By Jason Snell

March 29, 2024 11:22 AM PT

Apple’s Immersive Video problem

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

On Thursday Apple debuted its first immersive video since the Vision Pro launched, a five-minute-long compilation of highlights from the MLS Cup playoffs late last year.

Without even seeing the video, I had many questions. Why did it take more than three months to produce a highlight package? And why, when it finally arrived, was it only five minutes long? And what do those two facts suggest about how difficult it is for Apple to produce immersive video content on an ongoing basis?

Now, having seen the video, I have a few more observations. The first is that I don’t think the new video is very good. Oh, sure, the individual shots can be impressive. Being that close to professional athletes doing their thing is stunning, and being in a giant stadium thrumming with fan energy is pretty awesome.

The problem is that, based on how Apple and MLS built the video, it’s not actually immersive.

As you might expect from the runtime, the video is a highlight package, with lots of quick cuts. Video’s all about quick cuts. I’m a child of the ’80s; music videos ingrained the value of the quick cut at a formative age.

But immersive video doesn’t work with quick cuts, I don’t think. Several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180-degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right… only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective. Now I was staring at nothing. It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings and re-orient—often times a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing.

Most of Apple’s initial immersive videos, launched with the Vision Pro, linger with long shots. Cuts happen, but only occasionally. The pace is such that when a cut occurs, there’s time to re-orient. You need time to immerse. Quick cuts in a regular video help speed up the action; in immersive video, they’re like hitting a speed bump.

I get that immersive videos are basically a new medium and it’ll take a lot of experimentation to find the best way to present them. I’m sure that behind the scenes, Apple and its media partners are working on it. I’m glad the MLS highlight video exists, because it taught me some important lessons about this new medium. Unfortunately, they’re largely of the “what not to do” variety.

I still firmly believe that immersive video is going to be amazing for sports, live theater, concerts, and other live events. But those are events that take time, spooling out over several hours. A tightly edited highlight reel, it turns out, might be the worst possible showcase for immersive video.

Regardless of how I feel about this particular video, I hope Apple has much, much more planned. Perhaps the single clear consumer use case for the Vision Pro is video viewing, and immersive video is a unique part of that. It was one of the aspects of the Vision Pro that I was most excited about, and as a result it’s been one of the biggest disappointments.

By Jason Snell

March 28, 2024 4:41 PM PT

MLB for visionOS strikes out on Opening Day

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

As is typical for one of Apple’s best sports partners, Major League Baseball had a demo app for visionOS ready to go for the debut of the new platform. It used the device’s augmented reality functionality to display a live 3-D Gameday animation simultaneously with video playback from a demonstration game—one of the games from the 2023 World Series.

While the app was otherwise fairly basic, it was just enough of a taste to suggest that MLB would be using its amazing in-game data to create something new and groundbreaking for the Vision Pro.

That might still happen, but just before Opening Day the app was updated to support real, live baseball games, and all the exciting stuff is gone. Today I took it for a spin and was deeply disappointed—it’s essentially just a front end for watching games via MLB TV, and a buggy one at that.

I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.

When the Vision Pro MLB app works, Gameday mode is pretty cool. I don’t love the strike zone view, but the all field view really has potential. All the baserunners disappeared but it was otherwise synced with action and I could see data about batted balls, positioning of fielders. It was a little toy field on my floor. There’s potential here — just needs lots of kinks worked out.

Outside of gameday, the app will only play back a single video at a time, even if multiple games are going on at once—despite the fact that watching multiple video streams at once is basically what VR was made for.

It gets worse. The main window is just not right. You can make it very small by pushing it very far away, which shouldn’t happen. Its control bar and close box are way below the bottom of the content of the main window. Controlling the window was also difficult—I had to bring it very close to my eyes before I could properly control it via eye tracking.

When you play a game video, the app spawns a second window, which some video player apps do. But if you close the main window, the entire app closes—and so the video window goes away. That’s not supposed to happen. And it means that in order to watch a game, you’ve got to keep that unncecessary main window around at all times.

