Another great Mac at 40 overview from my ol’ PC World counterpart Harry McCracken at Fast Company:
Even if everyone knows the 1984 Mac was a big deal, that doesn’t mean we fully understand it. I’m still gaining new appreciation for all the ways it mattered, despite following its progress from the start and being a Mac user—off and on—since 1987….
The most celebrated part of that original Mac was its software interface, which brimmed with new ideas, despite the lazy conventional wisdom that it merely imitated work done at Xerox’s PARC lab. But at the moment, I’m most fascinated by its industrial design. That petite all-in-one beige case, created by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, was unlike anything anyone had seen until then—at least outside of a kitchen. Jobs is said to have latched on to the Cuisinart food processor as design inspiration.
Harry’s also right about the classic Mac being both iconic and not particularly influential from a hardware standpoint. That classic Mac silhouette wasn’t really knocked off by competitors and only lasted in the Mac line for about a decade.
Before I started writing my piece on the Mac’s 40th anniversary for The Verge, I was thinking of different ways to plot out the arc of the Mac’s history. I ended up going with the fact that the Mac has been the underdog for most of its existence, but I also considered plotting the Mac’s history as defined by the Mac’s four distinct processor eras.
The Innovation era (Motorola 680×0)
The early days of the Mac were about justifying its existence as the first and most popular1 personal computer with what’s now a familiar graphical user interface style rather than being driven by a command line.
The IBM PC and the emerging DOS PC clone standard weren’t the only enemies here. Plenty of other platforms existed in the early days, including the one that generated most of Apple’s revenue, the Apple II.
History tends to flatten everything into simple narratives, so you might expect that the moment the Mac was introduced, Apple began pivoting away from the Apple II. That did not happen. Apple didn’t discontinue the last Apple II model until nearly a decade into the Mac’s existence. After the Mac was introduced, Apple kept introducing new Apple II models: The compact IIc three months later and the 16-bit IIGS more than two years later.
But the Mac started winning hearts and minds, especially in the design community, where the prospect of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphics and typography was just too powerful to ignore.
During this era, the Mac expanded, perhaps most notably with the Mac II, which was a more traditional standalone box with card slots and support for external monitors. The System, as Mac OS was called back then, also continued to advance, reaching a pinnacle with version 6.0.8 and then blowing right through it with the next milestone release.
System 7 was this era’s major reinvention of the Mac, and its introduction in 1991 gave the original Mac OS a decade of additional life. It was a game-changer, with proper multitasking support, system extensions, a revamped Apple Menu, file sharing, aliases, AppleScript, and a new full-color interface.
The Desperation era (PowerPC)
But by the early 90s, Microsoft had made the graphical interface of Windows passable (with version 3.1) and then extremely Mac-like (with Windows 95). Apple was feeling pressure on the software front, and Motorola’s 6080×0 series processors were also reaching the end of their life.
In came PowerPC, a new chip series from an alliance of Apple, Motorola, and (of all companies!) IBM. The transition from Mac to Power Mac (as the first PowerPC-based Macs were named) led to a lot of trepidation in the Mac community, but Apple executed the whole thing incredibly well, including using clever code-translation software to ensure that older Mac apps would still run. (This transition would set the standard for subsequent Mac chip transitions, all of which were executed smoothly.)
This is more or less where I began my career as a professional Mac person rather than just a user and fan. The PowerPC transition was solid, but the overall market was getting ugly. Windows 95 really did change the game, because while old-school PC fans hated the Mac-ification of their computers, most regular people really did like the graphical interface!
Real talk: For Mac users, Windows 95 was a pale knock-off. But for PC users, it was good enough to completely eliminate any possible reason to switch to a Mac. That, combined with the rapid speed increases of Intel’s processors, made the “Wintel alliance” of this era basically a Death Star of computing. These were dark times.
Apple cycled through CEOs during this era and made a desperate stab at licensing Mac OS to clone-makers, a move aimed at expanding the market that ended up just cannibalizing Apple’s own Mac sales. (I admit that I bought a Power Computing clone during this era. It was great.)
Meanwhile, Mac OS was also reaching the end of its life cycle. Microsoft was working on a modern version of Windows, Windows NT, that added modern memory management, multiprocessor support, and many other features. Mac OS was patched and patched again to create ramshackle solutions to things like multitasking and multiprocessor support, but it was clear that Apple needed a new solution.
