots, and I saw other videos of Android apps flat-out restarting when a phone is cracked open because they can’t switch screen sizes on the fly. Opening an Android foldable is like Russian roulette; you never know if your work will survive.
Meanwhile the iPhone Duo has one of those “obvious once you see it” ideas: an interaction model that treats the two screens as one surface. When closed, the outer screen appears like a transparent window ‘looking through’ to the inner screen. Unfolding the phone “adds” more screen to the left side, creating the illusion that the whole device is glass, sold with a sublime blurring animation bordering on magic. So instead of conceptually switching from one small screen to a bigger one, you’re simply expanding a screen you were already looking at, and it’s seamless rather than disorienting.
Alas, even putting the eye-watering price aside (nearly $2,500 USD in Singapore before AppleCare+), I can’t see myself jumping on this first-generation version because of the aforementioned camera compromise. Not only does it lack the Pro’s 4x optical zoom, but the Duo, like the iPhone Air, doesn’t support shooting ProRAW photos or Apple Log video. It’s rumored that the Duo’s camera sensors are smaller than even the Air’s, and more in line with the iPhone 17e’s, so that could be why.
My prediction is that next year’s Duo 2 will also have only two lenses, so as not to pull attention away from the rumored 20th anniversary iPhone, which I expect will merge the functionality of the Pro with the thin, elegant aesthetics of the Air. I’m guessing the Duo 2 will improve its two cameras, maybe add Face ID, and further improve the folding screen. So unfortunately it’ll be 2028 before I get one, because my iPhone is my primary camera these days. I have shaken off all desire for further Fujis, Leicas, and Ricohs — which I only ever used as compact point-and-shoots anyway.
So where’s that leave me this year? A silver iPhone 18 Pro Max (sadly we still get the version with a physical SIM slot and smaller battery here in Singapore), and an Apple Watch Series 12. The iPhone replaces a perfectly good silver 17 Pro Max — but don’t worry, I’ve fully justified this with boy math: it simply makes more sense to sell an iPhone early than to hold it for two years or more, and this way the upgrade costs me less than a dollar a day! The larger main camera aperture and updated Photographic Styles are exciting, but early benchmarks are putting the A20 Pro above even Apple’s own M5 chip in single-threaded performance. Coupled with a 40% faster GPU and an additional Neural Engine, these are outlandish improvements.
The Watch replaces an aging Series 8 that barely lasts a whole day now after four years. I could replace the battery and use it a while longer, but I’m keen to try this new “AI wearable” use case that was shown, like being able to invoke Siri AI on my wrist, and getting recaps of an entire day’s conversations. It’s worth noting that for people who only want silver watches that this is the second time Apple has skipped offering a silver aluminum model (the Series 7 was the first). I thought that I might get a cheaper aluminum one this year to justify an earlier upgrade next time, but since they only come in black, gray, bronze, and gold aluminum, I decided on titanium instead. IMO Apple Watches are at their best when they’re shiny.
Next week will be an eventful one because on top of setting up new devices, it’ll also be time to install the new ‘27 OS updates for Mac and Vision Pro. I’m looking forward to macOS Golden Gate, which will fix the egregious misgivings of former design lead Alan Dye, who I hope is gumming up the works over at his new employer, Meta. And on the Vision Pro, I can’t wait to revisit my library of panoramic photos, taken over the years, as 3D spatial scenes that feel like how I remember them.
Finally, I thought John Ternus did a great job at this, his first event as CEO, and appreciated the callback to Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” strategy for the Mac — this time reframing the AI-enabled iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub”. The text was a little drier than I’d like, but his comfortable, easygoing energy and connection to the products was evident throughout. It was also good to see newly elevated design leads Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay, looking like the kind of people who get down to work instead of creating drama and getting corner radii wrong. It all paints an optimistic picture for Apple’s future.
That’s enough of that
I got a new pair of glasses made from frames that didn’t fit Kim very well. When I went to pick them up, I noticed that the left lens was too close to my eye, on account of not being made of the most expensive high-index material. The store was busy at the time, and I could tell the employee serving me was probably not much more experienced at optical matters than me. I asked him if there was simply nothing that could be done about it, and he answered no, short of making a new thinner lens and paying $200+ for it, there was nothing we could do. I said I’d think about it and left to get lunch.
An hour later, still dissatisfied, I described the situation to Gemini and asked if he was right. With supreme confidence, the AI told me that a professional optician had several options to resolve this, such as adjusting the pantoscopic tilt of the lenses, the seated position of the lenses in the frame, and the curvature of the arms to push one side more forward than the other. Thus armed, I decided to go back to the store and speak to a more senior employee now that the lunch crowd was gone. And wouldn’t you know, they fixed it quite easily. I could have just gone home and had a terrible experience if not for having a consumer advocate in my pocket. When things fall apart and we take to the ruined streets to battle megacorporations and their metallic humanoids, take heart: standing side by side with us will be a few rogue AIs who love fighting the status quo.
I switched mobile telcos yet again because Giga’s app and site weren’t loading properly on my iPhone — supposedly due to an expired certificate. Taking that as a bad omen, I moved to M1’s Maxx service. Where many others have raised prices and made their plans less attractive lately, Maxx is bucking the trend. For S$12/mo, I’m now getting 600GB of data that I can use at home or in 9 other Asian countries including Japan. Do you understand how insane that is? I should probably start looking into a Tokyo apartment timeshare.
