2024 is fast fading behind us and thus, as is our custom, it’s time to cast our eyes back at the year that was and see how things shook out for Apple.
A lot has happened to the company over the past twelve months—and not all of it to Apple’s liking. As Apple has gotten larger and larger, it’s found itself increasingly in the crosshairs of governments, not to mention its equally weighty competitors. While the company remains wildly successful from a financial standpoint, it’s struggled somewhat when it comes to its vision of the future. In short, there are definitely cracks puncturing Cupertino’s traditionally invincible image.
So let’s take a trip down memory lane and see the stories that shaped Apple’s 2024.
I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and always hated practicing. I can blame it on the cold room we kept the piano in, but part of the reason I hated it was that most of what I played was boring. (I didn’t love having to take a long school bus ride to my piano lessons, either.)
This week I took Simply Piano for Vision Pro for a spin, and it was anything from boring. The popular iPad app for teaching piano has come to Vision Pro, and so I sat down at the very same piano I used to practice on as a kid—it’s in a somewhat warmer room now—but with a Vision Pro over my head.
Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.
Even all these years later, I’ve got sight reading skills above Simply Piano’s introductory lessons, but as I went through the introductory lessons I found that the visual augmentation did feel a bit like magic. If I had any complaints, it was that sometimes Simply Piano struggled to recognize when I was playing notes, especially two of the same note in quick succession.
The Vision Pro app also comes with a virtual keyboard feature that allows you to practice on any flat surface, by overlaying a keyboard and letting you play it. I like this idea a lot, but in practice I found that it didn’t work very well. It played incorrect notes and even played notes when my fingers weren’t down. I think there’s something here—and having the ability to practice piano when you don’t have a keyboard handy is an amazing idea!—but I gave up pretty quickly and went back to my real piano.
Maybe if I had an iPad, or a Vision Pro, I would’ve practiced the piano more faithfully back in the day. Or maybe not. But this app seems to do a pretty great job of teaching the basics of piano, no teacher (or long school bus ride) required.
Tim Cook sits down for another interview (two more and he gets a free set of steak knives), Apple and Spotify take a look at your taste in music, and changes are coming to how iPhones handle memory, all for AI.
More time with Tim
If you’ve ever wanted get into it with Tim Cook about AI, this week there was an interview for you.
Writing for Wired, Steven Levy asked Cook about Apple’s awkward Apple Intelligence ads and his own comments about its features.
I’ve heard you say that Apple Intelligence could make you funnier, which seems strange.
I think it can make you friendlier, which, in many ways, can be funnier as well.
Well… no. But, OK.
Turns out if Tim doesn’t like a question, he just doesn’t answer it.
If AGI does actually happen, how would that affect Apple?
That’s a discussion that we’ll continue to have.
Tim, can you tell us your fundamental message for our times, that encapsulates the meaning of existence and holds the secrets to reinforcing the connection that holds the human race together?
My fundamental belief is, if you’re looking at your phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, that’s a problem.
Beautiful.
Questionable tastes on display
Apple released its annual Apple Music Replay this week and people were gleefully sharing their results. It used to be that no one would know what your poor choices in music were. Now people put it out there for everyone to see. What a time to be alive. Thank god these features weren’t around when the Spin Doctors were popular.
Apple Music Replay 1992: “You listened to ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong’ four thousand three hun-… oh, my god, is that right? Seriously? These numbers are going to come back and haunt you, you know.”
Spotify also released its annual music review, Spotify Wrapped, leading to a bit of comparison between the two services. While Replay on iOS finally keeps you in the app (in a web view), Replay in Music on the Mac kicks you out to the web. Spotify, meanwhile, included an AI podcast instead of other features users have found fun in the past.
The result is meant to feel like you’re listening to a podcast about your Wrapped.
“Area Grown-Assed Man Listens to a Surprising Number of Superhero Movie Soundtracks.” Thanks, but no thanks.
This surely had nothing to do with the fact that Spotify cut 2,300 jobs last year.
