Tommy

5 days with the iPhone Duo. It's the most compromised phone I've ever owned. It's also the best piece of hardware I've ever used. 9/10. I'm not going back to my 16 Pro Max. Some impressions from actually living with it: 👎 Disorientation. It isn't mentioned enough! I constantly reach for volume or Touch ID on the wrong edge, or expect controls at the bottom that are now on the side. Good technology should become invisible. Five days in, the Duo keeps reminding me it's there. 👎👎 Face ID. You really don't appreciate it until it's gone. Touch ID feels like a surprisingly big regression. Unlock with Apple watch feels mandatory. 👎 Battery and heat. Underwhelming for a new flagship. BUT I'm running native GTA V, Genshin Impact (looks incredible), and video editing software. I'm really pushing this thing. It gets hot and I've noticed throttling. 👎 Inner display. The matte finish looks beautiful until the slightest finger grease leaves a distracting reflective patch. A damp microfibre sorts it, but I'm wiping this thing far too often. 👎 Durability anxiety. It's a £2,599 folding slab of glass. I hope I never find out how well it survives a drop onto a hard surface. 👍 Folded form factor. Surprisingly, I prefer carrying this to my 16 Pro Max, including when running. Thicker and heavier, yes, but less of a wide slab in my pocket. The outer display is fine. 👍 Camera. Here's a potentially controversial thought: did smartphone cameras cross the "good enough" threshold years ago? I'd still bet on a brilliant photographer with the Duo over an average photographer with an 18 Pro Max. And using the main camera for selfies is a bonus. Maybe £2599 copium. I'm still deciding. 👍👍 Performance. The A20 Pro is great. Not exclusive to the Duo, but a huge upgrade from my 16 Pro Max. Moving from 256GB to 1TB has also been liberating. 👍👍👍👍 Unfolded. This is everything. I build apps, and this is the most excited I've been about a new form factor in years. I've already got my UFO video editor and Ball Bros (Smash Bros meets football) running on it. See the video. This feels like an entirely new canvas for developers. The screen feels impossibly large for something that lives in my pocket. I can list endless things Apple needs to fix. But every time I unfold it, I have zero regrets. 9/10. Five days in.

Prompt engineering is dead. Knowing what you can get away with is very much still a learning curve. ‘Do the thing’ is often sufficient!

18 days till GTA VI and still no PS5 Pro. Launched at £699. eBay wants £900–1,200. And it doesn't matter how good your PC is. I run an account about intentional choices. This is one. Doesn’t mean I have to like it tho.

ChatGPT / Codex 5x Pro £89/$100 plan. I am feeling the additional doubled usage limits - Astra has become much less of a problem and GPT 6.1 Sol / Terra last seemingly forever. The unlock for me will be work, which I avoided in favour of max usage for software dev. gg OpenAI. Opus 5.5 remains superior, it's not difficult to argue that it's the strongest and fastest model. And yet I've just paid for another month of GPT Pro 5x, and also run the Claude $20 tier. For the month of October, I wished I had this the other way around - I bet on the wrong side and yet I've just doubled down on OpenAI again. I really hope the regret doesn't carry over into this month; I expect the next OpenAI model to drop soon and for it to have better usage limits than the Anthropic equivalent. But this could be a turning point, and OpenAI should pay attention to it's most loyal users - I burn 1-2B tokens a day often. I'm using Claude Code a lot now and the friction jumping ship is rather low. I'd like to see OpenAI continue to do what they have done since the beginning, making AI more accessible across the world and giving the most power it can to everyone. OpenAI have been better at navigating this transition than Anthropic so far.

