By John Moltz
This Week in Apple: Mind games
Apple announces new accessibility features, CarPlay gets richly updated, and Tim Cook garners some unwanted attention.
The good Apple
After weeks of Goofus Apple checking into work, Gallant Apple finally showed up at the office.
“Apple teases accessibility nutrition labels as part of wide-ranging feature preview”
Later this year, the App Store will feature cards indicating the accessibility features each app supports. Hopefully that’s the usual “later this year” not the Apple Intelligence “later this year” or the CarPlay 2 “later this year”.
Apple is not done in the accessibility field, however.
“Apple lays groundwork for iPhone brain control technology”
If that sounds creepy and terrible, it’s really not. While Elon Musk is working on brain implants because he wants to extract the thoughts of normal humans and implant them into his own brain to see what real human emotions are like, Apple’s efforts here are more noble.
Researchers believe that Brain Computer Interfaces, such as the Stentrode and Neuralink, will revolutionize the ability of people with diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, to interact with their devices.
Of course, you could argue that’s only giving people with ALS the ability to doomscroll like the rest of us, but that’s a different problem.
CarPlay Ultra expensive
You couldn’t afford a Vision Pro. You shrugged at Apple Intelligence. But now Apple is back with a new product that you’ll be sure to want to get immediately.
Assuming you have $250,000. You have $250,000, right?
“CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, begins rolling out today”
Finally! How exciting! When can I get it in my car?!
CarPlay Ultra brings the best of iPhone and the best of the car…
Goose: “Which car?”
…together for a deeply integrated experience…
Goose [beginning to chase Apple]: “WHICH CAR?!”
…beginning with Aston Martin vehicles
Ah, yes, those easy-to-afford Aston Martins. Still, after being promised to arrive before the end of 2024, the next generation of CarPlay is finally here! Enjoy. Don’t say Apple never gave you anything.
It’s fine if, like me, you bought 15 gold Apple Watch Editions in 2015. I’m sure they’ve retained and probably increased their value. Lemme just check eBay and ohhhhhh nooooooo…
Never fear. Those trickle-down economics you’ve heard so much about will surely kick in at some point. Expect to be enjoying the many benefits of CarPlay Ultra some time before the heat death of the universe.
Little problems
Moving to political coverage (because we apparently all have to cover politics now), we see that the nation’s misunderstander-in-chief continues to not get how iPhones are made.
“Trump wants Apple to stop making more iPhones in India”
“I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” Trump said…
These are definitely words you want to hear from someone in power who’s trying to shake you down. Tim Cook’s plan to pay for access is going very well.
Despite Cook whispering “No whammies, no whammies” to himself over and over for months, someone let it slip to the President that Apple was shifting iPhone production from China to India in order to reduce its dependence on one manufacturing giant and to evade Trump’s tariffs. Now Trump wants to know why Apple isn’t bringing production to the U.S.
Dude, so many reasons.
…iPhone production is unlikely to come stateside due to a lack of labor, suppliers, and manufacturing facilities in the US.
You cannot wave a wand and make a manufacturing infrastructure appear. U.S. manufacturing hasn’t been on the cutting edge since the edges it was cutting were those on honkin’ big steel fenders.
It’s often hard to tell with Trump how much of something is dementia (whether mental or political) and how much is grift, but the relative percentages don’t really matter. The bigger question is why you’d think for a minute that trying to negotiate with someone like that was a good idea.
[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.]