Unfortunately, the company botched its own next-generation Mac projects—and it had more than one. It went so far as to announce one, Copland, as “Mac OS 8″—and even showed it off at WWDC one year. It never shipped. What shipped in Mac OS 8 was a re-skinned version of System 7 with some extensions to keep the plates spinning while Apple’s desperation increased.
Apple’s Mac OS desperation ended up saving not just the Mac but the entire company. Rather than buying the shiny, new, and untested BeOS from former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gasseé, CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock went with a more battle-tested, tried-and-true operating system: NeXTStep, from Steve Jobs’s NeXT. Oh, and Jobs came along in the deal… as an advisor. Sure. Yep.
You know the rest. Jobs took over, NexT became Mac OS X, the G3 iMac revived Apple’s fortunes and kept the company alive long enough to fund OS X development and the creation of the iPod and Apple retail stores, and things stabilized.
The Halo Effect era (Intel)
The PowerPC alliance was falling apart. IBM’s new G5 processor gave the Mac some speed advantages over Intel PCs, but they suffered from heating problems that forced some Power Mac models to be liquid-cooled and utterly precluded Apple from building a G5 laptop. Famously, Steve Jobs said on stage that IBM would be supplying a G5 processor running at a gaudy 3GHz… but IBM never delivered.
NeXtSTEP had run on Intel processors, and deep within Apple, the OS-on-Intel skunkworks project had continued. This was its moment: Apple announced it was embarking on another processor transition, this time to Intel. The enemy had become an ally.
Psychologically, this was an enormous move for Apple. Intel had spent years branding itself as the standard in computing. Even when PowerPC chips had speed advantages over Intel chips, to explain why a chip with a lower clock speed was actually faster required a lengthy lecture about chip architecture that would put almost anyone to sleep. Apple’s sales pitch for the Mac was now a lot simpler: We have the same chips that they do.
It doesn’t seem like much, but during this period, it was incredibly reassuring. The iPod had helped rehab Apple’s brand with people who had never been Mac users before. It drew them to the new Apple retail stores, and the Mac was right there. People who had never had a fondness for Apple products now asked themselves: If I love this iPod so much, maybe I would like Apple’s computer, too?
It was called the iPod Halo Effect, and it was real. The fact that Macs ran Intel processors was an extra reassuring bullet point. A lot of people bought their first Macs during this period, reassured in part by the fact that Boot Camp and virtualization software existed that would allow them to also use Windows software in a pinch. (Most of them never needed to, but it eased their anxiety.)
During this era, the Mac was on the upswing. But as the iPhone and iPad entered Apple’s product line and siphoned off attention from the Mac, the platform suffered from a deep malaise in the 2010s. I have theories about why this happened, but no tangible evidence. Maybe it was just the natural effect of focusing on other platforms, or maybe there were specific decisions made inside Apple to put the Mac on life support while it built a new computing platform based on the iPad.
Either way, the late 2010s Mac was plagued by bad laptop keyboards, OS updates that lacked complete support for new features on iOS, a dearth of new Mac software, and a couple of compatibility-breaking OS updates that wiped out lots of apps from the early days of OS X. It was a bad decade for Intel, too, and that showed in a bunch of lackluster chip updates that couldn’t match the innovation going on in Apple’s other product lines.
The Graduation era (Apple silicon)
What a way to break out of the malaise! Apple switched the entire platform to chips based on the ones it had designed for the iPhone and iPad over the previous decade. Now, rather than being starved of the attention given to other Apple platforms, the Mac was being reinvigorated by the fruits of that labor.
Apple silicon Macs were faster than Intel Macs and far more power efficient. When the COVID pandemic hit, loads of people bought new Macs, driving the Mac to its two biggest sales years of all time. Not bad for a 40-year-old computing platform.
The big question is, what happens next? Nothing ever ends, after all. As I mentioned in my Verge article, the Mac’s move to Apple silicon can be viewed as a Faustian bargain. Apple’s long-term goal seems to be for developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac all together. In the end, does that mean that the Mac will be a container for “legacy” apps while most new apps are coming from Apple’s other platforms or the web?
It’s possible. But that prospect is better than a scenario where the Mac just can’t keep up because it doesn’t run any new apps. I’d also argue that the Mac has a unique position among Apple’s platforms: Not only is it where software development is done, but it’s also the only platform that can run iPhone/iPad apps and full Mac apps. It’s a superset of Apple’s platforms, not a subset. That’s a powerful place for the Mac to be.
