Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Xiaomi just held the most revealing phone launch of the year, and the interesting part wasn’t the phone. It was the apology. Lei Jun, the company’s founder, stood on stage and pre-explained the price before anyone could complain. Memory has gotten very expensive, he said, so the new Xiaomi 18 Fold starts at $1,540, and … Read more
What “in-house” actually means here The Huawei Mate 90 series launched in China this September. The line everyone repeats is that it is the most self-contained flagship on the market. That sounds like marketing until you look at what is actually inside. The processor is Huawei’s own Kirin 9050. The operating system is HarmonyOS 7, … Read more
Ask a friend in the US to name the biggest phone brands in the world. You’ll hear Apple, Samsung, maybe Google, maybe Motorola. What you almost never hear is Xiaomi, which is strange, because by shipment numbers Xiaomi is the third-largest phone maker on the planet. It outsells almost everyone, and a typical American has … Read more
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 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 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’ll be honest, I didn’t know this feature existed until about two months ago. And I’ve worn an Apple Watch every day for three years. Here’s what happened. I went to see Dune: Part Two with a friend. Dark theater, big screen, the whole thing. About 20 minutes in, I reached for my popcorn, and … Read more