By John Moltz

February 3, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Let them fight

Cue up your best Ken Watanabe gif because the kaiju of Apple rumors are going head to head! Samsung announces it’s getting into… some kind of reality, but it doesn’t matter because Apple’s going out of business. Again.

Dueling rumors

Ming-Chi Kuo came in hot this week with a rumor that Apple would ship a foldable iPad in 2024. The killer feature? A kickstand.

I’m not going to say that Steve Jobs would never have shipped an iPad with a kickstand, but I do believe he would have said “If you see a kickstand, they blew it” a few years before he eventually did. It is reportedly a carbon fiber kickstand, so at least it’s fancy.

I dunno, though, Ming-Chi, are you sure about this?

…I’m positive about the foldable iPad in 2024…

Oh. Wow. OK.

Case closed, then, I gue-

“Rumors: Foldable iPad in 2024 dismissed, Apple developing 21-inch ‘foldable notebook’”

OHHHH, CLEAR THE STAGE BECAUSE IT’S ON. WE GOT OURSELVES A RUMOR BATTLE.

While Ming-Chi Kuo reported on Monday that a foldable iPad with a built-in kickstand could launch in 2024, that may have been a bit optimistic. Since Kuo made this claim, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman and analyst Ross Young have both said they’ve heard nothing about such a device being in the pipeline for next year…

Your rhymes are weak
Your insight’s meek
Don’t trust rumors
From this geek

Interestingly, however, Young says that there is supply chain chatter about a 20.5-inch foldable notebook from Apple. This product could be ready for 2025, but more details are unknown at this point. Young says that the supply chain is referring to this as a “notebook,” but it’s unclear what software it will run.

[pushes glasses up on nose] Erm, the last time I checked, all notebooks are foldable. So. Erm.

As fun as rumor battles are, it kinda sounds like perhaps they’re both talking about the same device. If the big new feature is it folds for you to more easily type on a virtual keyboard, though, I’d rather it be an iPad than a MacBook without a physical keyboard. Consider me in Ming-Chi Kuo’s corner on this one.

This one goes to X

Samsung announced new phones this week and also announced it would be joining the battle to sell immersive headsets that will, purely by random coincidence, probably look exactly like whatever Apple’s look like.

…the South Korean company also confirmed that it is working on a mixed reality device with “XR” technology to compete with Apple’s rumored AR/VR headset.

So, you got your Augmented Reality. You got your Virtual Reality. And you got your…

You sure you wanna go with that name, Samsung?

…the South Korean company confirmed that it has been developing “XR” or “extended reality” technologies in a partnership with Qualcomm and Google.

That… doesn’t start with an “X”, but OK.

But the bigger issue, have you seen reality? I can understand why you’d want to augment it—put on a fresh coat of paint, some flowers, dress it up a bit—or create a new, totally different virtual reality. But do I want “Reality, the Extended Cut”? No, I do not. I already watched The Snyder Cut. Haven’t I suffered enough?

Well, welcome to the X-tended family, Samsung. Hope you survive the experience.

Meta’s Reality Labs unit, home to the metaverse ambitions, lost $4.28 billion in the fourth quarter, bringing its total operating loss for the year to $13.72 billion.

Mob boss: “This is a nice business you got here. It’d be a shame if something… Wait, this business is terrible. What did you do to lose that much money?! Jeez, I was gonna knock a couple of things over but now I just feel bad for you.”

Is Apple really sure it wants to get into this business?

Sults and results

PAGING MR. DELL. MR. MICHAEL DELL. PLEASE REPORT TO A PHONE WHERE SOMEONE IS PROBABLY CALLING YOU FOR A QUOTE ON APPLE’S QUARTERLY RETURNS.

Yes, it’s time for Apple to shut it all down and give the money back to the shareholders again (wait, isn’t it already doing that through buybacks?) because the company announced its first quarter financials this week and both revenue and profit were down from a year ago.