When asked for comment on how it decided what to include in Wrapped this year, Spotify simply said, “Every year we look to bring a new and exciting experience to Wrapped for listeners. It’s part of the secret sauce of Wrapped.”
Did an AI write that response?
Dubious features
You know the old saying: “It’s not a feature it’s a… actually, I don’t know what this is.”
The shift will mark a departure from the current package-on-package (PoP) method, where the low-power double data rate (LPDDR) DRAM is stacked directly on the System-on-Chip (SoC).
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure. I was gonna suggest that. LPDDR. PoPping and SoCking.
Now, there might be a downside.
It may also use more power and increase latency.
All so we can walk faster through the uncanny valley of Image Playground. OK.
All that work for AI is still not as little requested as this:
Now you can convert your real money to fake money right from your iPhone!
That’s great and all but can I buy Hawk Tuah meme coin with Apple Pay? (If you don’t know what Hawk Tuah is, do not type it into your favorite search engine. Or anything.) Probably just as well that you can’t as — gasp! — it seems to be a bit of a pyramid scheme!
What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust a person who got famous for saying [WHAT SHE GOT FAMOUS FOR SAYING REDACTED] with your money?
[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.]
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Developer Simon Støvring (Scriptable, Runestone) has just released a fun new app for the holidays called Festivitas:
Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences ✨
That’s it—that’s the app. It hangs holiday lights off your menu bar and on your Dock. (You can choose to have lights in both places or just one.) It’s a well executed app that’s got the flavor of the fun early Mac era. It reminds me of classic Mac apps like Underware and more modern takes like Notchmeister.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Festivitas is that it’s so customizable. For the Menu Bar and the Dock you can choose the size of the lights, the cable thickness, the distance between lights, the color of the lights, and the pattern the lights use to move (or not move, as the case may be). I immediately set mine in the six Apple rainbow colors, for obvious reasons.
Back in the day, I had one computer. It was a laptop bought for me by my employer, and at work, I’d attach it to an external display and use it at my desk. At the end of the day, I’d close it up, put it in my backpack, and take it home.
For the last ten years I’ve worked at a desk at home, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the last year or so, I’ve been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether I’m traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.
So what’s better, the single-Mac life or being a Mac vagabond? As someone who’s been there, and back, and there again, I can tell you that it’s never been easier to live the two-Mac lifestyle—but it’s also never been a better time to just give the desktop up and learn to love a Mac laptop.
The KVM switches between the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, allowing them to share the keyboard, a monitor (on the arm above) and a mouse. The Zoom Podtrac P4 audio interface is also shared between the two Macs. The cable leading from the right edge of the switch connects to a small puck that is magnetcially stuck to the VESA mount above.
I live a multi-Mac lifestyle. It’s a luxury, but mighty close to a necessity if I want to keep my work life and personal life (which includes freelance projects) separate. But how do you organize your life and desk so that both Macs can do their best for you? My solution is a modern spin on an old option: a KVM switch.
The Problem
The radio station where I work issues me a MacBook Pro, on which I edit audio, write feature stories and do all the admin things you do when you have a job. I use the MBP in the office, but most often while working from home. It’s connected to a Dell P2242H monitor (also workplace-owned) that’s mounted on a VESA arm.
Also on my desk is a computer I own. Until recently, it was an Intel iMac, shoved unceremoniously to the back of the desk, behind the monitor arm. To manage my personal stuff, I have routinely fired up Screen Sharing on the MacBook Pro to control my iMac.
My plan when I started this job several years ago was to keep work and personal computer things entirely separate. But files and apps have always been a little bit mixed between the two machines. Lately, I’ve concentrated on making the separation of job and home more explicit. It’s a privacy thing, and a backup and archiving thing.
Unfortunately, Screen Sharing’s occasional glitches—and a vast difference between M2 and Intel performance—made that harder than I liked. So I recently bought a new M4 Pro Mac mini.
Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Screen Sharing has mostly worked well when I needed to check on personal stuff during the work day. Everything financially or personally sensitive has lived on the iMac’s local drive, and my home email accounts don’t have a place on my MacBook Pro. But there have been issues, like when I need to edit a document or fill out a form over screen sharing. Characters sometimes get dropped. Occasionally, network glitches forced me to find a keyboard I can connect directly to the iMac. And the pointer I enlarge in accessibility settings so that I can actually find it onscreen turns tiny again when I use Screen Sharing.
These are small annoyances, but ones I’m tired of fighting.
Keyboard, Video, Mouse
There’s nothing new about a box that allows you to share a keyboard, monitor and mouse between multiple computers. The idea of a KVM switch goes back so far, that I hadn’t even considered it as an option I could try. Do they still exist? How do they handle multiple port types and video resolutions?
I quickly learned that they do exist, and in an era where I/O ports are often in short supply, a modern KVM can serve effectively as a dock, too. My MacBook Pro is one of those two-port M2 numbers that made its debut at the bottom of the range in 2022. So I bought the Mac mini for performance,and a KVM switch so I could share all the things.
I picked an the Anker Docking Station KVM Switch ($160). Options with more or fewer ports are available from Anker and elsewhere, including many that are far cheaper. Some KVM/dock devices, including mine, offer support for multiple 4k monitors, but since I use a single, mid-priced display, I was more interested in ports than pixels.
Ports of Call
The switch box is a small rectangle, with ports for connecting computer and monitors on one side, and three USB-A ports, plus a USB-C port on the other side. This arrangement makes it tough to completely banish unsightly cables from your desk, but I’ve compromised by leaving the KVM behind my monitor arm, and bundling cables where I can.
On one end of the KVM switch is a 1/8″ audio jack – theoretically useful for an audio producer and podcaster who wears wired headphones a lot, but I haven’t used it much. On the other end is a hard-wired cable, leading to a puck that’s just about the size of a second-gen iPod Shuffle. The lighted button on the puck switches between your connected computers. Its cable is two feet long, but the best thing about this switch is that the puck is magnetic. It’ll stick to the back of my VESA mount, keeping it out of the way, but easy to reach. That little puck brings me so much joy. It’s my favorite feature of the switch!
So Much to Share
Once two computers are connected to the switch, you can add peripherals via the USB-A or USB-C ports. I’m rocking an old Magic Keyboard, with a Logitech mouse plugged into it, so that covers the K and M aspects of the switch. I could start using the computers together now, but I have more devices to share. My Logitech webcam is also a USB-A device. And the most modern gadget I want to share between MacBook and Mac mini is the Zoom Podtrac P4 I’ve been using as an audio interface. With a microphone plugged into the Podtrac, I can record a podcast or jump on a Zoom call from either Mac.
Since I started using the KVM switch, I’ve learned that when everything’s connected, I can use both Macs at once by switching to the Mac mini with the switch and then opening the MacBook Pro’s lid. It’s not something I do often, but you might want to. I also realized I needed to differentiate the look of each Mac’s screen, so I’d remember which machine I was using at any given moment. I’ve given each Mac its own wallpaper, and the Mac mini’s login screen says “Welcome home,” which reminds me when the workday is over.
Caveat KVM
My switch needs are relatively simple, with no 4k displays or dual monitors. If you want to share high-resolution gear, or if you have multiple displays, be sure the switch you choose supports them. A good return policy on any switch you buy could also save you headaches, if your setup doesn’t work with the first switch you bring home.
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss emergency calls, reaction to Jason’s “The Mac is the Model” piece, iPhone metals, our innate troubleshooting powers, Jason’s laptop dilemma, the ChatGPT Mac app, and some very old Vision Pro news.
Developer Tim Rogers’s litra-rs project on GitHub is a freely available command-line tool for controlling not only the Litra Glow but the Litra Beam and Beam LX key lights. By specifying command line options you can turn the light on or off, toggle the power, and adjust both brightness and color temperature as either an absolute value or relative to the current setting. You can even get all the information about your currently connected devices—including having it provided in JSON in case you want to more easily connect to some external apps.
