Linked List: September 7, 2026

Monday, 7 September 2026

Trackables:

There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started.

Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface.

Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a paid tier in the future, but core functionality will remain free.) I’ve been using Trackables for months and it’s just a better dashboard to the stats I care about than the Health app itself.

(One interesting detail: HealthKit only makes raw data available to apps. Apple Health’s “sleep score” isn’t part of that data — only the raw input, like how many hours you slept, and how much time was spent in each sleep stage. So Trackables computes its own sleep score. When I bother to compare, Trackable’s score is almost always similar to Apple’s, but seldom exactly the same. But I personally find that Trackable’s sleep score corresponds better to how I feel I slept. Which, admittedly, is usually pretty good.)

The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Larry Ellison ★

The Onion:

The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry?

Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.

McKinley 1.0 ★

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall:

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

McKinley is Mac-assed out the wazoo:

Rich AppleScript support, including a library of practically useful example scripts.
Quick Look previews and thumbnails for documents.
A well-written comprehensive user manual. (Me, a few months ago: “There exist good products with bad or no documentation, but there are very few poor products with great documentation.”)

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool. McKinley is a $60 one-time purchase, and there’s a 15 percent launch discount this week only (taking the price to just $51). What a remarkable 1.0.

See also: Michael Tsai; Worrall on Mastodon.

Matt Birchler’s Folding iPhone Predictions ★

Matt Birchler:

So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well).

My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me.

Birchler has been using a Samsung Galaxy Fold8 — the new one that preemptively copied the folding iPhone’s aspect ratio — for the last month or so. So I’m intrigued by his firsthand experience with the same general form factor. But I have no idea what he’s talking about regarding “the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world”. For 2025, Counterpoint and TrendForce both pegged foldable phones at 1.6% of the global market. Just today Counterpoint released a report that says “Foldables still account for only about 2% of the overall smartphone market, leaving plenty of room for the category to grow.”

Anecdotally I find it hard to believe the 2 percent number. It’s my nature to take notice of the phones people use, and there’s no way that 1 in 50 people I see have foldable phones. I don’t even think it’s 1 in 100. On a recent vacation, I didn’t see a single foldable at the airport nor at the resort hotel where we stayed. Obviously my own anecdata could be all wet, but I think “2 percent” is generous — and presumably, if it’s accurate, it’s almost entirely from outside the U.S. It’s like saying “touchscreen phones” had “increasing market share” before the iPhone. Going from 0.1% to 0.2% is a doubling of share, but the share is still tiny.

Regarding the name, Birchler spitballs a decent suggestion:

Finally, there’s the name. Everyone seems to think it’s going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that’s what I’d bet on as well.

But I just don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s not “ultra” in many ways, and I don’t like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do…

I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there’s a 99% chance I’m wrong, but hey, won’t it be amazing if I’m right?

The problem with “Folio” is that it’s too descriptive only of the form factor. Not the feeling it’s supposed to convey. I’m betting on “Ultra”, but I’m still rooting for “Duo”, which has some history and sounds like a nice companion adjective to “Neo”.