In April 2019, New York University’s AI Now Institute released a report on the impact of bias in artificial intelligence systems. About 12 months later, you might remember the Twitter the storm caused when a pixelated image of Barack Obama was turned into a higher resolution image of the former president by an AI model. Except the model returned a high-resolution image of a white man when it was given a pixelated image of a black man. This is a classic example of the bias The AI Now Institute detailed in that NYU report. As we increasingly integrate artificial intelligence…

A little while ago, I wrote an article about some pretty bad product design misses by Apple.

So in this post, I want to talk about my favourite Apple product designs — and there is of cause plenty more of those. Apple has built a reputation for making some very well designed products. They have an entire book dedicated to showing off some of these products — which itself, is very well designed!

There are plenty of products in that book, but I’m only talking about my favourite product designs — ones I’ve had the chance to use. …

There’s plenty to love about the iPhone 12 mini. It gets some of the cameras that you’ll find on iPhone 12 Pro, the same processor, and MagSafe is here too. The physical size of the device was the main reason I opted for a non-Pro iPhone last year, and it’s been pretty great. It’s not as intrusive as my last iPhone Xs.

I never really watched any content on a smartphone besides Instagram and Twitter so the smaller display size didn’t bother me. …

The iPads are pretty capable machines. The models with the post-2018 all have powerful hardware and accessories that mean you can use them as pro machines. The processors are plenty fast, and the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil unlock the ability to get work done.

Since I’ve been using an iPad over the last few months, I’ve picked up on a few tips that can help with improving productivity. For me, productivity is all about optimising the use of your time. That is, spending less time doing the things that don’t really matter, and more time doing valuable tasks —…

Ever since WWDC21, I’ve been more and more convinced the best value iPad that Apple offers is the latest iPad Air. I’m one of those people who will tend to buy a “pro” version of a device if I can afford it, but I’ve been thinking I actually should have picked up an iPad Air instead of the iPad Pro 2020. Of cause when I made the purchase, I was still convinced Apple would bring pro-level features exclusively to iPad Pro.

Post-WWDC21 I think, value-wise, the iPad Air is unbeatable for the majority of people — including some of us…

I have been loving my AirPods Max since I picked them up a couple of weeks ago. This was one of those purchases I had zero justification for — I didn’t need over the ear headphones, and I certainly could have used the money for something more productive. And yet, I haven’t regretted buying them for one second. They fit perfectly with the way my life is set up at the moment.

That said, I think Apple needs to address a couple of things urgently with the next iteration of these headphones. They could even address one of the issues…

I find Apple Music’s Lossless Audio and Spatial Audio some of the most confusing software features by Apple. When these were announced, I was confused, but I assumed it would all make sense once the product launches. It’s still confusing and I have questions.

In a nutshell, Apple’s Lossless Audio feature allows users to listen to CD-quality music. I bet most casual users assumed as I did that the technology we have now is better than CD quality — new is always better, no?

Anyway, you can get this higher quality streaming with the right equipment, Bluetooth does not support…

I’ve recently decided to build an app for iOS. I’ve had an idea in my mind for a long time and only recently decided to do something about it. I have some experience with programming languages like Python and Bash, but I didn’t know anything about Swift, one of the two languages that most iOS apps are written in.

So I started learning. As you might expect, there are plenty of courses and takes on learning the language to program apps for the iPhone. …