A Chilean Architect Quietly Built a House That Follows the Hill Instead of Fighting It

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House 22, designed by Chilean studio Loft7 and completed in 2023, sits on a sloping coastal lot south of Punta de Lobos — a stretch of Chilean coastline known for dramatic surf and untouched native scrubland. The lot descends toward the northwest, and rather than resisting that gradient, the architecture follows it, letting the terrain pull the building naturally toward an uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean.

At 320 square meters, the residence is generous without being excessive. Loft7 structured the build using a combination of reinforced concrete and steel frames — a technical pairing that allows the house to hold its ground on a challenging slope while keeping the interior language warm and tactile. Exposed timber beams run through the living spaces, the dining area, and the kitchen, grounding each room in material honesty. There’s no attempt to disguise how the building is put together. That transparency is the design.

Designer: Loft7

What makes House 22 worth studying isn’t a single dramatic gesture — it’s restraint applied consistently. The interiors lean on wood, natural light, and sightlines that always resolve at the ocean. No surface fights for attention. The beam grid overhead becomes rhythm rather than decoration, and the open-plan social spaces feel like they’re orientated by the view rather than by a floor plan. Spaces breathe because the architecture got out of the way.

Pichilemu is famous in surfing circles, but architecturally it’s a place where the Chilean coast has quietly been producing some of the country’s most considered residential work. Loft7 fits that lineage — a studio that has built its reputation around sites where nature already has the upper hand. Their approach with Casa 22 trusts the land and the light, deploying materials that age well in a coastal climate and a massing that reads modestly from the outside while delivering on every expectation from within.

Photographed by Fabián Acuña, the project looks different at every hour of the day. Morning light hits the timber and fills the interiors with warmth; the Pacific turns silver in the afternoon. That relationship between material, orientation, and time of day is never accidental in good coastal architecture — and here it feels entirely intentional. House 22 isn’t trying to be the loudest house on the Chilean coast. It’s trying to be the most honest one. On both counts, Loft7 delivers.

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Your iPhone’s Portrait Mode Was Fake for a Decade – The iPhone 18 Pro Changes That With A Real Aperture

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Would you be shocked to hear that the “Portrait Mode” on your iPhone all these years was ‘fake’? Well, it’s real as in the background is actually blurred, but it isn’t blurred because the camera captured it that way, it’s all been software trickery for the past decade… until now. Six laser cut blades, each thinner than a human hair, are about to change that. The iPhone 18 Pro’s new main camera can physically open and close its lens for the first time in iPhone history, and that single mechanical change rewrites how the blur behind your subject actually gets made.

Here’s the quick version of how Portrait Mode has worked since 2016. Your iPhone takes the shot, uses a second lens or depth data to figure out roughly where you end and the background begins, then runs software over the image to blur everything behind that outline. It’s a clever guess dressed up as photography, and it’s why hair strands sometimes disappear into a smudge or a stray earring gets blurred along with the wall behind it. The new aperture system skips the guessing entirely. The lens itself controls how much of the scene stays sharp, the same way it’s always worked on a real camera.

Designer: Apple

So how does a phone this thin pull off something that usually needs a chunky lens barrel? Apple built a system of six laser cut blades, each one thinner than a strand of hair, arranged around the main lens and moved by a tiny rotor mechanism. Together they shift the aperture through four stops, all the way down to f/1.48, with the camera defaulting to a f/1.8 for everyday portraits and opening or closing automatically depending on what it’s looking at. In low light it opens wider to pull in around 50 percent more light, which should mean cleaner night shots and sharper astrophotography without cranking up the ISO and adding grain.

Because this is optical now instead of computational, the depth falls off the way it would on an actual camera lens. Hair, glasses, jewelry, the fine stuff that always tripped up the old software blur, should render properly instead of getting smeared into the background by accident. Close the aperture down and you get more of the scene in focus for group shots, which is the same tradeoff photographers have been making with real cameras for a century. It’s just that now your phone gets to make that tradeoff too.

Apple didn’t stop at making the hardware smarter, it also handed a lot of that control directly to you. The redesigned camera app now includes Pro Controls, letting you manually pick one of the four aperture settings yourself, check exposure with an actual histogram, dial in white balance, and adjust shutter speed for motion blur or freeze frame shots. Third party camera apps are getting access to the same aperture system through an updated API, so this isn’t going to stay locked inside Apple’s own app for long. Photography folks who like getting hands on with their settings finally have a real reason to poke around the camera app instead of leaving everything on auto.

