I’ve never written two issues of Nanoglyph so close together, but yesterday’s blast was running long, so I’m following it up with a brief point release.
Last issue covered Rails World 2025. Its closing party was at a museum in Amsterdam Noord called STRAAT. I knew there was a chance it’d be cool, but wasn’t prepared for what I got. The space is the size of an airplane hangar, and it’s been left with features of its past life as a shipping warehouse: exposed walls, overhead cranes, gritty metal and brick. Its modern incarnation is adorned with 200 large-format canvases interspersed throughout on walls, hanging from the roof, and on freestanding displays. Reminiscent of a Peter Lik gallery in Vegas, some of the real magic is a nearly invisible but highly sophisticated lighting system that makes each piece pop to an otherworldly degree. Gorgeous place.
The venue bills its contents as “street art and graffiti”, but given how in the contemporary age the word “graffiti” has become synonymous with “tag” as the practice has devolved into a sloppy affair involving a single can of black spray paint or a stencil, most of the work at STRAAT would be at the 99.9999th percentile of talent in the street art discipline. If we can call the single color geometric shapes on white canvas at the MOMA in San Francisco “art”, then it’s safe to say the same for the pieces here.
Shopify was sponsoring again, and had even commissioned custom beer for the event. Maybe not quite as lavish as the party they’d held in their office in downtown Toronto for last year’s Rail World which had involved interactive AI displays and robot dogs, but just as good.
That’s all a long way of saying that I’m sending this largely as an excuse to publish a few more photos from Amsterdam. See below for those. I also got an iPhone Air.
iPhone Air
Years ago after Apple instituted their fairly generous trade-in program, I got into the bad habit of buying a new iPhone every year. I have no regrets from the first couple of times I did it, but the mistake was not stopping my ordering when Apple stopped its innovating. For many years in a row the announcements we get in September have boiled down to:
- The number on the A* chip is incremented by one like A18 → A19 (unnoticeable).
- X% better camera performance (unnoticeable).
- One or two new colors (and one or two existing colors removed)
- One novelty item. Last year we got the “Camera Control” button, which at first I was excited for, but which turned out to be terrible (ranges from too sensitive to not sensitive enough; fails completely if one microgram worth of moisture is present).
And yet despite all that, I did it again.
This decision largely boiled down to (1) Apple’s signature “Desert Titanium” color I’d ordered last year turned out to be far uglier in person than in their promo material, so I wanted to get rid of it, and (2) the iPhone Air seemed to legitimately be the most interesting thing Apple’s done with the iPhone in years.
Despite waking up at 5 AM on preorder day to buy it, I wasn’t looking forward to release day that much because it’s some effort to rebuild a phone, and now involves a fair bit of job-related legwork like transferring over four separate MFA credentials (our great security overlords have prescribed that more MFA is always better, even when every multi-factor is the same device using the same biometrics).
September 19th rolled around. I went to pick up the phone and was delighted to be in for a surprise. I knew it’d be thin. I knew it’d be light. I didn’t expect it to be this thin and this light. Pictures and videos don’t do it justice. It’s thinner and lighter in person to an impressive degree, and little is sacrificed to make that possible. It’s my favorite new iPhone model since iPhone X.
Battery
There are a couple tradeoffs. The battery isn’t as big as in the Pro models, but that works fine for me as someone who’s not a heavy phone user. I’ve been limiting my phones to 80% maximum charge for years and haven’t had a problem. A day of heavy use will bring me close to zero, but I’ll usually have a laptop on hand for an emergency top up.
Camera
The iPhone Air goes to one camera from three, losing the wide 24mm lens and telephoto 120mm lens from the Pro’s three camera array.
The first phone I ever took a photograph on was a Motorola KRZR back in 2006, and it’s extraordinary how far cameras in phones have come in that time. It used to be a requirement that you’d accompany your photos with spoken narration as whoever you were showing them to stared into the blurry things trying to figure out what they were looking at. Nowadays, you need a trained eye to tell what’s shot on a phone and what’s not.
That said, I tend to use my phone’s camera for throwaway shots or when I don’t have anything else. As much as phone photography has improved, shots that come out of a phone have a soft, artificial quality that I don’t like, and which look noticeably worse compared to photos from a full-frame mirrorless when blown up beyond Instagram size.
I’ll still be carrying around my 5-year old Canon R6 and don’t expect the absence of the extra cameras to bother me much.
Screen
At 6.5 inches, the Air’s screen lands between the iPhone 17 at 6.3 inches and the 17 Pro at 6.9 inches. I like the larger form factors, but having carried the Pro for a number of years I’ve found it just a little too big as the top left side of the screen is just out of reach for my thumb. A few days of use later I can confidently say that if I hadn’t already known the screen was smaller than what I’d had before, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
I was a big Apple fan for years, but under Cook-era leadership it’s been hard not to be a critic as the company’s famous innovation has been replaced with financialization.
It’s been a while since we got a gamechanger like M chips, unibody MacBooks, edge-to-edge displays, or the original iPhone with its revolutionary capacitive touch technology that’d alter the course of history. The iPhone Air isn’t quite up there with any of those, but it’s great. My favorite Apple device in recent memory, and a pleasant surprise after many consecutive cycles of the same.
Until next week.
