Someone new is in charge of Netflix’s film output, which lets us ponder the company’s past and future film strategy. [Downstream+ members get: Max’s new Harry Potter approach, and lessons we could learn from The CW’s mid-budget approach to superhero TV.]
One of my surprisingly favorite features of the Vision Pro is the dynamic display of photographic panoramas. Immersive environments are great, and I love that I can capture stereo video now, but I’ve got an immense library of panoramas that date back to the 1990s.
Yep, that’s right: before the iPhone made it easy to capture panoramas, you used to have to take them the hard way—namely by rotating in a circle and capturing photos every so often. What’s worse, I used to do this with film. I know! I know! But in the late 1990s my parents sold the house I grew up in, and I wanted to capture that place one last time. It was the heyday of QuickTime VR and so I took several rolls of film on my last visit and captured it all.
Developer David Smith gets it. He has detailed how, even now, it’s often superior to capture a bunch of stills and stitch them together rather than use the iPhone’s convenient panorama feature:
Unfortunately right now these panoramas are limited to roughly the width of a standard 12MP capture…
Looking at these iPhone panoramas on a Vision Pro is lovely, they have barely enough resolution to give a good sense of being back at the place where the image was captured. However, after the initial WOW! factor has worn off I started to really notice the fuzziness of the presentation. Presenting an image which is around 3900px tall at a conceptual height of about six feet tall just isn’t enough resolution to really feel immersive.
His solution is mine, too: Take a bunch of photos vertically as you swivel around, then use Photoshop to merge them into a panorama. (The command is File: Automate: Photomerge.) His resulting panoramas were 304 megapixels in size!
If you’re in a spectacular location, it’s totally worth the trouble.
(Left to right): A transcript playing back, selecting a paragraph in the transcript view, and sharing a quote from a podcast.
As was foretold back in January, with the release of iOS 17.4 Apple’s Podcasts app now supports podcast transcripts. This is a pretty big breakthrough in terms of access to podcast content and accessibility of podcast to audiences who might not be able to listen.
The way Apple has implemented transcription is very clever. It’s all happening up in the cloud—the moment it detects that a new episode has arrived, Apple kicks that episode into its transcription queue and quickly generates a full transcript. (This is why, if you start listening the moment an episode drops, you won’t be offered a transcript—but very soon thereafter, it should appear.) Apple supports transcripts in English, Spanish, French, and German, which should cover 80 percent of overall listening in Apple Podcasts.
Apple’s not just running that podcast through a standard transcription engine like the one I use to generate transcripts on my Mac, but one that’s been built to detect some detailed information about how the podcast is structured.
That’s important, because many modern podcasts use something called Dynamic Ad Insertion to insert different ads depending on where you are, who you are, and when you downloaded the episode. A traditional transcript file won’t keep sync with a podcast if the time codes of the ads keep changing. Apple’s engine should be able to detect the beginning and end of those ads and adjust its transcript accodingly, inserting a filler animation (three slowly filling dots that will be familiar to users of lyrics in Apple Music) until the podcast content resumes, at which point the transcript should pick up right where it should.
Apple’s processing also detects content down to the word, so that (again, Apple Music style) it can highlight every word in the transcript as it’s spoken. It detects speaker changes and breaks paragraphs to improve readability, though it can’t identify the speakers. Episodes with chapter markers should see those reflected in the transcripts as subheads.
You can also select a paragraph from a transcript and share it (including a link back to the podcast), or even view the entire podcast transcript on its own without playing audio.
Podcasters who would prefer to use their own transcripts—I could see it happening in podcasts where there are some highly specific spellings and terms that they want to get exactly right—can do so by using the <podcast:transcript> field in their podcast RSS to point at a subtitles file in SRT or VTT format. Apple’s backend systems will pick that file up, run it through their own special processes, and supply it in the same interface.
