Tag Archives: universal

Universal Studios Hollywood family tickets 2026

We recently went to Universal Studios Hollywood and had to figure out which tickets to get. By default, I would’ve just gotten annual passes at Costco and called it a day. Thankfully on Reddit, people discuss the different tickets you can choose from.

It seems to me there’s 2 main paths to choose from: 1.) minimum price or 2.) maximum value. For the former, you can get a single day pass (and maybe look online for discounts).

For value, I was initially considering the Costco pass since the value is there on the surface. You get “a year” (with a bunch of blockout/restricted dates) for $180 per person. Living in LA and being close to Universal Studios, getting an annual pass seems like a good deal.

After doing some research (reading Reddit), the Costco annual pass appears to match the California Neighbor Pass in both price and blockout dates. So the Costco pass doesn’t offer anything better than the CA annual pass.

What I ended up doing was buying 1 Gold annual pass ($299) and the rest in Silver annual passes ($219 per person). This helps for going often since the Gold pass comes with parking while the other passes (Silver, Costco, and CA neighbor) make you pay $40 parking per visit.

There’s also a current promo (at this time of writing) where you get 3 more months free when you buy a new pass. You might wonder why not just mix 1 Gold with the rest as Costco passes? The problem is the Gold pass would be valid for 15 months while the Costco passes only get 12, so the last 3 months wouldn’t be very useful.

If you’re buying Universal Studios passes for a family, you don’t need everyone on the same tier. Get one Gold pass to cover parking for the whole group.

iOS Universal iPad Portrait Gotcha

I wanted to share a small tip that reinforces the necessity of on-device (non-simulator) testing.

While finalizing my latest iOS app (universal for both iPhone & iPad), I found an issue through manual QA on an actual iPad. I had only left Portrait checked in the Project > General section of Xcode, but my app was somehow running in landscape mode on the iPad.

general

Confused as to why it was rendering in both landscape & portrait mode on my iPad, I found a handy stack overflow post.

For one reason or another, you have to update your Info.plist to only specify portrait settings for iPads. Below is my Info.plist after I updated it to only target Portrait mode.

info_plist

It’s confusing as to why the Project General section’s Device Orientation is not sufficient to force only Portrait orientations and you have to also update the Info.plist.

Through simulator testing, it’s not likely that I would have caught onto this portrait vs landscape issue. I relied mostly on my primary iPhone and copious amounts of simulator testing for the other iOS universal devices.

For the highest level of quality control, you would need an iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPhone 6+, iPad, and iPad Pro. That’s a lot of devices and I certainly don’t have all of those. Sidenote: if you do have all those devices, you would also be positioned to record App Preview videos for all devices natively (AKA lots of work).