2025-12-31 07:00:00
Kathryn Krawczyk from Canary Media: Clean energy is still winning. These 10 charts prove it.
Solar’s monumental rise is the main reason for the shift: The source more than doubled its share of global electricity production from 2021 to 2025. And while coal still remains the world’s largest source of electricity, it’s declining while solar and other renewable sources are on the rise.
And:
Between January and September, power demand around the world rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all of that new demand on its own, and with a boost from wind, was able to cover all of it. That’s a huge deal for the clean energy transition. When we produce more renewable power than is needed to cover growing demand, that’s when we can start chipping away at fossil fuels.
While the vibes suggested this would be a dismal year for clean energy deployment in the U.S., it simply wasn’t. Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the grid this year through November.
The continued domination of clean, renewable energies, both in the US and around the world, is still a major win worth celebrating. Solar expansion alone covered basically all worldwide energy consumption increases this year, which is huge. I've said it before and I'll say it again, a world where energy is plentiful and clean and we can use it without guilt is far better than a world where we have to ration energy because it's dirty and expensive.
The energy story is one I'll continue to keep my eye on into 2026, but it feels like a quiet but significant win year after year.
2025-12-31 06:02:40
Amanda Hess for The New York Times in 2018: The End of Endings
Didn’t endings used to mean something? They imbued everything that came before them with significance, and then they gave us the space to reflect on it all. More than that: They made us feel alive. The story ended, but we did not. This had been true at least since the novel supplanted the oral tradition. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin wrote that the novelist “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis.’” He continued, “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” We needed stories to end so we could make sense of them. We needed characters to die so we could make sense of ourselves.
I think a factor in my general dissatisfaction with franchises and TV shows is that a key part of storytelling, the ending, isn't really a thing. Here's how they usually go:
Patrick Willems has a very good video out now called Let Franchises End and I highly suggest you check it out.
2025-12-31 05:32:31
This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Vision Pro 2024 and 2023 report cards.
I'm going to give myself a round of applause here, because absolutely no one this time last year was expecting new Vision Pro hardware in 2025, except me.
I would be positively shocked if I’m writing my 2025 report card a year from now and the current Vision Pro is still in stores and selling for $3,499.
Well, I got it right, as we have a new Vision Pro on store shelves now.
Of course, this upgrade was about as unexciting as it could have possibly been. Effectively, the only change here is to the processor, which jumped three generations from the M2 to the M5. Apple also advertised some benefits to display clarity and refresh rate, but the display hardware remained exactly the same, and the M5 just seems to have been able to push that display a little harder.
I think overall it's good that Apple updated the Vision Pro, but I think even the product's most ardent supporters would admit this wasn't a super compelling upgrade. I know these people exist, but I literally don't know anybody personally who bought the original Vision Pro, loved it, and has upgraded to the M5 edition. There's just not enough value there. This was also made worse by the fact there was no trade-in program for owners of the original model. If you are a day one owner of the original Vision Pro and you want to get the second model, you got to pay full price, there's absolutely no trade-in. If I had to guess, it's likely because the resale market for this product is so anemic that even Apple doesn't want them back because they can't resell them for any reasonable amount.
Is it too sensationalist to say this has been a terrible year for the Vision Pro? I guess it's been a fine year for people who already like it, but for a product that's only two years old and which has not proven to be remotely successful in the market, I feel like it made zero progress this year. This is a product that should be finding its stride. It should be a place where we see new and innovative software released that gets people on board. It should be a playground for developers to find new and interesting solutions to problems that could not be solved with 2D screen-based computing platforms. We've seen none of this in 2025. There's positively no energy around this product and no interest from the general public that I can see.
Let's look at this another way. Can you name a single app that released for the Vision Pro this year? Can you name a single moment where the Vision Pro broke out of its diehard fans and got other people excited about it? I can't. Maybe you're thinking about that Marvel What If… game, but no, that came out in mid 2024. Maybe the television app from Sandwich? Nope, that was February 2024. Maybe it's that Lapz F1 app that was based on some pretty cool concept videos? Nope, that never even released. Their last updates on the blog were in November 2024, and you can no longer join the TestFlight at all. Apple's Vision Pro app of the year was Explore POV, which appears to be a collection of 3D videos from beautiful places around the world. I guess that's something, but I don't think that's a ticket to mainstream success anytime soon, and to be fair, also launched in early 2024.
I still think spatial videos are kinda cool, but even those have lost their luster for me. Last year, every time a new spatial video came out, I would charge up the Vision Pro and watch it, no matter the subject matter. In 2025, I can't be bothered unless it's something I find particularly interesting. The Metallica and MotoGP ones were pretty cool, but I can't think of any more off the top of my head.
