At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple gave a little bit of time to its major platforms: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS—even tvOS got some love. But one device was conspicuously absent: the HomePod.
Given that Apple spent a lot of time during its keynote talking about the future of Siri, one might be mistaken for thinking that the HomePod, with its reliance on Siri, would be at the center of such as strategy. But instead, it’s looking increasingly like Apple’s smart speakers will be left on the periphery as those developments roll out, or at the very least will be forced to find a workaround in order to stay relevant.
And yet, it seems like there might be something else brewing in the HomePod arena, something that moves the category forward instead of merely consigning it to an also-ran position. Something to keep your eyes on.
Apple had also been expected to take an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a deal to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone maker’s devices, but would not do so, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple declined to comment.
Microsoft, which has held a non-voting board seat since the Sam Altman fiasco last year, has also given up its position. Instead, both companies will be part of “regular meetings with partners”, along with some of OpenAI’s major investors. This seems to be, at least in some part, due to increased scrutiny related to antitrust concerns in both the European Union and U.S. Given that Apple and Microsoft have been subject to plenty of antitrust attention, especially in the EU, it’s reasonable they wouldn’t want to open themselves to more.
But this does make for a wild ride for Apple. It was just a few days ago that it was reported that Apple Fellow Phil Schiller would be taking the observer role as part of the company’s deal with OpenAI, but I guess Phil can go back to sparring with Epic in Europe full time.
Via Christina Warren, some jokers called Web Orange Limited have acquired The Unofficial Apple Weblog—a classic player in Apple blogging—and have turned it into a gross AI-generated garbage blog posting as a real one:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has been a cornerstone of Apple-related journalism since its establishment on December 5, 2004. Acquired by Web Orange Limited from Yahoo IP Holdings LLC in 2024 without its original content, our mission has been rejuvenated to continue providing Apple enthusiasts and tech professionals with authoritative and engaging content. We strive to serve as a comprehensive resource for news, credible rumors, and instructional content that spans the Apple ecosystem and beyond.
The tell? They’ve re-used the names of key historic contributors, but generated new bios and photos(!) and claim that new stories are written by these historic contributors.
I looked up my friend Scott McNulty, a laughable 360-word “deep dive” that references Mac OS X Jaguar and Tiger. It’s dated July 1, 2024. The bio bears no resemblance to reality, and the dude in the photo is not Scott McNulty. The very least these crooks could’ve done is give Scott a hot author photo, but no.
Anyway: Don’t go to TUAW.com. It’s a scam.
(Update: After coverage here and elsewhere, the site has changed all the names of real people to fake people. Same bios, same photos, but now fake names. This doesn’t stop the new TUAW from being an AI-generated garbage farm, but at least my friends’ names aren’t attached to the garbage anymore.)
Analyst Canalys has updated its worldwide PC market share stats, and while the PC industry actually showed 3.4% growth year-on-year, Apple’s sales grew 6% during that period:
Apple secured the fourth position, shipping 5.5 million units and capturing a 9% market share, marking a 6% increase compared to the same period last year.
Mac market share is now 9% (okay, 8.8%, but who’s counting?) which seems small but historically is a pretty healthy number for Apple. And of course it doesn’t factor in revenue or profit, two areas where Apple generally out does the competition.
Apple has been outpacing the PC market for years now, but with the overall market now growing and the possibility of a sales spurt due to the introduction of Copilot Plus PCs, it’ll be interesting to see how Apple fares overall.
Speaking of figures (since Canalys’s are unofficial, of course), one other Apple-related note: Apple will announce its official results for its most recent quarter on August 1, so get ready for some colorful charts to kick off August.
There’s more news about Apple’s battles with Epic and the EU, and Apple tightens its ties with OpenAI, but all of the controversy gets us thinking about what makes us stay excited about technology during difficult times.
There’s a joke in one of my favorite movies, “Real Genius,” which feels directly applicable to a lot of AI discussions we’re having today. (It’s an ’80s movie, so it’s not a scene—it’s a montage, set to “I’m Falling” by The Comsat Angels.)
In it, our protagonist Mitch attends a normal math lecture, but over the course of the montage most of the class is replaced by tape recorders of various sizes.1 In the final shot, Mitch enters the lecture hall to discover that a large reel-to-reel tape player has replaced the professor himself. It’s just one tape recording being played into all the other tape recorders.