The only thing that’s really missing is support for private podcast feeds, which is where most members-only versions of podcasts live these days. (Full disclosure: I produce several podcasts with members-only versions, and subscribe to several more!) I realize that there are some complicated technical isuses with members-only podcasts—technically each one is unique for each member, which is a real complicating factor—but between the file download URL and the URL of the transcript file, it should be doable for Apple to group all the members-only podcast episodes together. If it wants to transcribe those episodes itself, it’s more than welcome—but I’m also happy to provide my own transcript. I just don’t want my members missing out on this really great new feature.
It’s time to say goodbye to the M1 MacBook Air (hello, new M3 models!) and our Upshift segment (RIP Apple Car project), but our in-depth coverage of Apple being regulated and fined by the European Commission rolls on!
If you’ve been keeping your powder dry for Apple’s most popular laptop models to get its latest processors, well, time to light that candle. The company announced on Monday that it has updated its MacBook Air line with M3 processors, bringing not only faster performance but also a much desired new capability: support for two external displays.
The new 13-inch model comes in three basic configurations: all three feature an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. While the $1099 base configuration includes an 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, the $1299 and $1499 versions include a 10-core graphics processor and a 512GB SSD—you can get up to 2TB of storage on any model. Just to mix it up a bit, the two lower configurations start with 8GB of memory, compared to the highest model’s 16GB—all are configurable with up to 24GB of memory at max.
Meanwhile, the 15-inch model also comes in three configurations, though all use the same 8-core GPU/10-core GPU configuration. As with the 13-inch version, the lower two models both includes 8GB of memory with the highest offering 16GB and the higher two configurations have 512GB SSDs with the lowest having only a 256GB.
There should be very little surprise about these options, given that they mimic the same versions of the M3 chip found in the latest version of Apple’s iMac, including the 16 core Neural Engine, hardware ray tracing, and 100GB/s memory bandwidth.
Where they do differ is one place that many vocal users have been upset: the new M3 models not only support an external display at up to 6K resolution but now also support a second external display at up to 5K resolution…if you close the MacBook Air lid. While that may not appease all critics of the display limitations, it’s likely to make many users happy.
The only other change is the addition of Wi-Fi 6E (aka 802.11ax), which offers better performance. Otherwise, specs—including size, weight, and available colors—are unchanged across the line.
There’s one last footnote, though: in true Apple fashion, the 13-inch M2 Air has been kept around to hit that sub-$1000 price point. For $999 you can get a 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage; there’s also an $1199 configuration with the 8-core CPU/10-core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That means there’s effectively a configuration at every $100 interval, so you can buy as much MacBook as you need. The M1 Air, meanwhile, has shuffled off this mortal coil, bidding adieu to its Intel-era design.
All models are available for order today and will ship this Friday. The company also announced a new assortment of Silicone iPhone cases and a refresh of Apple Watch bands as it generally does in the spring.
[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.]
There was a moment when it seemed like an Apple Car made sense. Ten years ago, when the Apple Watch wasn’t anything more than a rumor (and I still worked at a magazine), it seemed like the entire automotive industry was on the edge of an enormous change, and the traditional players just weren’t ready.
In 2014, Tesla was sort of the only one out there trying to bring that future into existence, and back then, Tesla only really sold one consumer car—the expensive Model S. If the future of cars was that they were going to be computers on wheels, wasn’t there a chance to catch the auto-industry giants sleeping and elbow them out of their own industry?
That’s not how it worked for a multitude of reasons. But as Apple begins the process of tearing down all the pieces of its fruitless quest to build its own vehicle, it’s worth remembering that at one point, it almost made sense.
In defense of the gamble
It’s 2014, and you’re Apple. You’ve got all the free cash and ambition in the world, and you know that as the iPhone matures, it’ll cease to be a major generator of the growth that Wall Street demands. (To be clear, there was a lot of growth still to come for the iPhone: Apple wouldn’t even introduce the first “big” iPhone, the iPhone 6 Plus, until the fall.) You’ve got the Apple Watch on the horizon, and a grand plan to dramatically boost Services revenue, but you know that investors want growth to be infinite and eternal.
You’ve got the Innovator’s Dilemma buzzing in your mind, as well as Steve Jobs’s maxim that it’s always best if you’re your own replacement. You and your fellow tech giants have enormous amounts of money and a commitment to not become so complacent that some new tech company comes along and turns you into a historical footnote.
