I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.

I'm trying very hard to understand what you mean specifically here.

The AirPods Pro I use every day for casual listening are far and away better headphones than the wired earbuds I used in that context in 2005.

The regular Airpods I bought my wife 3 months ago were a categorical improvement over the ones she'd lost in a move this summer, and they barely have ANC.

Even the first iteration of Airpods exceeded the quality of equivalent wired in-ear buds available at the time. I recently came across my old Etymotic in-ear headphones, which were at one point a gold standard. The sound from my AirPods Pro is better, and the Apple option is FAR more comfortable in my ears.

I'd argue that cost per unit of fidelity is lower now, in 2026, than it's ever been before. The level of playback a person can enjoy for, say, $500 today is wildly better than what was available for an inflation-adjusted equivalent amount of money in 2016 or 2006 or 1996.

I also have Headphone Acquisition Disorder, for which there is no known cure. As a result I've had a number of fancy wired setups over the years, sometimes requiring a headphone amp.

Owing to a lot of air travel, I bought the AirPods Max soon after they were introduced. I intended them to be airplane accessories for the most part, but the fact of the matter is that my $500 Sennheiser setup that required cables and an amp wasn't obviously superior to the Maxes. Once you factor in convenience, the Apple over-hear setup won the comparison in a walk. In the runup to our x-country move last summer, I sold off or gave away nearly all of the rest of my headphone horde; now, if I'm using headphones, it's one of the Apple options.

In other news, I am old.

You have to be careful with blanket statements like this. Southern Baptist churches are entirely self-run enterprises with no top-down doctrinal control from anyone else. Consequently, there are congregations who would qualify as high-control, culty organizations and there are congregations who welcome LGBTQ folks and such (although it's increasingly true that welcoming / progressive congregations are self-sorting into their own categories/groupings such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship).

I don't know of any SB churches that preach specifically that THEIR church is the One True Church, which is usually what that kind of control requires.

Certainly many folks in the SBC church of my youth moved from church to church, or even to other denominations, and nobody thought that was soul-risking behavior. A central tenet of MOST Baptist churches is the primacy of the adherent's personal relationship to the almighty, which is unknowable to others by default, so this tracks.

Maybe iOS just isn't for you.

Are we really still having this discussion? I feel like you KNOW the answer, and why the market rewards Apple for its position here.

The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.

I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).

Midlife brings many things, some good and some bad and some just part of life. One of these is the more visceral, serious understanding -- replacing the mere intellectual knowledge you had before -- that the ride you're on will end.

You will, in your middle years, have friends whose own rides were far shorter than any of you imagined.

You will see people's partners die, and the emotional wreckage that leaves behind. My friend D. is, right now, navigating his first summer alone after losing his wife of nearly 40 years last spring (fuck cancer).

You will realize it could be you, on either side of the sod.

May Elise's memory be a blessing. But I'm gonna go hug my wife now instead of reading Stephen's piece.

Now things flutter in and out of availability, and are fragmented between countless different services. In 1999, though, a visit to Blockbuster and/or my well-stocked film-geek local store would get me pretty much anything I wanted to watch.