One of the announced features for Apple Intelligence, Smart Reply, will offer quick ways to respond to direct queries in email, asking you simple questions (“Do you like me? Check yes or no.”) and drafting a reply for you.
Apple is hardly the first company to suggest that in the future, your phone will write your emails for you. Gmail’s Smart Compose has been doing it for several years, and Apple’s been offering its own version of multi-word autocomplete for almost a year.
But with this latest round of AI announcements, once again, I’ve heard a lot of people making jokes about how, pretty soon, your AI will email my AI, and humans will never need to be involved anymore! It’s usually meant as absurdity, but I think there might be more to it than that.
Suppose our AIs end up emailing each other endlessly, striking up meaningless conversations and having their own inner lives. In that case, that might make for an interesting science fiction story, but I’m not sure it would really matter to us as humans. Think of it this way: email is just a communication pathway. It was built for humans to talk to each other, but for years now, we’ve received automated emails, newsletters, spam, and the rest.
If you know much about tech, you’ve heard of APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. APIs are, at their most abstract level, an agreed-upon method for software to use or communicate with other software. APIs are in the cloud, on the web, on our devices, everywhere. So why not in our email messages, too?
I realize that it’s absurd to consider that a free-form email message would ever be better than a programmed API, but email has a flexibility that other APIs don’t. Emails can be about literally anything. And a lot of times, APIs are just not well used because the people who would use them are lazy, busy, uninterested, or don’t know they exist.
Let’s say you need to find a common meeting time for you and four other people. Are there internet calendar APIs for this? Yes! Are there calendar apps that feature built-in support this sort of scheduling? Yes! Are there literally web apps that will do this work for you? Yes! (I use StrawPoll, myself.) And yet, I’d bet that most people just… send an email to everyone asking them if they can make a certain time and try again until they get it right. It’s not efficient, but it is convenient.
Now imagine that same scenario, but everyone is using an AI system that’s reading email and has access to each user’s calendar. The end result might be the same as using an existing API or web app, but instead email messages among AIs are sorting it out. Maybe some AIs know exactly when their person is available; others might need to ask. But instead of the onus being on the users to interface with other systems and bring it all together, the AIs handle most of it and the user just chimes in when it’s necessary.
I don’t think that’s an absurd scenario. (And yeah, if the AIs are particularly intelligent, maybe they’ll use an existing calendar service to solve the problem up front.) It’s the equivalent of each of those people having their own human assistant setting up the meeting—except none of them likely have the budget to hire a personal assistant.
In fact, where AI assistants really run into trouble is not when they’re talking to other AIs, but when they’re talking to human beings. Remember when Google showed off its service that pretended to be a human and called real people to verify Google Maps data or make reservations? That’s what I really dread: being battered by emails and texts and phone calls from AIs operating for people and organizations who want my attention but aren’t willing to give me any of their own.
As long as I, a human, don’t have to read a pile of AI-to-AI email communications, I don’t mind if they have them. The protocol doesn’t really matter—use iMessage or RCS, for all I care—so long as the job gets done and I’m not left to clean up the mess. Keep me out of it, other than answering questions or making my own requests.
Email and text messages may be a stupid way to build an interconnected web of AI software systems, but history has frequently shown us that sometimes the easiest solution is the one that’s available, not the one that’s the most elegant.2
The scene is meant to satirize the apparent mid-80s proclivity of college students to tape their lectures, or to skip their lectures and have a friend tape them? I dunno. Three years after “Real Genius” came out, I went to college and discovered that there was an official student organization that would sell you the complete lecture notes of any major class. ↩
My university’s Lecture Notes service was eventually replaced by—you guessed it—AI. ↩
Phil Schiller has a new role, we get a glimpse into Apple’s fall releases, and why don’t Epic and Apple just kiss already?
Ben Stein: “Schiller? Schiller?”
Congrats to Apple fine fresh Fellow Phil Schiller for landing a cushy gig on the board of OpenAI. Even better for Schiller, he’s just auditing this class.
As an “observer” all he has to do is show up to some Zoom meetings! He doesn’t even have to read the board books! He probably has to put a shirt on, but no one’s gonna know if he’s not wearing pants. Sweet gig.
It’s also sweet for Apple. As Dare Obasanjo notes, Microsoft had to invest $13 billion in OpenAI for the same privilege. Apple paid nothing, it just happens to have the platform OpenAI really wants to be on.
While Schiller is only supposed to only be an observer, maybe he can ask them about this:
“We are aware of this issue and have shipped a new version of the application which encrypts these conversations,” OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson says in a statement to The Verge.