The upgrade carries over into video too. Cinematic mode effects can now be applied after you’ve already shot the footage, and it supports 60fps for smoother half speed slow motion. Time-lapse jumps to 4K with Dolby Vision HDR. None of that depends directly on the aperture blades, but it’s part of the same larger push this year to hand serious creative control to people who just want to point their phone and shoot something that looks intentional.

All of this sits inside a redesigned Pro body that now uses color matched aluminum and back glass, available in Black, Silver, the new Glacier, and a genuinely gorgeous Burgundy that photographs beautifully next to the camera module. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, both up for preorder September 12 and shipping September 18. For a feature that lives entirely inside a few hair thin blades you’ll never actually see moving, it might end up being the most noticeable camera change Apple has made in years.

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Apple’s Coolest Watch Feature Has Nothing To Do With Health… It Lets You Rewind Time.

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“Could you come again?” “Pardon?” “Huh?” “Wait, say that one more time?” These are examples of phrases that make you seem dumber than you really are. Nothing destroys aura more than unironically asking someone to repeat something they said because A. you weren’t listening, or B. you were but just didn’t happen to comprehend what they were saying. Apple has a solution for that, and it’s wrapped up in their latest smartwatch. The new Live Rewind feature, powered by Apple’s new S11 chip, allows you to instantly transcribe the past 15 seconds of any conversation and read its chat logs. Press the digital crown on the new Watch twice, and you pretty much get ‘subtitles’ for the past 15 seconds, so you don’t have to “excuse me” your way into a repetition.

Your watch, just like your phone, earbuds, smart speaker, and smart home hub, is always listening. It’s waiting for the magic words “Hey Siri” or Alexa, or Google depending on which ecosystem you’re tied into. The point is, it’s always listening, so Apple simply created a way to package that into a feature that feels impressive rather than invasive. Think of how a dashcam can auto-log the past 3 minutes of video AFTER an accident occurs (using a feature called loop recording), Apple just brought that to your watch, packaged as a part of its new Audio Intelligence suite of features. Impressive, no?

Designer: Apple

Once you’ve got the transcript, you can ask Siri about it directly, or save it into the new Siri app to dig up later. Say your coworker rattles off a Wi-Fi password or a colleague mentions a book recommendation mid-hallway chat. Instead of fumbling for your phone, you catch it on your wrist and move on. Apple says none of this gets recorded in the traditional sense. Audio flows into a secure buffer inside the S11’s Secure Exclave, a hardware compartment isolated from the rest of the system, and once the transcript is generated, the raw audio is gone. No file, no clip, nothing to subpoena, because nothing exists.

Sitting next to Live Rewind is Siri Recap, which does the same basic trick but for an entire conversation instead of a 15 second clip. Turn it on before a meeting or a parent teacher conference, and Apple Intelligence quietly builds a title, a summary, and a list of key points you can review afterward in the Siri app. You control the boundaries here more than you’d expect. Leave it running all day, schedule it for work hours only, or flip it off entirely from Control Center whenever the conversation turns private. Summaries auto delete after seven days unless you save them, and saved ones sync end to end encrypted, so not even Apple can read them back.

Audio Intelligence isn’t just built for eavesdropping on your own life. Sound Recognition listens for sirens, alarms, doorbells, and crying babies, then buzzes your wrist even when your phone is nowhere nearby, which makes it a genuinely useful accessibility tool for anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing. Shazam gets folded in too, sitting in the Smart Stack and naming whatever song is playing around you without you having to pull out a phone. Four features, one microphone, and one chip doing the quiet work behind all of them.

Both Live Rewind and Siri Recap need Siri AI to function, and Siri AI is still in beta, so expect this to roll out gradually starting in English before other languages follow. You’ll also need an iPhone 16 or newer paired to the Watch, so the 16e and anything older is out of luck. Apple Watch Series 12 itself starts at $399, is available for preorder today, and ships September 18. The health sensors got a real upgrade this generation too, but for once, that isn’t the headline. The mic is.

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