By John Moltz

February 17, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Delayed gratification

The Air might be getting bigger up here, this Mastodon deal keeps getting better and better, and the Apple headset get kicked down the road (disclaimer: kicking an Apple headset down the road will void your warranty).

Serious Air time

How big can a MacBook Air get before it’s no longer able to achieve lift? Asking for a rumored 15-inch Air, possibly coming as soon as April.

15-Inch MacBook Air Rumored to Launch in April as Display Production Begins

15-Inch MacBook Air Will Reportedly Have M2 Chip

Speaking personally, I’m happy with my 13-inch Air and, if anything, a return of an 11-inch Air would be more likely to tempt me. Still, this is a smart move by Apple. Plenty of non-pro users want more screen real estate.

It you’re a fan of smaller laptops, however, you can hang your hat on still other rumors that have the company returning to the 12-inch form factor.

“Apple May Still Be Planning to Reintroduce 12-Inch MacBook”

I wouldn’t use a hat you particularly like all that much, though.

In 2022, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that he hadn’t heard of any plans for a new 12-inch MacBook model. Display analyst Ross Young similarly expressed “skepticism” about Apple launching new MacBooks with display sizes below 13-inches.

Presumably such a device would be another one-port wonder like the previous 12-inch MacBook (although probably with a MagSafe port) but such a device has more the… air… of Jony Ive than today’s Apple.

From Musk to dawn

Let us rejoice, for Tapbots has released a beta for Ivory for the Mac, rounding out the Mastodon user experience on Apple platforms for those lucky enough to click the TestFlight link fast enough.

Further, when the beta for iOS 16.4 was released, Mastodon aficionados were treated to another pleasant surprise: Apple has added rich content previews for Mastodon posts to the upcoming operating system release. So, pretty soon Mastodon will be a full-fledged replacement for whatever the name of that social media site we used to use was.

Look at our little pachyderm! All grown up!

OH, MY GOD, RUN! IT’S STAMPEDING!

Meanwhile, on that other site, sentient mid-life crisis Elon Musk has had quite the week. First he fired an engineer for the high crime and misdemeanor of informing him that his reach on the site he spent $44 billion to buy is dropping. Not to worry, Muskstanistas, your very stable genius reacted quickly by ordering changes to the algorithm so his tweets will now get shoved into peoples’ timelines like ground organ meats into a sausage casing.

Problem fixed.

Things are going equally well for the dullest edgelord in the drawer at his other company as Tesla has fired dozens of workers in retaliation for trying to unionize. Free speech is super cool when it’s about harassing people and stuff but not when it’s about collective bargaining. Important distinction. Also great news for Musk is that the company has had to issue a recall for hundreds of thousands of vehicles because… let me just pretend to put on my reading glasses here… they might kill a whole bunch of people.

“Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles, says Full Self-Driving Beta software may cause crashes”

“May cause crashes” is not a great side-effect to have to list at the end of a car commercial. Ideally you wouldn’t be listing any side effects because it’s a car commercial.

It might be slightly less bad if Musk hadn’t claimed for years that fully autonomous driving that would be safer than humans was just around the corner. A corner his company’s cars apparently couldn’t navigate, causing them to crash through a guardrail and explode dramatically over Reality Gulch. Earlier this year, the SEC decided to investigate these claims, so this hasn’t been a great start to 2023 for Musk.

Headset headwinds

As a long time follower of Apple rumors, this is one of my favorite tropes: that thing that Apple hasn’t even announced yet is “delayed”.

“Apple Delays Debut of AR/VR Headset Until June”

Based on a report by Mark Gurman, the device has experienced another “setback”, which is probably just as well because I only got about $1.24 out of the couch cushions and $100 for my paper route, leaving me a little shy of the $3,000 it’s supposed to cost.

It’s still mind-bending to try to imagine the kind of causality loop that results from delaying something that doesn’t have a release date yet. Likewise I must sadly announce the delay of me winning the Lotto. I had expected it to be this week but there was an unfortunate setback.

I didn’t win.

That was the setback.

Are there internal dates that Apple has to get these things out? Sure. But the reason it doesn’t announce them to the world and say “The Apple Car will be available on March 1st, 2025! Put it on your calendar!” is because stuff happens. Anyone’s who’s worked in project management knows there’s a reason OmniPlan and MS Project exist, and that’s to help you manage changes in deadlines.

