By Jason Snell

iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence

We’re getting closer to the end, presumably, of the most static design era in the iPhone’s history. While Apple continues to iterate on the specs of its most important product, the iPhone 16 product line is visually part of a generation that dates back four years to the iPhone 12.

On the one hand, it’s a fact that reveals just how the pace of smartphone design innovation has slowed. This is the longest time Apple has been stuck on a design generation in the history of the iPhone. On the other hand, Apple largely stopped redesigning its laptops in 2010, and nobody seems to mind too much. There’s something there about a device slowly iterating toward its ideal form, and I do wonder if Apple thinks that the iPhone 5-esque stylings of the iPhone 12/13/14/15/16 are the equivalent of the classic MacBook Air/MacBook Pro design.

The problem is this: History suggests that every time Apple does a physical redesign of the iPhone, there’s a surge in iPhone sales. That’s quite a motivator, given the iPhone’s place as the generator of more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue.

So what do you do if you’re Apple? You (again, presumably) try to work on new technological breakthroughs that will let you change things up more dramatically—the introduction of Face ID in the iPhone X let the home button go away, for instance—while you keep pushing forward with the specs and internals in the meantime. It’s not exciting, but neither is it a moral failing.

I’d sure rather be using an iPhone 16 Pro than an iPhone 12 Pro, because the newer model is better in almost every way. That’s what years of iteration will do. Since most iPhone buyers do not upgrade once a year, those individual iterations only really matter in the cumulative sense. So before I dig into this year’s collections of choices and iterations, it’s worth considering the grand sweep of time (iPhone Pro edition):

• iPhone 13 Pro: ProMotion, 3x telephoto lens, chip improvements
• iPhone 14 Pro: Dynamic Island, Crash Detection, SOS via satellite, 48MP camera, always-on display, brighter display, Action Mode, chip improvements
• iPhone 15 Pro: Action Button, USB-C port, 24MP fusion image, chip improvements, titanium exterior, and (in hindsight) Apple Intelligence support

This year, that list grows to include larger displays, a new 48MP camera, 4K120 video support, 48MP ultrawide camera, new Photographic Styles workflow, surround audio, 5× telephoto lens (which arrived last year on the Pro Max model only), and (of course) chip improvements courtesy of the new A18 Pro chip.

Would it be fun if Apple unveiled an entirely new, never-before-seen iPhone design? Yes, it would. Maybe next year. But the company needs to sell phones in the meantime, and as ever, it has taken the last year to add a bunch of improvements that will provide a solid set of upgraded features that, when added to those from previous years, make for a solid update.

Continue reading “iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence”…

By Joe Rosensteel

Lost In Space

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Sometimes there are bugs that happen and hit wide swaths of devices causing serious problems for users, and other times a teeny tiny thing breaks and it only affects a handful of people. It doesn’t really matter, though. Bugs are still frustrating.

On October 1st my friend Ry went on a hike. He completed his hike, and I sent him the usual, terrible, canned fitness response that we send one another ironically. “Way to take a hike. 🌳” He said thanks, and then the Messages app in iOS said Ry was only available via satellite. I thought he was being a fancy lad on a hike using satellite messaging, but he was no longer on a hike, and was on 5G cellular.

He tried force-quitting Messages, and restarting his iPhone, and reseting his network settings, but no matter what he did, my iPhone insisted Ry was only reachable via satellite. So then I restarted my iPhone, and I tried turning off and on all the various connection methods at my disposal.

That’s when I found out that everyone else having a one-on-one conversation with Ry from an iOS 18 device was also experiencing what I was experiencing. Anyone on 17.4, or using macOS Sonoma¹ just had messages pop through with the usual iMessage tag.

What gives? How could only conversations with him be stuck in satellite mode and only on iOS 18 devices? This is a very annoying problem, because every time you send a message “via satellite” it bugs you about it, and you can’t do things like send images or media. Naturally, if he was really on satellite, you wouldn’t want to do that.

I did what everyone else does in this scenario and went to bed with the expectation that the passage of time would reset something.

October 2nd was the same deal. Ry was still stranded over Earth like a modern-day balloon boy.

I opened his contact info and messaged the email address tied to his Apple ID, instead of the phone number. It went through as a regular iMessage. I tried switching back to the phone number and it went back to satellite. Another friend tried the same trick, but stayed on the email address only to have it switch to satellite a few seconds after he messaged.

