For something like a year, there have been rumours going around about the new touch-based OLED MacBook Pros. 

The rumour that had me most skeptical was one about being thinner and lighter than previous generations.

I really want lighter MacBook Pros. Anything we can do to maintain their power envelope while making them smaller is a big win. My 16″ MacBook Pro is a tank, while 5lb isn’t enormously heavy, it definitely adds up in a bag. (From my recent experiences, I can tell you it adds up more when you’re carrying a laptop bag, a car seat, and a 13lb 6‑week-old baby too).

I was an early adopter of the disastrously thin and light MacBook Pros with the world’s worst keyboards. I went through a bunch of those as a sort-of unpaid QA tester for the world’s largest company. It was not great. Eventually, I gave up and bought an iMac Pro instead, because getting work done was more important than being portable.

The current MacBook Pro generation is a wonderful design and was a great course correction. Making them smaller and lighter again sounds like a terrible idea.

So I’ve been nervously waiting for more information about that with baited breath.

From the same Bloomberg article about Ternus taking charge of design at Apple (which I also wrote about) comes this juicy new tidbit about new laptop designs:

The new MacBook Pros are lighter — significantly lighter. Apple has reengineered the machine’s interior, miniaturizing parts and rearranging components to make the computer much easier to carry. The current 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs as much as 4.8 pounds, compared with 3.3 pounds for the 15-inch MacBook Air, so any meaningful reduction would be immediately noticeable. I expect these machines, currently in testing with macOS 27.2, to arrive by next month.

I will not be a guinea pig for this design. I’m not buying one in 2026. (Maybe 2027 with a new studio budget, but we’ll have to see.) 

However, this sounds like good news! Making a laptop thinner and lighter without making dramatic changes to the rest of the machine is a terrible idea. Making a laptop thinner and lighter because your chips are all smaller now at 2nm and you’ve miniaturized and rearranged the other components? That sounds like it could work. 

I’m hopeful that this machine doesn’t throttle, burn my legs, or ship with a stupid busted garbage keyboard made by imps from hell. But I’ll let other people test it.

My current laptop is an M4 Max and still has lots of life in it. A few things I would consider upgrading for:

1. If the touchscreen lets me work in something like Concepts on my Mac (where I do all my early exploration for work), that would be incredible.
2. If the laptop were lighter while maintaining or exceeding current sustained performance, and maintaining or improving current battery life, that’s a must.
3. Cellular. Please. Please add cellular. My home network is so fast (3.5gb/s symmetric) that leaving the house and using somebody else’s network is painful. And on top of that, the networks at my favourite coffee shops and libraries just don’t work reliably at all, leaving me to hotspot to my phone. And when I hotspot to my phone, I run into bizarre issues with Docker, DDEV, AWS, and Imgix while working on local development. Having cellular built into the laptop would resolve a lot of pain points for me.
4. If they, at the very least, keep the ports we have. HDMI takes up a lot of space, but I end up using it in conference rooms all the time. You know what’s annoying? Bringing the USB‑C to HDMI dongle. I’ve lost a lot of those.
5. 128gb of RAM. I bought 64gb on this machine a year and a half ago to save a couple hundred bucks. In the face of current RAM pricing, it’s important that I share this publicly: that was stupid. I should have bit the darn bullet; I could always use more RAM. (Currently I have 24GB in swap, and it’s a Sunday afternoon; I’m not even working.)

The nano-texture screen is so great on my current laptop, and the mini LED design works so well for me, that I’m not even sure OLED would make a difference in my workflow. While I’m a big fan of OLED and have the biggest OLED TV I could buy in my home theatre, I don’t need it on a laptop.

But there are other things I would like to have. I am very much looking forward to the October event.

From Bloomberg: Apple’s John Ternus Has Found a New Design Chief: Himself:

[The design arrangement] changed when Williams retired last year. Although Cook announced in a press release that the design teams would report directly to him after Williams’ departure — and that was true on paper — they actually began answering to Ternus. Cook gave him responsibility for design as part of the eventual transition to CEO. During the CEO transition period between April and September, Apple’s design leaders were effectively Ternus’ only direct reports before Cook stepped down.