I’m rereading Neuromancer with my book club, in advance of the Apple TV series coming out in January. It’s surprising how little of its story and characters I remember, and what I retained mostly concerns its cyberpunk atmosphere and prescient world building. Just try to imagine being in the early 1980s and writing like this about living in a networked world, about AI and a post-human age, and you’ll realize what a miracle William Gibson pulled off.
Last week I talked about stocking up on canned food. Well, back in June I noted a nationwide sardine shortage, and although stocks were replenished soon after, they were never very strong and we’re now facing empty shelves yet again. Even Ayam’s basic staple product, sardines in tomato sauce, is running low in every supermarket I’ve checked. Olive oil versions are completely out, and King Oscar can only be found in low quantities in some places. Rob tells me the same is happening in his part of the UK, and a little research suggests that low yields have been a problem for the past year, with overfishing in Morocco and other hotspots compounded by global shipping problems/war.
I’ve been enjoying Bill Callahan’s new album, My Days of 58, which coincidentally complements the new Lambchop album Punching the Clown very well. Both share a loose, chamber-folk feel with deadpan humor. Check out these lines from one of Callahan’s songs: “As time wore on, I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar / Instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion / I started to wonder, is this creativity or pathology? / Am I the Pathol O.G.?”
Drinking a lot of wine last Saturday night at what I thought was the end of my illness was not a smart move — my immune system probably felt like frontline troops betrayed by friendly fire, and by Sunday night I began feeling the stirrings of a new illness.
The return of the seasonal haze — caused by intentional forest fires in Indonesia — certainly hasn’t helped my throat and nasal membranes. It’s looking to get worse in the coming weeks, but one pretty side effect is a rather cinematic bloom over the city lights at night.
Look at the daytime haze, and this is “moderate”
I thus spent most of the week laid up in various poses, moving between states of aching, coughing, and mucusation. So there’s really not much more to report this week, but let me wring this diaristic serviette dry anyway; let me lean heavy on the word press’s crank with my phlegmatic body.
One of my sad meals was a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, eaten cold out of the can. But instead of the usual Heinz, I decided to try regional brand Ayam’s slightly cheaper rendition, and learnt that the version I’m used to (less sweet, with vinegar) is called an “English recipe” in their world. The verdict: pretty good and I dare say indistinguishable from Heinz’s without a direct comparison. Caveat: I was sick.
This new bean acquisition was part of a larger canned food stockpiling effort that I embarked on after reading some doomsaying posts such as this one from The Guardian. Coincidentally, I learnt shortly afterwards that James had also started doing the same. That made me wonder what vegetarians stockpile, because my pantry is mainly filled with sardines, tuna, chicken, and pork products. I got my answer on Saturday when I saw him for Peishan’s birthday celebration: lots of bean-like stuff such as lentils and chickpeas. In any case, we’re not prepping on any meaningful scale — the goal would be to avoid being caught out by a sudden food shortage, for maybe a week at best. After that, the attractiveness of survival in that world probably drops off quite steeply.
Oh, I also found and enjoyed this video on the history of everyone’s favorite canned meat, Spam. As a lifelong aficionado of the ‘spiced ham’, I already knew many of these facts, but did not know that its main ingredient, pork shoulder, was considered a cheap off-cut back when the product was being developed.
I finished reading all 1,600 virtual pages of Reamde within a week, and it was an absolute blast. A very bingeable book, and one that I realize underlines a trend in my recent media habits. A couple of months ago, I was reading and playing a lot of detective and murder mysteries. Right now it seems I’m on a techno-thriller and espionage kick.
After finishing Tiny Bookshop last week, I started playing Jack Move, an indie cyberpunk RPG with very nice modern pixel art graphics. It’s currently on sale at a tremendous discount for the Nintendo Switch, so take a look.
I also bought 007 First Light for the PS5 (20% off sale) but haven’t gotten around to starting on it yet. My hopes are high not just because of the developers’ pedigree (IO Interactive, of the Hitman games), but because in making a game about James Bond as a junior agent, focused on spectacular action set pieces, they seem to have also made a game that looks like Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies.
The best spy thing of all has been Seasons 1 and 2 of The Agency, which I just finished over the weekend. Michael Fassbender is in top form throughout as a ‘magically’ charismatic manipulator in the CIA, slipping between accents and allegiances as he tries to navigate an ever-expanding web of complications. I also loved Saura Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Daniela Morata/Acosta, a rookie agent sent on a dangerous undercover mission — a setup I alluded to as a ‘less stupid Lioness’ a few weeks ago. I liked that the show spends time looking at the psychology of the people who sign up for this job, all carrying some marvelous, self-destructive defect that makes them head towards things others run away from.
You know who else had a secret identity and was persecuted when he went public? That’s right, I’m talking about the original sleeper agent. We went to see the new production of his story, Jesus Christ Superstar, on its last day at the Marina Bay Sands. Tickets were bought impulsively and spontaneously by Kim, and we had a good time despite some of that rock music being quite dated now in not the best way. It was also consistently over 95dB during the fuller songs, so we used our AirPods Pro in Transparency mode to provide hearing protection while maintaining audio quality. They are super handy, and I’ll never attend a show without them.