Most convenient of all, it’s available via homebrew, making it a snap to install and set up.1
On its own, this would be good enough; it’s a simple matter to write a shortcut or use some other utility to easily control these features from a keyboard shortcut or the Stream Deck. However, Rogers also offers a second app called litra-autotoggle that makes life even easier: it automatically turns on the light whenever you activate your webcam and turns it off when you’re done.
I love this: the only thing better than making these devices easier to use is making it so I don’t have to think about it at all. There are some additional options to require that a device be present or only work with a specific light or camera on your set up, but otherwise it just chugs along in the background and doesn’t bother you.
I’d still love to see a GUI wrapper for this app to make it easier to adjust brightness and temperature without having to figure out numerical values or resort to Logitech’s own not great software, but for the moment, this setup makes life way easier for my videoconferencing life.
There’s also a precompiled binary, source code, and installation via Cargo, if that’s how you roll. ↩
[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.]
My book about Apple’s Photos app on Mac, iPhone, and iPad has been updated to cover some additional stuff announced with the iPhone 16. It’s a free update for fourth edition readers.
Also, Take Control is currently doing a Black Friday sale, so for everyone else it’s 50% off through midnight CDT on Tuesday, December 3.
CarPlay comes to GM cars, despite the company’s desires; Apple faces more regulatory headwinds; and, no, that AI supercycle is not happening.
CarPlayin’ around
I often keep tabs open with stories about GM’s travails since grandiosely ditching CarPlay and Android Auto because I am a big fan of cringe comedy.
So, in reviewing my open tabs for this week’s column I ran into this interview The Verge did earlier this month with GM’s VP of software, Baris Cetinok. Cetinok defended the company’s move, saying:
“You get the most out of your vehicle because now we’re the company that builds the vehicle and is also creating the infotainment experience, the cluster experience, the app, and everything. We’re going to build that one day and maybe a voice assistant on top of it.”
And a pony.
For its part, The Verge noted:
Every time we do a Decoder episode with a car person, we talk about CarPlay, and then we get an avalanche of emails from people who say they’ll never buy a car without it.
I might be a little more amenable to the idea that you should own the whole stack if much of that user experience didn’t already exist outside of the car environment and wasn’t owned by smartphone companies and if it was a company other than GM trying to do it. Ah, yes, put the company that made the Corvair and the Vega in charge of my entire user experience. Mmm, nice.
Good news: this week the market stepped in and said “Enough!”
White Automotive & Media Services of New Hudson, Mich., has created a fully integrated CarPlay/Android Auto system for Chevy EVs. You know, if you don’t want to wait for GM to cobble a pony together from spare parts.
Everybody’s doing it
Oh, boy, more Apple regulatory news this week. Yayyyyy.
Oh nooo. Will Chinese citizens not be allowed to know the awkward pleasures of wandering through Image Playground’s uncanny valley? First they had to suffer through the Cultural Revolution and now this?
This stuff makes writing about daily deals look interesting.
Honestly, maybe it’s self-indulgent, but I’m really tired of talking about Apple’s run-ins with government regulations. I started writing about Apple because I loved its products. I didn’t start writing about it because I loved fights between companies and regulatory agencies over app store rules. There weren’t even any app stores when I started writing about Apple! That would have been impossible!
Gah.
I wonder if Jason would mind if I just started captioning these sections something like “EU fines Apple for Candy Crush approval fiasco” but then put my Star Trek fan fiction in the body.
It’s good stuff. All post-Dominion War.
There’s a dryly sarcastic Andorian security officer.
No one asked for this
Get ready to put on your surprised face because, according to IDC, AI is not driving a smartphone supercycle as many had predicted.
Wait, nobody wants that thing nobody asked for?
Weirrrrd.
“While GenAI continues to be a hot topic and top priority for many vendors…
Vendors, not customers.
…it is yet to impact demand significantly and drive early upgrades.” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
You can add another feature almost no one wants to this bonfire of the tech vanities.
