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.”

Ed Morrissey, writing for Hot Air, thinks Scott Pelley got what he deserved and Bari Weiss is doing a good job running CBS News:

And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his own position — and if Bilton’s letter is accurate, in as mean-spirited and conceited a manner as possible. Pelley could have chosen a dignified resignation under protest, but instead pulled a power move in an attempt to intimidate Bilton, Weiss, and Ellison, only to discover that no one feared his absence. In fact, they’re probably happy to cut him loose.

There’s always at least one person in these situations who thinks they’re untouchable. A wise executive knows to start by making an example of that person, and then see how many other people think they’re indispensable. It’s not as if TV news jobs are expanding these days, after all. Pelley’s going to find out the hard way that no one’s paying $5 million a year to emote into a camera from other people’s copy.

It doesn’t even enter this man’s little mind that Pelley wasn’t concerned about his job, wasn’t concerned about his salary, but was concerned only with the integrity of the institution to which he’d committed decades of his career, and that he saw as his duty the need to stand up for his remaining and former colleagues. That Pelley himself has integrity. To the Trump lickspittles, everything is performative. They don’t just lack integrity, they don’t believe integrity is real.

Katie Notopoulos:

The Scott Pelley story to me is a lesson in how if you work hard enough in your career to get Fuck You Money, the real reward is the day you need to say it, you can.

Link: hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/06/03/cbs-fires-scott-pelley…

Neil Panchal, on Twitter/X (XCancel link):

Of all the dickovers, the dickover that blueballs you with some first-time buyer incentive. “Sign up and get 10% discount, new accounts only”, the dickover boasts.

Never understood why you’d ever penalize returning customers with a dickover, blue-balling them with 10% off teaser that they’re ineligible for. wtf?

And for first time buyers, they’d always feel left out if they don’t shove their email address in the dickover. The choice is an illusion with a penalty of 10%. But wait… there’s more! You only get a discount code if you, after clicking the confirmation email link, also sign up for their SMS marketing. You just got double dicked.

I fell for this racket once, albeit with my eyes open. Last year I bought a cap from New Era’s website. They offered me some sort of discount for giving them my email address. I knew they were going to get my email anyway because I was going to buy the hat, so I figured why not. Only then — exactly as Panchal describes — did they say I also needed to give them my phone number and grant permission to text me marketing messages. Now I was pissed. I did it anyway, just to see what happened (and get the discount). As soon as I bought the hat, discount applied, I rescinded their permission to send me text messages and marketing emails. (They had already texted me like two marketing messages, in addition to the ones confirming my phone number.) Overall I’d have rather paid a few more dollars than go through the hassle, which is why my standard operating procedure is to decline all such entreaties. A real discount is just offering a lower price. Anything else is a scam of some sort.

But the real problem is that it completely soured my impression of New Era. I am far less likely to purchase from them again. I will eventually buy a New Era cap again — their actual products are excellent, and they are the exclusive maker of official MLB on-field caps — but if I can buy it elsewhere, I will. I’ll go out of my way to avoid buying direct from New Era for the rest of my life.

The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes — and insist on adding dickovers and dickbars to websites — do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.

Link: x.com/usgraphics/status/2060559523585355986