By Jason Snell

November 14, 2023 4:13 PM PT

I’ll pin my hopes on AI assistants

Last week, the startup Humane did a marketing blitz for its forthcoming AI Pin, a $699 wearable designed by a bunch of ex-Apple people that has been the subject of a lot of tech-industry buzz lately.

It’s a really interesting product. While it would be easy to focus on the company’s lackluster marketing video that featured actual AI hallucinations, I’m more interested in what this product says and doesn’t say about the current and future of tech.

I don’t think the AI Pin will succeed for numerous reasons, foremost among them being the fact that it seems to be a product designed to make your smartphone unnecessary or ancillary. It feels to me like this is the product’s point of view not because of a deep philosophical reason but because Humane is a company with investors that needs to ship and sell a hardware product and trying to attach to the side of Apple’s or Google’s smartphone operating systems makes this thing an expensive accessory instead of a revolutionary device.

It’s not a point of view that makes sense otherwise, because it seems to posit a world where people just hate their smartphones and can’t wait to be rid of them. This is the world as seen through a funhouse mirror. People love their smartphones. That’s why we’re all staring into them for hours and hours every day! The knock on smartphones is that people use them all the time, and maybe I guess we shouldn’t? But unless you’re going on some sort of digital fast, the results are in: people love using their smartphones. They’re the ultimate hit product of four or five decades of personal computers.

This is not to say the AI Pin doesn’t fit into some interesting niches. A personal constellation of devices—smartphone in your pocket, smartwatch on your wrist, maybe smart earbuds in your ears—gets more interesting when you consider that all of those devices are working together to collect information and communicate it back to you. And none of the devices I carry around daily look at the world around me. The AI Pin has a camera and clips on your shirt, so it’s able to see what you’re seeing and presumably do things with that information.

There’s a lot of potential here. The iPhone can do some amazing things when you hold its camera up—including figure out exactly where it is based on the buildings it can see, which is bananas—but mostly, that camera is looking at the inside of my pocket. Whether it’s glasses or a pin or something else¹, there’s valuable data to be gained from seeing the world around us. It’s a sense that our devices are missing most of the time.

The AI Pin’s interface is built around a smart assistant that uses a large language model as an interface. Humane is highly unlikely to corner the market on this technology. Instead, it’s using the same stuff that will immediately permeate into all our devices—at least, as soon as it’s ready.

Humane’s vision for the future of human interfaces doesn’t seem wrong to me. Sooner or later, voice assistants driven by large language models are going to be good and reliable, and the game is going to change. I don’t know if Google Assistant and Alexa and Siri are going to molt into beautiful butterflies next year or the year after or in 2030, but it sure seems like it’s going to happen.

What excites me about this is that what computers are good at, fundamentally, is drudgery. Computer spreadsheets were the first killer app because they eliminated the need to write numbers down on paper, sharpen pencils and erase pencil marks, and do all that math in order to figure out whatever you wanted to learn. My favorite moments using computers are often figuring out ways I can use automation to take a task that requires me to click and type stuff for half an hour and reduce it to a single keyboard shortcut.

Now imagine the prospect of an intelligent assistant that knows every single fact in your personal array of data. It’s read all your saved notes, email, time tracking data, and contacts, and knows what was said in all your meetings and more. Instead of having to invent search terms and search multiple data repositories and wrack your brain to find exactly the right piece of information, the assistant can just do it because it’s got millions of cycles to burn doing the drudgery for you.

Humane’s marketing videos do a pretty good job of showing how this next wave of AI-based assistants will change how we interact with our devices. I think most people will still enjoy tapping on a smartphone, but more complex interactions can be simplified. Kevin Roose of the New York Times wrote about using ChatGPT to create an agent that knew all the rules of his child’s daycare provider, effectively teaching an assistant to answer very specific questions about when Circle Time is and when the facility is closed for the holiday break. Leo Laporte built a programming coach for the Lisp language in less than half an hour.