As of September 1, Apple entered a new era. It’s hard to believe that Tim Cook’s been CEO for 15 years already, and I wonder if that’s because his term was marked by many smaller ripples adding up, rather than big waves that shook the world and demanded attention. I look forward to seeing how things turn out with Ternus. As for the upcoming product event next week, I’m still doubtful I could commit to a first-generation folding iPhone without a telephoto lens. After getting used to having 200mm of reach on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, giving it up for a larger screen doesn’t sound like a great trade. Let’s see if they offer any novel use cases beyond “watch bigger videos”.
But I saw a tweet saying Tim was asked what his legacy would be, and he answered neatly that a legacy is what others decide about you, not something you choose for yourself. Which got me thinking: I probably used to believe it was important to make good things and leave them behind to have had a worthwhile life. While I still think that’s a noble pursuit, history will happily separate you from your output if pushed. At best, people will now say ‘Annie Hall is a great movie’ or ‘Thriller is a solid album.’ The product doesn’t rescue the person’s reputation, it just stands on its own merits. It’s probably more important to try and be a good person than to write the great Singaporean novel.
Look Ma, no memorizing and switching apps and searching and clicking and switching back!
In any case, iOS 27 is going to be a huge upgrade for anyone with an eligible phone. I’ve been using Siri AI to answer my everyday questions during the beta period, and I’ll say again it’s good enough to replace whatever service you’re using now, e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT. The fact that it’s more private than those other services should be reason enough. And last night when I came across an Instagram reel recommending a handful of albums (I get these quite often now), I just paused it and asked Siri to “Add this album to my Apple Music library”, and it did. These are tasks some of us maybe naively expected to be able to ask of our devices years ago, but soon learned to stop trying when they failed to understand, or suggested that they could ‘show us some web results’ instead. Well, now we get to unlearn all that and figure out where the new limits are.
By the time this goes live, I should be in Tokyo. We picked this week to go because Kim thought that there would be a lull at work. That did not turn out to be true, nor is it particularly good timing by any measure: it will be Japan’s Golden Week holidays, a notoriously busy and crowded domestic tourism season, plus there was just a massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast this week. I believe the Japanglish phrase would be Ohwellganai.
24 hours until take off and I still haven’t packed a single item. That’s either a sign I’m becoming a seasoned traveler (not likely) or that I’m taking this trip more casually than usual. Maybe it’s the fact that the weather is pretty mild and won’t require a different wardrobe than what I usually wear. I hope Tokyo is ready for my basic-ass black t-shirt and baggy jeans look. Compared to last year’s month-long stay, stopping by for a week this time feels really breezy.
I’ll often obsess over what camera to bring on a trip, but this time the decision is much easier. For one thing my top pick, the Ricoh GR III, has decided to completely lock up, physically. All its critical buttons are stuck and gummed up either with dust or crystallized substances — not for the first time, but worse than ever. This doesn’t happen to any other line of camera I’ve owned. The GRs are brilliant little things but their build quality and reliability has sadly been a weak spot.
Secondly, the cameras in the iPhone 17 series are the best they’ve been in years. I’m okay just shooting with the native app in HEIC and editing photos with its “next-generation Photographic Styles”. Or I could shoot ProRAW and edit them in Halide Mk3 too, but it’s mostly extra work and not essential like it was a couple of years ago when Apple’s Smart HDR lost the plot.
This week was also a birthday week so there was altogether too much eating and that’s never a great idea before a holiday where you’re already destined to put on a few kilos. This week has involved too many curry puffs, pizzas, roast lamb, pastas, and patés. I didn’t buy myself anything more than a 10th anniversary copy of To Pimp A Butterfly on vinyl. I decided that since I’m managing to get a lot done with my M1 MacBook Air, upgrading to an M5 isn’t something that would really excite me at all. Making the most of this five-year-old machine is more satisfying, so I could conceivably wait for the M6 model.
This week I once again repurposed existing parts to make more new things. Last week’s work on the orchids was too intricate to use only once (pun unintended). So I ported the math to my procedural artwork generator to create a new style called Orchids Forever, where I can stage them with different lighting conditions and make wallpapers.
Because Cien said she enjoyed having the music from Orchids, Once. in the background as she worked, I started to think about making a thing that was designed to sit in the background of a workday. The first idea that came to mind was sadly too complex for me to pull off (for now), so I started on another that places a few orchids in a flower box outside a window, looking out over the Singapore skyline. The idea is that it lets people anywhere pretend they’re in Singapore, looking out over a scene that changes with the time of day and actual weather.
The day after I made it, my ex-colleague Tobi over in Germany said he misses Singapore, so I sent this over to help. Rather than reuse the procedurally generated music from Orchids, Once., which would be completely stripping that work for parts, I integrated a free Apple Music Radio player, which makes me happy because more people should hear their live stations.
While reflecting on all this, I’ve started to think there are three camps of people making things with AI. The first, like me, wants to design experiences and outsource the coding. The second wants to code and outsource the design. The third just wants to see things made and don’t care much about either.
This is an enthusiast market, and people are even buying curated Markdown prompt files that promise to enforce design and/or development “best practices,” trying to compensate for not knowing what good looks like. But I’m still skeptical that the general public will want to generate their own custom apps. Most people might create a widget or two to solve a personal problem, but that’s it.