Ternus already had some involvement with the design studio as Apple’s head of hardware engineering, given the close coordination required between the two functions. Since becoming CEO, however, he has immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. Several people familiar with the department say he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times in a single day.

Steve Jobs, of course, was known for taking a similarly direct approach to design while working with Ive. But Ternus’ involvement marks a major shift from the Cook era. Designers say Cook typically visited the studio for about an hour once a month, at most.

… With Ternus making design a major priority and taking such an active role in the department, it appears he has already chosen Apple’s new design leader and ultimate decision maker: himself.

Compared to Tim Cook, Ternus’ involvement is refreshing. Colour me intrigued. Cook was never much of a product guy, and there were times when the products suffered for it.

The comparison to Steve Jobs makes my eyes roll into the back of my head a little bit. We need to stop comparing every tech CEO to Steve. Only Steve could be Steve.

One thing that Steve had was taste, and he had it in spades. It remains to be seen if Ternus has taste. It sounds like he took over in July last year, presumably when the new Liquid Glass designs were already wrapped. So I’m encouraged to see Liquid Glass get a little better this year. All their changes have pushed it a little closer to the Aqua designs of yore, and it’s a massive improvement over all.

I also think Ternus is a good speaker and a smart (and shrewd) guy, and it comes across like he knows his stuff. In a couple interviews with Tom’s Guide and TechRadar, Ternus speaks clearly and intelligently about his team’s products.

But clearly Ternus is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was a known Mac Pro apologist at one point. He understands the Mac. If he doesn’t like Liquid Glass on the Mac, I wouldn’t be surprised.

But as CEO, he as conflicting priorities:

1. Apple’s pride and hubris forbids it from admitting mistakes and rolling back a design. So we need to wait until the next full redesign in a few years to see if Ternus has the goods.
2. Ternus might be a product guy, but he’s also a corporate CEO, and he knows the iPhone is where the juice is. What’s good for iPhone is good for Mac, from that perspective, so maybe Liquid Glass stays, even if it makes the platform a little worse.
3. Money, money, money is the top priority for a CEO.

So fixing designs that old-school (read: old) people in the community don’t like is probably pretty low down his priority list.

All that to say, I don’t know what to think about this. It’s either very good news or very bad news, but it’s hard to imagine that a CEO spending hours a week guiding the designers is a neutral event with no consequences whatsover.

We’ll have to wait and see.

After her WordPress site was consecutively hacked and scraped by bots, Winnie Lim writes about how running a personal website is not fun anymore:

It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience. Why should I take the time and effort — the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words — when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.

I get it.

What a beautiful way to describe the act of creating something for other people. Making something for others requires a belief in our shared humanity. I love that.

I don’t know if I agree that running a personal website isn’t fun anymore. I’d simply say: never bet against the blog.

To me, having your own website and blogging feels more vital than ever. A good personal website — one that doesn’t look and read like slop — is a differentiator now. In that sense alone, having a little website for yourself feels important.

But the real strong feeling I have probably stems from a youth spent playing in a metal band and hanging out in the hardcore and punk scenes a lot: screw the man, man. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over bots scraping my site. You can’t fight what’s coming (RIP Cormac McCarthy). Yet I look around and I see a lot of old-timers leaving the scene. Just the other day I saw a thread of developers on Mastodon talking about how they were changing careers entirely; some were becoming nurses, some were getting into the trades, and some were making plans to get out while the going is good.

Similarly, a lot of people have stopped blogging. My RSS feed is drier than ever. (I guess I’m implying that my RSS feed was wet at one point? Sounds gross. But you know what I mean).

I don’t think humans want to see less cool stuff than before. This is a generational sea change.

I grew up in a mob-run town (it was very safe for that reason; don’t poop where you eat and all that). 