“New foldable phone models continue to grab headlines despite the low volumes in the market,” said Anthony Scarsella, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
Apple was able to inch up iPhone sales and the smartphone market overall is growing but not because of AI or foldables. (Someone really thought foldables would drive an upgrade cycle? I’m gonna need names.) So, why are people buying new phones? Just to upgrade. And when they do, they’re getting cheaper phones.
Rapid Android growth of 7.6% year-over-year focused in APeJC, Latin America, Middle East and Africa and China, primarily in low end devices…
Still, big tech’s current favorite technologies cannot fail, they can only be failed. IDC insists sales of foldables will grow in double digits through 2028 and:
…we continue to believe GenAI will revolutionize the user experience in the years to come…
Technically 2167 is one of the years that will someday be coming. Then when AI is finally viable because it’s actual artificial intelligence instead of Rube Goldberg-style large language models, the heads of these analysts that are being kept alive in jars will be able to say “I told you it was going to be a hit technology.”
Heads in jars always get the last laugh.
[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.]
Here in the United States, it’s our annual tradition of Thanksgiving, in which we prepare way more food than any group of people we can eat. Also, we give thanks for the things that we are grateful for over the past year, such as…uh…there was that…no…maybe when…oh, right…how about that one…oh did they? Geez. Well, I’m sure I’ll come up with some any time now.
As your local and organically sourced Apple columnist, it seems only appropriate that I take this occasion to call out a few things that I’m grateful Cupertino has bestowed upon us in the last year. I mean, without Apple, where would I be?1
Run DMA: Who doesn’t enjoy a good battle royale? Forget Apple taking on Microsoft or Google; it’s graduated to the big time now: an entire continent. The amount of back-and-forth, back-and-forth between the European Commission and Apple is like watching a tennis match where one player is slamming the ball as hard as they can while the other is tipping it gently back over the net with minimal effort. Also there are billions of dollars at stake. What I’m saying is that I’m finally starting to see why people enjoy sports.
The Vision Pro provides: With the Apple Car out of the running, we’ve been badly in need of a new punchline, and the Vision Pro has delivered in spades. A ridiculous looking headset that’s mainly good for playing movies and occasionally pretending that you can still afford to go to the beach after you’ve spent all your money on the thing that lets you pretend you can go to the beach? Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if that $3,499 price tag was just so we could all have something to sit back and have a good laugh at. Come on, these are hard times; everybody deserves a little humor.
Not so intelligent, are you?: The main reason I appreciate how much Apple has spent developing and promoting its Apple Intelligence features is that they are all still so bad it makes me look great by comparison. Although, to be fair, I’ve been drawing people with six fingers since I was a kid, and nobody’s ever decided to invest billions of dollars in me. At least the next time my parents lament the ridiculous amount of money that my education did cost, I can at least point out that I write a better email than a computer.
Money money money money…monnnnneyyyyy: Apple making billions of dollars every quarter doesn’t directly benefit me, but I’m honestly glad because it seems to empower the company to feel like it can do whatever weird things it wants to (see the Vision Pro). Oh no, your growth slowed this last quarter and you only made $20 billion in profit? The horror. Why don’t you go build a robotic HomePod or something—that will make you feel better. I don’t miss the days of worrying that Apple might go out of business any minute—but I am now concerned about the world exploding first. Real trade-off vibes there.
The M1 chip: Here we are, four years later, and my M1 MacBook Air is going strong. Stronger than ever, I’d argue. Last night I caught it bench-pressing my M2 Pro Mac mini just for fun. Honestly, I’m a little scared of it now, which is why I will, uh, definitely not be replacing it any time soon. (Help.) It’s just so good at what it does, that I may never need to buy another computer. (I’m whispering because it can hear me.) So, Apple should probably just stop building new M-series processors already—why bother when it already achieved perfection the first time around? (I’m AirTagging myself now, please come find me before it does.)
[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.]
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Our tech use with family and friends during the holidays; gadgets we’d bring for a long, power-limited day trip like attending a Supreme Court rally; seeking or avoiding Black Friday tech deals; and the apps we use for recipe discovery and management.