I’m optimistic about the future of the Mac. Tech products come and go. The iPod was the biggest tech product of the early to mid-2000s, and these days, when you see the word, you’re more likely to think it’s a misspelling of “iPad.” Somehow, through three chip transitions and two entirely different operating systems, the Mac has survived.
More than that, the Mac has thrived. More people are using Macs today than at any other point in its existence. That’s miraculous, and it’s a testament to the Mac’s ability to change with the times while continuing to appeal.
Here’s to the next era, wherever it might take us.
To celebrate this milestone, mac40th.com showcases every Macintosh desktop and portable Apple has ever made… The site is easy to use: you’ll see a continuous stream of random Macs – just keep clicking ‘Show me more Macs’ and that’s what you’ll get. If you’re a hard core Mac fan, this site should keep you busy for a very long time.
What a perfect celebration of the Mac. Just keep scrolling and clicking until you’ve gotten your fill.
Twenty years ago, on the Mac’s 20th anniversary, I asked Steve Jobs if the Mac would still be relevant to Apple in the age of the iPod. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: “of course” it would be.
Yet, 10 years later, Apple’s revenue was increasingly dominated by the iPhone, and the recent success of the new iPad had provided another banner product for the company. When I interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller for the Mac’s 30th anniversary, I found myself asking him about the Mac’s relevance, too. He also scoffed: “Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever,” he said.
Today marks 40 years since Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino, and it once again feels right to ask what’s next for the Mac.
Forty years. In the world of technology, where many devices seem to evaporate after only a matter of months, lasting for a decade is an accomplishment—but four of them? It’s nearly unheard of.
And yet today marks the fortieth anniversary of the Macintosh, a device that—while it has certainly seen its ups and downs over the intervening years—has nevertheless been in constant production since that day Apple co-founder Steve Jobs first took the wraps off it back in 1984.
In that time it’s run on four different processor architectures and two major operating systems, making it bit of a computer of Theseus. It’s seen challengers rise and fall, been threatened with extinction more than once, and yet for all of that has emerged in recent years revitalized and stronger than ever.
Amongst Apple’s products, the iPhone may be more popular, the iPad more futuristic, and the Apple Watch a more impressive feat of engineering, but none have the emotional resonance of the 40-year-old pioneer of the personal computer. Ask any user who’s been around long enough, and no doubt their own personal story is intertwined with the Mac.
Sleeve 2’s customization is impressive, and it scrobbles too.
I listen to music on my Mac all day long, but It’s been a long while since I’ve displayed the currently playing track anywhere. I’ve gotten back into the habit thanks to the $6 utility Sleeve 2 by Replay.
What made me instantly buy Sleeve was its extensive capability to customize the currently playing track information. You can choose to show album art at a wide range of sizes (or omit it entirely), with your choice of corner rounding. You can choose display track name, album name, and artist name, and display them in a variety of fonts and weights. There’s customization for text alignment, drop shadows, and pretty much anything else you might want. You can set the track information to float above everything, always say on the Desktop layer, or float above briefly when the track changes, then land back on the desktop.
Three different customizations that just scratch the surface.
But what also distinguishes Sleeve 2 are the other Music-extending features that have been rolled in. The app integrates not just with Music (which I use) but Spotify, and it’ll also scrobble songs to Last.fm if you’re a latter-day scrobbler. And perhaps most importantly, it lets you program systemwide hot keys for controlling playback—and of course, you can opt to have those playback controls appear on the track information, too.
It’s the perfect example of a simple, low-cost Mac utility that makes life a little bit better. I’m happy to have my music back on my desktop again.
Celebrating 40 years of the Mac, we’ve gathered an all-star panel of longtime Mac users to pick the best Macs, Mac software, and Mac accessories, as well as induct a few events or devices into the Mac Hall of Shame.
Left to right: Boox Page, TCL NXTPAPER 11, Kobo Libra 2.
I’ve been writing about e-readers—Kindles, Kobos, and the like—since the first month of this site’s existence. I write about them not just because I’m an enthusiastic user of the devices in this category but also because I’m fascinated by these strange devices that are so very different from the phones, tablets and computers that fill the rest of our lives.
This month, I’ve been using a few different devices that push the definition of an e-reader to its limits. As a result, I’ve ended up challenging myself to define exactly why I like e-readers—and why I’m not satisfied just using an iPad or an iPhone to read books.
The unlikely contenders
A closer look at the Boox Page and TCL NXTPAPER 11.
After a somewhat underwhelming experience with the Boox Leaf 2 and a strangely satisfying time with the phone-shaped Boox Palma, I decided to take one more trip to the parallel world of Boox devices, which run Android but have E-Ink displays rather than the traditional backlit screens found in modern smartphones.