iPhone Duo - playing with it in the Apple store. I'm sold. 'I wish we had Apple foldables all along'. A couple things surprised me. I'm specific about details so this might be a useful list: - The nano coating is more washed out than I expected. I've always found OLED inky blacks and extreme contrast impressive. Duo is more like an older TFT style display where at an angle you can get this off-black to off-grey gradient. (!) However!! - it is simultaneously superior for a lot of things like general reading / emails / calendar etc. I'll take it overall and I genuinely believe I'm more fussy over this point than 99% of people (80% don't even care / notice). - The crease is easier to feel than I thought it'd be. It is also non existent when using the phone, even during dark scenes. It is very visible when powered off and held at an angle. That's great overall, it's not a concern for me. - It feels impossibly thin when unfolded - I really liked that. I wonder what that means for thermals though - nothing I did stressed it really (Google maps / YouTube 2160p HDR were the most taxing things). - The keyboard / typing in all orientations is fine. I was concerned it might feel overly compromised and I'm at ease now I've used it. - The outer display size coming from iPhone Pro Max is very usable and doesn't feel like it'll be a problem. It was important it wouldn't feel too small or cramped when typing, especially with the vertical sidebar - it wasn't. - The nano texture touch has a different feel to the normal glossy finish - and it feels way better than normal phones to me. I really hope it doesn't become more glossy / shiny over time but I suspect that it will. - I like the chrome finish like some older iPhones - feels far more premium than the matte grey titanium finish on modern iPhones. The feel of the hinge is also obvious Apple put a lot of time into making it feel as satisfying as they could. Polished mechanics beyond expectation. - I ordered star white, but I found the black better than I expected. It looks more cohesive than white, but white is also nice and still my preference. - Calendar app - I like the month view with details listed below (content changes based on selected day) - this freaking CHANGES based on front / open landscape / open portrait. Software growing pains. Enter the guinea pigs I guess. - Watched some YouTube / GTA VI trailers - I love how the whole thing keeps flowing when you close/open - but the video will pause briefly for a second. - Adjacent to my first note - the GTA VI trailers were feeling compromised due to the nano texture it doesn't have the wow factor pop like watching an LG OLED 4K HDR demo for the first time. - Volume / power button; muscle memory will need retraining... I trust Apple put them in the best place. I'll complain loudly if it doesn't work. - Fuck the iPhone camera button, I really hate it. With the disorientating fold form factor, I even pressed it a couple times. I hate it on iPhone: Slab format too. I hope it somehow becomes useful with Duo. I feel like I'll fully get over it during the 14 day return period. - The camera is as good as I want it to be. This was never likely to be an object and now I've seen it. - The camera in portrait seemed to stick to 9:16 ratio. I was struggling to go landscape - skill issue. Although, Steve Jobs would argue that the dumb customer (me) should be able to figure it out. - The multi-tasking seems good but if you are side by side and want to make one side full screen it seems like you need to dismiss the other, then make that one full screen. Too fiddly, didn't find it as intuitive as I'd hoped for that particular sequence. Hopefully skill issue. It was generally easy to do. - None of the intermediate orientations between clamshell and unfolded seem useful. I doubt they are. It feels all about quick functions on the front and the full open view for everything else to me. We shall see. Really good, look forward to receiving mine. iPhone Duo star white 1TB. That's a beautiful upgrade from 16 Pro Max 256GB - storage space finally!

GTA VI is out in under 3 weeks and there’s not a single PS5 Pro in stock anywhere. Watched the trailers 100+ times. Watched the whole 30 min gameplay 6 times. Already accepted this is a ~£1000 game. Meanwhile my PC is sat here unable to help. At this rate I’m becoming a scalper’s bitch. Holy shit chat, what do I do? 👇

update - no movement: probably Monday 2 Nov. £2599 taken, so it'll be poor form if I need to wait until 9 Nov. We pay a premium for day 1 and the delay directly eats into the benefit. I've never failed to get an iPhone day 1 prior to this. People should complain loudly and stop low launch supply and delays becoming 'acceptable', or the consumer will quietly just settle for worse terms year on year. Scarcity also encourages scalpers and all the ugly sides of capitalism. Proactively making noise on X about this is important.

Who knows what is real and fake and how much nonsense is going on behind the scenes. Trust your instincts and reality. Everyone is desperate and making shit up. Social media thrives on it, sadly. If a model is solving problems and good value just use it.

Cyber Security in 2026. Rick explains 👇