Sure, some may quibble and say “Uh, yeah, but they were still both the company’s second highest ever, it’s just that the year ago quarter was a huge quarter.” And others may ask “Where did you say you got your business degree again?” And still others may point to my CV where it says “The Wilkes-Barre Correspondence School and Beautician Academy”.

(No. No, it is not “accredited” by “the man”.)

The point is, Apple is clearly going out of business. One monster quarter at a time.

Hopefully it will survive long enough to ship its AR headsets and folding whatever-they-ares.

[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 Dan Moren

January 31, 2023 2:05 PM PT

The Back Page: M2, Brute?

It wouldn’t be the release of a brand new Apple product without the release of a brand new -gate to go along with it. Unlike power adapters and headphones, the company continues to bundle in controversy with every single purchase. (At least this time, it’s environmentally-friendly renewable controversy, since we already went through SSD-gate with the M2 MacBook Air last summer.)

Why does the company keep committing these unforced errors? For a trillion dollar corporation, it seems like there should be somebody whose job it is to make sure all the iMacs are dotted and all the AirTags are crossed. Which leaves only one possible conclusion.

They’re doing it on purpose.

Yes, there may not be someone in charge of stopping these gaffes, but after exhaustive investigative work, my sources have exclusively confirmed that there is somebody in charge of making them.

And their name is Erin. Or maybe Aaron. It was hard to hear over the iPhone I was holding wrong.

Yes, Erin/Aaron is the mastermind behind all of Apple’s most famous -gates of the past two decades. Mousegate: The Lightning connector that plugs into the bottom of the Apple Magic Mouse? Their handiwork. Camgate: The Apple Studio Display’s lackluster webcam? All them. Mapsgate: The launch of Apple Maps? They went to town on that sucker.

The real question, of course, is why. Why was such a position ever created, and why does it persist to this very day? Surely Apple would prefer if its products were not being actively sabotaged from the inside out.

Ah, but therein lies the galaxy-brain rationale behind it all. By baking in its own controversies, Apple is doing its customers a favor.

Yes, I said it. A favor.

Nobody wants to spend all their time looking for the flaw in the expensive iPhone they just bought, or thinking “Oh… this MacBook is just too good, there must be something wrong with it.”

But if you tell them up front what the stupid tradeoffs are going to be, you engage that good old cognitive dissonance reduction that says “Oh, sure, this iPhone might bend if it’s in my pocket [Bendgate], but it still feels like the future!” Because, frankly, everybody talks about slow read/write SSD speeds, but nobody ever does anything about it.

Now, thanks to Erin/Aaron, you just don’t have to worry about mights and maybes. The other shoe is pre-dropped for you. You’re welcome.

It might sound counterintuitive, but you can’t argue with success. Sure, people might have complained about keyboards (Butterflygate) and outdated video-out protocols (HDMIgate) and surprisingly talkative processors (Hiss-gate), but Apple has still sold products hand over fist despite the OMG major flaws inherent in each of them.

Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, this has kept Aaron/Erin in a job for twenty years. And you don’t want to see what would happen if they were unleashed on the rest of the world.

Just think Twitter, but bigger. With more flames.

So when the Apple AR/VR headset eventually comes out and inevitably has a clunky battery pack that you need to stick in a pocket, don’t get mad. Just sit back, nod knowingly, and say, “Nice one, Erin/Aaron. Keep up the good—er… bad?—work.”

[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 next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By John Moltz

January 27, 2023 12:05 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Feel the elephant

The M2 Mac mini and MacBook Pro reviews are in, Ivory is here, and details of the Apple headset?! Our collective cups runneth over.

“You made the car too good.”

The new M2-based Mac mini and MacBook Pros fell into the hands of reviewers this week and the results were mostly what you’d expect.

Let me just check the notes here I made from reading several reviews…

Just says “hecka fast”.

Actually it says something different but I changed it to “hecka” because this is a family-friendly site.