One of the things I learned about the mob is that they have a purge every decade or two to get rid of the bad blood. It’s The Godfather, basically. Assassinations, hits, all that stuff. 

I learned the general pattern for recognizing mob warfare, so when my wife and I later lived in Toronto and there was a shooting at the same restaurant down the street from our condo twice in one week, I could say with 100% certainty that this was a good old-fashioned mafia purge.

It feels like the same thing is happening on the internet with a generation of designers and developers. They’re all really smart people, but they either feel too young, too old, or too risk-averse to deal with the industry changing anymore.

I’m not trying to imply that’s who Winnie is and what she’s thinking. I don’t know her. But I have seen this sentiment expressed many times in the past twelve months.

My point is this: if your peers all leave a scene, you can view that as a warning, or you can recognize that you have the entire market to yourself.

So it goes with blogging: if you have the stomach to scream into the void, this is a vital time to share your thoughts freely on the internet.

I think a lot of it has to do with motivation. If you write for other people, and it feels like those people have disappeared, why bother continuing? 

But I write for me. I write to figure things out. I write to practice critical thinking and I share because I’m a nerd. I’m under no illusions of my own importance. Publishing is the exercise that takes this from a vanity journal to a creative practice — something that involves showing up and putting in the time to make something, even when it’s hard, even when nobody is listening, even when bots are the core audience. Because who cares? Bots won’t always be the core audience, nobody is listening until one day when a lot of people are listening, and it gets easier the more often you do it.

All that to say pull your pirate flag out of storage, be a rebel, screw the man, and blog like your life depended on it. I think it’s more vital than ever.

A couple years ago, somebody recommended Carl Pullein’s YouTube channel on the Mac Power Users forum.

This really messed me up.

The video that caught my eye was called ​“Stop Using Your Task Manager as a Project Manager,” and it sort of blew my mind. I have been a devout Omnifocus user for fifteen years or so, with brief flirtations with Things and Todoist, and have always stored my tasks there.

Carl’s thesis is that Omnifocus, Things, Todoist, whatever — these are not project managers. The tasks might be linked to projects, but you’re not dealing with the project in those apps. You’re working with the tasks. Carl’s problem is that, when you check off a task in those apps, they disappear from view. And if it’s going to be a project manager, you need a bird’s eye view of things.

This has sent me down a years-long rabbit hole. While Carl espouses Gantt charts, I hate them. I’m sure they’re useful, but I have a job, you know? Carl also espouses spreadsheets, but my friends, I am allergic to spreadsheets. Extremely allergic.

I am a designer by trade. I might sound superficial, but if I’m going to use a tool, it’s got to be aesthetically pleasing. Gantt charts and spreadsheets are not going to cut it.

So I’ve tried Asana, ClickUp, Notion, and several others that I genuinely don’t remember anymore because the dalliances were always brief. Asana got kicked out for being too expensive for a single person. ClickUp is a disaster; it’s so broken that should be punishable by law.

And Notion is… well, it’s Notion. Do you like proselytizing the software you use and spending all your time click-click-clicking around instead of getting something done? Notion is for you. Do you like software that looks like junk, but is extremely customizable? Notion is for you. 

I have spent years on this, and still don’t have a great project management solution. At this point, given the way that LLMs are doing, I’m considering writing everything in Markdown docs (I love Markdown and have used plain text for all my notes since 2010).

I have a few needs:

1. First, I am a single individual. Sometimes, I need to share tasks. For example, my wife is on maternity leave for the next eleven months, and she wants to help with my business’s finances. (She never really sees the money going in or out of the business, I think she’s always wanted to, and it takes two hours a month — so she has the time.) I need to share my monthly project with her so she knows what receipts she needs to grab. So sharing needs to be possible.
2. I take a lot of meeting notes.
3. I write a lot of notes while working on a project, and trying to reason something out.
4. I also collect all the files clients send me.