This time, I tried out the $250 Boox Page, which has physical page-turn buttons and uses the same screen as the $190 Kobo Libra 2 and $160 Kindle Paperwhite. It was a pretty great experience—with all the caveats that I’ve brought up before when writing about an Android-driven E-Ink device.
It feels and looks like a Kindle or Kobo, but the Boox Page will run pretty much any Android app.
When you buy a Kindle or Kobo, you can just turn it on and use it without any configuration beyond logging into your Amazon or Kobo accounts. Android devices aren’t like that—there’s a lot of work to get it the way you want it, including downloading apps and then configuring various extensions that make those apps behave better on the slow-refreshing E-Ink displays.
That all said, if you’re a relatively nerdy person who really wants a device that’s at the same level as the Kobo Libra or Kindle Paperwhite—but with slightly better hardware than both, as it’s got a flush screen like the Paperwhite and page-turn buttons like the Libra—you could be at home with the Boox Page. If you’re someone who wants access to the Kindle store and the Kobo store and the ability to read DRM-free ebooks with another reader (Moon Reader was my favorite, though there are many others), the Boox Page can do it all.
Unfortunately, I started down this Android tablet path largely because I wanted to read other stuff on the same device I use to read books. Think RSS feeds, newspapers, newsletters, and the rest. When it comes to this stuff, it’s hard to get past the fact that apps are built for fast-refreshing phone screens and just don’t work well with E-Ink displays. Even if you configure your RSS reader to be just right, you’ll end up having to jump to a web browser to read stuff that’s not contained in the feed—and the web experience on these devices just isn’t great.
So, while I really enjoyed reading several books on the Boox Page, I’m not sure there are enough good use cases for it. Even if you’re devoted to DRM-free ebooks, you can sideload those to either a Kindle or Kobo via an app like Calibre. I’ve been back on my Kobo Libra for the past few weeks, and it’s nice to have the simplicity, though I sure do miss the flush screen of the Page.
The NXTPAPER 11 displays color comics better than any black-and-white device, but it’s still just a tablet with a matte screen.
But wait: What if someone could build a device that had a screen that looked like E-Ink but offered full color and refresh rates that matched phones and tablets? Someone did, sort of. Which is why I also spent a little time with the NXTPAPER 11, an 11-inch Android tablet from TCL that claims to offer “an e-book viewing feel.”
It’s weird. It’s a regular Android tablet with a regular tablet screen, but TCL has applied a coating to the screen that feels very much like a Paperlike iPad screen protector. It reduces blue light and glare and makes the display textured like paper. TCL has also shipped Android extensions that let you push the tablet into “reading mode,” which is basically a black-and-white mode meant to ape the look of an e-reader.
It… sort of works? Leaving aside that the tablet screen is so huge that it’s basically a two-page version of a Kindle, when it’s in reading mode and you’re using the Kindle app, it’s a pretty close approximation of the look and feel of reading a Kindle book. At night, the backlighting makes things a bit bright, but there’s a white-on-black mode that’s pretty good.
And, of course, it’s still a regular display—so I read full-color comics on it, and they looked very good. Beyond that, I could pretty much run any Android app I wanted, including RSS readers and newspaper apps, and it provided the substandard iPad experience I’d expect from an Android tablet. (Also, while the NXPAPER 11 had decent battery life for a tablet, it pales in comparison to the low power consumption of an E-Ink device.)
This made me ask myself: Did I really want an e-reader, or did I just want an iPad mini with a glare protector running in a black-and-white accessibility mode?
What do I want, really?
Which brought me full circle. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote:
Backlit tablets just can’t compete with E-Ink-equipped Kindles when it comes to reading in the bright sun…. At night, the inverse applies. My Paperwhite, turned down all the way, is much darker than my iPad’s backlight at the lowest setting. Which means it’s much less likely to disturb my wife while she’s sleeping and I’m reading.
Whether dark or light or in between, I prefer reading on these devices. They never push notifications at me, I’m never tempted to switch over to Twitter or email, and the static black-and-white calm of words on a page evokes the best things about reading a paper book or newspaper.
This was a good reminder of what drew me to these devices in the first place. Namely:
A reflective (rather than backlit) screen that’s readable in bright sunlight and offers gentle side lighting for use in the dark without being blindingly bright.
