From Jim H
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for over 30 years from TidBits
2 March 2026
#1793: New iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air, 1Password price increase, troubleshooting old hardware, reading like an LLM
This week, we cover Apple’s latest hardware announcements: the iPhone 17e adds MagSafe and doubles base storage to 256 GB for $599, while the iPad Air gains improved performance from the M4 chip and 12 GB of RAM. With 1Password raising prices, Adam Engst compares it with Apple’s free Passwords app and explains why he’s sticking with 1Password—though you may decide differently. Suman Chakrabarti’s experience reviving a 2017 Brother printer offers practical advice for anyone helping others resurrect donated or legacy hardware: use the simplest connection type available when the device was new. Adam wraps up the issue with an exploration of how it can be helpful to think of reading as training your internal large language model rather than filling a database, offering a freeing perspective on why we consume information. Finally, we link to Adam’s conversation with John Gruber about iOS 26 interface quirks on The Talk Show. Notable Mac app releases this week include DEVONthink 4.2.1, Quicken Classic 8.5, ScreenFloat 2.3.5, and Tinderbox 11.6.