AI art and the iPhone Air

5 things worth sharing this week

Though I'm loving all the daily posts that I get to write on various topics (and if you're not a paid subscriber yet I hope you'll join in to give it a try), writing these listicles for the start of the week is a lot of fun.

I get to go through my backlog of hundreds of saved bookmarks and pull out my favorites. Currently keeping one of my lists below 500 with this latest post.

The iPhone Air is the One Steve Would Use

It’s been a few years since Steve’s passing, and it’s always a risk to invoke his name when talking about something recent from Apple. 

The iPhone Air has little relation to the technology available in Steve’s day, but has a connection nonetheless to the idea of a phone making tradeoffs that matter. 

For the first time in years, an iPhone truly made me feel something again. When this year’s new devices came out, I picked up the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but I quietly (or not so quietly) harbored envy towards those who bravely picked the iPhone Air. About a week ago, I finally caved and picked up my very own iPhone Air.

This lines up with what I’m hearing from people I follow. The Max checks off all the boxes on paper. But the Air is more than the sum of its parts. 

I am in awe of the dichotomy that is the iPhone Air. It’s simultaneously drop dead gorgeous, like a piece of jewelry or a fine watch, and more durable than you could possibly imagine.

When I first saw it announced, I assumed we’d have another bendgate situation, reministicent of the iPhone 6, where just sitting on the device could cause it to warp. But that’s not the case. Testing shows this phone can hold up to just about anything we could naturally throw at it. 

For me the biggest holdout is the zoom lens. I love taking pictures of my kids at school events on the field. It’s hard to get closer without getting yelled off the field by a ref. 

With that said, I still haven’t gotten to hold an Air. I hope to remedy that soon.

A Cartoonist's Review of AI Art

True to The Oatmeal’s standard form, this is a hilarious comic, but also touches on some really interesting points that had me thinking about my own AI usage.

Rather than linking to the original Oatmeal piece (which I read a few days ago and wholeheartedly recommend you read!), I wanted to link to Kev’s take on this. 

I felt something while reading through Matthew’s comic. Part of me was waiting to see if he’d reveal part of it had been generated with AI, that’s how cynical I’ve become. 

As an illustrator myself, and formerly someone paid to do graphic design for a living, I’ve been torn by all the AI slop being used in every area of our lives. It’s useful in ways, but it’s soulless. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s stopped many other things from existing in our world. 

My hope is that there will be a place for real humans to keep making art. 

Quoting Simon Højberg

Me quoting Simon Willison quoting the other Simon:

The cognitive debt of LLM-laden coding extends beyond disengagement of our craft. We’ve all heard the stories. Hyped up, vibed up, slop-jockeys with attention spans shorter than the framework-hopping JavaScript devs of the early 2010s, sling their sludge in pull requests and design docs, discouraging collaboration and disrupting teams. Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”

I’ve been having a back and forth argument with Saadia on Async for a few weeks now about AI vibe coding into production. Don’t tell him, but I think he might have been right.

The Iconfactory vs. AI

For those who haven’t been following along, The Iconfactory is an iPhone app and icon design shop, along with making some fantastic apps that I love and use. The genesis of this post was written on Tot. 

It sounds like they’re struggling with business because people aren’t buying their services and are resorting to AI generating tools instead. That very well could be the case, but what I find more interesting are the comments on Michael’s post, with a few pointing out that costs to design anything have gone up, and service has gone down.

I’m not sure if this is the case, I actually reached out to them to see if I could get help on an little app idea that me and a friend have been developing. But I do know, having worked in agency like companies for nearly a decade, that providing great service in changing times is just plain hard, and some clients might be happy while others are frustrated. 

I hope companies like Iconfactory continue regardless, or that designers in general are able to use their craft and make a living. 

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

Fantastic article at The New Yorker about how far we’ve come with solar energy in just the last few years. I’m only halfway through but it’s already hitting on so much progress. I was feeling this last year when I bought solar panels for camping. When the costs finally work, it changes everything.

I haven’t read the piece yet, but I’ve been following a bit of what’s been happening in solar the last year, and it’s exciting. We’re literally harnessing the power of the sun.