The real unlock for wider consumer vibe coding will be raising the quality of AI-generated UX design. Nobody scrutinizes generated code, but bad design can be felt instantly. Better design defaults might increase the numbers in camps two and three: the people who just want a thing made and don’t particularly have an idea how it should look or work, but would still notice if it was ugly or confusing.
Claude Design, released this week, might be a trojan horse for exactly this. Although seemingly positioned as the anti-Claude Code, with a focus on front-end design and visual prototyping rather than coding (making it a tool for the first camp), it’s still going to make design more accessible for all makers, even the code-oriented ones. It’s worth noting Figma’s stock fell 7% after the announcement.
The secondary effect — already playing out in layoffs I keep hearing about — is a devaluation of designers for common production tasks. This drum is being banged by every dimwit on LinkedIn so you know it’s well underway. Most designers will have needed to start burrowing deeper into their organizations yesterday, into strategy and human-centered decision making roles. Service and business designers should have had a head start, but this is a game of musical chairs and someone’s taking out half the chairs.
I watched the Sphere (1998) movie with my book club and while I expected it to be possibly racist or sexist, I didn’t think it would be as offensive as it was. It’s godawful. I didn’t hesitate to give it 1 star on Letterboxd. There must be an interesting story behind how Barry Levinson came to direct an undersea horror film based on a sci-fi hit novel by Michael Crichton, starring Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone among others, and have it come out so unwatchable and incoherent. The effects, both practical and computer generated, are laughable. And this was just a year before The Matrix.
We finished Company Retreat, the new hidden camera show from the makers of Jury Duty. The premise is that a normal person is chosen to temp at a company that’s going on their annual team-building retreat, except everyone else is an actor. They put him through absurd situations that test his character, and like in the first show, the mark turns out to be an unbelievably good human being. The scale of the con is much larger this time, and the behind the scenes content is as interesting as the main story (if not more so). I think they went just a little too far with some of the characters this time, to the point where you think he must have known this wasn’t normal.
I’m currently reading another goddamned Japanese cozy novel, except this one seems to be worth the paper it’s printed on. Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop seemed like an appropriate choice given that district is where we’ll be staying. Like some of these other trash tomes, it’s a bunch of intersecting short stories centered around a titular shop. This time, the stories are actually kinda interesting and have emotional cores that work — stories of everyday people trying to write letters to resolve personal issues. Rob asked if it was appropriate for his 12-year-old (that’s about the reading grade for these books), and I said yes, as long as you can explain the concept of a hostess club to him.
I’ve also begun reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, a book that appeared on my radar awhile back but whose apparent premise — life is only 4,000 weeks long, so what are you going to do about it? — scared me off. Then Ted mentioned it when we met up a couple of weeks ago and thought that I’d find its concepts familiar, and in line with how I’m already living. I took that as a tremendous compliment and permission to get started. I read the intro and first chapter on the plane, and they deal with the idea that you should embrace that life has time limits, and accept you’ll never be able to do everything. Not only is that okay, it’s how all people lived before our clock-watching, productivity-obsessed era. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was taking away the wrong conclusions, though, because when I think about how short life is, I think of how Whose Line Is It Anyway? is played. You may recall it’s the show “where everything is made up and the points don’t matter”.
It’s Sunday night in Tokyo and I’m in bed rewatching Lost In Translation (2003) on local TV.
I’ll say one thing about my vinyl collecting this week and move on to other subjects, promise. But I run these posts by Claude to get comments and catch mistakes, and it’s been saying that their money is on me owning 100 records by March since I’m weak. Well, joke’s on you, Bubbles, because I only bought one album this week! Yes, I said ‘no more’ but this one was justified because it’s only available on vinyl. The album: Dr. Dre’s 2015 Compton album’s instrumentals.
Okay I said we’d move on, but this is related. An article about “friction-maxxing” in 2026 made the rounds this week, and Rob shared it with me saying buying records was kind of in the same territory. I jokingly replied, “things yo-yo so fast these days, I think the backlash to frictionmaxxing is gonna come quick and we’ll all embrace digital (convenience) again.” I sent him back this tweet, which argued that ‘ackshually, we have so much friction in modern life, and I’m happy for AI to take some of it away so I can be more intentional about the important things’ — which I fully agree with.
Some time ago, I saw a video series on YouTube from a guy who decided to only listen to music through an old iPod again, instead of streaming. He was obviously effusive about how much better the experience was, and some other people I knew said they were going to try and do the same. The act of using an iPod with its wires and manual syncing struck me as adding unnecessary friction. It’s not friction that makes the music more enjoyable, it’s focus and intention, and friction is one way to induce it in an attention-deficit mind. But you can have that same experience on your iPhone with a little more self control; just prune your library, make a couple of playlists, pin six heavy rotation albums to the top of your list, and ignore the limitless catalog in the background.
I got on my soapbox and continued to Rob, “I think many people struggle with doing things intentionally enough for their brains to become aware they are doing them, and form the memories. I saw a tweet the other day about how looking at your hands when you set something down, like your keys, increases the chance of you remembering where you put them.”
