By John Moltz

March 3, 2023 3:30 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Cocaine Bear

This week we wonder what the Apple headset will look like, hope that Apple will improve the Apple Watch’s battery life, and sigh loudly again at Twitter.

Looks aren’t everything, but they’re something

Remember Google Glass? Sure you do. You laughed so hard milk came out your nose. And you weren’t even drinking milk at the time.

Which is how we found out you were a replicant. Different story, though.

The point is, it looked silly and everyone hated it because they didn’t want someone in their face recording literally everything. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the inevitability of the surveillance state in a weekly wrap-up column, so let’s focus on the looking silly part. Because if Xiaomi’s new prototype AR glasses are any indicator, that particular issue has still not been fixed. For some reason I am reminded of the unibrowed baby from The Simpsons.

Based on precedent, it is not unreasonable to expect the industry to quickly jettison their existing designs and immediately follow the cues of whatever Apple ships. There’s certainly a lot of movement in the space based on expectations of an Apple announcement in a few months. Meta is cutting prices on its existing lineup, which is already priced significantly below what Apple is expected to charge.

It’s possible a differentiating factor for Apple will be a newly patented handoff method that allows a user to transfer content and focus with facial expression and gestures. That sounds like it beats my usual shuffling of papers and confusedly using my Mac mini’s mouse for several seconds while wondering why the cursor on my MacBook isn’t moving.

The low power mode lifestyle

I scream, you scream, we all scream for more battery life.

I mean, I wouldn’t say no to ice cream, but… c’mon.

Is Apple finally taking the hint?

In an interview with India Today, Apple Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers discusses one of the places battery life is most acutely felt: on the Apple Watch.

Borchers says that the question of battery life on Apple Watch is a tricky one and the company is hoping to answer it in various ways.

Oh, good, now we’re going to get some solutions!

One of them is faster charging…

Customers: “The real problem with the Apple Watch is when I’m out wearing it and it dies.”

Apple: “Ah! Well, what if you could charge it faster?”

Customers: “That’s not… that… What?”

At the same time, the company also continues to explore how it can achieve the best way to balance features … and battery life.

Uh. OK.

“We were going to put lasers into the Apple Watch but they burned through the battery in 15 seconds so we didn’t do that.”

The message here seems to be less “We’re focusing on Apple Watch battery life!” and more “Apple Watch battery life continues to be a product in our lineup.” It’s always interesting that when you ask Apple customers what they want, more battery life is usually fairly high on the list. But the company usually only ships minimal battery upgrades that are measured in the “how long you can watch a movie” metric. Which, incidentally, is why every time there’s an iPhone event Martin Scorsese suddenly feels sad, though he does not know why.

Certainly the company has managed to greatly improve battery life on the Mac by switching to Apple silicon, but the iPhone and Apple Watch particularly continue to be just sort of fine. Looks like we can continue to expect more just fineness in the future.

If anything, it’s unfair to the bear

Twitter-related drama is the new normal, as the steady rain of nuclear fallout from Electric Bugaboo’s purchase of the platform continues to fall.

This week the makers of both Twitterrific and Tweetbot, most likely after hashing out options with Apple, shipped what are likely to be final updates to their apps. As Dan describes, the updates let users choose whether or not to get a prorated refund for the amount time the app(s) were no longer able to connect to Twitter or, in the case of Tweetbot, convert the subscription to a license to Ivory, Tapbots’s Mastodon client. If you do nothing, you’ll receive a refund.

There’s been some question as to why Apple is forcing these refunds when they have no material impact to the company’s bottom line but will have substantial impact to The Iconfactory and Tapbots. No one has really said so publicly, but it’s most likely because there are certain jurisdictions where if a service is no longer being provided, you legally have to give the option of receiving a refund.

Going to the trouble to choose not to get a refund might seem like a ridiculous exercise—an excessercize, if you will¹—but I’d urge you to consider doing it.

I don’t know about your finances, but if someone said they were going to have to garnish my wages because a capricious billionaire decided to take away one of my revenue streams so he could trash a platform like a bear that has accidentally taken too much cocaine, that would cause me some financial distress. And anger, honestly.

If you think comparing one of our titans of industry to a hopped-up ursine is unfair, consider that Twitter outages are on the rise, Musk has backed a cartoonist who went on a racist rant, Twitter is being sued over unpaid bills, and misinformation is on the rise on the platform. And these are all just stories from the last week.

There has long been a concern about the race to the bottom created by the App Store in terms of pricing. If we’re legitimately concerned about the negative effect of downward price pressure, it’s pretty easy to argue that we were probably not paying enough for these apps in the first place.

In the end it comes down to who you think needs the money more. It really might be you. But if it’s not, consider taking a few seconds to help out some valuable members of the app community.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]