But take it from applecarfan69 on Reddit, the Apple Car is totally coming on March 1st, 2025.

Unless it gets delayed.

[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.]

By John Moltz

February 10, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Pie in the Skynet

Apple looks to the future as two of its rivals make AI announcements, rumors swirl of an even more expensive iPhone, and the company would like some games for the Mac, please.

Bing, where can I dispose of a dead loveseat?

This was a big week for announcing your new AI strategy so if you didn’t have one ready to go, that’s on you.

Google announced that its AI service, Bard, is now in a private beta test and will be opened to the public “in the coming weeks”. No word on whether or not the number of those weeks is closer to 2 or 52, but if history is any guide, Google will lose interest in the project by about 260 weeks. In fact, it’s already having a bit of a rough start.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced an AI-aided version of Bing, which the company says will let you ask real questions from how to attend your first EDM festival to whether or not a loveseat will fit in your 2019 Honda Odyssey. This is helpful because there is a direct path between EDM fandom and owning a minivan and I don’t think we talk about that enough.

These announcements leave many people wondering where Apple is in this space. Apple’s not really in the search business so it doesn’t seem like it really has to ship an AI chatbot, but if this technology can be used to make Siri better, that’d probably be a good thing. Anything that would make Siri better would be a good thing. The company is holding an AI summit for employees next week, so look for some leaks that will drive Tim Cook to fits of apoplexy.

While not a big fan of the technology in general, I have to admit that this use case, having a chatbot respond to spam texts for you, has me thinking maybe there is a good reason to have a system-wide chat AI on iOS.

The iPhone Thicc

Who’s looking forward to paying even more for an iPhone?! Many of you, apparently, because the iPhone 14 Pro line has largely sold better than the iPhone 14. Don’t think that Apple hasn’t noticed. If you keep buying the more expensive iPhones, you shouldn’t wonder why the price of iPhones keeps going up.

“They want expensive phones, eh? Then, by God, we will give them expensive phones! Ready for maximum chamfer!”

Now the company is reportedly considering:

…releasing a new top-of-the-line iPhone alongside future Pro and Pro Max models, tentatively referred to as “iPhone Ultra,”…

Mark Gurman indicates this high-end iPhone would be part of the iPhone 16 lineup in 2024, if it becomes a reality. Naturally, the device would come at a… well, what do call a price point that’s above the iPhone Pro Max’s already premium pricing? Premiumier? Premultimate?

A German designer has posted speculative renders of what the device might look like if it were based on the Apple Watch Ultra styling, resulting in an iPhone that looks thick enough to have great battery life—which is how we know for certain this is not a design that Apple will use.

Apple follows a strictly Buddhist approach to iPhone design, teaching the impermanence of battery life, suffering through repeated charging cycles, and non-self, when your iPhone goes dead and you may as well not exist anymore. Through this you will attain enlightenment.

Game on?

In an interview with TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino this week, Apple’s vice president of Platform Architecture and Hardware Technologies Tim Millet and VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers made the pitch for the Mac’s potential as a gaming machine.

Of course, you have to say “potential” because the Mac hasn’t been a serious contender in gaming since… let me just pretend to check the calendar here… forever.

Man, this calendar goes back really far. The Big Bang picture is cool.

Still, the company has high hopes for the future.

Millet has been building chips for 30 years and has been at Apple for nearly 17. He says that with M1, Apple saw an opportunity to “really hit it.”

Is Millet a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds fan? Does Craig Federighi’s hair make him wistfully think of Captain Pike? Sadly, Panzarino fails to ask these probing questions.

“Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anybody by saying that overnight we’re going to make Mac a great gaming platform. We’re going to take a long view on this.”

That’s probably wise because, as Dan pointed out this week, Apple has a real chicken-and-egg problem—developers don’t make games for the Mac because there’s no audience, gamers don’t buy Macs because there are no games—that prevents this from getting solved in a fortnight. (Yes, the temptation to spell that differently was high, but I pushed through it.)

A lot of us would probably love it if the Mac had more games, but when the big Apple gaming news of the week is an iOS port of a 30-year-old game, you know the company’s got a long row to hoe.

Given the options of Apple building an AI system, shipping a more expensive iPhone, or making the Mac into a great gaming platform, I know which one I’d bet on. Start saving up for an iPhone Ultra.

[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.]