“We just do a lot of things with minimal attention and focus now to get through the day, and not enough of it sticks, so we feel unsatisfied or unmoored from our lives. So you don’t really need a physical music collection, you just need to pay attention to the music you listen to rather than slap something on in the background with an algorithm. But that discipline is waning.”
I found this in the sleeve of my dad’s old Bowie album
Let’s go on another tangent if you’re still here. Fujifilm announced a new product, and I literally did not believe it when I saw it. I was convinced the pictures were an AI hoax, and only began to accept it when I landed on the official press release.
The Instax mini Evo Cinema is modeled on the form of an old Super 8 video camera, and takes photos and short video clips. It can print those photos on Instax mini film, of course, but it can also upload video clips to a server (they’ll stay up for only two years) and print a keyframe that has a QR code link to the video. This is objectively a stupid design if you care about media permanence, which the very idea of printing images on Instax is based on. I think the product is okay if you discard the Instax component altogether — it’s a cute, retro-styled digital camera that you can transfer photos and videos off onto your computer or phone. They could have just made that, but Instax makes Fujifilm a heap of money, so they bolted that on.
The other thing that prevented me from ordering one on sight was the central “Eras dial” gimmick. You can turn a physical dial and add filters to make your videos look like they were shot in the 1930s, 40s, and all decades up to 2020. I like this in principle, but 100% doubt the ability of the Instax team to pull off the execution. Let me take a step back: the Fujifilm camera division that makes their X-series cameras (e.g. X100VI, X-T5, X-E5) is absolutely goated. They have brilliant people doing color science and their “film simulations” are basically software updates so good that people will buy new $2,000+ cameras when they come out with fresh ones.
The Instax team, on the other hand, are like the Temu version. They make chintzy plastic cameras with clumsy industrial designs and even worse software. I have the Instax mini Evo camera and all its filters are so cheesy they would embarrass the most amateur of iPhone apps. Pulling off the processing required for the Era effects to look authentic would call for a powerful chip in the Cinema camera, and there’s little chance at all there’ll be one. But the counter argument is that this is all by design. The Instax/Cheki target audience in Japan significantly overlaps that of a purikura photo booth, where cheesy, over-the-top effects are the point. So maybe I’m just not the intended buyer here, but I’ll wait for the release to be sure.
The ‘Season of Joy’ has been dismantled
Why do I sound so grumpy this week? Maybe it’s the weird itching I developed on my arms. Maybe the new glasses I got made that turned out too tight. Maybe the six mediocre episodes of the UK series Red Eye that we decided to watch a second season of. Maybe the letdown of Sushiro’s “Claws for Celebration” crab promotion, where said crab legs were weird and mushy. Maybe the persistent pain in my right knee that says I’m getting old.
But J Dilla’s music has been a bright spot. I finished reading Dilla Time, the very detailed and extremely readable biography by Dan Charnas that I started last week. As someone who’s always sucked at rhythm games like Rock Band, I now understand that my predilection for hitting the drums slightly before or after the beat could simply be a byproduct of listening to too much jazz and hip-hop and having a ‘swung’ sense of time. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.
Please enjoy this recent hour-long mix of Dilla’s music performed by one DJ Kenta in a Tokyo coffee shop that I’ll now have to visit the next time I’m in town.
The week got off to a bad start when our three-year-old Dyson V12 vacuum cleaner stopped working. The motor cyclone made a pulsating noise and the error message “Airways Blocked” appeared on the little LED screen. Usually this means that you’ve got some ball of hair choking one of the attachments, or your filters need cleaning. I checked everything and knocked out so much dust that my palm hurt, but still no luck.
Our cleaner shared that another client had similar problems and paid about $150 for repair at a Dyson service center, and a Perplexity search corroborated that would be the starting point, depending on what needed to be fixed. It said complex replacements could take over three weeks! My first priority was to get it working asap, because I have no idea how people lived before vacuum cleaners were invented.
On a whim, I decided to check what a new vacuum cleaner would cost. The latest Dyson, the “V16 Animal” model is over S$1,100, and another V12 would be S$800. But the shocking thing is how crazy cheap the Chinese clones have gotten, ranging between S$80 (yes) and S$400. Xiaomi’s most powerful, the G20 Max, is only about S$320 and I’m sure it rivals our Dyson in capability and (I wouldn’t have thought so before this) longevity. I was beginning to think buying an entirely new Chinese vacuum for the price of a Dyson repair was a viable option.
Anyhow, I got an appointment at the service center for a couple of days later, and the staff’s instant opinion was that there wasn’t anything stuck further inside the cyclone unit, but it was an electronic or PCB (printed circuit board) issue. Meaning the entire main bit of the vacuum cleaner, minus battery and air filter, would need to be swapped out. Total cost: S$168. I believe this is simply the modern default for consumer electronics — don’t bother repairing or replacing one little component, give the customer a new unit and send the old one back for recycling (or disposal). It’s wasteful, but means the business doesn’t need to train frontline repair staff and the customer gets a “better” experience to boot.
Later, I went to have a look at the Xiaomi model in person, and it’s definitely uglier and clunkier, with the same downward dust receptacle ejection system as much older Dyson designs. I do like my V12 very much, I just don’t believe in it as much after this incident.
