The Amble One is perhaps the world’s best-designed golf cart. It’s street-legal, tuned for off-roading, goes 60 miles on a charge, and starts at $25K.
The Amble One is perhaps the world’s best-designed golf cart. It’s street-legal, tuned for off-roading, goes 60 miles on a charge, and starts at $25K.
Great piece by Andrea Pitzer on how lost Ezra Klein is in this current moment, newly relevant because he interviewed fascist activist Christopher Rufo on his NYT podcast (JFC!) “If you don’t know what your core beliefs are, you’re going to get played.”
Brexit vote: 10 years on. “‘Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,’ says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.”
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for spring 2027, aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Current prototypes of the new model, code-named V62, add a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photography, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product hasn’t been announced. It’s now in advanced testing within Apple, they said.
When Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu of The Information broke the story on the second-gen iPhone Air getting a second camera system back in November, they didn’t say what kind of lens it would be — ultra-wide or telephoto. I speculated that it could go either way. The no-adjective iPhones 11–17 have all sported two lenses: 1× and 0.5×. Pro-tier iPhones have shipped with three lenses (1×, 0.5×, and a telephoto that has varied in length from 2× to 5×) ever since the iPhone 11 Pro introduced the “Pro” adjective in the name. But prior to the iPhone 11 model year, top-tier iPhones with two lenses (7 Plus, 8 Plus, X, XS) shipped with a telephoto 2× lens, not a 0.5× ultra wide, as the second lens.
If Gurman is correct that the additional lens on the second-gen iPhone Air is going to be an ultra-wide 0.5×, I wonder if that is motivated by which type of lens is more popular, or which one fits the Air’s thin form factor better. Could be both — that ultra-wide photography and video is more popular than telephoto, and it fits the constraints of the form factor better. (When I wrote about this in November, a bunch of readers emailed to say that their teenage kids shoot a ton of ultra-wide photos.)
I just ran the numbers on my personal photography with the iPhone 17 Pro over the last nine months. I’ve shot just a hair under 4,000 stills and 90 videos. Still photos by lens:
0.5x: 6%
1x: 86%
4x: 5%
Front: 3%
Videos by lens:
0.5x: 18%
1x: 80%
4x: 2%
Front: 0
By the numbers, I use the ultra-wide 0.5× lens about the same amount as the telephoto 4× for stills, but much more frequently for video — because video is captured with a sensor crop. But flipping through the stills shot with each, an awful lot of my 0.5× photos are macro close-ups of things like receipts and products on store shelves. If I could only have one of the two additional lenses, it’d be a close call, but I’d choose the telephoto 4× — which has become more useful than any previous telephoto lens this year with the sensor crop to get an optical 8× zoom.
Update: “Ultra-Wide 0.5× Lenses Have Utility Beyond ‘Photography’”.
Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-17/apple-prepares…
Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head while reading this: “Not even a celeb like Emily Ratajkowski can find a decent man to date” and “A celeb like Emily Ratajkowski especially can’t find a decent man to date”.
The Best Headlights in the World Are Illegal in America. “America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it.”