Outside of tasks, everything else is basically a simple file, or a collection of files. So I think what I’m going to do going forward is pretty simple:

1. I need to use a task manager that supports sharing projects. In my case, since the only person I really need to share tasks with is my spouse, I could use Things or Omnifocus and give her my login credentials. Then let sync just deal with the rest. (Otherwise, the ​“best” option for my tastes might be something like Todoist.)
2. Each client should get one meeting note. For the past two or three years, each meeting note has been its own log in Notion. I have never reviewed those files, or at least very rarely. Clients often have multiple projects, but those projects might weave together (like a book design and an accompanying website, for example). I’ve been using databases to connect everything in Notion, but this seems like tremendous overkill for one person. It’s so much slower than just typing in plain text on my Mac.
3. For the notes while I’m working on a project, I should make each note a date-based plain-text note and stick it in a project. Maybe I should just make this one file too, which H2s for different dates? Some of these notes run pretty long; much like this post, I ramble about things that would be of interest to only me.
4. Those files that clients send me already go into the appropriate project directories in my Mac, in a subdirectory called 01 Assets (numbered so I can sort them in the Finder alphanumerically).

This would mean that everything that touches a file is a file inside a file system, and todo lists are the only things that aren’t done in plain text. If a project ever needs a top-level file describing it, that’s a non-issue in this system too.

I think this would cover it. A standard project directory would look like this:

Client Name:
- Client Name Meeting Notes.txt
- Project Name
	01 Assets
	02 Editable Files
	03 Review 
	04 Delivery
	Project Name.txt
	Project Name Notes.txt (or a subfolder)

Then tasks can live wherever they need to live.

If you’re reading this and you have any other options you might recommend for something like this, let me know! I’ve never worked in a team in an office setting (always freelanced and ran a studio), and this is one of my blind spots.

Austin Kleon blogs about social media in The Bad Place:

Pretty much all social media is The Bad Place, but some social media thinks it’s The Good Place, and that somehow makes it even worse.

For example: Bluesky (literally blue sky, a.k.a. the heavens) thinks of itself as The Good Place, an alternative to The Bad Place (a.k.a Twitter/​X). But it’s still a place where people torture each other — mostly by preaching to the choir and/​or boring each other into submission. It’s not, IMO, what I’d call fun. (At least in the microdoses I’ve experienced. As with all social media, the dosage is the poison.)

Meanwhile, whenever I pop into The Bad Place, it’s like everybody has accepted it’s The Bad Place and has carried on. Despite its toxic chaos, it’s still sort of… well, I won’t say fun, but it’s not boring.

I love this way of thinking about social media. Twitter, Reddit (the current dopamine addiction I cannot shake), Facebook — all of them are the bad place.

I’ve been thinking about using Ochi to keep myself off of these places.

I have two thoughts on the iPhone Duo.

First, I think the iPhone Duo is going to be a hit.

Second, It’s not for me. But I kind of want one anyway, partially out of curiosity and partially for work.

My prediction

As far as my prediction goes: I don’t think the Duo is going to be the best-selling iPhone this year. (I don’t think Apple could produce enough of them to make that happen, even if they wanted to.) But I do think it’s going to sell like hotcakes. I think they’re going to sell as many as they can make, and I think every folding phone will look like this within the next twelve months.

I’m 35 years old, and my friends, my parents and in-laws, and my friends’ parents are all talking about this phone. All of them are expressing skepticism: ​“Who on earth would want a folding phone? Why do you need that?”

I am well aware that anything invented after you’re 30 is basically from the devil and unnecessary, so I’m cognizant that this derision from the older generation likely indicates a hit.

A few other times I’ve heard similar sentiments in my lifetime from the same age range:

• “This iPad thing. What a stupid name. And it’s just a big phone. What’s the point?”
• “A phone without a keyboard is just dumb. Nobody wants this.”
• “So you’re telling me people send text messages to the internet and it just posts on this Twitter thing. It’s 104 characters or something. What a joke. Nobody wants that.” (This remains my personal favourite; my father said it after he heard about Twitter on the radio one day circa 2007.)