So what do you do? You place your bets. You put money down in the hope that you will stave off irrelevance and maybe even discover the Next Big Thing. In 2014, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that in 2030, most new cars would be computers on wheels, using new electric technologies that were foreign to the big automakers. What was more likely, that Ford and GM would learn the vital synthesis of hardware and software, or that Apple could turn the talents of its hardware design team to an auto chassis?
(Just an aside: Could Apple have just… bought Tesla? Or Rivian? Or Lucid? Perhaps the timing never quite worked, but it also feels like there’s some strong “not invented here” syndrome at play here. Apple didn’t want to buy the revolutionary electric car and popularize it; it wanted to invent it.)
The dangerous distraction
Apple may have had a decent reason to make a speculative dive into the car business, but it seems like the effort lacked leadership and direction. If someone with authority had put a stake in the ground and said the company should ship its own Tesla-style car by, say, 2019, that might have been something. Given the eccentricity and distraction of Tesla’s leadership, Apple might have ended up even beating Tesla at its own game in a few years.
But it sure seems, based on various reports over the years, like Apple’s strategy kept swerving into other lanes. Any observer of Tesla has noticed that Elon Musk has spent the last decade hyping the just-around-the-corner promise of true self-driving cars. Alphabet and other companies have invested in the dream, too, and as an outside observer, it sure seems like what we’ve learned is that the technology just isn’t there yet—and might never be. Human streets are messy.
But as much as a hype man for self-driving as Musk has been, and as questionable as his taste in hardware driving interfaces has been, Tesla has continually designed its cars with, you know… steering wheels. What if we just can’t crack the entirely autonomous vehicle? Steering wheels. They’re a great fallback.
The moment that I realized Apple’s car effort was completely off track was when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple’s car design did not hedge: “Apple’s ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals, and its interior would be designed around hands-off driving,” Gurman reported.
Was Apple convinced that it could beat everyone to the self-driving holy grail? Had it decided that if it couldn’t build a roving autonomous salon on wheels, it didn’t want to make anything at all? Was the project hijacked by a bunch of idealistic designers fed by unearned confidence that Apple could achieve anything it set its technological mind to?
It took two more years for the sword to fall on the project. If reports are to be believed, the team was issued an ultimatum to come up with a product to ship in the next few years. My guess is that they came up with that product and realized it would be a more expensive Lucid Air. That might have been great in 2017 or even 2019, but at this point, not only are there numerous companies trying to use the Tesla playbook, but most of the major automakers have awakened from their slumber. A $100,000 Apple sedan in 2018 might be the start of something big. The same car in 2028 is a footnote. The opportunity to change the world has passed.
Mistakes were made
It seems like Project Titan lacked a leader with a clear vision (or at least lacked a leader with the ability to implement their vision), and then someone steered the entire project off course while chasing an unattainable dream. (Apple would’ve been better off shipping that Tesla-like sedan in 2018 and then iterating for a decade.)
But was Project Titan’s whole existence a mistake? Not so fast.
If you’re an incumbent like Apple, your biggest threat is your own complacency. Apple should constantly be trying to identify areas of interest where it could make a difference in the world with an investment of the company’s enormous resources.
Take visionOS. The Vision Pro is an interesting experiment that might have some fascinating applications today and in the next few years. But where it makes the most sense, and where it justifies Apple’s massive investment, is as a long-term play designed to stave off any possibility of some other company cracking a future wearable item that makes the iPhone obsolete.
The iPhone is half of Apple’s business. Apple should be spending money and time trying to envision its replacement—and ensuring that Apple is the company that’ll popularize that product.
I like Apple taking bets like Project Titan. Of course, there was an opportunity cost to it. If Apple wasn’t dallying with computer vision models, perhaps it would have invested in large language models. Probably not, but there’s no way to know. The longer the project continued, though, the more opportunities were missed. And it does feel like the project went on too long.
