Breaking Change

Lance Ulanoff at TechRadar:

'Satisfying' is the best way to describe the feeling of repeatedly opening and closing the iPhone Duo.

Britta O'Boyle at Tech Advisor:

The paper-like texture makes long reading sessions a pleasure, too.

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac:

Even after a week of using the iPhone Duo, that "wow factor" hasn't worn off.

Lisa Eadicicco at CNN, via KQ2:

The Duo's inner screen is best used when dedicating the whole thing to a single app like Netflix.

Mark Spoonauer at Tom's Guide:

Overall, though, I think the iPhone Duo is the best designed foldable yet with the most polished, intuitive and fun software experience.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

For me, by far, it's my favorite tablet experience ever.

Andrew O'Hara at AppleInsider:

The side-aligned dock is very comfortable to use, but it does stick out a bit on unupdated apps.

Stefan Vazharov at Popular Mechanics:

While I wouldn't recommend dropping the iPhone Duo, its extra-tough hinge made me feel more confident.

Nicolas Lellouche at Numerama (English translation from French):

The iPhone Duo is a tremendous success.

David Phelan at AVForums:

This is an unbeatably elegant and appealing phone and is all you could want from a foldable

Max Weinbach at Creative Strategies:

Being forced into just 2 apps means both apps are given better space.

Robert Leedham at British GQ:

The more I use the Duo, the less I want to go back to a normal iPhone.

Sean Keach at The Sun:

Gaming and entertainment are both elevated, and the larger keyboard makes it possible to actually get some work done on it too.

From Breaking Change v4, 4:45:

What is the Apple Vision Pro? I think it's clearly the future, and I feel even more strongly that way now that it's clearly the future because it is definitely not the present. It is coming in hot. It is not ready for prime time. And it's probably a good thing that Apple isn't going to make a whole lot of these or sell a whole lot of these. It's probably appropriate that they priced it the way that they did to not entice a lot of people to want to buy it right away. It's not to say it's not worth it, it's not to say I'm going to return mine, it's not to say it's bad.

Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson at The Verge:

Switching from the Duo back to one of our standard slab phones to get something done often felt like a relief.

Kenny Yeo at HardwareZone:

The Fold8 is surely the more compact and svelte phone, and it fits pockets more comfortably.

Ben McKimm at Man of Many:

Still, my overarching takeaway after a week is that the Duo is a stunning piece of hardware that I simply need more time with.

Julian Chokkattu at WIRED:

The trackpad works OK, but I could only get it to work after turning on AssistiveTouch in iOS' accessibility settings.

Sam Rutherford at Engadget:

But a lot of apps still need fine-tuning to look their best on Apple's first bendy iPhone.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball, on authentication:

I don't think Apple should have released the Duo before they figured this out.

Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel:

I just don't think it solves any problems the iPad doesn't already address and revives old ones the iPhone long since solved.

Brett Williams at Men's Health:

The foldable display is fun and works well, but I still don't think I'd be missing out if I didn't have it.

Nicolas Lellouche at Numerama (English translation from French):

On the downside, we still found an abnormal number of bugs for a new Apple product.

Munechika Nishida at AV Watch (English translation from Japanese), on multitasking flexibility:

Conversely, those wanting freedom here should choose an Android foldable, rather than the iPhone Duo.

Max Weinbach at Creative Strategies:

iOS feels buggier than normal iOS.

Jason Snell at Six Colors:

Even the apps I chose to place in my Dock were wrong, because the Dock serves a different purpose on the iPhone Duo!

Jason Cross at Macworld, first-day impressions, on the inner camera:

If this is the cost of an under-display camera, I don't want it.

Britta O'Boyle at Macworld, October 24:

The trade-off is reduced contrast, so darker scenes lose some depth, and smudges are easier to spot.

As always, send me your takes at [[email protected]] or justin.searls.co/feedback

Unlike Sam Altman, I sat down and did the math by hand to calculate that it

I regret to inform you the episode is now over. You can listen like you always

It was particularly fun for me to build a production pipeline with updating

As always into the show at [email protected] or via the feedback form.

Stuff we talked about, in order of me talking about them:

Zach Holman, founder of Signed, joins me for another 🔥Hotfix🔥. Zach wants more of everything. Let's see what we can do about that.

Write into the show at [email protected].

Show notes:

The summer heat has finally broken here in Shizuoka, and I'm enjoying a cool, wet, and cloudy day huddled around my microphone for warmth. I hope you'll join around my verbal campfire for yet another one of these.

As always, you can e-mail the show at [email protected]. Only a small proportion of listeners will ever write an e-mail, so I now offer a second option: the justin.searls.co/feedback form. People love filling out forms! Go try it out! Check the anonymous checkbox! Hell, enter a fake e-mail address—see if I care!

Stuff we talked about, in order of me talking about them:

We cut our trip a day short, so I found myself with a totally free day with no plans. Naturally, I wasted it by recording a 3-hour podcast. Dang.

I always enjoy shooting the shit with/at you, and if you'd like to be a more active participant in the shit-shooting, then hit me up at [email protected]. Really, I'll be nicer to you than I am to Sam Altman and Tang Tan. I promise.

Back to manually writing links. The zen of monotonous input tasks is suddenly something to be cherished in the current era.

The summer heat ended up thawing out my podcast, so I had no choice but to go buy a new microphone and grumble into it for a couple hours. Just how that works. Please enjoy.

I am actively soliciting mailbag participation. As always, the address is [email protected], and I'd be really curious to hear how America is doing because it seems like everything is going great.

For the first time I let Claude write these links for me, because it never occurred to me I didn't have to format the markdown manually:

The promise of Breaking Change is that with every major version (this being the 60th episode of the program, but only the 53rd such release), I will break something. Well, I finally did it. I think I broke the show. Find out how by listening for yourself!

Want to be my friend? Drop me a line at [email protected]. Want to file a complaint with my supervisor? Forward your concerns to [email protected].

These links may rot, but alas—death comes for us all:

Today, we're joined by a very special guest, Len Testa! You might know him from The Disney Dish podcast or from his excellent theme park travel planning app Touring Plans. Or you might not know him at all! No wrong answers.

This episode is all about Disney's ill-fated Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser live action role-playing hotel—which we both had the opportunity to experience right when it first launched. It was a life-changing experience for both of us, so why did it fail? Is it true that the top Disney brass learned all the wrong lessons from that failure? And will the CEO-in-waiting Josh D'Amaro ever have the courage to attempt something so ambitious again? Listen to this episode, in which we speak with an unearned confidence that suggests we have all of these answers!

You can reach out to Len at [email protected] and you can write into the show at [email protected]. He'll read your e-mail and reply to it, but I may only skim it.

Sure feels like some combination of AI, the US military, and the AI military could bring an end to the world any day now, so I figured I'd better record one last show for posterity. Welcome me on this version's speedrun to the apocalypse!

So long as the EMP blasts don't nuke all our ham radios, write in to [email protected] and I'll read it on the next release of the program. Over.

Be sure to click all these links while the clickin's good:

I feel like I'm getting saltier, and it's concerning. If you want me to tone it down and/or up, let me know. It'll go a lot better if you just write to [email protected] instead of yelling at your phone.

As usual, I brought the goods. Now here are the receipts: