Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Pierce Allen 
Apple announced the new Mac Studio with M5 Ultra yesterday, and my feed has been nothing but benchmarks and hot takes since. I was eating cereal when I saw the press release — not even kidding. I almost choked because the memory configs go up to 512GB now, which is insane for a desktop you … Read more
I almost sold my old phone for $15. That’s what the recycling site offered. Fifteen bucks. I stared at the screen and thought, “Really? This thing has a Snapdragon processor, 4GB of RAM, and a perfectly good screen. And you’re giving me lunch money?” So I didn’t sell it. Instead, I turned it into a … Read more
I woke up to something weird this morning. Scrolling through Twitter, I saw a post about Sony adding free TV to the PS5. Over 100 channels. No subscription. Just ads. My first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was confusion. I was mid-coffee when I scrolled past this, half-asleep, squinting at my phone. And I remember thinking, … Read more
I checked my battery health last week. 91%. Not bad, right? But my phone was dying by 3 PM. Every single day. I wasn’t gaming or editing video. Just scrolling, texting, taking some photos. Something didn’t add up. So I went down the rabbit hole. Read through Apple’s support docs, watched a bunch of videos, … Read more
Apple pushed iOS 27 Beta 7 to developers today. I checked the build number first, because that is usually where the interesting details hide. It is 24A5424a. That trailing “a”? It is Apple’s way of signaling the finish line is close. Let me back up for a second. I have been following the iOS 27 … Read more
Apple is finally refreshing the regular AirPods. Not the Pro models, not the Max. The entry-level earbuds that most people actually buy. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to announce AirPods 5 at its September 9 event, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and the foldable iPhone that everyone keeps discussing. There are two versions: … Read more
I’ve been messing with website performance for a while now. And one thing that kept coming up? Image sizes. Big images slow everything down. Visitors bounce. Google notices. It’s a whole thing. So I started looking into WebP. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an image format Google cooked up. The idea is simple: … Read more
I’ve been running a SATA SSD in my gaming rig for years. Never thought much about it. It loads games fast enough, or so I told myself. Then I started seeing NVMe drives drop in price. Gen4 ones. The kind that promise 7,000 MB/s read speeds. My SATA drive does about 550 MB/s. That’s a … Read more
I’ve been watching Google roll out AI products for a while now. Every few weeks, there’s a new announcement. Usually, it’s something technically impressive but feels a bit distant. Like, cool, but am I actually going to use it? Then I tried NotebookLM. And honestly? It’s different. NotebookLM isn’t the only underrated thing Google shipped. … Read more
I installed the August Windows 11 update last week. KB5121003. Didn’t think much of it. Security patch, right? Fixes some vulnerabilities, makes things safer. Then I tried to play a game. It crashed. Not a gentle crash either. The screen froze, went black, and then blue screen. EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION. My PC restarted itself. I stared at … Read more