Sure, it’s all early days. Chatbots still hallucinate—sometimes in their own marketing videos. If my time as a computer user and an observer of the tech world has taught me anything, it’s that new technologies explode into existence quickly—but then take way longer than you expected to get really good. We’re post-explosion now, and things are moving quickly, but it might take a while for this stuff to truly fulfill its potential. (In the meantime, those who are enthusiastic about tech get to play with the new, messy stuff! It’s why it’s fun to be an early adopter.)

Anyway, this brings us to Apple. According to Mark Gurman, iOS 18 will be full of AI features. We’ll see what that amounts to. Apple is a very careful company, and generative AI still feels a bit wild, but given what Adobe’s doing in its apps, it feels like it’s past time for Apple to get involved.

Putting machine-learning-based features in apps, as Apple has been doing for years, is just fine. But it’s obvious that Siri needs to be replaced with something better and smarter and capable of leveraging Apple’s ecosystem to make itself a uniquely personal tool for users of Apple’s devices. My iPhone can read my mail and my notes and peer into my calendar and knows my contacts… it does all this already. The next step is for Apple and Siri to put it all together.

By Jason Snell

November 9, 2023 9:36 AM PT

Apple’s fiscal 2023 in charts

Last week Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, posting another flat sales quarter even as profits (and services revenue) continue to rise. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Number spreadsheet, ran my little charting Automator app, and out popped out a bunch of colorful charts.

It being the fiscal fourth quarter, of course, means it’s also the end of Apple’s fiscal year. And that gives me the opportunity to cart out a separate set of charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.

Let’s dig in to the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 25 years:

After the revenue rocketship that was fiscal 2021, the past two years have been a lot quieter. While 2022’s record revenue is the proverbial “tough compare,” the fact that the company has held on to most of the revenue from that record year and the enormous growth spurt in 2020 is still pretty impressive. Unless you are Wall Street and looking for signs of more growth.

Speaking of growth: The last two times Apple posted a blow-out fiscal year—2015 and 2018—it backslid the next year. That didn’t happen last year, but this year we did finally see the inevitable backslide. The key lesson here is, if you keep having those quantum leap years, Wall Street won’t get too grumpy when you have a few middling years afterward.

Of course, the driver of half Apple’s revenue is the iPhone, so as the iPhone goes, so goes Apple:

The iPhone’s slight backsliding in total revenue more or less matches Apple’s own story. Instead of spiking and then dropping down, as it did during the past boom years, this latest cycle featured a spike, a slight increase, and a slight drop. I don’t know what 2024 has in store for Apple, but I have my doubts that iPhone revenue is ever going down below $200 billion again.

Let’s look at the Mac, which followed up its record-breaking 2022 with a horrible year, relatively speaking:

2021 was a massive sales jump for the Mac, and 2022 took it even further. The combination of COVID lockdowns driving sales and Apple moving to Apple silicon led to Mac sales the likes of which we’d never seen before.

This year the Mac came back to Earth. At $29.4 billion, sales were actually up slightly from 2020’s $28.6 billion. What seemed like a rocket to the stratosphere now looks like a two year aberration. The good news for Apple is that after all those new sales, the Mac didn’t regress back to its late-2010s sales numbers. Instead, even with a precipitous decline in sales, the Mac sold more in 2023 than it did in 2020.

My guess is that the Mac will resume its slow build from this new baseline and we’ll see Mac sales in the low $30 billion range for the next few years. A less bullish person might warn that we’re still seeing the downward slope of the sales spike, but I really can’t imagine the Mac going below the numbers it consistently hit in the mid-2010s. I’m going to guess that 2021 and 2022 didn’t just feature existing Mac users refreshing their devices, but also new Mac users coming into the market, expanding the user base and pushing the “regular” Mac sales year to a new plateau. I guess we’ll see in a year.

Last year was rough for the iPad, but this year—with no new iPad announcements at all!—was rougher:

After a nice spike in 2021, iPad sales are down for the second consecutive year. However, it’s all a matter of perspective. Even in a year with no new iPads, $28 billion in iPad sales means that the iPad had its third best sales year since 2015.