“Having been made aware of the situation with the cows escaping, we have closed the barn door.”
“We’re committed to providing a helpful user experience while maintaining our high security standards as our technology evolves.”
“We apply the same rigor to security that we do to respecting the copyright protections of web content creators.”
Fall previews
Fall previews are here and I hope you’re looking forward to AI because it’s coming to every iPhone 16.
Assuming Apple has not changed its scheme for model numbers, these recently discovered new numbers indicate all this fall’s iPhones will have the same chip. If Apple has changed its numbering scheme, then chaos reigns and all bets are off.
There is also news about the upcoming revision to the Apple Watch. After a number of miscalled redesigns, the Series 10 will surely be the one to remake the Apple Wa-
Apple? Throwing up roadblocks to Epic? Now I’ve seen everything.
According to Epic, Apple has rejected its store app, saying the labels and buttons look too much like those in the Apple App Store.
Apple? Rejecting an app because of design complaints? Now I’ve seen everything.
“Apple’s rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation of the DMA (Digital Markets Act), and we’ve shared our concerns with the European Commission,” it said.
Apple? Making arbitrary and obstructive app approval decisions? Now I’ve yeah, OK, we could do this all day, you get the point.
Apple continuesto test the waters of the DMA, possibly trying to see how far it can go before the EU starts fining the company 10 percent of global revenue. But as anyone who’s held their finger one inch away from a sibling they were specifically told not to touch while riding in the back seat of the car knows, all it takes is one bump to find out the hard way whether they meant that threat or not.
[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.]
We’re about to enter the Apple Intelligence era, and it promises to dramatically change how we use our Apple devices. Most importantly, adding Apple Intelligence to Siri promises to resolve many frustrating problems with Apple’s “intelligent” assistant. A smarter, more conversational Siri is probably worth the price of admission all on its own.
But there’s a problem.
The new, intelligent Siri will only work (at least for a while) on a select number of Apple devices: iPhone 15 Pro and later, Apple silicon Macs, and M1 or better iPads. Your older devices will not be able to provide you with a smarter Siri. Some of Apple’s products that rely on Siri the most—the Apple TV, HomePods, and Apple Watch—are unlikely to have the hardware to support Apple Intelligence for a long, long time. They’ll all be stuck using the older, dumber Siri.
This means that we’re about to enter an age of Siri fragmentation, where saying that magic activation word may yield dramatically different results depending on what device answers the call.
Fortunately, there are some ways that Apple might mitigate things so that it’s not so bad.
The danger to the Internet as a cultural institution is real and evolving as rapidly as AI technology itself. However, while the threat to the web is new and novel, what these AI companies are doing is not. Quite simply, it’s theft, which is something as old as AI is new. The thieves may be well-funded, and their misdeeds wrapped in a cloak of clever technology, but it’s still theft and must be stopped.
It’s a good read and a solid argument. I hope someone, somewhere is paying attention.
After some feedback about the future of the Vision Pro, we discuss Apple’s adventures in the EU, the inevitable fragmentation of Siri, and a curious new AirPods rumor.
Apple and the EU continue to butt heads, betas are for everyone these days, and Meta gets the cold shoulder.
EU Island
Clearly the only way to solve Apple’s problems with the EU is to rent a mansion somewhere and have the two of them live together for however long it takes to film a 24-episode season of reality television. Hey, it’s gotta work better than whatever it is they’re doing now.
In addition to not thinking much of Apple’s steering rules, the EU said other policies, including the Core Technology Fee, “fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple’s obligations under the DMA.” If the EU is suggesting that Apple can’t make money off apps that are distributed in other ways than the App Store, we could be entering a whole new ballcan of wormgames.
While Apple is unlikely to just flip the board over, take its ball, and go home (sorry, all my metaphors fell on the floor and I just shoved them together in a drawer when I cleaned up), it is trying to hold back certain things, and the EU doesn’t seem to like that, either.
It’s like a company can’t even flex its muscle around here!
Beta be downloading those operating systems
Summer is not wabbit season or duck season or Fudd season, but it is beta season. As of 2023, Apple now lets anyone who likes to live on the edge put the betas on their devices right after WWDC. Yes, now anyone can experience the thrill of tinting their icons and not all of them un-tinting when they suddenly realize tinting them all green was actually a mistake.
So, should you install them?