Clearly this app shipped half-finished because MLB otherwise wasn’t going to have something ready for Opening Day. At least it does stream the games! But that’s pretty much it. There’s plenty of time left in the season, but right now MLB’s app is the tech equivalent of going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts.

By Jason Snell

March 28, 2024 9:19 AM PT

Apple’s immersive MLS highlight reel to debut

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Apple announced Thursday that the first Apple Immersive Video documentary for Vision Pro, featuring highlights from last year’s MLS playoffs, will debut March 28 at 6 p.m. Pacific.

The video format has previously only been seen in a handful shorts in the TV app on the Vision Pro. This new film will be similarly short, running about five minutes long, and will be free to all Vision Pro users.

I’m excited to see the finished product—all of Apple’s immersive videos have been pretty amazing—but I have to point out that this five-minute highlight packages is being released 110 days after last year’s MLS Cup Final. That’s not great turnaround time. If immersive video for sports is going to be a thing, turnaround is going to need to be a lot faster.

By Dan Moren

March 26, 2024 10:19 AM PT

Apple announces WWDC 2024 takes place June 10-14

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

It’s that time of year, when young developers’ fancies turn to thoughts of platform updates. Probably because Apple has announced the dates for its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, which will take place between June 10 and 14.

As with last year, the event will happen both online and in person with a special “all-day event” taking place at Apple Park on Monday, June 10. Those in attendance will be able to watch the keynote—presumably led by CEO Tim Cook—at Apple Park, as well as meet with Apple team members, and join in for some “special activities.” Those interested in participating in person can apply for one of the limited slots available.

Apple’s also once again offering a separate track for students via the Swift Student Challenge; those who have applied will be notified on March 28, and will then be able to apply to join the festivities at Apple Park.

Rumor has it that this year’s platform updates will be amongst the biggest in some time, including a big push in generative AI. But Apple will also be holding the event against the backdrop of challenges from its recent legal troubles in both the European Union and the US.

[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 Glenn Fleishman

March 25, 2024 4:46 PM PT

A disk so full, it couldn’t be restored

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

My younger child’s MacBook Pro was unsalvageably full. Only a complete wipe would suffice—and then Time Machine failed us.

I love my children, but they do sometimes forget what I do for a living: answer questions and write books about the most troubling problems people have with their Macs, iPhones, and iPads. But when something goes truly wrong, they suddenly remember, “Hey, Dad might know how to fix it!”

So it happened that my younger asked for my help when their M2 MacBook Pro’s storage filled up while they were downloading a (legitimate, purchased) game using Steam. No problem! I could just empty the trash. Nope, they tried that. Well, what about finding some caches and…nope. I could just go into the Terminal and…ok, that didn’t work either.

Turned out, my kid had managed a neat trick, though they were not alone: they had filled macOS’s startup volume storage so full that the operating system was incapable of deleting files in any fashion. Instead of halting the massive Steam download when the drive became disastrously full, macOS continued to write files until there was just 41K free on the drive.

I don’t know quite what happened. They didn’t realize their terabyte SSD was quite so filled, as they keep most of their useful files in the cloud. It was likely…er, perfectly legitimate video files. Yeah, I’m sure there was no problem with the copyright there. But they weren’t concerned about retaining them. They just wanted their computer to work again!

I have a theory about what happened. Due to our gigabit Internet connection and the size of the Steam file, macOS outstripped its ability to throttle filling storage because it was also making a local Time Machine snapshot. The Steam file appeared monolithic to me—one giant file—but clearly not to Time Machine. macOS keeps these snapshots to provide local backups for the last 24 hours even while it’s copying files to an external or networked Time Machine destination. I don’t think macOS tracks these snapshots well, and I suspect a collision of live files on disk with the specially created snapshots.