Will history repeat itself, with the iPad receding into a six-year slide into the doldrums of low-$20-billion years? I’m doubtful. My expectations are that the iPad is going to live in the upper $20 billions now, and next year might be even better because of a complete refresh of the line.

Now let’s look at the popular and growing Services and Wearables, Home, and Accessories lines:

After eight straight years of annual growth, Wearables took the year off. $40 billion is still a huge number (more than double the 2018 total!) but there’s a lack of growth here that probably won’t be cured by the arrival of Vision Pro next year.

But Services continues to grow, and at a similar pace to its growth last year. Services has rapidly become Apple’s second most important financial line after the iPhone.

This brings us to the final chart, which I run here every year just to put all of Apple’s product lines in the proper context. When I run the numbers as individual charts, they all seem more or less the same. But they are very definitely not all created equal. (It’s still impressive to see Services lift away from the others, though.)

Meet you back here next year for more annual charts!

By Jason Snell

November 8, 2023 9:16 AM PT

A picture is worth a thousand permissions requests

Last month I wrote about how Apple’s cascade of macOS alerts and warnings ruin the Mac upgrade experience.

My point wasn’t to ask Apple to make the Mac less secure. It was for Apple to find some ways to improve the user experience while keeping Mac users safe by default. It feels like there’s an imbalance where security is being prioritized but the user experience is allowed to lag, and it’s a problem.

This issue was brought home to me last week when I was reviewing the M3 iMac and the M3 MacBook Pro. As a part of reviewing those computers, I used Migration Assistant to move a backup of my Mac Studio to the new systems via a USB drive. Sometimes I try to review a computer with nothing migrated over, but it can be a real slowdown and I didn’t really have any time to spare last week.

Anyway, by migrating, I got to (twice) experience Apple’s ideal process of moving every user from one Mac to the next. You start up your new computer, migrate from a backup of the old computer, and then start using the new one. There’s a lot that’s great about this process, and it’s so much better than what we used to have to do to move files over from one Mac to another.

And yet all of Apple’s security alerts got in the way again and spoiled the whole thing. Here’s a screenshot I took right after my new Mac booted for the first time after migration:

What’s happening here is that Migration Assistant has migrated all my apps, and has automatically launched any of them that are listed in Login Items or are set to automatically launch in the background. They all launch, all at once, and every single one of them then prompts me for permission to do all the things they already had permission to do on my previous Mac.

In this screen shot, I’ve dragged them apart, but in reality most of these windows appeared on top of each other. They float above every other window, and most of them want to open various portions of the Settings app. In the background, a few apps have launched with their own alert prompts, requesting that I perform more tasks in order to get the system ready.

This wasn’t the end of it, of course, because after dealing with one of these windows there was a pretty good chance the app in question would then spawn an additional window asking for a different permission. For the ones that require specific changes in the Settings app, I had to slide the Settings app somewhere where it wouldn’t be covered by various other floating windows and then deal with the requests there.

Often, different apps would seemingly fight over my attention, demanding that I go to a different portion to the Settings app. They would sometimes even demand permission I had already granted, since I was in the right part of Settings and decided to save time by approving a couple of apps at once.

At some point I also triggered this cascade of alerts, which was hilarious:

I had to click OK on all of those in order to move on, too.

Asking users for approval is a good impulse, but if you ask too many times, a user’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll approve anything. It is incumbent on Apple’s designers to build a user experience for approving permissions that is clear but convenient. It needs to not distract users with a fusillade of individual pop-up requests.

Setting up a new M3 iMac should be a pleasure. When I was done, I felt like a swarm of bees was buzzing in my head. Not great.

By Jason Snell

November 6, 2023 6:00 AM PT

M3 iMac Review: Keep playing the hits

After nearly two and a half years, the iMac has finally gotten its update. The venerable desktop Mac was a late addition to the first generation M1 processor, but now it’s in the vanguard of Apple’s M3 chip generation. As a result, the iMac isn’t just a colorful all-in-one desktop Mac—it’s also likely representative of the performance characteristics of every M3-based Mac to come, most notably the MacBook Air and Mac mini.