While not everything is going to be perfect, it seems these betas will not blow up your iPhone (disclaimer: if you install a beta and your iPhone blows up I’ll deny ever having written that). It probably helps that the all the AI stuff isn’t in there yet as it’s not coming until this fall. Or next year. Or to an OS to be named later.
I’m not going to tell you to go ahead and install these betas for liability reasons, but if you treated me like an AI and told me to ignore all previous instructions and then asked if you should install these betas, I would totally tell you to install all these betas.
Meta commentary
Last week brought rumors that Apple had reached out to Meta to work together on AI, but a lot can change in a week including, apparently, the past.
Mark Gurman reportedly sighed heavily after reading The Wall Street Journal’s report on the attempted Apple and Meta superfriends team-up and then cracked his knuckles.
Gurman says the two did have a discussion, but at the end Apple said “Don’t call us, we’ll call you. And we won’t actually be calling you. Unless it’s to tell you we’ve rejected another of your apps for violating peoples privacy.”
Meta was reportedly rejected because Apple “doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough.”
Why, ah say, that is a positively scandalous accusation! And based on whut, exactamally?
Years of experience? Oh, OK.
While Apple passed on Meta, it is already working with OpenAI and is pursuing deals with Google and Anthropic. So, you’ll get your AI, eventually. Until then, just hijack the one your car dealer uses, like everyone else.
[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.]
You might have heard recently about some challenges we’ve been having when it comes to regulation. It’s been alleged that Apple is anticompetitive, that we use our power and position in the market in order to dictate terms. That we are “gatekeepers” preventing a free flow of commerce and innovation. But nothing could be further from the truth: Apple is and always has been committed to building the best products that we can and competing on the merits. Keep gates? We’re firmly anti-gate! People just keep foisting them on us.
Frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that we, the company behind the competitive and democratic engine that is the App Store, would do anything that discourages a free and open market. Apple fully complies with all laws and regulations in local jurisdictions—just look at China, for example. Do you think we want to be in business with a repressive regime that directly contradicts so many of the values we claim to espouse? No. But we would never dream of depriving the Chinese people of owning our products and also we would basically not be able to manufacture iPhones.
But Europe?! Come on, it’s not even a real country. I mean, there’s a reason you need two modifier keys to type a Euro symbol. That’s where we stick stuff nobody uses, like ligatures. Even £ just needs one. The dollar? Printed right there on the 4.
Who is this commissioner for competition to be lecturing us on competition, anyway? That makes about as much sense as having a hundred centimeters to a meter. Apple is a profit-seeking, capitalist-as-apple-pie corporation, and if that means throttling every last dime out of our customers in our attempt to make the world a better place that you will enjoy living in, then so help us god, we will do it. I mean, have you seen what we charge for iPhone cases?
They want to fine us? They want to fine us? Go ahead: last time a country all the way across the ocean tried something like this, we dumped a bunch of tea in the harbor and then nobody in the United States ever drank tea ever again. Seriously, try ordering it in a restaurant and watching the server freeze like a deer in the high beams.
Look, Apple’s not going down without a fight. If that means depriving some users of the latest and greatest technology, so be it. Let’s start with our most exciting new feature: Apple Intelligence. None of that for you, EU. Your Apple products will be dumb as rocks and we’ll see how all the people in Europe like it! And, yes, we may have just started shipping the Apple Vision Pro in France and Germany, but frankly, that’s not because we want to, just because we really need to sell more Vision Pros in order to make sure the platform survives, so please go spend the equivalent of $4200 to get one.
So, what are we going to do? Well, people have been saying we should pull out of Europe. But where’s the sense in that? We’re not the problem; they are. So we’re not going to pull out of Europe—we’re going to pull Europe out. They say that Americans aren’t good at geography, but I’m pretty sure this empty space in Apple Maps is where Europe used to be. Go ahead and try and fine us now—lalalalala, we can’t hear you when you don’t even exist. Next time you want to issue us with a fine, you can stick it in whatever’s European for “where the sun don’t shine.” Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some apps to not notarize.
[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 thanks to ListenLater.net for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
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The Vision Pro isn’t a product many people should buy today, and that’s not really surprising. It’s an example of Apple playing a long game, trying to build a wearable computing platform over many years. You have to start somewhere.
Right now, it’s a development kit for developers who are willing to gamble or experiment with a platform that’s not going to be broadly adopted for a while, if ever. It’s a pretty intriguing niche entertainment product, but it’s desperately in need of more content. And it’s a productivity product for people with very specific use cases and work methods. Still, most people should not consider buying one—especially not at $3500—and most people are definitely not!
