Clearly one current need to solve: how to get away from negative aspects of phones while retaining the positives—more presence in the real world vs reflexive insular online ones. Needing a better (productive) remote control for our life over a better (addictive) tv in our pocket.

Don’t sleep on the cellular Ultra + @thetinyPod lite combo

can ai fix his vocal fry yet.

For all our organizational faults this was an exceptional strength of Snap design. Our designer to engineer ratio was prob the most skewed of any company out there at our scale, which really forced a trust level and cross app responsibility to be felt by the 10-12 of us back then.

Needs work and I still can’t handle the sharp glowy/tacky app icons but using ios 26 for the past day, it hit me that I’m just… really happy skeuomorphism is kind of back. (if it took an army of designers and engineers then so bet it lol also pls make all animations 30% faster).

Using iOS 26b,.The app icons are bad. The contrast/legibility is bad. The new cramped tab bar/collapsing UX is bad. The search bar being reachable is nice. The organic button to menu transitions are awesome. The liquid glass light refractions and depth is actually… incredible.

They're showing us the next era of iPhone industrial design (rumored all-glass, curved, bezeless iPhone 20) without actually showing it. "our new design blurs the lines between hardware and software" doesn't really make sense yet but will in two yrs.

“It’ll prob be subtle like some shimmering borders here and there” they said.

But I’m honestly here for it.

A big, beautiful contrast and legibility disaster.

thanks gpt i'll take your word for it

Not convinced of a real 10x convenience factor here that outweighs the steep cultural/social etiquette hill. Wireless AirPods were weird looking for less than a year before normalizing—I doubt cameras on your face and empty gazing ahead at a private HUD will have the same story.

Issue is they fundamentally dont know how to innovate in software esp w iPhone. Craft in a league of their own but w all the resources/talent, theyre still philosophically rudderless—AI’s just a perfect storm to showcase that inability to take swings at new value/not play catchup.

The exact watch series 10 display size kinda fits perfectly if you combine the leaked thickness/dimensions of the iPhone 17 Air and the camera redesign of the 17 Pro. If the body were Pro Max size/bigger you could prob fit 3 cameras… Maybe this is the rumored 2026-7 flip iPhone.

Have Apple designers actually used Apple Intelligence? How do you ship an answer dialogue box hard coded to disappear after 4 seconds, w no ability to retrieve it… literally can’t read a gpt answer in time, how would anyone rely on it? Embarrassing lack of basic ux consideration.

Kinda funny the end-vision of our collective digital future (w apple/meta throwing billions & billions at it) is essentially a floating iphone. Ornamentation of the physical world will be crazy tech too but so low utility that it really will just come down to: hands free screens.

One of these starts with the keyboard up and the other doesn’t. Makes all the difference over any of the aesthetic choices.

Betting the next several years of AI still feels like you’re talking to a kind of stupid person w super fast internet access. As an incredible utility it’ll only improve, but as a thing that feels like a real dynamically & subtly understanding & responding entity, we’re far away.

RT @thetinypod: 👀 Guess who’s finally here.