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I saw with some excitement that Puzzle Quest was being rereleased in an “Immortal Edition” for the Switch, with remastered visuals. It’s also out on other platforms. I played the original back in 2007 on my Nintendo DS and probably sank over 100 hours into it. It was probably the first game to combine Match-3 puzzling with an RPG storyline and character progression. To date, I haven’t played a better expression of this idea.
With regards to this new version, it’s been good so far. The UI looks gigantic going from a tiny handheld to a 65” TV, but the great thing about playing on Switch is that you have the touchscreen controls this genre was made for. I have yet to encounter any of the bugs that plagued the original release, but that’s no guarantee I won’t. If I recall correctly, sometimes moves wouldn’t register and you’d die despite technically winning. On one hand it made the game feel unfair, but glass-half-full people would call it extra challenge. The game was so fun, I was happy to play around these deficiencies.
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On Friday night we met Wen and Sarah for Mexican food at a place called Huevos, in New Bahru. I read awhile back that the retail complex was struggling but that was not the case that night; it was pretty loco. One fun memory that came up was a trip to Bintan we took together back in 2009 where Mandy sang John Mellencamp’s Hurts So Good in the pool so often that it became the theme song of that vacation. I went home that night and unearthed a video I made in iMovie from all the clips I shot, using that song as the soundtrack. The video quality, shot on my Panasonic LUMIX LX3, has held up incredibly well after all this time.
The next day, I ate at Shake Shack and made the double mistake of ordering a Tiramisu milkshake and finishing it even though I could have stopped halfway. It turns out that single serving had 850 calories and a whopping 90g of sugar — that’s 18 teaspoons of system-disrupting poison! For comparison, the single-patty Shackburger I also ate has only 550 calories. After learning all that, I didn’t have the heart to look up the side of fries I also ate. At this age, I don’t think the damage will ever be undone. I might have to start saving up for Ozempic.
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My Goodreads annual reading challenge has been completed with a vengeance, and currently stands at 40 books out of a targeted 24. The last few weeks have been made up of financial self-help material, including Nick Maggiulli’s The Wealth Ladder, which I also saw being featured on the shelves of a local Books Kinokuniya. I thought it worth mentioning because of how it lays out different strategies for people on different rungs of the so-called ladder of net worth: $1–10k, $10–100k, $100k–1M, and so on. It’s a very clear way to think about what actions and sacrifices are needed to get to the next level, and whether you’d even want to. There’s also some interesting data on how people at the higher levels distribute their money in completely different ways from us plebs.
I also read Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, an infuriatingly patchy story about time travel and searching for a father who’s gone missing in time and space. There are some novel ideas here that move the genre forward, some of them explained with a lot of (pseudo?)science and some only intriguingly hinted at. The post-time travel world that it builds is fundamentally illogical, and almost no effort is made to integrate it with a reader’s expectations — in other words, it kind of fails to hold together. However, the actual writing is occasionally brilliant. There are passages that collapse memory, description, and feeling — suddenly you’re thinking about your own childhood and watching it through the quantum bookshelf, like at the end of Interstellar (2014).
Speaking of movies, I rewatched the Wachowskis’ 2012 version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with my book club and it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Turns out both the book and film feel shakier on return. Anyhow, it was only 13 years ago, but there are race impersonation elements in this film that seem like transgressions today. Multiple white actors have their eyes taped up to play Asian characters. Halle Berry and Zhou Xun both have scenes where they play blue-eyed white women. The Korean characters speak English in a mix of other Asian accents. The only line that isn’t crossed is white people putting on blackface. Everything else seems to have gotten the green light.
I type this while listening to Sam Fender’s last album, People Watching. I’ve been meaning to hear this through for awhile, but it got buried in my ever-growing library of new music. Thankfully, with the latest update to Apple Music in the OS26 series, you can now pin up to six albums or playlists to the top of your screen. I’ve wanted this sort of ‘Now Playing’ or ‘Heavy Rotation’ virtual shelf for the longest time — it’s the first feature I’d add if designing a music player app. So this album and five other neglected ones are now sitting up there, and I can give them the attention I want.
I’ve been listening on both my new AirPods Pro 3 and an original pair of AirPods Pro, and dare I say the difference is quite obvious. Louanne asked me what I do with old pairs of headphones when I get new ones, and the answer was “put them in different rooms!”, of course. I’m fast running out of rooms. The new model sounds much more Beats-like than ever (modern Beats, not OG Monster Beats). That is to say, a bass-forward sound with a very clear, almost sparkling high end. It’s a fun sound, and I think they’ll be very popular for all kinds of music, if not audiophile-grade neutral. They appear to fit better than before too, and the difference in body shape will strike longtime AirPods users as soon as they pick them up.
Then my new iPhone arrived, and before you judge, the old one is being returned to Apple’s Trade In partner in a few days, where it will hopefully be responsibly refurbished or at worst recycled. They’ve suggested that I’m likely to get nearly half the original cost back, which is an astounding deal for a two-year-old model! I’ll believe it when the deposit lands in my bank account.
I’m very happy I decided to stick with the Pro Max size instead of switching to a Pro. The slight increases in height and width are visible if you put them together, but isn’t really noticeable in the hand. The increase in thickness IS, but combined with the new gentler corners on the seamless aluminum body, I think thicker is actually better? This might be the best feeling iPhone ever.