As far as I’m concerned, ​“Who wants a folding phone?” has claim chowder written all over it.

In addition, I was at the Apple Store on Sunday for an unrelated errand and asked one of the employees if people seemed excited about the Duo, and he told me at least 50% of the people coming by were asking if they could see one. So yeah, people seem very interested.

My own thoughts

As for me, I think the form factor is smart, and the design team has clearly knocked it out of the park. I think people are going to love the matte display outdoors (I would love a nano texture option for my iPhone Pro). And I think people just love their iPhones, and given the option, always want a bigger iPhone.

I’ve been keeping a list of how often the bigger iPhone would have been handy since it was announced. My wife and I just celebrated the arrival of our firstborn. She’s six weeks old now. Until just a couple days ago, she wouldn’t sleep without being held, and I’m already a bit of a night owl, so I took the night shift. A larger single-handed device would have made this much better for me, as you can imagine.

But I don’t think the form factor is for me. To tell you the truth, I want a smaller phone, not a bigger one. My iPhone 17 Pro is already too wide for me. I don’t think my hands are particularly small or particularly large. They’re normal-sized hands for a male. And phones are getting too large for me to use with one hand, which is a problem.

I’d love the Mini form factor with the Pro camera system.

However, at some point, I think I’m going to test the Duo in an Apple Store. Depending how it feels to use, I might end up with one. Maybe not this year, and not as my primary phone. But if this thing takes off, it’ll be important to understand the form factor and how it feels for web browsing and apps. 

Safari on a Duo looks really weird.

A website collecting fantastic film art and posters? Reelizer is extremely my jam.

Lex Friedman writes about the origin story of Apple Cards, an app I had completely forgotten about. Turns out to be a very good piece of reporting and a great read:

In 2011, Mike said, ​“Steve Jobs was on one of his famous walks after having had a dinner with someone,” and he said to his walking companions from Apple, Mike was later told: ​“Wouldn’t it be great if I could just right now on my iPhone send [the dinner companion] a thank you card?”

Apple decided to build an iPhone app just for creating and mailing cards. And the project moved fast, because it was a Steve-initiated one. As it turns out, the app was built and launched during the final year of Steve’s life.

While I’m talking about Lex, let me also say that his new website covering Apple instead of AI is really, really great, and has already become something I look forward to reading in my RSS feed.

From Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave. (Automattic is the company who controls WordPress​.com, and also basically all of WordPress.)

This is a remarkable story about a failed coup attempt to oust Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, following up a years-long story I’ve previously written about at my studio. (If you want the long version, Josh Collingsworth has an excellent writeup.) The shortest possible version is that Mullenweg seems to have joined the list of tech CEOs who, despite being well respected, suddenly went insane and started saying and doing the dumbest things.

This whole story is bananas to me. Here’s my favourite quote:

Of note, Mullenweg also replaced Automattic’s legal counsel after his return, a move that raises questions about whether the boardroom fight is tied to the company’s ongoing lawsuit with hosting provider WP Engine over trademark disputes and claims over WP Engine’s lack of contribution to the WordPress open source project. (WP Engine’s legal team had also accused Mullenweg this July of destroying evidence, court filings show.)

Yes, it’s obviously about the company’s ongoing lawsuit with WP Engine. Is there something even more ridiculous it could be about?

I can’t believe almost 50% of the web relies on something this guy is responsible for.

TechCrunch also updated their article after publishing with this hilarious tidbit:

After publication, Mullenweg confirmed the board additions and advisors, and shared the following statement: ​“We are living through times of unprecedented change, possibly a singularity. The next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic.”

Matt, we are not living through a singularity. This is crazy talk.

We need to stop giving crazy CEOs so much airtime.

Chris Butler’s Design Fiction mood board, largely from sci-fi movies and television, is really fantastic. It’s amazing how far ahead of their time Blade Runner and Alien looked, at least aesthetically. I’m suddenly tempted to make my own mood boards public (but I should not).