At least there’s a silver lining. You never know what will be salvaged from the wreckage of Apple’s car project. I would imagine that quite a bit of what was learned in Project Titan will benefit future Apple products. Of course, it’s unlikely that any of that will justify the enormous cost of the project—but that’s not the point.
Apple made a bet. Maybe the odds were bad. The bet was probably too large. And Apple threw some good money after bad in the hopes of chasing a jackpot. You win some, you lose some.
When it comes to planning the future, the only thing worse than making some bad bets is making no bets at all.
I’m so old I remember when the Apple car was coming in five years.
Technically, you’d only have to be nine years old to have been alive when people were saying that, but then there’s the issue of cognition and when earliest memories form… Well, you get the point.
Anyway, time’s up. In a step we haven’t seen since 2019, Apple has canceled a product development project. If you’re a fat cat automotive executive who said the PC guys were not just gonna knock this out, give yourself an extra dollop of caviar on that cracker.
Were these wind-up cars? No wonder they killed the project. But, man, think of the carbon neutrality of a wind-up car.
Despite several strategy pivots, Apple has ultimately determined it simply couldn’t make the car it really wanted to make: one that was fully autonomous. Not without running a bunch of people over, anyway. Sure, they could probably make a standard electric car, but what would be different about it? Or different enough that it would be worth the Apple price premium?
Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project…
That sounds like a lot but remember, this is Apple. They can’t make an omelette without breaking some Fabergé eggs.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Tripp Mickle article without at least a soupçon of Apple doom.
The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011.
Apple Watch. AirPods. HomePod. TV+. Vision Pro. All in 13 years. But… you know… other than those things, what have they developed? Practically nothing.
…it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.
But Elon Musk said fully autonomous driving is only six months away! He said that for like 10 years!
Ohhh, I see, right. I get it now.
Early ideas for the car were maybe a little too optimistic.
It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri.
They still haven’t found several of those early prototypes. The Pacific is a big ocean.
After that the project seems to have changed focus and mangers several times, before finally being canceled. When even the loving but meaty-handed ministrations of Bob Mansfield can’t save a project, you know it doesn’t have a chance.
Apple cancels car project!
OK, so the car project has been canceled. (Have you heard?) But what does that mean for those of us still stuck in this stupid Apple-car-less timeline? Don’t worry, they’re not throwing out the AI baby with the car bathwater.
This would be the ground where they salted over the car project, as Apple has indicated that some of those working on Project Titan would be moving over to AI while others would be moving to…uh, unemployment.
It’s a smart, if belated, move to focus on things that are achievable with AI rather than things that are not achievable with AI. Apple tries a lot of things that never see the light of day; that’s part of how it comes up with great products, so you can’t fault it for trying.
Adding an extra space to my garage? That’s on me.
[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.]
The dominant narrative has been that a single phone call hacked MGM, but that help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols. And there’s another factor that could have stopped the hackers in their tracks: it’s all about the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what Kolide learned when they researched the MGM hack (like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story), check out the Kolide Blog.
Mysteries, Apple cars, and web apps
Jason’s computer keeps dying after login; virtue of Apple trying to make a car even if the project ended up failing; and a surprise reversal on homescreen web apps in the EU.
Aa a longtime Mac user, I’m just as aware of the platform’s limitations as I am its strengths. Chief among those limitations is—and has been for many years— gaming. Personally, though I played my fair share of Mac games throughout my teens and college years, I haven’t been an avid Mac gamer for a couple decades, first leaving for the greener pastures of PC gaming and then, eventually, the simpler world of consoles.
That’s why I found last year so interesting. Not only did Apple spend some significant time talking the talk about games with the release of its M2 Pro and Max chips and how good they were for gaming, but it even walked the walk with the WWDC release of its game porting toolkit.
As this year’s annual platform updates grow closer, Mac users are left wondering whether this is another flash in the pan from a company that has historically never gotten games, or if Apple might instead be poised to demonstrate that its commitment is more than just lip service.
Coming into port
Last summer I tried giving the game porting toolkit a whirl on my M1 MacBook Air, which was then running the required macOS Sonoma beta. At the time installing the toolkit meant following a series of technical instructions, involving no small amount of command line work. Though I’m no stranger to spending time in Terminal, I ultimately didn’t even manage to get to the point of firing up a game.
