Yining Karl Li

I can't wait to see everyone's new product names over the next 24 months. Get ready for Samsung Galaxy Book Neo, Huawei Matebook Neo, Dell Neo, Xiamoi Neo, etc...

Only ones immune are MSI and Asus who will continue to name their laptops "ROG Crystal Elite Emperor 97TXU5BRev2".

The real story for the Neo isn't that its starting price is $599... it's that the price is _$499_ for students. They knocked it out of the park on the pricing. Interesting that recently, across the board for basically all models Macs are now really competitive on price.

Yeah. The real story around the Neo actually isn't the $599 starting price either... it's that the starting price is _$499_ for students. They knocked it out of the park on the pricing.

YouTube video by Apple Hello, MacBook Neo

The MacBook Neo video feels like a return to peak early 2010s Apple videos; it's really wonderfully done. Also interesting is the target audience: it's as much an intro to the Neo as it is an intro to macOS. They're going to sell a zillion of these.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SI...

Ah yes the legendary Longchu 🤣

Oh wait I didn't realize that the introduction of the Studio Display XDR also means Apple is straight up _discontinuing_ the Pro Display XDR. That's pretty wild to me- the Pro Display XDR's size and resolution is completely in a league of its own.

For every show we keep an internal folder filled with this stuff, including funny glitches and bad renders, and goofy stuff the animators intentionally make for fun. But it'll almost certainly never see the light of day.

Apple debuts M5 Pro and M5 Max to supercharge the most demanding pro workflows Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro.

Interesting details on M5 Pro/Max chips: CPU and GPU are now separate dies combined via an interposer. Also Apple now has 3 types of cores: super cores (what used to be perf cores), perf cores (new design), and efficiency cores (same as before).

www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Studio Display XDR 27-inch 5K Retina XDR display. Mini-LED backlight. 2000 nits HDR. P3 + Adobe RGB. 120Hz and Adaptive Sync. Thunderbolt 5. Perfect for pros.

Studio Display XDR is 5K/27 inches, has 2000 nit HDR, and does 120hz. This monitor is The Chosen One.

The interesting thing though is that you can get Pro Display XDR used for about the same price now. Only 60Hz sure, but 6K/32 inch.

www.apple.com/studio-displ...

I love the cinematography in the product video for the M4 iPad Air. They went with an idea where every shot has screen-upwards movement, resulting in a lot of really clever really fun shots. Absolutely delightful and wonderful framing and shot design.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT5i...

YouTube video by Umbrel Making Umbrel Pro

Opinion: product marketing videos which are just pretty footage of manufacturing processes are vastly underrated and everyone should do more of them. This startup's manufacturing video is great; it's right up there with the gold standard of Apple videos.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IAX...

Breaking down a scene from 'F1': Monza - befores & afters An excerpt from befores & afters magazine. Plus, watch Framestore's BRAND NEW visual effects breakdown video.

The accompanying article from the magazine: beforesandafters.com/2026/02/10/b...

YouTube video by befores & afters F1 - go deeper into the VFX with Framestore

@beforesmag.bsky.social has an amazing breakdown of the VFX work done for Apple's F1 movie. For a movie that "had no CGI work", there's a ton of incredible, utterly seamless CGI work that you'd never be able to tell was there if you didn't know!

youtu.be/mmAxzrIgVcI?...

At every animation studio I've worked at, this is a weekly occurrence.

IQ is building a procedural piano in ShaderToy. 🤯

Yup.

The results look spectacular. But the plumbing to make it all work? Probably no single person in the entire studio understands the eye pipeline end-to-end.

This is very close to how eyes work in our pipeline.

Bonus: our eye shader internally implements a variant of manifold exploration to handle eye caustics. The eye shader is literally a more advanced light transport system than the main renderer, inside of a shader, inside the main renderer.

I suspect this may be true for AAA game engines too, but can't speak to that as well because I haven't been in a game studio.

Go into any large animation/VFX studio pipeline and I guarantee you that however they model/rig/texture/shade/light/render eyes is probably one of the most haunted/curséd parts of that pipeline.

So this is what Apple's custom Apple Silicon servers for Private Cloud Compute look like. The new WSJ video about Apple's push for US-based manufacturing features a first-ever look at Apple Silicon server enclosures.

...they look like normal servers!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFl...

On second thought, screw having equal spec cars; an Olympic Grand Prix should absolutely have constructors by nation and should absolutely have a rule book riddled with loopholes for engineers to exploit.

Ferrari causes shock in F1 testing with rear wing which flips 180 degrees Ferrari has introduced a unique rear wing during F1 2026 pre-season testing, as it flips 180 degrees once opened

I don't watch F1 races, but I love reading about F1 engineering, because F1 engineering is really a fine art of reading the rules very carefully and finding insanely clever ways to thread the needle through tiny gaps in the rules to get an advantage.

www.motorsport.com/f1/news/ferr...

Kinda wonder what he thinks about Matthew 19:16-28 then.

Somebody implemented shortest-path-between-nodes entirely in CSS. I have a few questions:

1. what
2. how
3. why

css-tip.com/graph-theory/

A modest proposal: if esports are worthy of potentially being a future Olympic event, then so should Formula 1 style racing.

Olympic Grand Prix has a pretty cool ring to it. You'd probably want equal cars though, a-la Formula 2 or Formula E.

four stick figures on sleds, one is sliding face first, face down, marked "skeleton", diagonally opposite to it is one sliding feet first, face up, marked "luge". The other two combinations are drawn and labeled with question marks

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

Yeah! We still have 2D dept that uses them, and some of the story artists and visdev artists like using them too. Also one of our VFX supes who started in the 2D days but made the jump to 3D has a really cool setup- he has an animation desk modded to have a Cintiq mounted to the rotatable disc!