This is going on my shortlist for article of the year.

I despise AI writing. Every time I see it in somebody else’s writing, my brain shuts down, I judge that writer, and I stop absorbing what they’ve written.

And yet…

I’m on parental leave right now, which has given me just enough distance from my work to review it with a fresh pair of eyes. I’m in the middle of rebranding my design studio. And with fresh eyes, I can see I’ve made some terrible mistakes.

One of the things I like to do with my studio site is trial new technologies before I use them in client projects. I might try a new CMS, for example, or a new programming language. I’ll experiment with new CSS features or design systems.

In this case, in addition to experimenting with new CSS features, I experimented with using AI as an assistant.

This is not the first time I’ve used LLMs. Prior to this, I’ve used AI for research assistance, clarifying my thoughts on spec documents, and fixing bugs during development (and writing tests, of course). LLMs seem naturally suited to these things.

For my portfolio, I took it a step further. I would pass exported designs from Figma to Claude and work through my thoughts on them. I would do the same thing for copy.

Claude is a terrible designer. Every suggestion it made was terrible. I thought the ​“value” in using an LLM for this task would be strengthening my own opinions, but the fact I felt the need for it at all clearly indicated a lack of confidence on my part. I consider that part of the project largely a failure. It both slowed me down and created new neuroses for me to work through with a therapist.

Using an LLM for copywriting assistance has proven to be a disaster in different ways. 

Somehow, and I can only assume it to be a result of AI Psychosis, I ended up using Claude’s copy in my own writing. I can tell because the writing is garbage.

For example, one project gallery leads with a five-paragraph introduction (it’s 300% too verbose). Here are the first two paragraphs, which I will burn and rewrite:

Marketing website for a rebranded church curriculum. Acquired one year after launch.

After four years of growth, One Story renamed, rebranded, and repositioned their product to address the needs of their expanding customer base. One Story partnered with Wildfire to design a new marketing website that illustrates their new branding, their curriculum, their values, and their belief that children and youth have a valuable role to play in the story of the Kingdom of God.

Who the heck writes like this?

First of all, how did Claude convince me writing in third person was a good idea? It wasn’t my idea, but somehow I went along with it. 

Second of all, this is just the bloated, flat, corporate-ese crap that LLMs spew out on the regular.

With distance, it’s so obvious how terrible this writing is. I would never write like this in a million years. There’s no storytelling, drama, or escalating tension to this. I know it’s a case study on a design study, but holy smokes, humans have been telling stories for millions of years, and this copy has all the excitement of a second-grade book report.

It’s just no good. There are ethical issues with LLMs, but even if you set that aside, they just sort of… suck. They zap the personality out of everything they touch.

That might be okay with code, but it’s an obvious no-go for writing. Or art. Or design. Or any situation where you don’t want to look like an incredible dickwad.

I’m grateful that I caught this now, because I can rewrite this and tweak the theme of the site before it goes live. I feel like I’m scheduling reshoots for a movie; the project felt basically done, but now it’s time to rewrite half the script in the edit and save the work from becoming a financial disaster.

The part that weirds me out the most is that I absolutely, positively, with 100% certainty, thought it was good before I went away for paternity leave.

I think of myself as a pragmatic realist, and most people I know consider me a cynic. What terrifies me about this is that I didn’t think I was susceptible to AI psychosis. I thought I was just dipping my toes in the water, but I feel like I jumped straight into a vat of oil and set myself on fire.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and Professional Writing. I was an honours student. Before I graduated, I got my start as a freelancer writing commercials for national television campaigns. How did I fall for this?

So disappointed in myself.

Editor’s note: this post was written on an iPhone while holding a baby. I am late to writing on this topic and possibly have made many more typos than usual.

Sony: Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles

… physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format. 