This week, though, I noticed that one of the classic games of my teen years, Star Wars: Dark Forces1, had gotten the remastered treatment. That updated version was available for many of the consoles, as well as for Windows…but not for the Mac.
An updated version of a many years-old game seemed like ideal pickings for another stab at Apple’s toolkit: the gameplay wouldn’t be very demanding, but would also no doubt highlight any shortcomings in Apple’s technology.
Whisky makes it incredibly easy to install PC games—perhaps too easy.
What a difference eight months makes. That’s in no small part due to Whisky, an app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder. It installed all the necessary under-the-hood software, leaving me with nothing but time on my hands.
So I grabbed the standalone installer for Dark Forces that I’d purchased from GOG.com2 and simply ran it. Less than ten minutes later, I was running around blasting pixelated stormtroopers.3 I even connected the Xbox controller I keep in my office and it worked seamlessly, with no additional setup (I was surprised to see that even Dark Forces‘s in-game UI knew I was using an Xbox controller and changed to reflect that).
Stormtroopers would be scarier if they could actually hit anything.
The only issue I ran into was that the MIDI sound stuttered somewhat—all the sounds and music were intelligible, just with this additional audio artifact. Some digging around suggested workarounds involving replacement DLLs, which I gave a half-hearted shot at but had no luck.4
The once and future king of Mac gaming
Windows gaming on the Mac is hardly new: over the years enthusiasts have used tools ranging from Apple’s Boot Camp to emulators like Parallels and VMware Fusion to translators like Wine and CrossOver to finagle PC games into running on Mac hardware. But all of those solutions were cumbersome to different degrees and served to alienate the people who just wanted playing games to be as simple as everything else on the Mac—nobody wants to hear that games work great if you just install these four pieces of software and tweak endless settings.
Apple’s said that its game porting toolkit is designed specifically for developers, to help them enable running their titles on the Mac. The idea being that it takes care of a certain base-level compatibility—to make sure titles are optimized and run well, companies have to put in some time.
What I wonder is just how well that’s paid off. There certainly hasn’t been an explosion in Mac gaming in the past several months, though, to be fair, games have long development timelines and large shops are probably not about to throw caution to the winds and embrace the Mac after all these years.
But has Apple done everything it can? I think the company’s only fighting half the battle here. The Mac has always suffered from a chicken-and-egg gaming problem: developers don’t want to commit resources to making games for a platform because there aren’t enough customers there; but the reason there aren’t enough customers is because there aren’t enough games.
The game porting toolkit attacks the developer side of the equation, but only brushes up against the other side: consumers.
If Apple really wants to jumpstart gaming on the Mac, it should bake the underlying technologies of the game porting toolkit directly into the system. Make installing and running a PC game as easy as if it were a Mac native title.
Make Moff Rebus canon again, cowards!
Are there risks with this approach? Definitely. As I mentioned, the audio in my version of Dark Forces was sub-par and, from what I can see online, these kinds of edge cases are not uncommon. It’s not hard to imagine blame being leveled at Apple’s hardware and software for “not being up to the task” when the truth is that the titles simply need some extra care and attention to play at their best. Whisky already does a good job of trying to package in a lot of the ancillary software that can help make the right tweaks; there’s no reason Apple couldn’t apply a similar approach.
In the end, I’d argue that the potential benefits outweigh the risks: running PC games on the Mac at all is a pretty big coup, to say nothing of them running pretty well. If Apple’s really worried about a bad experience reflecting poorly on its products, it can throw up a splash screen disclaimer—come on, you guys love splash screen disclaimers!
The more demand from folks who are willing to play their games on the Mac, the better the chance that developers will be willing to at least invest the time to make sure their titles run well. And if that ends up being a gateway to making games that run natively on the Mac, well, then, mission accomplished. As impressive as Apple’s tools are, just chucking them at developers and expecting them to jump at the chance of being on the Mac doesn’t cut it.