By Shelly Brisbin

February 8, 2023 9:30 AM PT

Checking in on the accessibility of the Dynamic Island

Every hardware innovation from Apple brings some version of this question to my mind: “Yeah, but how does it work with VoiceOver?” Or any other relevant accessibility tool, for that matter. Before I got my hands on them, I asked this question about Apple Watch, Apple TV, and even the MacBook Pro’s touch bar. And as part of my ongoing adventure in documenting everything the iOS platform offers for accessibility, I needed to pay a visit to the iPhone Pro’s Dynamic Island.

The island is an interface that also hides Face ID and the front-facing camera. You’re meant to interact with the pill-shaped space visually, glancing at it to unlock the phone, or to gather tiny bits of information about what’s going on in a supported app.

Now, being visual doesn’t make an iOS feature inaccessible. Far from it. But it raises questions for the accessibility nerd about how information will be delivered to to a non-visual user, and what gestures are needed to get and control it. Most times, it’s extremely straightforward — notifications can be read by the VoiceOver screen reader, and they can be interpreted by other accessibility tools, too. You can have VoiceOver speak the notifications if you want. (I do not want, by the way.)

But my curiosity about the Dynamic Island centered on the seemingly incidental nature of the data offered – the status of a phone call, duration of a timer, or what song Music is playing. It’s not necessarily a notification, meant to capture your attention. And even if Dynamic Island could give up its secrets to VoiceOver, would the user get anything from it they couldn’t find elsewhere? Can a VoiceOver user save taps and swipes with Dynamic Island the way a non-VoiceOver user can? Is Dynamic Island a selling point for the Pro phones if you’re blind?

Is it, or isn’t it?

First of all, the Dynamic Island is accessible. If an app puts content there, VoiceOver will be able to read/speak it. The screen reader does not announce that there’s currently information on the Dynamic Island, a la notifications. But you can flick through the status bar or explore by touch – essentially, drag your finger in the general vicinity of the island until you hear its contents spoken. When you encounter Dynamic Island with VoiceOver on, it’s selected, just like any other screen element. That means you can double-tap (the VoiceOver equivalent of a single-tap) to open the current host app, or use a double-tap-and-hold or a rotor action to expand the island’s display. Either is the equivalent of a standard long press. The rotor also includes Activate and Dismiss actions, to open the app or empty the island’s contents.

Expanding the Dynamic Island gives VoiceOver access to whatever control the current app provides. Adjust volume in Music, mute your mic during a phone call, switch to the Remote app while AirPlaying to an Apple TV. Just as in any app, the controls are accessible to VoiceOver with a double-tap, and you can collapse the display again by double-tapping outside it.

Flexible little pill

I set a lot of timers: sometimes it’s my sandwich in the toaster oven. Or maybe I’m reading a script aloud and need to know how long it took. An active timer’s countdown appears in the island. Just pass your finger over the pill to have VoiceOver read the display.

If something else, like Music, is already displaying data there, a timer button appears in a space of its own, to the right of the main Dynamic Island. Visually, the timer button updates with a visual representation of how much time remains. To access the countdown with VoiceOver, you’ll need to expand the timer. It would be great to have VoiceOver read time remaining when I flick to the unexpanded timer button.

There’s one way in which the Dynamic Island experience with VoiceOver is superior: If you’re listening to audio, whether from Music, Spotify, Overcasts, Audible, or another supported app, swiping into the island causes VoiceOver to read the track and artist. Visually, there’s only a tiny album art thumbnail at one end, and a pulsing waveform indicator on the right, that tells you something’s playing.

Island on the go

Maps has a few Dynamic Island tricks. Just as the app will display a card if you’re not in the Maps app as you navigate, Dynamic Island delivers tiny status updates instead, including arrows indicating turn direction and distance. VoiceOver speaks these, just as it does when cards appear onscreen. If you expand the island’s contents, you can even end a route immediately. This is a real time-saver over returning to Maps, pulling up the card and choosing the End Route command.

More and more third-party apps offer Dynamic Island support. For a busy traveler using VoiceOver, FlightAware’s updates save both time and lots of flicks and taps. If I were a baseball fan, I’d want my scores flashed atop my phone screen, once again saving me the trouble of digging into the app that provides them.

Though Dynamic Island might not be enough of a justification on its own for some people to splurge on an iPhone Pro, it’s not only well-implemented for VoiceOver, but occasionally provides info more quickly than a host app can.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]