By Dan Moren

November 30, 2023 12:41 PM PT

The Back Page: The Apple features you should be worried about

It wouldn’t be Apple software update season without a bizarre fixation on an otherwise innocuous feature. Yes, everybody’s up in arms about NameDrop, because if there’s one thing you never want to share with anyone, it’s your contact details. Especially to people who you want to…uh…contact you.

But allow me to peel back the curtain and reveal the real truth of the matter: this is all a smokescreen. A cleverly planted story intended to distract attention from the real Apple features that you need to be worried about. The ones that you don’t even know exist, because if you did, you’d never pick up a technological gadget ever again.

Say Cheese: Buried deep within the Health app, amongst all the stats for blood oxygen and heart rate, you might be mistaken for overlooking a little entry for a peculiar figure: Cheese Intake. That’s right, Apple is tracking just how much cheese you eat. You thought you could sneak a little piece of Camembert on the fly? That no one would miss that last chunk of Gouda in the fridge? Help yourself to a spare slice of Manchego? Not without Apple knowing about it, you can’t. What kind of clever analysis or sensors is it using? No one knows.

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Everybody knows that Apple Calendar can show you the birthdays of your contacts, and that when you text someone Happy Birthday, it’s accompanied by a barrage of balloons. But this feature sends those messages automatically, even to your exes, people you’ve defriended, and your demanding boss. Do you know how many of these Tim Cook gets? The man is inundated. Look, nobody wants to forget to text their mom happy birthday, but also nobody wants to text their mom “Happy Birthday, Jane” either.

Pay Back Talk: Look, we’re all for saving the environment and being more thoughtful about how we spend our money, but did we really need machine learning to analyze our Apple Pay transactions in real time, complete with judgmental notifications? “Do you really need to buy that third coffee, Todd?” “Didn’t you just buy three LEGO sets you haven’t built yet, Susan?” I’m not saying it’s ineffective, just that it’s, you know, mean.

Most Secure Data: You want your data to be secure and private—that’s the Apple promise, right? But what if your data is too secure? Apple’s new DoubleSecretFileVault encrypts all of your information with a military-grade algorithm and a 3-trillion bit key that would take so long to crack that not only would it see the heat death of the universe, but might very well last until the birth of its replacement.¹ It’s so secure, in fact, that nobody—not Apple, and not you—has the key to unlock it. Honestly, I think they took the idea that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead a little too far here.

Bluetooth: Seriously. I mean. Yeah.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]