A title, let it be noted, that I actually owned for my Mac on CD-ROM! ↩
GOG has its own GOG Galaxy client, but I wasn’t sure how that would play with Whisky, so I opted for the simplest route. ↩
Almost 30 years of gaming means I am much, much better at this now. 🤣 ↩
Though when I loaded it up later and listened through the headphones connected to my audio interface, it was much better. Weird! ↩
[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.]
In these difficult times, hard decisions sometimes have to be made. Not by anybody specifically, you understand—just in general. That’s why we are shutting down the Special Projects Group and its effort to develop autonomous driving systems. After more than a decade of work of thousands of people, with several billion dollars spent, the Apple Car is driving off into the sunset via a convoluted route that may or may not involve collisions with cyclists.
This decision was not taken lightly. At Apple we pride ourselves on creating products that surprise and delight our customers, but there was some concern that the car’s tendency to ignore stop signs and lane markers was perhaps putting too much emphasis on the “surprise” part of that equation.
In times like this, we’d like to follow the example of a true Apple icon, Project Titan’s namesake, the world’s former tallest dog, may he rest in peace. While our project, like Titan, was only in this world a relatively short time, we’d like to believe it made an outsized impact on the many lives it touched.
It is, we all agree, a shame that our reinvention of the automobile will never reach the consumer market of people who could afford $100,000 cars, which had a not insignificant overlap with the consumer market of people who could afford a $3,500 device for watching movies by themselves while on the moon. But despite this, we continue to persevere in related areas, including both our upcoming launch of partner vehicles featuring the next-generation of CarPlay 2 as well as our busy schedule of uproarious laughter at GM’s Ultifi system.
Many of you are surely wondering about your futures. Rest easy: those with relevant skills are being reassigned to our teams working on generative artificial intelligence, a technology that can also create a car, but in far less time and with square wheels. This work is of the utmost significance to Apple’s strategic goals and we believe it is just as important to the future of humanity as self-driving cars, except instead of removing people from making risky decisions while in a fast-moving vehicle constructed from several tons of glass and steel we are removing people from making risky decisions that produce staggering works of art and creativity. We can all agree that the key detail is “taking humans out of the equation.” In the end, Project Titan simply was not proving efficient enough at this on the timescale required.
We can’t overstate how important AI is and how pleased we are that you will all be contributing to its integration through Apple’s product lines. There is nothing more critical to our company than the success of this venture. Though our automotive endeavor may be at an end, we are still committed to delivering a product that will move all of us forward.
Do you see what we did there? Move forward?
Anyway. We look forward to working with you in your new capacity, bringing this important work to fruition and ensuring that humans can be eliminated in the most effective means possible.
Sincerely,
Apple Generative AI
[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.]
Apple really sweated the launch of the Vision Pro. It brought select retail employees to Cupertino for multi-day training sessions in which participants tried the hardware and memorized the script to be used while demonstrating the hardware in stores. Those participants then went back to their Apple Stores and taught their co-workers what they had learned.
When the doors opened on launch day, the demos seemed to go pretty well. But it turns out that the Vision Pro is perhaps the most ergonomically complicated device Apple has ever made—and that getting it to fit on an array of faces needed more than a large selection of Light Seal sizes and a fancy app that scans your face.
Getting a good fit for the Vision Pro, it turns out, can take a human touch. And on this front, Apple has failed its retail employees and its customers alike.
Every discussion about money is an Apple Pay transaction waiting to happen.
Whether it’s attempts to regulate iMessage, or attempts to circumvent Apple’s hardware requirements to use iMessage, there’s sure been a lot of interest in Apple’s meager messaging platform lately. From a competition standpoint, iMessage has a grip in North America, but little penetration elsewhere where more platform agnostic messaging apps are preferred.
What is it that we like so much about iMessage and the Messages app? I use them multiple times a day, across the Mac and iPhone, and yet I’m not sure I would call the experience “good” or advocate for it in any meaningful way that didn’t invoke security and privacy concerns.
Reliability
iMessage delivery has been pretty reliable for many, many years. You send it, a little piece of gray text pops under your message a few seconds later and says, “Delivered” and you don’t have to worry about it.