I went through a succession of file deletion attempts, relying on my own knowledge and searching for similar situations in online forums:

• Empty Trash: Emptying the Trash via the Finder a big “no” (File > Empty Trash). “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.” Yes, macOS, I’m already aware of this.
• Terminal: While Terminal would launch, using the standard Unix rm command resulted in a similar error: “No space left on device.” All rm alternatives, like using the find command to search for very large unneeded files and adding the -exec option to run the rm command, failed too. Terminal was a bust.
• Disk Utility: Disk Utility shows Time Machine snapshots on APFS startup volumes, and you can typically select and delete these snapshots, which occupy only the amount of storage space required to contain the differences from the previous snapshot. That failed with a “no space left” error as well.

It was time to restart to see if it would clear caches. Unfortunately, restarting left the Mac unable to start up at all. No matter what I tried, it would reach about halfway through the progress bar before failing.

I shifted to recoveryOS, Apple’s somewhat new name for the special disk partition in macOS that lets you run operations on the main startup volume while it’s not mounted, including Disk Utility repairs and reinstallation. From there, I hit the wall as well, as Terminal commands continued to fail with the same error.

I restarted again to access the Apple silicon Share Disk option to mount my kid’s drive on one of my Macs, hoping that over Samba (the disk-sharing protocol), I’d be able to force a deletion. No dice.

At this point, I shifted to stronger medicine. I had a series of Time Machine backups of their drive, including one from the previous evening, and they weren’t terribly concerned about losing data, as they have most things they care about in some kind of cloud storage. Here’s where things went pear-shaped in an entirely different direction.

First, I erased the drive and used macOS Recovery to reinstall Ventura, the native system with which the MacBook Pro had shipped. I then used Migration Assistant at macOS startup to access the networked Time Machine backup. In choosing what files to restore, I unchecked a number to ensure there would be plenty of storage. My kid had a lot of things they could delete, too, they said, and I could give them the Time Machine backup as a mountable drive if they needed access to files that weren’t restored later.

Halfway through, Ventura stalled and wouldn’t resume. I decided to upgrade to Sonoma, the version of macOS that was running at the time the Mac filled its drive. That worked fine—but the upgrade took the Mac to version 14.4, and my kid had had 14.3.1 installed. When I attempted to restore directly at startup, I was told the version different wouldn’t allow it. Now what?

I completed a basic Sonoma user account setup and then ran Migration Assistant. It found the networked Mac on which I manage Time Machine backups and recognized it. However, it refused to mount my child’s backup volume. No matter what I did, “Mount failed” appeared. Digging around in forums, I found that Sonoma has broken the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores, and no one had found a solution. This appears to still be the case in 14.4.

Because my younger only needed their apps and certain files, we both gave up at that point. I copied their Time Machine backup onto an external 1 TB SSD through this straightforward method:

1. On my Mac, which handles networked backups, I double-clicked the disk image for their computer and then entered their Time Machine volume password. (I always set a networked password for Time Machine volumes.)
2. I found the disk icon with the latest timestamp and copied this to an empty 1 TB drive.
3. Ejecting it from my Mac, I connected it to their stub account on their MacBook Pro and copied over the necessary files, including the contents of most of their home directory folders, excluding some large downloads and unneeded (ahem) video files.

I gave them the drive so that they could restore anything else they needed if it were missing, and we’ll probably keep it on hand for a while to make sure nothing is missing.

This put them back in business, but I missed two tricks that I could have tried to make things easier:

• I could have unmounted the Time Machine backup drive from my computer I use for other computers on the network. (I have a separate drive I use for local Time Machine backups from that computer’s startup volume.) Then I could have connected that directly to my kid’s computer and it likely would have become available as a Migration Assistant starting point.
• Failing that, I could have copied the virtual disk from the Time Machine disk image I mounted on my Mac of their backup so that the external 1 TB drive I was transferring “looked” like a Mac source volume. I’m not sure if this would have worked, but I didn’t try it. Then, I could have potentially restored directly from it using Migration Assistant.

I’m sorry I didn’t try the above, but I had already invested a cumulative couple of hours of my time and over a day of effort while my kid was unconcerned about a perfect directory-to-directory recovery.