Movies are a tough one too. I liked watching movies on this last year, but I think I watched a grand total of 2 on it in 2025 (and that's not a lot considering I watched 100 movies this year). I won't name names, they can do their own updates, but I know for a fact that several people who were high on this for watching movies last year have also basically stopped using it for that as well.
visionOS 26 released in the fall, with widgets and controller support, which are nice. As we‘ll explore more below, the OS is not the problem, and it’s continued to improve. Shout out to the dev teams working on this.
I know some Vision Pro fans will be reading this and might be upset, and I really don't want to take anything away from those who enjoy the product as it is. My point is that if the Vision Pro is only ever going to be a product made for a small slice of relatively wealthy VR enthusiasts, then that's fine. If this is meant to appeal to a wider audience, then Apple made zero progress towards making that a reality in 2025.
It’s always tough to set expectations for the Vision Pro because, honestly, I feel like I have to be vague. I really don't have a clear vision of what I even want from this product or what I think will help it go mainstream. I literally can't think of anything Apple could do to make me start using mine on a regular basis, and I certainly don't know what use case is going to get people buying a $3,500 VR headset in any sort of mainstream capacity.
In the product world, we often talk about the MVP, or minimally viable product. This is usually a little rough around the edges, but it exists to prove whether there's a good market fit for the thing you're making. Once you prove people want it, you invest in polishing the experience. When I look at the Vision Pro, I feel like we’ve done the inverse of that. People often complement how nicely made VisionOS is, but I’d argue maybe that's part of its downfall. It's incredibly well thought out and well implemented for a thing that doesn't solve problems or desires that most people actually have.
So with that in mind, my broad hope for the Vision Pro in 2026 is to see some sort of software experience that can only happen in virtual reality, and which I—and a decent chunk of the rest of the world—find compelling. Yeah, that's not very specific. And yeah, I'm offloading figuring out what that thing is to other people, but I honestly don't know what it is. Speaking for myself, I've spent all of 2025 identifying problems I have with the computers in my life and building solutions to those problems. Personally, none of the problems I currently have are solved by a virtual reality headset. What I'm craving is something that wins me over.
Additionally, and I know this is a hard one to solve, but I continue to believe that a fundamental problem with the Vision Pro is its price. At $3,500 or more, it is simply a product that too few people could purchase, even if they loved the idea of it and desperately wanted one. You can make the product twice as good in every spec, and I still don't think it would move the needle much because the raw cost is simply too much for most people to stomach.
Frankly, at the amounts we're talking about, shaving even $1,000 off the price might not be enough to move the needle meaningfully. We really need to get down to a place where this is closer to a $999 starting price. Unfortunately, everything we know from the rumor mill is that a product like that is nowhere close to happening. I guess my realistic hope for 2026 is that the M5 Vision Pro gets some sort of permanent price drop. $2,999 isn't great, but it would be something to move it in the right direction.
As for hardware predictions, my honest prediction is that nothing changes, and the M5 Vision Pro remains the only product in the lineup and remains at the same price. If there is new hardware, the boring safe bet is that it's going to be an M6 version of the current product. But I think there's a sliver of a chance that will get some sort of cheaper model, either the more affordable Vision Pro (or Vision Air?) is closer to reality than we think, or they've made serious progress towards a more Meta Ray-Ban-like product that gets announced before the end of the year.
Tune in tomorrow for the final in the series, and thank you for reading Birchtree through 2025!
2025-12-30 22:52:11
I'm a big fan of movies, they're my favorite medium for storytelling, and it was sometime in 2019 that I said to myself, "man, you don't watch that many movies for someone who claims to love movies."
Of course, I was watching like 10-20 movies a year, which is probably relatively average in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't feel like enough for me. I was missing out of so many good stories because I just wasn't making the time for them. TV shows and video games were taking up my free time instead.
Well, that was when I jumped back into Letterboxd (apparently I joined in 2012!) and started logging my movie watching, and I ramped up my movie count in 2020 and 2021, bit I set an arbitrary goal for myself in 2022: watch 100 movies.
The purpose of this 100 movies wasn't just that more is better, but that if I committed to watching a lot of stuff, it would get me to stop waffling and just hit "play" on more things I was on the fence about. I wanted to get past the "hmm, what should I watch?" mode that has you browsing streaming services for 30 minutes before giving up, and just taking a chance on more things; get out of my comfort zone, if you will. And I think that has been successful! I probably would not have taken chances on movies like Shoplifters, Jojo Rabbit, RRR, The Father, or Perfect Blue if I wasn't chasing this arbitrary number.