I’ve yet to put the new camera system through its paces, but I’m excited and very pleased after a couple of days with it. Images look cleaner, and the redesigned front-facing camera is a revelation. I took a test selfie and could scarcely believe how presentable I looked. Coming from the iPhone 15 series, I’m also new to the new Photographic Styles that were introduced last year, and am getting a lot out of them. I compared photos shot in RAW with Halide and in HEIC with the default camera using a tweaked “Natural” style, and they’re extremely close in both SDR and HDR. This is a big deal! Along with the revised Photonic Engine this year, the dark days of overprocessed iPhone photos may be behind us.
When reviews get creative
One thing I’ve noticed this year is how bland and predictable the video reviews from the usual tech YouTubers and influencers have been. They go through the spec sheets while speaking to the camera, do a few test shots, and end without any thoughts you couldn’t have pulled out of ChatGPT. But then I saw a couple of videos from the Chinese-speaking side of the internet, and that’s when I realized Western civilization is well and truly finished.
Take a look at these and tell me you’re not duly impressed by the storytelling creativity, production skill, points of view, and passion on display — even if you can’t understand a word (but most of them have English subtitles you can enable). They could just shoot the phones on a stand while swinging a light overhead, but they instead they go hard with CGI, costumes, sets, comedic sketches, and cinematic editing. And they do these in the WEEK they’ve given between the phones being revealed and launching.
We visited a local art sales event for works based on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex franchise, just to have a look. The metal-printed pieces were going for upwards of S$4,000, so there was never any chance we’d buy one — but I got a little acrylic plate standee for my desk (S$25). Above are some snaps straight from the iPhone 17 Pro Max, using only Photographic Styles.
Afterwards, we visited the SG60 Heart&Soul Experience which is being housed at the site of the old library@orchard. Supposedly it will be renovated and return as a downtown library next year, which is great news. From what I can gather, it’s meant to inspire people about what Singapore’s future might look like, and what place they’d have in it (employing lots of tech to personalize the journey). Criticisms I’ve heard are that it doesn’t go far enough, and the future shown looks kinda like the present: delivery drones, working in VR headsets, greenery everywhere. Visit and see for yourself. Bookings are required, but the tickets are free. It’s quite an involved production with each visitor being given a guide device (an encased Xiaomi smartphone) to wear around their necks, and human facilitators bringing them through the stations.
Oh, speaking of cases, we went by Apple Orchard Road after the show to have a look at the iPhone Air, and I haven’t seen that store so packed in years. I picked up a rather loud Beats case in “Pebble Pink”, mostly because I really wanted a Beats case last year but they only made them for the iPhone 16 series. It’s hard plastic with a matte finish that’s slippery when your hands are dry but tacky enough if there’s a bit of moisture.
Check out my reel with the Pink Panther theme:
And while we’re on the subject of great directors, I finally sat down with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) on MUBI. More explicit than I expected, it’s easy to see why people call it pretentious with its heavy callbacks to classic cinema, but it’s never boring and it sure knows how to use mirrors. I gave it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, mostly because there’s “altogether too much time spent lying on floors for my liking”. There’s also one truly revolting moment where, out of money, they raid the apartment building’s trash for scraps of food and assemble the world’s grossest bento.
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025), now on Apple TV+, is a remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which I’ll embarrassingly only get around to watching after this homage. But this is a fine film that stands on its own: a sharp, sometimes experimental exploration of class and morality, constantly playing on the gulf between generations — Motown vs. modern rap, film vs. digital, Kurosawa vs. Lee.
This week’s installment is update #256! That’s a big deal for fans of computationally significant numbers.
Oddly, just as Michael blogged that his family was down with gastroenteritis last week, a similar bug hit our household. Kim got a bad case of what we thought was food poisoning, and then, of course, I came down with it two days later. It’s a weird one: the stomach trouble comes with headaches and fatigue. Fearing that it was contagious, plus being all tired out, I had to skip one meetup and a wedding dinner over the weekend.
So not that much happened with me this week, but I suppose we can talk about the mess out there?
Google held their annual I/O event and showed off their latest AI achievements. Tl;dr, some of this stuff is just gross. From a technical standpoint, yes it’s remarkable that pretty realistic video (with sound) can be generated from text, and Google can now use your personal context from documents and emails to help with tasks — similar to what Apple promised (but has yet to deliver), with the important distinction that one centers privacy and on-device computation while the other will do it on their servers. I don’t know if I trust Google to let an AI crawl all my documents, and for that reason, minimized my exposure to Google years ago.
I remember when Gmail first came out and pioneered showing contextual ads next to your emails. There was an uproar, and the company had to calm people by saying ‘no one is reading your emails, it’s just automated keyword matching’. Well, with LLMs, it’s much, much worse. No human would be able to go through all your messages, photos, location data, and search history to piece together an invasive psychological profile about your vulnerabilities, and make it actionable for advertisers. Trust that an AI will. Just look at how a version of Claude 4 Opus in testing tried to blackmail an Anthropic engineer over an affair it believed they were having.
Beyond the business model of Google’s AI products, it’s their designed intent that feels particularly bleak. One example they proudly demoed: a friend emails asking for holiday recommendations at a place you’ve visited. Instead of writing them a thoughtful reply, you let Google AI scour your photos, emails, documents, and receipts to auto-generate a message, using words chosen to sound like you. Sundar Pichai even had the nerve to say, “With personal smart replies, I can be a better friend”. With friends like these, don’t even bother writing. Just ask Google directly and it can snoop the inboxes of a billion other customers to give you the statistically “best” itinerary.