I was on to something, though, right? Maybe the problem was on the receiving end (our iOS 18 iPhones) instead of the sending end (Ry’s iOS 18 iPhone).

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and so I turned iMessage off and on again. Hold onto your butts.

Fortunately, no raptors were released, but the conversation thread with Ry split into two. One thread had some messages and was stuck in satellite mode. The other thread had some other messages and was in normal iMessage mode. I force-quit Messages for the zillionth time in two days, and when I relaunched it, the conversations had merged back together and the satellite mode was gone.

It was all iMessage, baby.

I relayed this information to the other friends, and they did the same thing. Messaging Ry returned to normal… but I hadn’t noticed one side effect, reported by another friend.

On the lock screen of the iPhone, and only the lock screen of the iPhone, notifications from Ry were now labeled “Maybe: Ry Amidon To You & Ry Amidon”. As if Ry and I were in a group text with Ry.

For crying out loud. The Watch notifications, Mac notifications, and even the display name in iOS were all singular Ry. That’s when I remembered the email address tied to the Apple ID that I had messaged earlier.

I blew away the email address and then the “Maybe” went away. Everything was normal.

I typically don’t open Feedbacks when I can’t reproduce something (and I absolutely can’t reproduce whatever this is) but I put together one with system logs and screenshots and fired it into the void².

If I had to guess (and it’s probably better if I don’t) it seems like Ry’s phone pushed some status to Apple’s iMessage servers which was pushed to our iOS 18 devices… and stuck. I can’t think of another reason why the satellite messaging state was preserved until we each toggled off iMessage support on our individual devices. There’s no toggle to disable sending and receiving satellite messages in Settings. In fact, if you search Settings for “satellite” it doesn’t return any results at all.

Having satellite messaging is definitely a boon to people that have experienced real emergencies and have been otherwise disconnected from the world. Ry, however, wasn’t experiencing any such issues—so we all just got some puzzling inconvenience.

I can’t even say for certain that I fixed anything, because in the grand tradition of internet problem-solving, all I can report is that it “works for me!”

If anyone does eventually run across this weirdness (hello, Google searchers!), I hope you can at least learn from what I tried. If you’ve got an easier fix, or you happen to work at Apple and can just toggle this stuff from the heavens, then drop me a line.

---

1. I’m not upgrading to a .0 OS release. I have real work to do. This policy has never lead me astray. ↩
2. Feedback ID FB15362065 ↩

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

• Report a typo

By Dan Moren

Croissant simplifies social media cross-posting on iOS

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

It’s rare that I find a new app that immediately becomes part of my workflow, but it’s just as rare that an app as useful as Croissant comes out.

Hailing from indie developers Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, Croissant aims to simplify the process of posting to multiple social media sites. You know what I’m talking about: in the wake of Twitter’s X-ification, many of us are dealing with a splintered social media landscape. I, personally, have been reading and posting on no less than Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, and boy am I tired.

This came to a head last week as I was promoting the launch of my latest book and various ancillary projects like new t-shirts and a live event. Copying and pasting posts between those three sites was practically a full-time job¹, especially when they included pictures with attendant alt text.

But I got a chance to try Croissant in beta last week and it absolutely saved my sanity. It supports text and images, complete with that alt text, as well as threaded posts, and lets you choose which services you want to post to each time. You can also archive drafts for later, choose post visibility on both Mastodon and Threads, and add content warnings for Mastodon.

There are some limitations, however. For example, right now, while you can insert images from your Photos library, you can’t copy and paste, which can be frustrating. There’s also no support for GIFs or videos as attachments. And it’s currently only designed for the iPhone.² Many of those are on the app’s roadmap, according to the developers.

There are also issues that are beyond Croissant’s control: for example, tagging other accounts can work, but you won’t get autocomplete, and if a username doesn’t exist on a service it’s just going to show up as text. And ultimately it’s still only an app for posting to multiple networks, not for reading all of them in one place. But such are the vagaries of social media in 2024.

Croissant’s free to download and give a whirl, but it requires a subscription for posting to multiple services: either $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $59.99 forever.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

Meta and Apple: Same game, different rules

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

The game is to create a wearable, augmented-reality device that takes everything that’s great about a smartphone and overlays it on your vision, making the entire world a smartphone canvas. It’s part of a larger strategy, which is to own the next must-have technology device that supplants or augments the smartphone.