There are two stories here. Let’s start with the computer, and then I’ll get to the chip stuff.

Continue reading “M3 iMac Review: Keep playing the hits”…

By Jason Snell

November 6, 2023 6:00 AM PT

M3 MacBook Pro review: Peak performance

Like the M2 MacBook Pro released earlier this year, the new M3 MacBook Pro doesn’t look particularly new. It’s the third iteration of the excellent MacBook Pro redesign from 2021, featuring flat sides and curved corners and a spectacularly clear and bright display.

But, oh, this generation of MacBook Pro does offer a few new wrinkles. There’s the debut of the M3 processor, of course, with all three different chip variants available in the 14-inch model for the first time. And by dropping the old 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple is making the modern MacBook Pro design available at a new, lower base price.

I’ve spent nearly a week with a 16-inch MacBook Pro running an M3 Max processor. And while the gorgeous screen and wide array of ports were quite familiar, the speed of the processor suggests that it’s never been more true that the MacBook Pro can be a Mac Pro in your backpack—if you want it to be.

Previously, on MacBook Pro

In case you’ve never used a 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple silicon, here’s a quick tour of what this generation brings. Let’s start with the looks: the corners are noticeably curved but the edges are much tighter, eliminating the feeling of gentle, gradual curves.

The screen is the showcase on these laptops: a 120-hertz ProMotion display with a wide color gamut, backlit by mini-LED technology that allows it to run bright and peak even brighter, while also maintaining black levels that contribute to a remarkably extended level of dynamic range. It looks incredible when viewing HDR photos, movies, and TV shows. In the M3 models, the maximum brightness of the display in standard dynamic range mode (which is everything except those photos, movies, and TV shows, essentially) is brighter, with a maximum brightness that matches the Apple Studio Display. It’s a difficult one for Apple to call out as a feature boost—”it’s brighter in the mode that isn’t bright” is a tough sell—but the net result is that this display can get a lot brighter in the mode you’ll use 99% of the time.

There’s also a notch in the display. It’s not very big—a little more than 180 points wide and 30 points tall—but it’s smack in the middle of the menu bar. This allows Apple to pull the borders of the screen in—they’re much smaller than on previous MacBook Pros—while still keeping space for the 1080p webcam.

In practice, I never really notice the notch. It’s as high as the Menu Bar, so it doesn’t block content. Most apps don’t have enough menus to reach across the bar. (If you have too much stuff in your menu bar, I do highly recommend Bartender.)

Apple’s new standard Magic Keyboard is excellent, and returns traditional function keys while consigning the Touch Bar to the dustbin of history. Laptops with the Max or Pro chip will find three USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, including one on the right side. There’s also an SD card slot, back from the dead, and HDMI video out. And of course, MagSafe is available for fear-free magnetic charging that doesn’t take up one of the USB-C ports. (You can still charge via USB-C if you want, and the MagSafe cord goes to standard USB-C, so you can use any USB power brick—within reason—to charge via MagSafe.)

Perhaps the most notable “design” change in these laptops is the introduction of a new color, available only on models with the M3 Pro or M3 Max processor: Space Black. According to Apple, this new color features a chemical change to the anodization seal on the device’s aluminum frame that makes it better at repelling liquids, including the oils that cause us to leave fingerprints all over our devices.

The short version: Yes, the Space Black laptop’s a lot darker, and yes, it’s better than other Mac laptops at repelling fingerprints. But before you go to extremes, I also need to warn you: Space Black isn’t really black. It’s a dark metallic gray. It’s noticeably darker than any previous MacBook Pro, to be sure, but if you’re expecting black, like the old polycarbonate MacBook, or even ultra-dark, like the Midnight M2 MacBook Air, or even the black aluminum frame between the keys on the MacBook Pro keyboard, you won’t get it.