Sure, there was the weird thing that would happen when you’d try to send someone a photo, but the network connection wasn’t strong enough, and then it would just hang that little blue line, and none of your following messages would get through. You’d have to wait a few minutes until the iMessage failed to send. Surely they’d make that experience better some day, instead of… never improving it?
Then there’s the weird thing that happens when you wake your Mac and it starts notifying you about old messages, and maybe a chunk of message history is missing. Oh well. Sometimes it pops up later.
Occasionally read status gets out of sync, but never anything as bad as Slack, which just celebrated 10 years of not being able to remember what I’ve read.
More often than not I’ve been told that I have Do Not Disturb enabled, when I don’t. Just toggling the little DND in control center resets it, but why does it do that without any rhyme or reason?
There still isn’t an official way to export or archive my iMessage history, which has become something I’m more concerned with these days as I’ve had two occasions, in the past two months, where my iMessage conversation history with my boyfriend of 14+ years temporarily disappeared while I was on cellular, but then just magically popped back when I was on Wi-Fi.
So do I still think of iMessage as reliable, or am I just used to the ways in which it is less than reliable?
Features
I often think that all I really expect out of Messages is the ability to send clear, legible text messages and photos. But even the simplest texts can sometimes trigger message effects that were never my intention. (Congratulations!)
The Apple Cash integration, which highlights every monetary amount with an underline so I always look like I’m trying to ask for money, is especially obnoxious. Clearly someone at Apple who is sweaty for people to use Apple Cash considered it a win-win, but I’m almost never sending money.
Sharing photos is a game of 52 pick-up.
As for sharing photos… if I send one photo, it shows up in the original aspect ratio, with some pixels shaved off to round the edges and give it that little message speech bubble tail. If I send two or more photos, then all of a sudden we’ve steered into Whimsical Stack Town where Messages has decided that the clearest way to present the photos I’m sharing is a game of 52 pick-up.
The right thing to do is to tile the photos to fit the space without overlap to maximize the use of our limited screen real estate. I want a contact sheet, not a quirky slideshow. Tapping on the “[X] Photos” to bring up the contact sheet view doesn’t help, because it appears entirely outside of the context of the conversation.
iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma also made it take more effort to share photos via Messages. In iOS 17, everything except audio messages got sucked into the new, terrible, “+” menu. Which is not a menu, but a completely modal screen that obfuscates everything to show you a handful of common message buttons, including Camera and Photos. If you don’t tap the invisible bounds of the thin font used for Camera and Photos, or the small circular icon, you’ll dismiss the dialog entirely.
(Pro tip! In a completely unintuitive and non-obvious stroke of sheer un-genius, you can long-press on the “+” to get to the Photos picker.)
In Sonoma, where even the smallest Mac screen is gigantic, the “+” icon has been replaced with a tiny app store icon button, along with a series of lines as a sort of waveform for the audio message and an emoji icon. Why are the icons different? Who could say?
What I can tell you is that I have to click on the App Store icon, then click the Photos icon, and then wait for that to spawn a floating photo picker panel that is attached to the App Store icon, and can’t be moved or resized. Oftentimes I find it easier to find a photo and copy and paste it into the conversation, which seems more than a little absurd if I stop and think about it.
Fun!
Of course a messaging service, and its apps, need to go beyond the ability to send text and photos. We want to have fun with our conversations. That’s why every chat and messaging app includes the ability to react to messages with fun emoji. Oh, I mean every platform except for Messages, which Jason Snell has been on Apple’s case about for a long time.
The emoji sticker reactions suck. I absolutely loathe the jaunty angle that Messages applies to everything. I didn’t place it at a jaunty angle because I don’t want it to be a haphazardly applied sticker. This isn’t some three-ring binder that I’m trying to jazz up with Lisa Frank stickers.
Apple’s attempt to harness the raw power of fun with the Messages App Store hasn’t died yet, so I guess that still counts as “fun”. It still seems to provide dozens of people with access to official Starbucks Messages stickers.
