By John Moltz
March 31, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Who wants this stuff?
Another seven days, three more fantastic tales of Apple! The headset isn’t even out yet and it’s already DOA, the company’s classical music app is out with the fowlest of themes, and are you prepared for…the Mystery Button?!
Get your headset in the game
This headset mystery is already giving me a headache.
According to The New York Times, eight unnamed sources who work or worked at Apple on the headset are wondering why this device and why now?
Some internal skeptics have questioned if the new device is a solution in search of a problem.
On the other hand, if not this device then when? If not now, then why? Who? What? [Wookiee gronk]?
These are all valid questions to ask about this device that few have seen and even fewer apparently understand. This despite the fact that it was apparently recently demoed to the company’s top 100 executives.
What’s worse is, we might not be finding out more as soon as we thought we would. Ming-Chi Kuo says:
…the mass production schedule for assembly has been pushed back by another 1-2 months to mid-to-late 3Q23. The delay also adds uncertainty to whether the new device will appear at WWDC 2023…
The reasoning is apparently that even Apple expects sales of the device to be low. Although…
Executives expect consumer interest to grow as subsequent iterations of the headset launch at lower price points in the future.
Hmm. It’s almost as if they’re suggesting there’s an elasticity of demand and that it’s somehow related to pricing.
Huge, if true.
This week Apple announced WWDC would take place June 5-9 in the same format as last year, free and online, with select developers and students attending at Apple Park. Which raises a real quandary for deciding whether or not to try to get into the pool. Do you want to spend a lot of money to attend an event that may or may not be where Apple announces a device that may or may not be a game changer in the world of VR and AR which may or may not be the next big thing in technology?
Classical HONK!
This week Apple finally (FINALLY™) released the classical music app that it said it was going to ship last year. But what is this year if not a continuation of last year? Honestly, sometimes it seems like we’re living through the 39th month of 2020.
Dan has the deets on the new app from Apple, based on another app from someone else. While it’s not exactly half-baked it doesn’t quite seem fully cooked, certainly in terms of how the music is tagged, and it’s not even available on anything other than iOS, unless you like tiny windows on iPadOS.
What is this? Classical music for ants?
No, turns out ants don’t have ears (although they can feel vibrations, so maybe the 1812 Overture would be good for them). But it might be for geese, as one of the albums available is music from Untitled Goose Game. Is that ironic, considering Apple rejected Untitled Goose Game from the App Store not once, but twice? It’s not not ironic. It’s also not not ironic that Apple says that to listen to classical music on devices other than an iPhone, you can just create a playlist in the Classical app and it will show up in Music on other devices. What a sweet solution!
But the piping hot irony is this bit from the app’s web page:
Apple Music Classical was built exclusively for mobile and is available on iOS with Android coming soon.
Wut.
Fixing tags is a relatively easy thing to do (although I’m glad I’m not the one who has to do it), and all of these issues are eminently fixable. As they say, the best classical music app is the one you have with you. Hope you have your phone.
This button goes to 11
This week, button mania continues as details of the iPhone 15 Pro’s hardware changes bubble up from the seething cauldron of mystery sludge that is the Apple rumor mill. Do not ask how the sausage is made and do not ask what fell arts are involved in gleaning Apple rumors.
Just know that the number of Bothans who died to bring us this information is non-zero.
Eight. It was eight Bothans.
iPhone 15 Pro Rumored to Feature Multi-Use Action Button Instead of Mute Switch
Yes, the iPhone 15 Pro’s replacement for the mute switch will work much like the Apple Watch Ultra’s Action button. MacRumors speculates on the host of actions the button might be able to execute, including “Open Control Center”, “Screen Recording”, Shazam (but not Shazam 2), and a tantalizing action known as “Ring/Silent”.
Oh, wait, that’s…that’s what the mute switch does.
As one of the world’s preeminent iPhone-mini-super-fans (sigh, there are dozens of us, sigh), I’m not likely to get this hardware feature any time soon, so I will just have to look forward to one day mapping its function to the feature my iPhone 13 mini’s mute switch already executes.
Truly the future is amazing.
[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.]