(It was “darn fast”.)

Here’s Jason on the MacBook Pro:

These are incredibly fast laptops, and they don’t slow down when they’re running on battery power.

Here’s how Dan described the M2 Pro Mac mini:

…a high-performing machine that will go up against the more expensive products in Apple’s desktop line, like the Mac Studio.

The Verge’s Chris Welch said of the same model:

So far, it’s been an absolute screamer worthy of the “Mac Studio junior” moniker — and then some.

Greg Joswiak says the new Mac mini is:

A powerful media engine for blazing performance.

Oh, wait, he’s… that guy. Never mind. He’s not supposed to be in here.

These machines are so hecka fast, though, that they have Dan asking if Macs are getting too fast for their own good.

The truth of the matter is that even the Pro series processors are way overpowered for most common computing tasks.

Well, at least the low-end SSD configurations are slower!

Wait. That doesn’t… uh…

Really, though, while I understand people complaining about Apple going cheap on the SSDs, when the computers are already so fast, doesn’t it make some sense for Apple to make the low end devices a little, well, low end?

I’m legit asking because I kind of feel like we’re in uncharted waters here.

Ivory is here

With the much-anticipated release of Tapbots’s Ivory for Mastodon, I’d be tempted to say our long national nightmare is over but it really hasn’t been that long. It’s only been a bit over two months since the “unpleasantness” started at Twitter, so the fact that we already have a cherished and familiar interface for our new home in the off-world colonies is pretty cool.

And if you’d like to take a step outside the familiar, there are any number of other terrific iOS clients for Mastodon currently in development and even for sale. Here’s hoping the Mac catches up soon. (Literally as I was typing something snarky about the state of Mac Mastodon clients, a Mac beta for Mammoth arrived, so I retracted my comment.)

It’s a great time to be a part of Mastodon, if you like cutting your fingers on sharp edges! And, for a limited time only (disclaimer: not for a limited time only), if you set up a Mastodon account now, you can follow none other than Apple Fellow Phil Schiller!

Yes, the guy who introduced all those phones and Macs has joined Mastodon after famously deleting his Twitter account back in November. It’s almost like the guy has a problem with Twitter’s new management.

Look, if you’ve been hanging on to Twitter wondering if there’s enough to argue about on Mastodon to make it worth your time, let me assure you that you’ll find any number of people you’ll think are catastrophically wrong about which Mastodon client is the best. So come on over and check it out; you’ll be glad you did.

So, that’s how it works!

Finally, via Mark Gurman, we will find out…

“How Apple’s Upcoming Mixed-Reality Headset Will Work”

Is it magnets? I’m gonna bet it’s magnets.

The headset will have several external cameras that can analyze a user’s hands, as well as sensors within the gadget’s housing to read eyes. That allows the wearer to control the device by looking at an on-screen item — whether it’s a button, app icon or list entry — to select it.

So it’s not magnets?

Users will then pinch their thumb and index finger together to activate the task — without the need to hold anything.

Good news for those who were breathlessly waiting for the dystopian world of The Peripheral to become real! Jackpot!

Like Meta’s latest headset, Apple’s device will use both virtual and augmented reality.

And a third reality called “pudding reality”. Apple thinks you’ll find it “delicious”.

The device will have a so-called Digital Crown — like the Apple Watch — that lets users switch between VR and AR.

Transitions lenses, now for reality. I cannot wait for people to be wearing these while driving, because I really needed another anxiety. My doctor said I wasn’t getting anxious enough.

The details in Gurman’s piece are interesting, but the part that’s still nebulous is what it’s for, other than vague hints about meetings and games, neither of which have ever really been an Apple forté. At the risk of mixing metaphors with the Mastodon stuff above, it does still feel like we’re feeling our way around this elephant. It’ll be a relief to finally see it when it’s revealed and find out what Apple’s… pachydermed into it.

I’ll see myself out.

[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.]