Creator / Designer / Indie Dev
Since 2010
Matt Birchler
The man who started a blog when the iPhone was still learning to walk - and never stopped writing, building, or calling it like he sees it.
Birchtree Est. 2010
The man who started a blog when the iPhone was still learning to walk - and never stopped writing, building, or calling it like he sees it.
In a media landscape full of people who pivot to video the moment clicks dry up, Matt Birchler has been quietly doing it all at once for fifteen years. Blog posts before breakfast. YouTube videos after dinner. Apps on weekends. Podcasts in between. And somehow, none of it feels frantic. It feels like a person who genuinely loves this stuff and figured out that doing it consistently beats doing it loudly.
By day he's a UX and UI product designer at NMI, a payments technology company in Schaumburg, Illinois. That's the job with the salary and the health insurance. But the version of Matt Birchler that most people know lives at birchtree.me - a blog he founded on October 17, 2010, when the iPhone 4 had just landed, iCloud did not yet exist, and the App Store was still finding its footing.
He calls it "my life's work." That's not hyperbole from a guy trying to sound important. It's a straightforward observation: this blog has documented his 20s, his 30s, and now his approach to 40. It has outlasted countless tech publications, aggregators, and platforms. It survived the pivot-to-video era. It survived Twitter's collapse into whatever Twitter is now. It just keeps going, because Matt keeps going.
The secret, if you can call it that: he never tied the blog's survival to revenue. Ads peaked at "a few hundred dollars a month," which he describes without embarrassment. That restraint is the engine. When your mortgage doesn't depend on pageviews, you can say what you actually think. And Matt has always said what he actually thinks - whether that's defending the iPad as a legitimate work machine, building a social media app explicitly designed to minimize screen time, or telling his readers that the MX Master 4 is a disappointment.
The YouTube channel arrived in 2020 under the name "A Better Computer" - deliberately separate from the Birchtree brand, starting with exactly one subscriber: Matt himself. He published 151 videos in the first year alone, beating his own targets, and built an audience on the strength of focused, high-quality screen tutorials about the software and workflows he actually uses.
Then there are the apps. Quick Subtitles, which transcribes a 70-minute podcast in about a minute on your iPhone. Best-o-Masto, a Mastodon client he designed specifically so you wouldn't have to open it much. Quick Reads, a read-later service he launched in April 2025 because he wanted one that worked exactly the way he wanted. He built it. Now he sells it. That is, in miniature, the Matt Birchler method.
"The main thing that has allowed me to keep writing for so long is that I've kept it relatively loose in terms of structure and topics." - Matt Birchler
When Apple released the third-generation iPad Pro, Matt did something most tech journalists would only write about theoretically: he sold his MacBook Pro and switched his entire content operation to iPad. Blog posts, podcast editing in Ferrite, video editing in LumaFusion, design work in Affinity. All of it. On a tablet.
This wasn't a stunt. He documented it across dozens of posts and videos as a genuine experiment in what the iPad could and couldn't do. He became one of the most credible voices on iPad productivity - not because he cheerled Apple, but because he actually did the work on the device and reported honestly about where it broke down.
His watchOS review series ran from watchOS 3 through 8, and became a reference resource in the Apple community - thorough, comparative, useful in a way that most watch coverage isn't.
He has been a recurring guest on the iPad Pros podcast (six or more appearances), which says something: when hosts want someone who has actually lived the iPad workflow rather than theorized about it, they call Matt.
Matt's approach to software mirrors his approach to writing. He does not build platforms. He does not build for "scale." He builds tools custom-tailored to his own needs, ships them, prices them fairly, and lets the work speak.
Best-o-Masto, his Mastodon client, was designed with a deliberate constraint: it only shows the 20 most popular posts from your followed accounts, and you can only refresh it once an hour. He describes it as "a social media app that was built for you not to use it much." That is a product philosophy that runs counter to every incentive in the attention economy, and he shipped it anyway.
Quick Subtitles uses Apple's on-device SpeechAnalyzer to transcribe audio. A 70-80 minute podcast episode in about one minute. No cloud, no subscription for the core function, no data leaving your phone.
He also built twelve personal web apps as progressive web apps for daily tasks - one to append text to Notion, another to control his TV and Hue sync box. Most of these will never appear in an App Store. They exist because he needed them.
"What do you want them to feel when they close the tab?" - Matt Birchler, on writing for an audience
In June 2024, MacStories launched Comfort Zone - a weekly podcast with Matt Birchler, Christopher Lawley, and Nileanee Dorffer. The premise is simple and genuinely good: each episode, every host brings a piece of technology they tried that challenged them or pushed them outside their usual setup. Then one host issues a challenge to the others for next week.
It is the first MacStories podcast to also release video versions on YouTube, which is a notable distribution decision in a podcast world that often treats video as an afterthought.
For longtime listeners of the Apple podcasting ecosystem, Comfort Zone represents Matt's biggest mainstream platform yet - MacStories is one of the most respected Apple-focused publications in the world, and the show has a bonus tier called Cozy Zone for Club MacStories subscribers.
Before this, Matt ran The Birchtree Podcast independently - a micro-podcast about tech, Apple, and design - and has appeared as a recurring guest on the iPad Pros podcast six or more times. He knows how to be on audio. He's been practicing since 2015.
"I'm a UX designer at NMI by day, and a YouTuber by night. My passion is building great software and helping people get the most out of the technology around them."
- Bio, birchtree.me"This is a social media app that was built for you not to use it much."
- On Best-o-Masto"I wanted a tool that was custom-tailored to my needs. That meant minimal functionality and everything optimized around ease of use and performance."
- On building Quick Subtitles"What do you want them to feel when they close the tab? Entertainment, learning, laughter, or perspective shifts matter."
- On writing for an audience