I hate to think what people without decades of Mac experience do when confronted with systemic, cascading failures like this when I felt helpless despite what I thought I knew and all the answers I searched for and found on forums.

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Dan Moren

March 25, 2024 7:01 AM PT

EC investigates Apple and other tech gatekeepers over DMA compliance

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Europe’s Digital Markets Act continues to be the gift that keeps on giving—a gift Apple probably wishes it could return. The European Commission today announced that it was opening a slew of investigations into big tech companies over their non-compliance with the DMA, including Alphabet, Meta, and Apple.

Apple, in particular, has found itself in the crosshairs for three different areas. First, that the company may have put too many restrictions on developers who want to steer customers outside of the App Store. (Apple recently relaxed those rules, including ditching mandatory design templates.)

Secondly, in the area of user choice, the EC is concerned Apple has not done enough to allow users to choose what software is installed on their phone. That includes the ability to uninstall built-in apps, change default app settings, and provide screens allowing users to choose between alternatives. The EC’s announcement particularly calls out the browser choice screen, though it doesn’t specifically details its concerns beyond saying it “may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem.” The screen currently shows up when users first launch Safari on iOS and provides a list of the eleven most popular browsers in the region, in random order. However, Apple does impose some restrictions on what it takes to be included in that list, including a requirement that the app has been downloaded 5000 times in the EU over the past calendar year.

Finally, and perhaps most contentiously, the EC says that it is investigating the fee structure of Apple’s new business model in the EU, saying that it “may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA.” That decision was hinted at this past week by Margrethe Vestager, the executive vice president in charge of competition policy, when she said in an interview with Reuters “if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating.” This also comes on the heels of an EU-Apple workshop about the DMA last week, during which developer and AltStore proprietor Riley Testut asked Apple representatives how they would protect creators of free apps if those apps went viral, putting them on the hook for Apple’s new Core Technology Fee. Apple’s Kyle Andeer said the company was likewise concerned and that it was “something we’re working on,” though no further information has been provided.

These investigations aren’t going to be speedy: the EC says they will be concluded within 12 months, at which point the body will tell the companies what changes if any need to be made. The companies may also be subject to fines of up to 10 percent of annual global revenue, or 20 percent in cases of “repeated infringement.”

Apple, for its part, said in a statement provided to several outlets, including The Verge: “We’re confident our plan complies with the DMA, and we’ll continue to constructively engage with the European Commission as they conduct their investigations.”

Dan’s take

The DMA and the EC are clearly proving to be a thorn in Apple’s side. Despite the company trying to get ahead of these kinds of issues, apparently its attempts to do the minimum needed to comply weren’t quite enough. The specific issues over anti-steering policies and user choice are certainly annoyances, but seem like issues that can be tweaked by Apple without serious impacts to the company.

But the big risk here is the investigation into the fee structure. Big companies like Meta and Spotify seem unlikely to ever have used Apple’s new business terms as proposed: they would go from paying Apple nothing under the current App Store terms to paying Apple quite a bit—a scenario that Apple wins either way. While those companies might want more control over the distribution and monetization of their apps, they’re not going to do so at the literal expense of millions of euros. Likewise, while small developers might find the new terms comparatively more attractive, especially for types of apps that will never get approved by Apple, the risk of “hitting it big” and triggering the CTF could likewise be too high. And though Apple opened up the avenue for web distribution, the strictures it put on place as to who is allowed to use the feature—such as a calendar year threshold of one million downloads—certainly limits a lot of small developers. While that last isn’t specifically mentioned by the EC, I have a hard time imagining it’s not part of the overall investigation into the fee structure.

The real challenge for Apple will be in trying to figure out what changes it can make in the near term to both avoid the heavy end of the EC’s hammer and dodge further pitfalls along the way. Gee, sure is tough when your business is entirely subject to the whims of a seemingly capricious organization who won’t tell you exactly what rules you need to follow, isn’t it?

[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.]