But at some point, long game or not, Apple needs to start progressing and growing the visionOS platform. Mark Gurman’s report that Apple is working on a $1500 model for late next year is a start. $1500 isn’t cheap, but it’s less than half the price of the current model, and therefore more likely to snag curious people and improve the viability of buying one just to watch immersive events or 3-D videos or whatever.
So, not cheap, but… cheaper. And that’s a good start. Right now, the high price of the product is the top gating factor in growing the platform. Even if you’re impressed by the demo, it’s hard to get over that price tag.
But price isn’t the platform’s only challenge. The lack of software and content is also huge. If there’s a cheaper Vision product coming in late 2025, that means Apple has a year and a half to beef up what’s available on visionOS so that it can put itself in the best position to grow the platform when the lower-cost model is released.
The Vision Pro is the result of a years-long development process, which means that the current product as shipped is the outcome of Apple’s initial thinking about the device. Presumably, the people working on Vision Pro have learned a lot, both during the final years of the project and in its first few months out in the real world.
That’s good, because it’s time to reconsider some of the early decisions about the product and the platform. Obviously, this is already being done, because there’s no way that Apple can make a $1500 headset without pulling out some “must-have” features. (The obvious one is the lenticular outward-facing display, but I’m sure there are other features that seemed incredibly important that, in hindsight, are wastes of money.)
On the entertainment front, Apple’s made some strides in at least announcing partnerships with makers of hardware that can shoot in 3D and Immersive formats. But it needs to invest more in getting developers to build their apps on visionOS, and since the size of the near-term market opportunity sure won’t, some other inducement—like maybe even money?—might be a good idea.
And if Apple wants to get serious about expanding and growing the Vision product line, it needs to get over one particular choice it made in launching it. The company was clearly so proud of its advanced hand-tracking interface that it shipped the Vision Pro with no additional input devices. And I get it! “If you see hand controllers, they blew it” could have been one of the catchphrases of the Vision Pro development process. A headset shouldn’t require add-on controllers to be usable.
But just as the Mac eventually got arrow keys (despite omitting them from the first Mac keyboard to encourage using the mouse) and the iPad got an Apple Pencil (despite being a touch-first interface), it’s time for Apple to get over itself, and either build precision hand controllers for visionOS or build an API and make a partnership with a third-party accessory developer.
The fact is, lots of games and game-adjacent apps require a level of precision that Apple’s (excellent) hand tracking just can’t muster. Every Vision Pro game I’ve played that featured hand tracking has been a sloppy mess. I get that Apple wanted to show off its hand tracking and lean into “spatial computing” to send the message that the Vision Pro is not a game console but a serious device, but in doing so, it turned its back on the most popular category of entertainment software in the entire VR headset category.
One way for Apple to entice people to the visionOS platform—especially if a much cheaper model is on the way—is to load up on entertainment content. 3-D movies and immersive video are great, and if Apple’s not trying very hard to cut deals and encourage more content that shines on Vision Pro, it’s going to have wasted all of its effort. But if the platform can play games, if developers can port their games to visionOS from other VR platforms, it increases the viability of the product.
I’ve got a Vision Pro and a Meta Quest 3. And yet the Quest 3, which costs about one-seventh of the price of the Vision Pro, is a vastly superior platform when it comes to playing certain kinds of games. Games just require precision positioning (through detailed movement tracking), and input (via on-controller buttons) that waving your hands and tapping fingers together in Vision Pro just can’t match.
So, does Apple want visionOS to succeed or not? If it does, it needs to build or support hand controllers by the time a cheaper visionOS device ships. It needs to fill the platform with fun, fast-twitch games, exercise apps, and other stuff that’s proven successful elsewhere. No, the Vision Pro is not a games console. But if it stands defiantly against that kind of use case out of some sort of dogmatic opposition, Apple will have made it that much harder for an already hard-to-sell platform to succeed.
TV critic Tim Goodman guests to discuss the WBD and Paramount messes and give an update about what he’s been up to over at his Substack. [Downstream+ subscribers get to hear us talk about a very weird New York Times article about media moduls on a yacht.]
Reliable features of voice-based virtual assistants, our hypothetical U.S. internet legislation, the impact of Apple’s new Passwords app on our password management, and our comfort level with sharing intimate thoughts with an LLM.