Probably the most “fun” Messages-only feature is exclusively available to the Apple Watch’s version of Messages, and that’s Fitness notifications. My friends and I use the feature in an almost passive-aggressive way. We send ironic congratulations over short walks, or the baffling “Can I call you later?” prompt. All the other platforms get replies to the fitness notifications, even though the Mac still can’t display the Fitness notification that was replied to! But only the Watch can see the initial Fitness notification to start that conversation.
Pump up the jam
I’m uncertain if Apple’s warmed over iterations of Messages are because they see no reason to really compete in the messaging arena, or if they would be exactly as uninspired if they were regulated out the wazoo. Personally, I would rather see Apple innovate of their own volition to provide us with things like increased reliability and support across their platforms. Give us cleaner interfaces to our most used functions, and fun that feels like actual fun, instead just knocking things slightly askew and telling us they’re fun.
Sent with lasers.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
We discuss what an iOS release focused on AI features might look like, check in on our ongoing Vision Pro experiences, and discuss what the Apple Sports app might mean for Apple’s sports ambitions.
If this seems like an obvious first step toward eventually phasing out the humans doing AppleCare, that’s probably only because it is.
Apple recently launched a pilot program that provides select AppleCare support advisors with access to a new tool called “Ask” that can automatically generate responses to technical questions they receive from customers…
So don’t be surprised if the next time you contact AppleCare to get help connecting a printer or figuring out why iCloud is down again the person on the other end of the line starts going off on a tangent about how the moon landings were faked.
Still, if you ever get into real trouble you can always say “Pretend you’re my mother telling me a bedtime story about taking a Mac to Craig Federighi’s house so he can fix it. What’s Craig’s address?”
This also means that if you have trouble using the new AI features purported to be coming in iOS 18, you can contact AppleCare and…get help from an AI on how to use it.
AIs, helping AIs.
Certainly no way this can go wrong.
Apple Sportsball
Apple released Apple Sports for iOS this week, an app that will show you the scores of your favorite teams competing in major league sports from the kicky ball one to the bouncy ball one and all the ones in between. The app also includes odds on each game, provided by one of the popular betting sites (not that Apple is condoning betting on sports, cough), but if you’re a little more Han Solo, you can turn the odds off.
As a long-suffering Mariners fan, let me just say that professional sports are EVIL and no one should ever wish an interest in them on even their most bitter enemy, so I consider releasing this app as something of a personal attack. Eddie Cue is clearly a trickster god with an impish sense of humor or, possibly, has been sent by that bog witch that cursed me all those years ago.
As it turns out, the app doesn’t show spring training games so I wasn’t able to really try it out (like I’m gonna suddenly get interested in basketball) but I’m hearing the Mariners have already been eliminated from the playoffs? Not sure how that happened but it sounds right.
Pretty soon we’re talking about real money
The EU—fresh off its success in getting Apple to switch to USB-C and offer the most grudging of alternate app store models—is reportedly gearing up to hit Apple with a fine as a result of a complaint from Spotify about the App Store’s anti-steering provision.
While this is not an insubstantial fine, it should be noted that Apple makes that much in profit in about a day and a half. So it’s not exactly going to kill the company either.
In response to Spotify’s complaint, Apple argues that Spotify pays nothing other than $99 per year for a developer account to Apple.
I tend to side with Apple on a lot of things but when it’s complaining about developers linking to websites, as if the internet hasn’t existed for the past 30 years, the company makes it a little difficult.
In addition to the $500 million fine, the EU’s ruling will likely force Apple to allow Spotify and other streaming music services to direct users to outside payment methods.
Apple likes to talk about how everyone loves the App Store because it makes things so easy. If that’s really the case…then what’s the problem?
[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.]
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide wants your business to be secure. Think of it like airport security: there are two lines, one to verify your identity and another to scan your carry-ons. In enterprise security, the first line is user authentication. The second line is scanning the devices themselves.
That second line doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average solution is like eyeing a bag and listening to hear if there’s a ticking sound. And that’s assuming there’s a second line at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
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Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. Kolide can help close the gaps.
