Following the announcement of the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and the new foldable iPhone Duo, Apple quietly raised the prices of the older, non-Pro iPhones it will continue to sell. The iPhone 16, 17, 17e and Air are all still available on Apple.com and other retailers, but instead of these old models getting cheaper when the newest flagship model has dropped, which is what traditionally happens, these models will now cost $100 more than they did before the event.

There’s been plenty of chatter this year about Apple raising prices and I genuinely don’t think I have anything to add to that discussion. What I find more interesting is how strongly trade-in values seem to have shifted with this year’s phones.

I checked the posted iPhone trade-in values on Apple’s website for every September going back to 2019 when they started listing them.

The Pro line offers the cleanest comparison, because the 18 Pro went up the same $100 the old non-Pro models did. In September 2025, Apple would have given you up to $550 for a year old iPhone 16 Pro. Today they’re offering up to $785 for a year old 17 Pro. Before accounting for inflation, Apple’s offer on a one year old flagship went up $235 while the phone itself went up $100. Adjust last year’s $550 into today’s money and the offer still went up $215.

But what happened with the 17 Pro is consistent with other devices. Comparing every phone on Apple’s current trade in list against last year’s list, the median phone only lost $10 of trade-in value. Last year, phones typically lost $60 year-over-year, and in 2024 the typical phone lost $90. This year, some phones didn’t even go down at all. For example, the 2021 iPhone 13 Pro’s trade-in value actually went up since 2025.

The clearest takeaway is that if you upgrade every year, upgrading with a trade-in on this cycle is absolutely cheaper than last year. An annual Pro upgrader will pay just $414 for the base storage model this year, down from $549 last year. On a two year upgrade cycle, this year’s deals are far more modest at $10 better than last year.

Now, none of this is too surprising. If RAM-ageddon makes new gadgets more expensive to manufacture, it stands to reason that old gadgets also become more valuable. Apple’s boosted trade-in offers aren’t charity, just evidence of how values have shifted in RAM-ageddon’s aftermath.

Also, higher trade-in values now don’t really mean much if you keep devices longer than two years. My previous phone was a 256GB iPhone 14 Pro. It cost $1,099 new in 2022 and Apple gave me $320 for it last September. This year, a three year old 15 Pro would get up to $370. That’s $50 more credit than I got, but considering the phone is $100 more, the actual upgrade price is $50 worse than last year. So I’m less sure I’ll keep my 17 Pro for another three year cycle and risk the same fate.

And yet, I still don’t think I can convince myself to pull the trigger on a 1-year upgrade to the 18 Pro. There’s legitimately nothing that stands out to me as even a “nice to have” and I’ve still got 12 no interest payments left on the Apple Card plan for my 17 Pro. If I did upgrade, I’d have to make payments on both phones for a year to the tune of nearly $70 per month, which seems crazy. My only real argument in favor of doing it now is that these trade-in values look like a peak. The last time they spiked like this was the 2021 chip shortage and they snapped right back within two years.

So this isn’t really a “time value of money” problem, but a bet on whether $785 is the best offer I’m ever going to get for this phone. It might be, and I’m still probably not going to take it.

When I finished reading The Small Stuff (a non-fiction book), I excitedly told my wife and she asked me how many books I’d read this year. I thought for a second before saying, “Maybe three or four?” After I logged it to my GoodReads I went to check where this put me on my 2026 reading challenge. To my shock I didn’t even have a 2026 reading challenge. It was my first book to finish this year.

I’d started out as a fantastic reader when I was a kid, but I started to have trouble as soon as the books were too big to finish in one sitting. I loved going to the library but often my eyes were bigger than my appetite. I’d check out 3-4 books that I knew were interesting and/or important, but I’d shamefully take them back unread because I couldn’t get more than 25% into a book. I wanted to love reading, but my brain wasn’t letting me.

When it came time for the barrage of standardized tests kids have to take for benchmarking and college, my reading comprehension was almost always my lowest scoring one. As an adult, my doctor told me that trouble finishing what I read is one of the more commonly overlooked signs of ADHD, and that it gets missed most often in high achieving students like I was.

Throughout the rest of school, I only read the books I was assigned to read. My classes in college didn’t require I read any literature, so I didn’t. Throughout my college years, I almost completely stopped reading fiction for fun. I say almost, because in the last semester of my last year in college I bought a Kindle.