This game has no rules. There’s no single accepted way to play it.

Earlier this year, Apple made a move: It launched the Vision Pro, a headset that emulates augmented reality in a limited way. It is a finished product shipping to anyone who wants one, but it’s very expensive and has a very limited selection of software and content. It’s also a stake in the ground, suggesting that Apple thinks there’s something to “spatial computing” and that this is the first tentative step on the path to creating something more broadly appealing.

This week, Meta made another move.

Meta has been a leader in VR headsets for a while now—it’s a small market that attracts outsized interest because it’s surrounded by a cyberpunk-tinged cloud of possibilities that it might augur something about future of computing.

Originally pitched as a game console you put on your face, the Meta Quest series has increasingly also been pitched as being productivity-related. I don’t think that’s a coincidence—productivity is a use case that Apple has emphasized, so Meta is countering. And the new $300 Meta Quest 3S sure sounds like a compelling new device. I’ve got a Quest 2 and Quest 3, and they’re both pretty impressive in their own ways, especially given the price. The Quest 3S seems like it might be a great holiday purchase.

But, of course, the Quest 3S is not what people are talking about. They’re talking about Orion, a pair of chunky augmented-reality glasses that show that Meta really gets where this is all going. It’s a real punch to Apple’s jaw, one that makes the Vision Pro look dowdy and pointless. Media coverage of Orion has been really strong. People who tried it were impressed. It’s a win for Meta.

But look closer, and you can see exactly what game Meta is playing. Meta says that Orion would cost about $10,000 today, and that the company couldn’t see itself shipping the product. Orion, as used this week by various media influencers, is a tech demo—not a product that will ever ship. Meta says that it has backed off any plans to ship it and instead expects that it will ship a product sort of like it between 2027 and 2029.

This is all part of the game, of course. For decades now, competitors have made hay over Apple’s refusal to make public demonstrations of what it’s working on behind the scenes. Apple’s silence is assumed by many to indicate the company is behind on some innovation or another. And sometimes it’s actually behind—but other times, it’s not. It’s just keeping quiet.

I have no idea what the current state of the art is inside Apple. And while visionOS has seen some nice updates including the introduction of Spatial Persona, the excruciatingly slow rollout of immersive content and the dearth of new apps in the visionOS App Store leave the question of Apple’s commitment to this platform a bit murky.

Still, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been working on AR glasses alongside Vision Pro:

At one point, Apple aimed to release the glasses in 2023, before delaying the launch until around 2025. Now, Apple has postponed the rollout indefinitely and pared back its work on the AR device.

That’s a report from early 2023 that suggests that Apple was trying to build AR glasses presumably very much like Orion, but realized that the tech wasn’t yet at the point where they could release anything. So instead, they shifted work to Vision Pro.

In other words, Meta and Apple—both committed to the idea that AR glasses we wear in our daily lives might be a huge part of future computing tech—tried to make the product happen, and realized that the time just wasn’t right. Apple didn’t say anything. Meta showed off a product that will never ship (but might lead to something that will ship at the end of the decade) and gained some nice press coverage this week.

These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ever comment on unannounced products is beneficial or not, but it’s a Steve Jobs-created bit of Apple personality that is very unlikely to be countermanded any time soon.

I was impressed by what Meta showed with Orion. It absolutely gives me the sense that there is a product here, and it might actually be closer than I thought it would be. I sort of assumed wearable, powerful AR glasses in the style of Vision Pro would be more like a full decade away, but the end of this decade now seems plausible.

Of course, that’s for a first version—which will be expensive and compromised. It will take more years for the price to come down and for the utility of such a device to overcome resistance from people who don’t want to wear glasses and don’t want to be seen as a cyborg navigating the human world. If that resistance can ever be overcome enough to make that product category a hit, it’ll take years. Like, mid-2030s at the earliest.

This is a long game. We already knew Apple had the pieces to play (Meta’s system features a wristband that’s like a simplified Apple Watch and a compute puck that’s basically an iPhone), and now Meta has shown that it’s planning its own strategy, including working on custom hardware and silicon.

The game is afoot. Meta has shown they’re working on it. Apple remains characteristically silent. But there’s no one right way to play the game… and the clock doesn’t even start ticking until someone ships a product that people can buy.