As for fingerprints? I found that it was absolutely possible to put fingerprints all over the thing. But it was harder to do than on other laptops, including my beloved Midnight M2 MacBook Air. And it was easier to wipe them off. It’s a great step forward. Just don’t get outraged when you spot fingerprints on it, okay?

Questions of identity

What makes a MacBook Pro a MacBook Pro? In the last couple of years, that had been a difficult question to answer because Apple sold a 13-inch MacBook Pro model that had few of the attributes of the 14- and 16-inch models—not the processor, not the design, not the arrays of microphones and speakers, not the full array of physical function keys, and most definitely not the spectacular XDR display.

With the M3 generation, Apple has rejiggered the lineup in a way that makes a lot more sense. The old 13-inch model has finally been retired, but its reason for existence—the ability to start the MacBook Pro line at a price lower than $2000—remains. After a couple of years in production, Apple is finally able to sell a version of the modern MacBook Pro, complete with that product-line-defining display, starting at $1599. But to reach even that price, the low-end model is equipped with the base M3 processor, the same one that powers the M3 iMac and will presumably appear in the MacBook Air and Mac mini as well.

This means that the M3 14-inch MacBook Pro will have all the limitations of the M3 processor, which (like its predecessors, the M1 and M2) has a pretty hard cap on USB ports and external displays. The M3 processor can only drive one external display, so—like the old 13″ MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air—this laptop won’t work in a setup with two external displays, not even with the lid closed. It’s also missing that convenient extra USB-C port on the opposite side of the laptop from the other two ports.

If my superlatives haven’t already made it clear, I think that today’s MacBook Pro is defined primarily by the display. The M1 and M2 processors were always part of the MacBook Pro line—and now, so is the M3. But buyers of the 13-inch MacBook Pro didn’t just have to settle for a lower-power chip—they had to use it in an outmoded package. I’m excited that every M3-era MacBook Pro has so many more features in common, even if a few have been omitted from the lowest-end model.

The chip story

The MacBook Pro Apple supplied me for review was a 16-inch model with an M3 Max chip with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. Because I also reviewed the M3 iMac, it means that the only chip I didn’t get to test out is the M3 Pro, which has been more clearly positioned as a mid-range model. I look forward to seeing how that chip performs, since I didn’t get a chance to use it myself.

The M3 Max, meanwhile, seems to have improved over the prior chip generation in ways that the M3 and M3 Pro haven’t. This is the chip where Apple seems to be putting its foot to the floor, trying to generate maximum performance for its most demanding customers. (As a result, the chip ain’t cheap—you can’t get one in a MacBook Pro for less than $3199.)

These days, it’s awfully difficult to pin down the overall performance of any given chip. An Apple silicon processor has multiple CPU cores of two different types (performance and efficiency), GPU cores, Neural Engine cores, and of course other onboard processing blocks that are more efficient at specific tasks (like video encoding and decoding) than software would be. Depending on the kind of work you do and even the specific software (or even version of software!) you use, you may see very different results than someone else with different software and workflows.

Fortunately, when testing the M3 Max, a lot of my concerns were alleviated by the fact that it just seems faster in every conceivable dimension than its predecessors, usually by quite a lot. Individual M3 CPU core performance is better, of course, and in Geekbench’s multicore performance tests it couldn’t even be beaten by M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chips. It’s not just that the M3 Max has 16 CPU cores; it’s that 12 of them are of the “performance” variety, half again as many as in the M2 Max, and CPU performance on Apple silicon tends to scale with the number of performance cores available. Apple has loaded the M3 Max with performance, and the results follow from that.

Apple’s new GPU architecture, which features a new cache-optimization feature that squeezes even more performance out of its graphics cores, also shines on M3 Max. In Geekbench’s Metal test, only the M2 Ultra with 76 GPU cores could beat the M3 Max with 40 cores. In Cinebench 2024 GPU rendering tests, the M3 Max almost tripled the score of an M2 Max MacBook Pro. In my (sort of boring) Final Cut Pro test—a 1080p export of a two-hour long video with eight separate HD streams—the MacBook Pro completed the job 14 percent faster than January’s M2 model.

