By Dan Moren

February 28, 2023 12:00 PM PT

The Back Page: Inside Apple’s most secret secret research & development group

Apple is a notoriously secretive company. A company so secretive that, in the past, when information has leaked out, it has stridently told its employees that it’s doubling down on its already secret secrecy but secretly it’s quadrupled down on its secrecy. (You haven’t heard about that because, well, it’s secret.) Of course, two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead. And the other is Tim Cook, because he is very good at keeping secrets. And doing away with people who leak secrets. Secretly.

So, when a reporter gets ahold of a story about a secret Apple design group working on secret projects—and no, not that secret group or that secret group, yes literally, a more secretive third secret group—you can draw two important conclusions: first, that whoever disclosed said secret has already been entombed within Jony Ive’s featureless white cell to live out their days in perpetual oblivion. And second, that there is clearly an even more secretive group inside Apple working on secrets that you still haven’t heard of.

Which is how I can now exclusively confirm the existence of an ultra-secret Apple R&D group dubbed the Secret Exploratory Design Research Engineering Team, or SEDRET.¹

If you thought that Apple’s AR headset, electric car, or blood glucose monitoring technology were the acme of the company’s secret projects, think again. SEDRET is involved in no less than three super secret projects in various stages of development, all of which have the potential to shake up the entire technology market—if not the world—as we know it. Let’s do a quick rundown.

• Edible screens: Forget foldables. Forget rollables. Meet munchables. Thanks to advances in 3D printing and revolutionary display technology, these new screens put the “organic” in “Organic Light Emitting Diodes.” You can have a display of whatever size and shape you want just by nibbling away at the corners until you’re happy. Plus, with 19 essential vitamins and 8 grams of fiber, it’s part of a balanced breakfast.

• Self-driving ebike: Electric cars may have the attention of the world at present, but electric bikes are far more practical. Only who wants to pedal? Or steer? Or avoid the odd squirrel darting across the road? The Apple Bike will take care of all most of that for you², letting you spend that pesky commute time working on today’s Wordle, immersing yourself in the virtual reality of the Apple headset, or I guess talking to your kids or something. These are priced to be a steal at under $100,000.

• Artificially intelligent virtual reality meetings: We all have way too many meetings, especially remote ones, and with the coming wave of augmented/virtual reality, that’s only about to increase. But Apple’s devised a clever workaround for the digital avatars we’re all sure to soon be sporting: artificial intelligence. Yes, you can get photorealistic digital representations of yourself to converse in the metaverse, but what if we took that a step further so you didn’t have to go to meetings at all? Leveraging Apple’s machine learning technology, AI voice synthesis, and the conversational skills of ChatGPT, you can skip out on those meetings and let virtual you handle them instead, totally seamlessly. Overbooked? No problem: digital avatar lets you attend up to three meetings at the same time.³ Just a caveat: There is a slight possibility that your digital avatar may tell your coworkers you love them and try to convince them to leave their partners for you. But what new technology doesn’t have some kinks to work out?

I’m told that this is just a sampling of the super secret projects that SEDRET is hard at work on, and while none are expected to ship in even the next ten to twenty years, Apple is clearly well poised for the next generation of technological evolution. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that’s the doorbell, and I just need to…Tim Cook?! What are you doing he——

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By John Moltz

February 24, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: A stopped Watch

Is the Apple Watch about to become as scarce as woke liberal elites at Elon Musk’s birthday party? Meanwhile rumors about the iPhone 15 and the Apple headset are heating up, hopefully not like the devices themselves.

Apple Watch fracas

Like squirrels storing nuts, is it time to buy up and stash away Apple Watches?

Well, that’s one strategy. A strategy employed by rats with good hair style. If you want to go that way. I’m not here to judge your role models.

If things continue apace, the U.S. International Trade Commission could ban imports of most Apple Watch models due to a patent ruling in favor of a company that makes electrocardiogram technology. ECG technology is in every currently shipping Apple Watch model except the SE.

Is this game over for the Apple Watch, one of the most successful Apple flops ever?! Before we even get the recently rumored blood glucose testing?! Say it isn’t so!

OK, I’ll say it. It’s probably not so.