The novelty of an eReader worked for me for a while. It was directly responsible for the only fiction books I’ve read since high school: the first four Harry Potter books (circa 2010-2013, not recently), Ready Player One and David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary. If I also count a re-reading of The Hobbit I did before those movies came out, that’s just seven books in 18 years. But that’s not really a fair accounting of things, because as best I can recollect, I read all of those more than a decade ago.

However, owning a Kindle did not magically turn into a fiction reader. Looking back through my GoodReads, Kindle and Audible history, I can confidently say I did not finish a single fiction book between 2014 and 2024. Six years after I bought it, I traded in my Kindle because I wasn’t using it anymore and we could get a nicer one for my wife with a upgrade offer.

It’s not that I wasn’t reading entirely though. Between 2014 and 2024, I finished about 25 different non-fiction books and started but did not finish about 10 more. Even now, “currently reading” items on my GoodReads profile are non-fiction.

Even if those numbers are accurate I don’t think ~2.5 books per year is especially good, and no fiction for a decade is actually quite bad.

I finished The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost a few weeks ago and meant to write a post about it, but never did. Before I finished it, I had an idea to write a series of questions that I should answer afterwards, not just for this book but potentially for any book I’d finished. This is my first post using these questions, and I’ll probably tweak them over time. The one thing I deliberately did not want to include was a rating system or a yes/no recommend scale. My thought was that I don’t need to spend any time bashing a book. My goal is to share my experience with books I enjoyed without trying to overpromise for them.

When I restarted this little writing project, I set a goal of 2 posts per week. Yesterday was the last day of my fourth week, so I thought I should take a moment to grade my little experiment. For the purposes of this exercise, I’d previously decided a week starts on Sunday, and a blog post should contain at least 300 characters of text I wrote (e.g., block quotes don’t count). Anything else is what I’d consider a micro-blog post and not part of my personal goal.

The post you’re currently reading is my eleventh in less than four weeks. I’m quite pleased with that. Eleven posts with more than 10,000 combined words in 25 days is probably some of the most prolific blogging I’ve ever done. But for how I defined my goal, I haven’t managed to stay within the parameters.

This project kicked-off mid-week, but I still managed to publish 4 posts before the next Sunday. In my second week, I hammered out three posts on separate days. That all tracks for the excitement that comes from a new or revived hobby.

But, like always happens with a new or revived hobby, the shine wears off at some point. In my third week of this experiment, I only found the time to publish one post. The same ended up true for Week 4. Luckily, I know what the problem is.

I currently have about 10 unfinished drafts of posts sitting in Drafts. Some are further along than others, but collectively, it’s approximately 5,500 unpublished words. So, basically, about a third of my writing this month never even got published.

I had started and probably could have finished my post about new data centers and still hit my weekly goal, but I had a hard time letting go and calling it done. I don’t use LLMs to write, but I did ask Claude at one point to review what I had written and it said that what I had resembled two different essays shoved together.

Instead of taking that feedback as a sign to publish them as two posts I redoubled my efforts to make it one much longer, but hopefully cohesive one. I don’t know that I succeeded. I certainly didn’t feel that way. Finishing it and publishing it felt like a chore by the end. I just wanted to be done with it.

If I’d published them as two, separate, lighter posts I think I would have gotten them up faster and been able to be happier with them. It was the fact that it grew so long that made me have a hard time letting go.

I’m still going to keep my posting goal at 2 per week, but the thing I’ll try to consider more is to publishing faster, shorter and earlier than I might think I should because the alternative is not publishing at all.

Yesterday I saw Coyote vs. Acme. It’s enjoyable as heck and worth seeing in theaters, if only to vote with your dollars that this is still the kind of movie worth making. I don’t typically write movie reviews, but after seeing such a good movie, I only had one real grievance I felt kept it from being an all-timer. (No spoilers ahead.)

I didn’t love every second of the movie’s plot and pacing. A PG movie starring animated animals must cater to children, over-explain the plot and hit trademarked catchphrases as many times as possible. I can accept that. Well-made family films pack in just as many jokes that aim high and push the limits of the rating, and when those land right they’re even funnier for the adults watching¹.

But from a script and story perspective, I don’t really have notes. My issue is its visuals.

Of the four hybrid live-action and animated Looney Tunes films ever made, this might be the worst the gang has ever looked on the silver screen.

