By John Moltz
August 18, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Band of bothers
Change is coming and you will like it whether you like it or not. The iMac has a big anniversary and Apple dons a big rubber suit and crushes Tokyo.
Unband me, sir!
Are you burdened by too many Apple Watch bands? What if I told you you will soon be able to throw out all those bands?
And buy new ones.
OK, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a solution.
Yes, (all together now) according to Mark Gurman (not bad, could have used a little more volume from the people in the back), Apple is prepping a big Watch redesign to mark the tenth version of the much flopped device. So, conceivably, a year after changing the port on our iPhones, Apple could make us buy all new Watch bands.
In this economy.
Look, Apple’s just doing you a favor.
“Your Apple Watch band is likely covered in bacteria, new study says”
How dare you. I washed it… once.
The current band mechanism is an underrated innovation of the current century. If you wanted to change your watch band prior to the Apple Watch, it required a special tool, a lot of squinting and retrieving that little springy thing from across the room four or five times. With the Apple Watch’s band connector, it was more like plugging in a USB A cable. You might get it wrong the first time, but it was still much easier.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. Reportedly, changing the band connector would allow Apple to make the Watch thinner or add more components, like a larger battery. Apple has even been experimenting with magnetic band attachments.
If there’s one takeaway from technology, it’s “don’t get attached to connectors.”
iMac, still alive at twenty-five
Happy 25th birthday, iMac!
Let’s see, the iMac could already drink. I guess now it can also rent a car? This seems like a bad combination.1
Widely considered the device that “saved Apple”, the iMac has undergone a number of design changes over the years and seems to finally have settled on… rectangular.
Sweet. My phone is rectangular. It’s a shape I’m comfortable with. I wouldn’t have wanted a rhombus. Or a tesseract. Or a forbidden shape. Some shape that would drive you insane every time you looked at it. Others might like that, but it’s not for me.
The iMac is a perfect example of why sometimes it’s good to throw out things you’re comfortable with. I’m not familiar with any studies that might have been conducted at the time, but just imagine how much bacteria was in your floppy drive (not a euphemism). You don’t know where those disks had been.
Despite the iMac’s success, despite the fact that it blazed a Bondi blue path for any number of other devices from Apple and other companies, we still regularly complain about change. But sometimes change is not only good, it’s necessary to move forward.
King of the mon-stars
One of the knocks against Apple TV+ has long been that it lacks a back catalog with big names. Well, they don’t get any bigger than this.
Get it? Big names? Yeah, you get it.
Tim Cook justified Apple’s TV+ subscription price hike last year by noting its catalog was bigger than it was when it had shipped. And that’s true. That’s kind of how that works but… not all the time, as we’ve seen lately with services dumping shows to save money. Despite a brief panic when Frog and Toad temporarily disappeared from U.S. streaming, Apple has yet to remove a show for gross accounting reasons.
Gross like disgusting, not gross like before expenses are taken out. Because in that instance, it’d be net accounting reasons.
Despite Apple’s history of shipping finished products, TV+ was quite the exception. It’s a product Apple iterated over time and has slowly built into a real competitive service.
Does it really need Disney if it has the King of the Monsters?
- Finally, the Apple Car we deserve.—Ed. ↩
[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.]