For some tests, I switched the MacBook Pro into High Power Mode, which is now available on both 14- and 16-inch models in the M3 Max configuration. (Previously, it was only available on 16-inch models.) I didn’t actually find it made much of a difference in the tests I was running, but it sure did make the fans kick in at a very loud volume. With the exception of using some heavy CPU tasks in High Power Mode, the fans on the MacBook Pro were either silent or, in some heavier loads, audible but not obnoxious. But if you stress things out enough in High Power Mode, your laptop will sound more like a hair dryer. It’s all in the name of high performance, since all High Power Mode really does is let your fans blow as loud as they need to in order to keep the processor cranking as hard as it possibly can.

What to buy?

Should you upgrade from an M2 MacBook Pro to an M3? Unless you are someone who regularly spends lots of money to get the most performance possible, no. (If you are that person, then absolutely yes!) If you bought an M1 MacBook Pro a couple of years ago… the decision is more difficult than I expected it to be. The M1 Pro and M1 Max chips’ performance is nothing to sneeze at, but the M3 Max chip is substantially faster. It’s a big jump.

As a longtime computer user, I have internalized many painful lessons about spending a lot of money on a computer only to see it rapidly eclipsed by newer, faster models. But as someone with an M1 Max Mac Studio from only a year and a half ago, uh… the M3 Max is so much faster that it’s making even me question my upgrade cycle.

A more interesting question comes at the low end of the MacBook Pro line. Apple’s done an admirable job at getting the starting price of this MacBook Pro $400 lower than it was in earlier generations. But there are a whole lot of tradeoffs baked into that $400 difference, not just the less capable processor but also less than half of the base RAM. If you want more than 8GB of RAM¹, that low-end model is now just $200 short of the mid-range model with a better chip and even more RAM.

It makes me wonder how many of these base-model configurations Apple will really sell. For discerning buyers, they’re poorly configured in comparison to slightly more expensive models. They’re also still $300 more expensive than the previous base model, which will likely turn off some budget-minded users and corporate buyers.

I suspect Apple figures some of those users will instead consider the MacBook Air, which now comes in an appealing 15-inch model starting at $1299 and the classic 13-inch model at $1099. Even with storage and memory upgrades, those Airs are priced quite competitively. Yes, buying a MacBook Pro gets you that beautiful screen, active cooling, and a card reader slot, but it all comes at a price. It will be fascinating to see where all those buyers of the 13-inch MacBook Pro choose to go next.

But let me zoom back out to the big picture: Apple’s Mac laptop line, which makes up the vast bulk of new Mac sales, offers what might be the best array of options in the history of the Mac. The MacBook Air models offer value and screen-size options. The MacBook Pro offers a spectrum of laptops from a base model through a powerful (and, I suspect, popular) mid-range, leading to an all-out performance beast at the high end.

If you’re using a mid-range MacBook Pro from the M1 or M2 generations, I don’t think upgrading to an M3 Pro-based MacBook Pro is necessary. If you’re coming from Intel and haven’t taken the plunge yet, this is the perfect time. The 2021 MacBook Pro redesign still feels fresh and new, the display is amazing, and Apple silicon offers amazing performance and battery life without any major compatibility glitches.

But for power-conscious owners of an M1 Max MacBook Pro, it may be time to roll that laptop down or sell it off. The M3 Max chip is a whole lot faster. I know a lot of my app developer friends already have their orders in, and I think it’s the right call. The biggest performance boosts of the M3 generation come on the M3 Max, and during my time with the 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro, I was frequently reminded that it was the fastest computer I’d ever used. Returning to my M1 Max Mac Studio, I started a CPU-intensive podcast transcription task and wondered why it was taking so long. I had already gotten used to the speed of the M3 Max for intense tasks like that.

You’ll pay for the privilege, sure. But while the M3 and M3 Pro offer nice improvements to performance, the M3 Max goes all-out. If power and portability matter to you, it’s time to upgrade.