Good ergonomics. A device should be light enough to be held in one hand easily, with dedicated page-turn buttons that don’t require me to do a lot of swiping and tapping just to read a book.
No distractions. I shouldn’t be able to flip over to social media or read my email or do anything else on the device that isn’t reading text. As my friend and e-reader aficionado Scott McNulty told me, “The more features you add to an E-Ink device, the worse it gets.”
Great battery life, with the ability to go a week or more without a charge.
In other words, while a $499 iPad mini with an anti-glare screen might be a pretty decent e-reader, it would fail most of these points. Even with anti-glare film, I doubt the iPad screen could match E-Ink’s visibility in bright light or its very low light capability, and volume buttons aren’t placed properly to act as comfortable page-turn buttons. And sure, I could keep my iPad in Do Not Disturb and make sure that no distracting apps were present on it, but would I want to? Am I going to buy two different iPads? No.
So, I’m back where I started. Last year, I read more than 50 books, and probably 99 percent of those pages were read on an E-Ink display. When I put my iPad down at night and pick up my Kobo, I’m saying goodbye to the outside world and focusing on the “printed” page. When I’m reading on an airplane, I’m not worried about draining my iPhone or iPad battery unnecessarily.
Maybe someday, the e-reader will be made irrelevant. But it’s been fifteen years since I bought my first Kindle, and it hasn’t happened so far. E-readers are really good at what they do—and when I say that I’ve tried the alternatives, I really mean it.
There’s been talk inside the paper even further back about the possibilities of expanding into games. About a decade ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave Mark Thompson, then CEO of the Times, and David Perpich, now publisher of The Athletic, some advice. The Times executives were in the Apple boardroom, demoing the NYT Now app—a short-lived attempt to attract young readers—NYT Cooking, and the new NYT Crossword app. The Times, said Cook, should really be the leader of digital puzzles, according to a source familiar with the discussion. (The Times declined to comment on this meeting.)
I’m an avid player of the Mini, Wordle, and Connections, but at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I think of those as my daily puzzle appetizers: the Times crossword remains the entrée.
The new year must be in full swing because there’s actual Apple news this week. We got an Epic decision and some of you lucky devils bought Vision Pros. At least the Apple Watch Series 9 I got in November can still tell me my blood oxygen level.
A real Epic
It’s all over but the shouting as Epic’s swing at Apple turns out to be largely a miss.
And that’s not all. Apple is subsequently demanding Epic pay it $73.4 million for legal fees per the terms of the suit. That’s 21,000 Vision Pros! But it’s also just 1.33 Dutch App Store fines. I have a hard time making sense of large dollar values.
One lingering effect for Apple, apart from getting reimbursed, is the rescinding of the anti-steering provision. While Apple will now allow apps to link to websites for payment options outside the App Store—surprise!—it still wants its cut of the transaction.
Disclaimer: This should not be a surprise to anyone.
Fine, I’ll just have Fun On My Own
Happy FOMO day to all of us who didn’t get a fancy new spatial computer.
Apple turned the hype knob on the Vision Pro (it’s on the battery pack so you’ve never seen it) up to 11 this week by detailing the Vision Pro entertainment experiences that would be available for the device on day one, including 150 3D movies, a Disney app, tightrope walkers, dinosaurs, and someone name Jean Favreau who is maybe a French mime? I don’t know. Not familiar with his work.
One company that will not be Vision Pronabled (that’s what we’re calling it now) from day one is Netflix. The company said it could not be bothered to make an app for the device or even enable its iPad app on it because, and I fake quote, it “was too busy watching its stories”, un-fake quote.
Not to be out undone, YouTube and Spotify will also not be at the launch day festivities. And you’ve gotta imagine there’s no Instagram app.
On the one hand, it’s unfortunate for Vision Pro users that some very popular apps will not be available immediately. On the other hand, demanding companies commit to development work for 80,000 people is somewhat unreasonable. On the third hand, these are giant, multi-billion dollar companies. Let them fight it out.
Watch it disappear
The legal mill keeps on churning and the Apple Watch Series 9’s blood oxygen sensing technology is just the gristiest. As a result, starting today Apple will be selling the Watch Series 9 without the blood oxygen feature. The sensor is assuredly still there, but the feature has been software-disabled. $5 to the person who finds a way to update whatever plist on the Watch has the setting bloodoxygensensor.active to “TRUE”.
Barring that, if you want blood oxygen measuring in a smartwatch, you’ll be able to get one soon (or at least some day, as this is currently a prototype) from Masimo, the company suing Apple.