While I know this has been extremely controversial, I don’t think this is a big deal. A lot of games don’t play correctly without an internet connection or software update, and a lot of discs are just licenses for a digital download anyway. On Sony’s consoles, for example, Spider-Man 2 is a vastly improved game now compared to launch, with better visuals and performance. God of War: Ragnarok has received free DLC which is not available on disc. A number of games which game out for the base PS5 have been enhanced for the PS5 Pro and require patches to perform at their best, like Horizon: Forbidden West.

Even third-party titles are not immune to this. Arguably, they’re worse. Elden Ring is one of my favourite games of all time, but it’s been patched and re-balanced so many times that it feels like a very different game now compared to its release. (I beat Malenia, both Radahns, and Elden Beast before they were all nerfed, and those fights were kind of more fun then too.) 

In addition to all this, installing a game off a disc is just as troublesome and time consuming as downloading it over the internet. On the Switch, if I pop in a cartridge, I can play the game immediately. Not so with the PS5. 

And the fact of the matter is, a digital copy of the game is the same as the disc copy. It’s not like steaming a movie compared to the Blu-ray. If they stop making Blu-rays, I’ll scream bloody murder. They are far superior to streaming. But a digital download of a game and a fully-patched disc will be, byte for byte, the same experience. 

Finally, I’ve read many arguments that say physical discs force Sony to discount games on the PS Store. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that the PS Store (when a game is on sale) has been cheaper than buying a physical game in Canada every time for me for about five years now. This is true when comparing used prices too! For example, it’s cheaper for me to buy Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on sale via PlayStation than it is to buy a used disc copy. It’s cheaper for me to buy the Dead Space remake digitally than it would be to buy a disc copy. It is also cheaper for me to buy Red Dead Redemption 2 digitally than on disc. Etc. 

In 2026, I find it hard to care about physical discs, despite having a large collection of PS4 games. My PS5 library is tiny on disc and massive digitally because the prices have just been better. I think Sony is far more likely to worry about pricing competition from Steam before they lose any sleep over GameStop.

Chris Coyier wrote a lovely post about why people watch TV instead of movies, in which he observed:

Paraphrasing from what I remember, it’s that TV’s incentives are to make the most of it, not to make the best art possible, which is more aligned with movies. I’d think the budget and talent also favor movies (on average and per-minute).

So why the imbalance in the other direction for me, and maybe a lot of you?

I am more of a movies guy than a TV guy, basically for the reasons Chris stated. But I also watch a fair bit of TV, especially on weeknights. I have thought about this question a lot over the years. 

I think there are two reasons people choose TV shows over movies, beyond general FOMO and pop culture:

1. Lack of time. 60 minutes isn’t enough for a movie, but you can squeeze in an episode of Ted Lasso or Mad Men or The West Wing, no problem. 
2. Intertia.

Watching a movie requires making a series of choices.

First, pick watching a movie over a TV show. 

Second, which movie? (How much time do you have? What are you in the mood for? If you’re not alone, does your partner/​friend/​child want to watch this with you? )

And then, if you haven’t answered this question already: where is streaming? (Do you have that service? Can you rent it elsewhere? Where you can watch this movie?)

All those choices are made only once with a TV show. Once you pick the show, you just settle in with inertia. You don’t need to pick a new show every night. If you start Mad Men, you could easily spend a month of evenings watching nothing but that show without expending another ounce of energy on those choices. 

Choosing movies requires, in my opinion, an almost heroic level of energy. It’s not a wonder most people pick TV.

1. Should I rename the studio to something more easily discovered by LLMs?
2. Should this copy be written in a third-person perspective?
3. Should it instead be in the first-person?
4. Is this layout interesting? 
5. Is it too interesting?
6. Is the copy on my About page too long?
7. Will people check out while reading this?
8. Will they laugh at me?
9. Will they think I’m a fraud?
10. Am I a fraud?
11. Will this fail?
12. Am I a failure?
13. Why do I think the answer to all these negative questions is yes?
14. How long have I felt this way?
15. Am I chronically depressed?
16. When did I become chronically depressed?
17. Why is this redesign taking me so long?