Hi Friend,
You may have noticed (or not) that I've been doing a bit more publicly on YouTube recently. I'm familiar with the video-making process. I've made over a thousand of them for all the Field Guides combined, and I'm approaching 400 videos in the MacSparky Labs.
What I hadn't done much of, however, is public videos. So over the last several months, I've been making more of an effort there. I've got some editing help to give my videos a bit more of the public YouTube look, and I've been linking some of them in this very newsletter as of late. I felt like a few clicks from the newsletter would hopefully give the videos a little steam in the YouTube algorithm.
My goal here isn't to become the next Marques Brownlee, but instead just to get some of the stuff I'm doing out to a bigger audience. I hope it helps a few people out and, at the same time, brings a few more folks into my podcasts, MacSparky Labs, and the Field Guides.
Last weekend I had intended to share a video in the Saturday newsletter about why I'm choosing the iPhone Duo. I'd already shot the video, but the edit wasn't quite done when the newsletter shipped. It was finished later on Saturday, so I scheduled it for Sunday morning without expecting many people to see it since it didn't go in the newsletter.
I didn't think much about it until I logged into YouTube Monday afternoon to watch some of my favorite makers during some downtime. I wasn't thinking at all of that iPhone Duo video when it popped up in my recommendations. That was odd, I thought, so I looked closer, and it said 112K views.
What?
It turns out the video I released on a Sunday with no fanfare blew up. The last time I checked, it passed 600,000 views, which is about forty times the size of my YouTube subscriber list.
I've been making things on the internet for almost twenty years, and I still can't predict this. But I spent the week paying attention and reading the comments, and there's something in there worth passing along.
The video contains no news. Everything in it was already public. There's no benchmark, no teardown, no camera comparison. Indeed, I said explicitly at the beginning that this was not a review but a "buying decision" video. I explained what I'm buying and why, and what I'm giving up to get it. There were very few specs discussed.
The comments made the case better than I can. Nearly 900 of them, and almost none were about millimeters or megapixels. They were people explaining their own reasoning back to me. One reader wrote that he's had Pro Max models for six years, takes a lot of photos, and has never felt the Pro camera made him a better photographer. He wasn't reacting to my information. He was using my argument as something to push against.
Two things I'm taking from this.
If you make things, your audience probably wants your judgment more than your research. Research is easy. (Even easier in the age of AI.) Judgment is the part only you have.
And if you're just trying to buy a phone: the reason the argument landed isn't that the Duo is better. It's that I named the tradeoff out loud. I'm giving up the best camera Apple makes in exchange for a device I'll use differently. Once the tradeoff is on the table, you can disagree with me productively. Most gear advice never gets that far. It lists everything a product does well and leaves you exactly where you started.
It's all been a fun week for me, but I'm not taking any of it particularly seriously. I'm not tracking views or planning how to blow up next time. I made a video that the YouTube algorithm blessed for reasons I'll never know, and it resonated with people. I could make another 100 videos, and I wouldn't be surprised if none of them came close to those numbers. It's iPhone season, the Duo is the most argued-about Apple product in years, and I happened to have an interesting opinion. I can't reproduce that on purpose, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says they can.
The part I can reproduce is the part about judgment and taste. Now, more than ever, say the thing. Pick a side. Show the tradeoff.
I'm still buying the Duo. :)
Your pal,
David
Read this post on macsparky.com
This Week in the MacSparky-Verse
Here's what ran at MacSparky.com this week.
In the MacSparky Labs, we covered a lot:
- I posted the September meetup recording as a podcast episode, covering the iPhone Duo, local AI, the M5 Mac Studio, and the new AirPods.
- I updated my moving-into-a-new-iPhone checklist for iOS 27.
- I wrote the companion piece for moving into a new Apple Watch on watchOS 27.
- I published The Lab Report on the iOS 27.2 betas, the rebuilt Health app, and Siri AI in five more languages.
Next week I'm doing a live Deep Dive on turning my Mac Studio into a home server, and then a jam session on browsers.
That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.
PowerPhotos: The ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac
This week's newsletter is sponsored by PowerPhotos, the toolbox for Apple Photos.
PowerPhotos just continues to evolve with macOS, giving us a way to get Photo management tools that Apple will never include in the native Photos app. This includes managing multiple libraries, merging libraries, finding duplicates, advanced export, multi-library search, and more.
PowerPhotos 3.4 gives albums some nice updates, with new commands for creating, deleting, and arranging them. There's also a search field above the album list to filter albums by name. If you've accumulated a long list of albums, finding the one you want gets a lot easier.
PowerPhotos is ready for macOS 27 Golden Gate, including the return of star ratings to Photos. You can view and edit ratings, carry them along when copying photos, and use them to find the pictures you want. I like having more to work with than a simple favorite flag.
MacSparky readers can use MACSPARKY26 for 20% off for a limited time. If you already own PowerPhotos or iPhoto Library Manager, your existing key gets you 50% off the upgrade. Download PowerPhotos and take a look.
My thanks to PowerPhotos for supporting MacSparky.