Day watch, blood oxygen watch. Easy peasy. Glad we solved that.
Don’t expect this to end any time soon, though. Apple’s clearly of the mind that it’ll just take its ball and go home, while Masimo’s CEO says good riddance. Would they take $73.4 million? Just thinking out loud.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
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Happy Vision Pro pre-order day to all who celebrate!
Whether or not you’re virtually lining up to buy one of Apple’s fancy new spatial computers, you may be wondering what choices will come up during the process. So, purely for science, I went through it to see all the options and tell you exactly what you’ll need to think about.
Put it in storage
As reported last week, the Vision Pro does have storage tiers, and now we know what they are and how much they’ll cost.
Storage
Price
256GB
$3499
512GB
$3699
1TB
$3899
Those are roughly on par with Apple storage tier increases on the iPhone and Macs1, and frankly, when you’re already paying $3500 for a device, a few hundred extra dollars doesn’t seem like quite the same percentage jump. (It’s also worth noting that Apple is, as usual, offering 0 percent financing, meaning you can also pay a low low monthly cost of $324.91 for 12 months for that 1TB model.)
The real question is why you’ll need all that storage. Apple helpfully details its rationale below the tiers:
How much storage you need depends on how you use Apple Vision Pro. More room means you can store more documents, spatial photos and spatial videos, music, and apps, as well as extensive video libraries and large data files.
Over time, you may add more content to Apple Vision Pro, so you’ll want to think about how your storage needs may change.
So, think apps and files that you want to download to the device—spatial photos, spatial video, and movies (especially 3D ones) probably being among the most likely things to eat up data if you’re downloading them to store locally. Good news, though, you won’t have to worry about storage for Netflix downloads.
Keep calm and add on
Once you’ve picked your storage tier, you’re not quite done yet. Apple is, of course, offering AppleCare+ for the Vision Pro, which will set you back a hefty $500 for two years or $24.99 per month until you decide to cancel it. But again, if you’ve paid $3500 for this cutting-edge product, the insurance may provide some peace of mind: It offers “unlimited repairs for accidental damage protection” (at a cost of $29 for accessory damage and $299 for “Other Accidental Damage”) and an Express Replacement Service, so you won’t be without a Vision Pro while yours is getting fixed.
Apple’s also selling a few accessories for the Vision Pro. Though a cover for the headset is included with the purchase, if you’re taking it on the go, you may well want the travel case, which provides a padded shell in which to put the Vision Pro, a strap for the external battery and a cozy little pouch of for your optical inserts. That will set you back a significant $199 (though I imagine it’s one place where third-party competitors will be more cheaply available).
There’s also the $49.95 Belkin Battery Holder clip, which lets you attach the Vision Pro’s external battery to a belt or pants, as well as a cross-body strap if you don’t have a convenient clipping location.
Speaking of external batteries, we know the Vision Pro’s battery life is rated for about 2 hours of general use or 2.5 hours of video watching, but don’t worry: Apple’s more than happy to sell you an additional battery pack for $199.
You can also buy a few of the other included accessories on their own, such as the Solo Knit Band ($99), the Dual Loop Band ($199). You can also buy a Light Seal package ($199), which includes two Light Seal Cushions; you’ll need to use the face-scanning process to get the right size. Light Seal Cushions ($29) are also available separately and come in four sizes: N, N+, W, and W+. (Good news: the cushion attaches magnetically and is machine washable.)
In addition to all those Vision Pro specific accessories, Apple’s also pushing other existing products that it thinks Vision Pro users might want: the Bluetooth Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, a Sony DualSense game controller, the USB-C AirPods Pro, the 30W USB-C power adapter and USB-C charge cable, and, of course, AirTags.
Top of the line or end of the line
Which may of course set you thinking: sure, $3499 is expensive, but just how pricey can I make this thing?
Again, I’m not one to shy away from science, so let’s check it out. (I’m not including extra bands, Light Seals, or cushions, since it should be a while before you wear those out. And, of course, if you need optical inserts, you’ll be adding another $99-$149.)
Item
Cost
Vision Pro 1TB
$3899
AppleCare+
$499
Travel Case
$199
Magic Keyboard
$99
Magic Trackpad
$129
Battery Clip
$49.95
Sony DualSense
$69.95
AirPods Pro
$249
Extra Battery
$199
Extra Power Adapter
$39
Extra Charging Cable
$29
AirTag
$29
Total
$5489.90
Hey, still well shy of a maxed out MacStudio or a base-level Mac Pro, not to mention a gold first-edition Apple Watch. So there are definitely Apple products you could spend more money on, albeit perhaps ones with a more proven track record.