Like 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coyote vs. Acme puts cartoons and humans in the same world, so the 3D characters are meant to read as their original 2D selves. The film is clearly reaching for a cel-shaded style, but it doesn’t always work. Some scenes and characters look far better than others. I found Foghorn Leghorn especially hard to look at, and it might be the first time I’ve ever experienced the uncanny valley effect from a cartoon character.

Often, the CGI feels closer to 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle than to 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy, which was released by the same studio a year before Coyote vs. Acme started production.

It reminded me a lot of Fortnite’s skins for characters from traditional 2D animation. The game has featured 2D-inspired cel-shaded skins of Bugs Bunny, Hank Hill, Goku, Hatsune Miku and even 2D (the animated frontman of the band Gorillaz). Fortnite’s version of the effect is exaggerated and over the top, but I still think Epic Games figured out something that Warner’s animation group has not.

In fairness, there haven’t been many movies that mix live-action and animation with 3D-rendered characters expected to pass as their original 2D selves. Adaptations of Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Sonic the Hedgehog all sidestep the problem by reimagining them from scratch in 3D. I don’t necessarily think all of them turned out especially well (the original Sonic model was famously rather bad), but the new designs definitely have less uncanniness.

I could find only two real examples of characters transitioning to 3D while staying very close to their original look. The first is the 2021 mixed live-action Tom & Jerry movie, oddly enough also made by Warner Animation Group. The other is the 2022 Disney+ original Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, where the style is partly a gag because 2D characters in that world can opt for “CGI surgery” to improve their visual fidelity.

I decided not to count 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, because while the 2D crew comes ashore pretty well, they end up looking more like plasticized vinyl figurines than living cartoons.

I go to all the trouble of saying this because it’s an absolute shame, and likely indicative of just how little WBD believed in the film from the beginning. Money may not have been the only problem, but it seems likely to have been part of it. Modern 3D adaptations of 2D animation have had a real renaissance in the last few decades. One of the trailers I saw before the film was for the upcoming Bluey movie. I had heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Bluey and Bingo had a lot more visual fidelity in their appearance than any of the characters in Coyote vs. Acme, but it’s clearly “CGI surgery” and certainly isn’t being done on the cheap.

While writing this, I found a VFX reel from one of the effects houses that worked on the Disney+ Chip ’n Dale movie. Some of what made it into the final cut of Coyote vs. Acme feels closer to the Rescue Rangers’ PreVis footage than the finished shots. It makes me wonder if that’s part of what happened.

It’s no secret this film had a far smaller budget than the Space Jam sequel, and I’m sure recreating the traditional 2D effect from the original Space Jam and Back in Action would have cost more than the CGI they used instead. I accept Coyote vs. Acme for what it is despite the constraints it had to navigate just to get released. I still enjoyed it, and I still recommend it despite my own criticism.

If this were my own work, I think I’d have struggled to ship it as is. It’s by no means state-of-the-art, and I’m sure they knew that. But they shipped it anyway.

It isn’t the best-looking Looney Tunes movie ever made, but it’s good enough. I got to spend two hours in a theater enjoying it, and hours more talking and writing about it.

Existing like this is far better than not existing at all.

My family first got online with Prodigy dial-up when I was 8. We connected to it via a local phone number, and so I thought that meant the offices of our local phone operator down the street was where “internet” lived. As I got older I began to understand it was far more complex than that.

One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a tall man named Craig. He spoke in a loud, but friendly, North Carolina accent that likely wouldn’t make you think he was the kind of guy who gets really into computers. With his characteristic strawberry-blond horseshoe mustache, he looked, talked and even dressed like a long-lost cousin of Dale Earnhardt.

But in the same way my dad just knew how to work on any car, Craig knew computers. Every so often he’d help my family out, upgrading our first desktop from a 2GB hard drive to 8GB and later helping us make the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

I’ve been thinking about Craig recently because he was the first person I ever knew who worked in a data center. When I think about data centers, I still picture them exactly the way he described them: large, cold rooms filled with rows of whirring computers packed into racks and watched over day and night by people like him.

I can’t remember where Craig worked, and I may not have known at the time. For all I know, what he oversaw was a private network for a single company and not even part of the public internet. But the image sticks with me because it was likely the first time I understood, even vaguely, that rooms full of computers somewhere were doing something important enough that somebody had to watch over them day and night.