I've watched at least 100 movies in each of the last 4 years, and I think that's pretty cool. My biggest year was 2023 where I watched 149 movies, which I would say is too many movies. By the end of that year, I remember feeling like watching movies was turning into a bit of a chore. I had bounced back so much from TV and video games that I was putting off enjoying those mediums in favor of pushing up my movie count to heights I'd never seen in my whole life.
As such, in 2024 I did not have any sort of goal or target to surpass the year before…the line doesn't always have to go up. I have kept that 'just watch how many you feel like" attitude through 2025 as well, and the numbers pretty clearly show that around 100 movies per year is what works for me right now in my life. This sounds like a ton, but it's basically one movie every Saturday and Sunday throughout the year, which isn't that hard for me to do.
For some fun, let's look at a little quick data analysis on the 102 movies I've watched in 2025 (so far, there's still 2 days left!) from my Letterboxd year in review.
My movie frequency has ramped up quite a bit in December, as it often does. It's a combination of big movies I want to see coming out all at once, and time off of work giving me more free time to pop on a movie (or two) each day).
I only rewatched 2 movies all year, KPop Demon Hunters and One Battle After Another, both films in my top 10 of the year.
Speaking of top 10…this is my current ranking based on what I've been able to see so far. A few heavy hitters remain, so this may shake up, but if you're looking for something to watch in this week between Christmas and New Year's, I'd recommend anything here. For clarity, these are:
43% of movies I watched came out this year, and 88% of what I watched was new to me. I'm definitely still seeking out new stories and experiences, not just the comfort food I already know I love.
This score breakdown is pretty normal for a regular person watching movies. I get to choose what I watch, so I'm self-selecting for films I'll probably like.
These two options are fun…movies I rated higher or lower than most people. I don't know what I can say, Materialists resonated with me, Heart Eyes was a fun horror film in the vein of Scream, and the other 4 are widely adored, so I don't think there's anything crazy there.
On the negative front, I stand by The Gorge and The Woman in Cabin 10 being some of the most bland, cookie-cutter, "did AI write this?" slop I've watched in a while. Meanwhile, The Coffee Table was just a miserable experience, even if it was well-crafted; I just couldn't stomach it.
As for 2026, there are already 20 movies on my watchlist that we know are coming out, and I'm sure there will be many more that nab my attention, so it looks like another great year for the medium I love.
2025-12-30 00:07:32
This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my Mac 2024 and 2023 report cards.
Only one MacBook Pro got an update this year, and it's the baseline model, which was the first (and to this point only) Mac to get the M5 processor. No Pro or Max processors yet, just the base M5. The M5 seems like a good upgrade over the M4, but that's all I can say, everything else about the MacBook Pro stayed the same.
I think this makes buying a MacBook Pro a bit awkward right now. Many buyers are surely looking at the Pro and Max models, but those are on an older chip generation than the base model. They may outperform the M5 model in some tasks, but the M5 beats them at some other things, such as single-core performance. If you're in the market for a new MacBook Pro right now, I'd say don't buy one unless you're getting the base model; everything else is on the way out and will likely be notably better soon.
Back in March we got new MacBook Airs, which upgraded to the M4 processor and got an upgraded FaceTime camera. We also got a very nice sky blue color, which I know some people think looks like nothing, but I think it's pretty nice when I've seen it in person.
The big win here is the price point, which in last year's post I suggested could go several ways. If you think back to this time last year, the M2 Air was the $999 model, with the M3 starting $100 higher. My best case scenario was that they would ditch the dual-processor lineup and put the M4 in all models while sticking with the $99 starting price, but I wasn't confident that would happen. It turns out Apple was able to sort this out, and for the first time in the Apple silicon generation, the MacBook Air has one processor family and the starting price remains at $999.
Also in March, we got another upgrade which made a few people raise some eyebrows, and I get why. The Mac Studio, which lingered on the M2 generation through 2024, caught up to the rest of the line with the M4 Max and the…checks notes…this can't be right…the M3 Ultra.
Repeat everything I said above about the MacBook Pro lineup being split between processor generations, because the Mac Studio is in a similar situation, although this one is less transient and is just what they have decided is the right thing to do. Don't expect an M4 Ultra ever. I don't think this is the end of the world, and people buying this computer can figure out what they need, but it is undeniably odd and not the ideal state for this product.
It's all a bit odd to me, as the general discourse around the M3 generation was that it was kind of hard to make and not exactly the best generation of Apple silicon, and yet somehow it's the M4 that won't get an Ultra chip for some reason. Here's hoping the M5 generation gets to go from the base chip all the way up to an Ultra, it would be the first time since the M2 that we got that all at once.
On the plus side, if you need the best M4 chip in a desktop environment, the Mac Studio will save you a bunch compared to a MacBook Pro with the same M4 Max ($2,499 vs $3,699).