Apple’s not likely to detail exactly how many Vision Pros it sells, but it will be interesting to see if it provides any further information at the company’s quarterly financial call in a couple weeks.
I’d forgotten that while it’s only $200 to go from a 256GB 11-inch iPad Pro to a 512GB model, it’s a whopping $600 between the 256GB configuration and the 1TB. ↩
[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.]
After some Apple Vision Pro opinions, it’s time for a veritable Sports Pentagon of topics, including: Regional sports streaming alliances, the NFL cozying up to ESPN, Amazon cozying up to Diamond Sports, and the value of Peacock’s streamed playoff game.
As it turns out, it’s possible to tell if a developer has opted out by using App Store API endpoints. So, with a little help, we built a shortcut to check some of the most popular apps on the App Store.
Short answer: not a lot of native apps at present, and a lot of developers have opted out of even letting their iPad apps work in compatibility mode.
As John points out, this list is neither exhaustive nor necessarily perfectly reflective of ultimate app availability, as we’re still a few weeks away from the Vision Pro launch, and many apps have not been updated on the Store yet (including some known to have a Vision Pro app, such as Disney+).
Still, on the heels of news that Netflix won’t have a native Vision Pro or compatibility for its iPad app, there is definitely some question as to how many developers—and perhaps especially those at big companies—are planning on building apps for Apple’s spatial computing platform, at least at launch. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem in the making: developers don’t want to commit until they know there’s a market there, and the market may not develop if the apps aren’t there.
So Artifact, the news app startup from the creators of Instagram, is shutting down. There’s been a lot of analysis about the issue, and I agree with much of it.
There’s been a lot of cheap and bad “news content” on the Web for ages now, but in recent years, it seems to have gotten worse. In certain areas—I notice it with film and TV coverage as well as sports—a single bit of original reporting is breathlessly rewritten by dozens of sites, turning a juicy one-sentence quote into a thousand-word-long analysis with lots of backstory and relevant on-site links, all with subheads that answer questions Google users might ask. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
For all its boasting about using AI smarts, Artifact didn’t really cut through the noise. Surely an AI content engine could analyze articles and determine which piece was the original and which pieces added very little to the discussion? I’d hope that, eventually, someone will try to counteract this cottage industry of rewriting other people’s scraps for SEO hits with some intelligence that weights the original story over the word salad copycats. (Paging Google—this is supposed to be your area. And Apple News… what are you doing?)
But my favorite feature of Artifact was not its AI-influenced story browsing and categorization. I found it just as weird and off-putting as most other news aggregation apps that don’t allow me complete control over what I see. No, what I loved about Artifact was that you could take a meaningless clickbait headline and have the app read the story and write a new headline based on its contents.
Back in the day, when I learned how to write headlines (for newspapers!), the goal was to give the reader enough information to decide if they wanted to read that article. The Inverted Pyramid started above the story itself, even with key information in a headline and subhead that would let the reader decide if they wanted to bother reading that story.
But in the era of the web and news aggregators, headlines that give away pertinent information have become a lost art. Whole generations of editors have been trained to write coy headlines that will earn a click, even if the people who are clicking will be immediately disappointed by the truth of the story.
What’s most frustrating to me is that once this method of writing headlines is internalized, it’s very hard to break out of the habit. For instance, I subscribe to multiple news sites where you basically must pay in order to read articles… and yet the headlines are still clickbaity! San Francisco Chronicle, when you write, “This Bay Area city has a horrible secret,” I would like to know if it’s my city and if the secret is a serial killer or the lack of a good delicatessen.
This is where Artifact ruled, because its little AI agent would read that story and write a new headline. And if enough people said a headline was clickbait, all other users of the app would now see the AI headline instead of the original. Brilliant.
So let me put this out there to other creators of news apps, aggregators like Apple News but also RSS readers—this is a feature you should knock off. I would absolutely love to be able to see rewritten headlines for news sources that have failed to be forthcoming with factual headlines. Maybe the future of browsing news is an AI-driven service that writes good headlines so that I can make up my own mind about whether I want to read a story or not!
Anyway, I won’t miss Artifact much—but I will miss the perverse joy I felt everytime I had to ask an AI to improve on the work of a human being who has been miseducated about how headlines are supposed to work.
Personal Automations to keep my shower listening undisturbed.