Consider the fact that Apple spent $9.4 million on lobbying the U.S. government in 2022, an amount that John Gruber points out is about what the company makes in profit every hour. There is a way to solve this impasse and that way is sweet, sweet lucre. You know it, you love it, it’s the thing that sadly makes the world go ‘round.

I’m not saying AliveCor, the company holding the patent Apple has been charged wth infringing, is solely in it for the money. But this is capitalism we’re talking about, so they’re probably north of 95 percent in it for the money, just like Apple is. Expect a deal to be struck, the details of which will not be made public.

It’s possible Apple will let it drag out and maybe Apple Watch supplies will get tight for a while, but don’t bother stashing any in a tree. Because I’m not sure if that’s covered by AppleCare.

iPhone 15 rumor time

When the iPhone 15 comes out, you can have any size screen as long as the screen is larger.

According to CAD files obtained by 9to5Mac, the next iPhone Pro will have a 6.2-inch display rather than the 6.1-inch display on the iPhone 14 Pro.

A tenth of an inch isn’t a lot and 9to5Mac doesn’t reveal whether or not the iPhone 15 gains the increase through reducing the bezel size even further or increasing the size of the body.

The iPhone’s body, not yours. You can increase the size of yours the old fashioned way, if you’re so inclined.

Either way, as the #1 iPhone mini superfan, it’s going to be too big for my tastes.

Speaking of the body (again, the iPhone’s), another rumor indicates that the iPhone 15 could come in new colors: a dark red as well as pink and light blue. Given Apple’s predilection for making these colors just barely noticeable, I wouldn’t expect a real blood red. Most of their Pro colors are like someone softly whispered the name of a color at you from across a field.

“Bluuue.”

“WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU. DID YOU SAY ‘SHOE’?”

Ming-Chi Kuo also weighs in to tell us that the 15 Pro models will have an improved LiDAR scanner which is more power-efficient. That sounds great, but I wish someone would tell me what I’m supposed to do with the LiDAR camera I already have in my iPad. I saw a Nova episode where they used them to find evidence of ancient civilizations in the rainforests of South America, but so far I haven’t found any in my backyard. Maybe I’m holding it wrong.

Don’t let it go to your head

For a device that hasn’t been announced yet, there sure are a lot of rumors about the upcoming Apple headset.

Excuse me. Headsets.

Yes, Apple is expected to announce two high-end headset models this year, with guesstimated high-end price points between $3,000 and $5,000. Foxconn is now reportedly already working on two cheaper models with price points, uh, lower than the high-end models. These cheaper models could arrive in 2024 or 2025. Apple will reportedly make the devices more affordable by using cheaper components such as “lower-resolution lenses”.

I will have to remember to stock up on dramamine.

Maybe the company can also cut back on the number of cameras in the device, as the high-end models are expect to have a dozen. And here’s me, already not knowing how to make use of the cameras I have.

[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 Joe Rosensteel

February 21, 2023 2:00 PM PT

Music to no one’s ears

Look, I’ve been hoping that at some point, the rocky transition from iTunes to the Music app would be over and we’d all look back on it and say, “Wow, I can’t believe that was so brief.” But it isn’t over. Here I am, in the year 2023, and I have the same problems using the app that I’ve had for about half a decade at this point. And yes, many of these problems are tied to changes made for the Apple Music service.

When launching the Music app on macOS, you always start off at the Listen Now section of the app. It doesn’t matter what I was previously listening to in the app—that information has been lost to the sands of time. I can’t resume playback of anything I was listening to on this device, or any other. Anything I was looking at in the interface is wiped away too. I can, instead, see the four things that Apple thinks I want immediate access to. Those are “Joseph Rosensteel’s Station” in Apple Music, a new EP from Mariah Carey (sorry, Mariah, this is not one thing I need), the opportunity to revisit Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance, and the new album from Orbital (I know, we’re all surprised they’re still releasing albums, but I listened to this several weeks ago so it’s not new to me at this point).

What’s so bad about that, Joe? Well, the “station” Apple Music compiles for me—and, anecdotally, every Apple Music user I’ve spoken with—is trash. A churning abyss of things I’ve tangentially listened to that spans every genre, tempo, style, etc. Listening to it is unlike listening to a radio station; it’s more like an angry jukebox out to shuffle in some random thing and kill whatever vibe you had from the previous song. As a rule I don’t bother even listening to it, so for it to always be the number one thing here is ridiculous.