It wasn't a particularly thrilling year for the Mac. In fact, I'd say it was quite boring, but I guess you can still score pretty well on my arbitrary scoring system by coming into the year with what I think is clearly the best lineup of Macs ever in the history of the company. Seriously, has there ever been a point in time where Apple made so many Macs that are unanimously considered to be great computers, and where basically every single product in the lineup outperforms its competitors in the Windows space (minus some desktops)?
That said, I can't give the Mac an A grade because it was just boring and a couple of their products are in weird spaces right now. The MacBook Pro only getting its base model upgraded to the M5 is a little weird, and the Mac Studio's M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations are surely not what the company would have wanted. And then there's the Mac Pro, which Apple should really just build up the courage and kill. That thing is stuck on the M2 generation with no signs of it getting an upgrade past that.
A bright spot this year is the MacBook Air, which gets the processor bump in a timely manner. You get the best processor generation on the $999 model, and it's just clearly the best laptop for most people right now.
It's always hard to do these Mac predictions because for the last couple of years they've been pretty boring. Apple releases new processors every year or so, and every Mac is in a good place, so it's really just a matter of predicting when each product is going to get the new processor. That said, I do have a little spice in this year's predictions, so let's get to them.
I'm a MacBook Pro guy, and I'm excited to hear that this might be the most exciting MacBook Pro upgrade we've had since the 2021 Apple Silicon switch for this lineup. The boring part of this prediction is that we'll get M5 Pro and M5 Max models early in the year, eliminating the odd mixed processor situation we have right now. The more exciting part of this is what we're going to get in the fall, which rumor has it will be an OLED model with a touch display and an M6 processor. The rumor mill will surely start grinding away on this throughout 2026, and we'll get a better idea as to what we're looking at here, but I'm excited at the prospect of this update. I am concerned about the price, which is surely not going to be the same as what we pay today, and I'm also concerned that Apple is going to be too conservative with adding touch support to the Mac. Don't get me wrong, if this happens, I'll be getting one, but I really think the vision here should be a convertible device, much like an iPad, rather than the same clamshell form factor the Mac has always had. I think we'll get there eventually, but the early rumors are that this first version is a pretty conservative device.
The MacBook Air is the number one selling laptop in the world, and for good reason. It's an outstanding device with incredible performance and competitive pricing for its class of computer. I'm going to be really boring and say they'll do exactly what they did this year, and in March 2026, we'll get an M5 upgrade with no other notable changes.
I think the Mac Studio will get updated this year, maybe in the summer, and it will get onto the M5 generation of chips. Yes, including an M5 Ultra.
I predict the Mac Mini will get bumped to the M5 and M5 Pro in the spring, maybe at the same time as the MacBook Air.
The Mac Pro will continue to linger as the $7,000 computer that ships with a 2022 chipset that's 3 generations behind the rest of the Mac line.
And oh yeah, the iMac. I'm 50/50 on this one, but if I had to make a guess, I would expect this to get an M5 upgrade at some point in 2026. I'd love to know how many of these Apple sells compared to their other Macs, because this still feels like such a weird product to me. Like a relic from the past that they keep around for a very small niche of users compared to everything else they sell. That said, they've given it M3 and M4 variants, so you gotta think it'll get an M5 edition eventually.
There is an open question about displays, which isn't technically Mac hardware, but it's in the same ballpark. The Studio Display turns 4 this spring, and I'm going to be a downer and say that it will not get an upgrade in all of 2026. I mean, they're selling a 2013 display panel for an insanely high price that comically pales in comparison to the specs in far, far cheaper monitors, so they should upgrade it, but my money's on it not getting touched. My impression is that Apple won't upgrade this until they can make a meaningful improvement without spiking the cost, and I don't see them doing that in today's environment.
It's also not strictly Mac hardware, but the macOS story in 2026 will be an interesting one. I think two main drivers will impact this release: Tahoe's reception and touch Macs. I don't expect major changes to the design, but I do expect to see some changes to the Liquid Glass design system to feel more at home on the Mac. To me, Liquid Glass feels a bit like an ill-fitting Shapeshifter skin on top of macOS's real UI, and they should do better here. On the touch front, I expect we'll see that using macOS with touch doesn't actually require much change to the UI, since as we all know, macOS isn't as small as you think, and actually the pundits who have suggested for years that major changes would need to be made were way overthinking things.
And if I can take a major swing here, I'm going to say here and now that macOS will be available to run on the iPad Pro by the end of 2026. This could be officially from Apple or it could be though some clever people hacking things together to make it work, but I think if you want it enough, you'll be able to do it.
All in all, I think it'll be a relatively standard year for the Mac, but I think we have the potential for some real excitement with the MacBook Pro and what that means for macOS. We'll see what happens.
2025-12-29 02:00:46