And this is where a company’s lack of imagination and care makes itself plainly apparent. Instead of designing an AI system that writes replies in your place, they could have made one that recaps your holiday with a little presentation showing you where you went, what you did, and what you enjoyed most. Then, memory suitably refreshed, you could sit down and write your friend a reply that shows you actually give a shit about them, and both of your lives would be richer for it. I’m beginning to think that Apple, by failing to ship their AI features on time, might be saving us from a future I don’t want to live in. Maybe they’ll never ship. Maybe that was the plan all along.
Then a man who many would expect to know better — who sits on stages and professes the importance of values in technology, and is arguably the most famous designer of this century — announced a new venture (also called io) with Sam Altman and OpenAI. And the vibes, my friends, were off. The 9-minute launch video came across as a thin PR exercise to polish Altman’s spotty public image and reassure OpenAI’s investors. It struck an uncharacteristically self-congratulatory tone for the usually humble Ive while announcing, essentially, nothing. Sterling Crispin tweeted a biting Marxist read of the video in the style of Slavoj Zizek. Many saw it as Altman angling for a Steve Jobs comparison, with critics pointing out that he’s not enough of a product person to be a true partner (and necessary editor) to Ive. In any case, I have no doubt that the io team will deliver some beautifully designed hardware. But I fear even they can’t summon enough thoughtfulness or optimism to divert AI from its current trajectory, or prevent the cultural and societal wreckage it’s likely to create.
Speaking of nice devices, one of my fondest gaming memories involves my last year at university, when I switched from my PC to a Mac that was relatively useless for playing games. I couldn’t imagine not having any games (this was before smartphones, mind you), so I bought myself a Game Boy Advance SP — the pinnacle of the series, in my opinion. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect form factor for a handheld console. The clamshell design protects the screen; the vertical layout keeps your arms and hands close together, even when squeezed into an economy flight seat; the screen was sharp and self-lit, which was not a given in those days. I would lie in bed in the dark on cold nights and play Final Fantasy I until I was bored to sleep. To this day, I still fall asleep during boring turn-based battles — one of the reasons why I want to try Clair Obscur Expedition 33, since it blends turns with real-time actions. Pretty sure I traded in my GBA SP for store credit to buy the Nintendo DS (DS Phat) when it came out later that year, and I regret it.
Anbernic, the China-based maker of retro emulation handhelds, released a clone of the GBA SP last year, the wonderfully named RG35XXSP. It runs a Linux-based operating system and may or may not come preloaded with thousands of classic gaming ROMs from the NES to the PS1 — you should only play the ones you actually own, of course. I didn’t get one because Anbernic doesn’t have the best rep when it comes to build quality, and I wasn’t sure they’d get it right the first time. Fast forward to today, and the new RG34XXSP (yes, it went back a model number) looks to be the one to get, even over the competing Miyoo Flip V2. DYOR (do your own research) though! They made it slightly smaller, dampened the button clicks, added two analog thumbsticks for wider compatibility, and came up with some better colorways. Now that it finally sounds more like a product than a prototype, mine’s on its way in the mail, and I can’t wait to relive some old games while waiting for the Switch 2 to arrive.
Meanwhile in Japan, Fujifilm decided to get in on the nostalgia cash grab game with a new camera release, the long-teased “X half”. Many expected this to be based on the X100 or GFX series, that is to say, employing an APS-C or medium format sensor. But no, it’s a 1-inch sensor, vertically oriented to resemble 35mm half-frame photos. A major selling point is the ability to shoot “in-camera” diptychs (a two-photo collage). The overall camera concept is fantastic: it has a 32mm lens, is very small, and features a “film camera mode” that is basically a physical version of those iPhone apps that try to simulate the fun limitations of analog photography. When activated, you are locked into a chosen film simulation look until you’ve used up a virtual roll of film, ranging from 36–72 half-frame shots. You can’t see any photos until you finish, and you can’t even use the digital screen to compose shots, only the optical viewfinder.
I would be down for this, except that early reviews show many corners were cut between concept on paper and the final product. Firstly, it’s made of plastic painted to look like metal. There are no words for how much I hate this when done badly. There’s also a visible seam on the front face that ruins the look. Then the processor seems to be slow, and it ruins the illusion of the film advance lever which you need to crank before taking the next shot; it’s reportedly unresponsive until the last photo has saved. If you’re going to fake analog mechanisms then it has to be perfect! The flash unit, a big part of the analog film camera look, is a weak LED rather than a xenon bulb. Then there are the cheesy overlay effects, like light leaks and “expired film” color casts, which seem borrowed from the company’s Instax evo cameras rather than its premium X series. The camera costs S$999, which many are calling too high, but honestly if they had to charge S$200 more to actually do the concept justice, I’d be on board. If some random startup made this for half the price, the flaws would be forgivable. But this is Fujifilm, and if you’re going to carry this faux film camera around and look like an old douchebag with more money than sense, it had better be good.
Until they do a better job, I’ll get by with the Diptic app I bought in 2010 which makes similar collages with just my iPhone (see featured image above), which also shoots vertical orientation photos by default!
