Apple iPhone Air

tl;dr: I bought an Apple iPhone Air, not because I believe in Apple’s self-congratulatory “privacy is a fundamental human right” marketing, but because after years of replacing Google Pixel hardware roughly every 18 months I have, again, reached the point where I need exactly one mobile device that will reliably run the closed-source financial, corporate and government apps that modern societies insist on. The Air is a fascinating piece of engineering, despite the new Liquid Glass in iOS being the UI equivalent of a bad car accident, and the device’s raw performance for things like mobile RAW photo development is, sadly, significantly ahead of anything Android offers in 2026. I still do not recommend using an iPhone as a primary device, because Apple remains a surveillance company. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have spent the better part of the last decade trying to engineer my way out of the surveillance economy. I switched away from iOS and stock Android to…