Surely, the section under it, Recently Played, is exactly what I want? No, I want what I was last listening to, where I was last listening to it, tied directly to the play button. Recently Played only provides the entire song, album, or playlist I was listening to from its start.

If I scroll down, I get more recommendations. It’s good that they’re further down, because if I’m not in the mood, I can just stop scrolling, but that first chunk of the interface is irritating because I want to resume what I was listening to. Even if I quit and reopen the app instantly, it all resets.

Let’s say I start listening to Flowering Jungle by Monster Rally on my Mac, but I realize that I need to go downstairs. There’s no way to transfer where I currently am in my Mac’s Music app to my iPhone’s Music app. My iPhone says “Not Playing”, so it has no playback history of its own to even resume from at this moment. Instead, the iPhone’s Music app presents me with the same Listen Now options, where I can go to Recently Played, navigate into the album, and pick the song, and then offset the time to match roughly where I was on my Mac. Convenient!

If only there was some way to do, oh I don’t know, let’s call it a hand-off between the two devices that are both made by the same company, running software by the same company, and using the same music service that knows exactly what I am streaming from it. Something with a little continuity. What a concept.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

The other thing that’s really irked me is searching, which is usually the other thing I want to do when I open the Music app, if I’m not resuming what I was previously listening to.

The search field in macOS used to have a little toggle at the top that let you choose whether it was finding results in your library or Apple Music. That’s moved to the browse page and the search results page, which changes the behavior of the search text field, even though those buttons are not even in the same ZIP code. For a while I thought they’d just removed the library search, but it’s still there…if you want to do more work to use it.

You can also search in Apple Music and then go to your library version of an album or song by right-clicking on the tracks and picking “Show Album in Library” which also does a neat thing where you can see that whatever they use to style the album interface is different between the two for no good reason at all.

If you want your own version of the album and isn’t exactly what Apple Music has, then you must use the toggle in the browse interface before searching. I have a version of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack that I bought from Amazon because it had an exclusive track. It’s in my library and I can manually navigate to it, but I can’t use Apple’s search to get to it at all, only the versions of the album in Apple Music. Doesn’t seem like a huge deal, right? Well at some point I “loved” a track in Apple Music from this album, and now I have a version of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in my library that has one track in it.*

Look at the stars, look how they shine for you

Speaking of “loving” music, some of us prefer a more nuanced system for rating music. Sure, five stars is overkill and most people are either ranking their music either zero stars or five stars, but there are those of us with a rating system that we’d like to keep using because we were using it already. Even though the stars have been eradicated from the interface, you can still right-click on a track to see its star rating metadata or to even to rate it. Like when you go two levels deep in Windows’ Settings and you get that Windows 95-looking dialog about a network adapter—that’s where your stars are buried.

Some of my albums have had their star ratings wiped out, which I can only assume is from some iCloud Library sync issue at some point in the last eight years, so it’s no longer something I can reliably use or invest additional time in. It does, however, drive some of the features I like to use, like Smart Playlists.

What, you’ve never heard of Smart Playlists? Gather ’round, kids and let me regale you with how they work: They’re basically saved searches that filter your music library by the file metadata, and they’re super neat. Unfortunately, having a library is kind of the enemy of using a music streaming service. Apple would much rather you use stations or their human-curated playlists, but I don’t like to rely on those because at any point the human-curated playlist could be changed by a human who isn’t me. It’s not versionable and it’s not mine—it’s the service’s.

C’est la vie! I can make my peace with Apple product managers who the stars made sad, but not so much with the slow erosion via data loss of something that I use to play the music I want.

You’re getting closer to pushing me off of life’s little edge

As a long time user of iTunes, and now the Music app, I’m at a loss for why all of this is so bad, other than that Apple makes too much money to care. Why is this a streaming-first experience that is executed like a standalone music player? Why does my library even exist if I’m not really supposed to use it?

There are a thousand other things I could needle Apple Music product managers about, but let’s just start with playing what I want. A high bar.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]

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.]