I’ve learned in recent years that I’ve become something of a minimalist. I like keeping things simple, preferring glanceable information to alerts that get in my face whether I want them or not. I’ve reduced the number of apps that have permission to bug me, and more recently, I’ve embraced Apple’s Focus Modes to silence the noise.
There were several situations in which I found myself often being bugged, mostly on my Apple Watch, when I didn’t want to be, including when I was working (writing or podcasting), working out, playing a sport, or showering.
I don’t blame the apps that bug me when I’m doing something else—in large part, I’ve asked them to do it. (And as for the ones I haven’t, they will be silenced immediately as punishment!)
As for friends and colleagues who text me, I don’t blame them, either—they’re treating the text message as the asynchronous medium it’s meant to be. But having a text message sitting out there, unanswered, drives me batty—I’ll want to answer it. What’s worse, if I do answer it—usually with a canned reply from my Apple Watch—that reply often serves as a sign that I’m ready to engage in a larger conversation when I’m not. But I’m the cause of the problem, not them, and I need to deal with it.
I’ve addressed these issues using a few different approaches.
Setting a Recording Focus.
I’ve got a bunch of Stream Deck buttons that I press to start a podcast recording session, all of which run some sort of shortcut. I’ve added an additional couple of steps to all of them: when the session starts, I enter a Recording Focus Mode. And when the session ends, I turn that Focus off.
For writing, it’s trickier. I use different apps to write, and I use those apps in other contexts, so I’m largely triggering my Writing mode manually at this point. When I need to stick in my headphones and concentrate on writing, I will generally remember to click that box. I’d love to figure out some other way to automate this, but it may not be possible.
Workouts can automatically control the Fitness mode.
To avoid typing entire conversations by swiping fingers on an Apple Watch while trying to run—it’s absurd, and I’m sure I look absurd when I’m doing it—I use an Apple-built feature. On the Apple Watch, open the Settings app, tap Focus, then tap Fitness.
You’ll see an option to Turn on automatically when starting a workout. Flip this switch on, and you’ll be in a Fitness mode when you’re exercising. When the workout ends, the Focus Mode turns itself off!
You might think I don’t need to turn off notifications when I’m in the shower because how could they possibly affect me in there? But here’s the thing: First, some notifications have the strange effect of dipping the sound playing from my podcast player—as if they’re going to make a noise, but they’re silenced, so they don’t! But the dipping still happens. It’s very distracting.
Also, I leave my iPhone just outside the shower in case I need to skip to a different podcast mid-shower, or back up, or whatever. My shower is transparent glass. When a notification comes in, I can see my phone light up. It doesn’t matter that I shouldn’t notice—I do, and it drives me batty. I suppose I should put it face down, but that doesn’t address the dipping audio issue.
It doesn’t matter, though, because I’m using two triggers in iOS 17 to run shortcuts that solve the whole problem. One of the most underrated features of the Shortcuts app on the iPhone is Personal Automations, which are triggered when the iPhone experiences some specific conditions. As of iOS 17, you can trigger a shortcut when your phone connects or disconnects from a specific Bluetooth device.
So I built a simple shortcut called “DND Toggle” that gets the current Focus status, and if there isn’t one, turns on Do Not Disturb. If there is one, it turns off that Focus Mode. Then, I specified that the shortcut should run every time my iPhone connects to my Bluetooth shower speaker. That’s it! Now, when I turn on the speaker, the automation runs, and my iPhone enters Do Not Disturb mode—which it remains in until I turn the speaker back off.
Location is a built-in trigger for a Focus mode.
To address getting bugged while curling, I’m using a different Focus feature. I created a new mode called Curling (it’s got a snowflake icon, how cute!) and scrolled down in the settings for this mode to the Set a Schedule setting. Now, when I pull into the parking lot at the curling club, my phone enters Curling Mode. There’s a custom curling-themed wallpaper (for fun!), but more importantly, my notifications are silenced. When I leave the club, the mode ends. (In reality, it ends when I finish curling, assuming I’ve set a curling workout on my Apple Watch. As detailed above, the act of starting that workout means I’ll be placed in Fitness mode, and when I’ve finished, it’ll take me out of all Focus Modes.)
Now, as I write this, I’m realizing that maybe I could do with fewer Focus Modes since all of my modes are trying to do the same thing and have most of the same settings: let messages from my immediate family through, but nothing else. Maybe simplifying my Focus Modes will be a future project. But for now, I’ve got what I want: I don’t see interrupting messages until I’m done doing what I’m doing. It’s better this way. I recommend it!
