Look, I don’t know if that recent report about the new OLED iPad Pro costing between $1500 and $2000 is accurate. It’s always tricky to predict product prices, since they’re decided deep inside Apple Park, not off on the supply chain from which most new-product rumors emanate.
But I do know this: Adding OLED to the iPad Pro is only going to make it more expensive. The current iPad Pro models start at $799 and $1099 and go up from there. (A 2TB 12.9-inch M2 iPad Pro with cellular, an Apple Pencil, and a Magic Keyboard will run you nearly $2900!) I would be surprised, frankly, if any OLED iPad Pro costs less than $999, and even a price that low seems unlikely.
We’re talking prices getting pretty comparable to those of Mac laptops, and that’s without factoring in the accessories. While dedicated iPad Pro users might not flinch at prices like that—or, more likely, will flinch and then roll their eyes and then pull out their wallets anyway—it’s asking a lot of other potential iPad buyers.
Is Apple risking the future of the iPad Pro by making it too expensive? Not necessarily. In fact, this might be one in a series of moves that will set up the iPad for future success at both the high-end and midrange of Apple’s product line.
AppleVis, an organization devoted to empowering blind and low vision users of Apple products, has published its second annual Apple Vision Accessibility report card. The survey collects opinions of readers who use VoiceOver and the other vision-related accessibility features of Apple platforms.
Overall ratings were slightly down over the previous year, with the exception of tvOS, which improved from an average 3.5 out of 5, to 4.0. VoiceOver ratings were also down, with tvOS ticking up slightly. Braille users gave iOS, iPadOS and macOS noticeably higher ratings for 2023, with tvOS and watchOS taking hits. Low vision users rated all platforms higher for 2023 than in 2022.
In a year of OS releases that did not focus on new vision accessibility features, survey respondents were mostly concerned about ongoing bugs, though many acknowledged that a major long-standing macOS VoiceOver bug—known as the “Safari not responding” bug—had finally been fixed.
iOS and watchOS earned praise for new features, including new Braille options, and fine-grained control of licensed VoiceOver voices. The Point and Speak feature of iOS (only available on Pro and Pro Max phones) came in for criticism for being “not ready for prime time.”
A user named Sebby reflected the feelings of many respondents who want Apple to focus on fixing existing bugs before adding new features, especially on macOS. “We desperately need a Snow Leopard-like release for VoiceOver,” Sebby wrote.
Among the content that will be available at launch is a catalog of 150 3D movies, including recent releases like Dune and *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; if you buy or have already purchased a movie that has a 3D version, you’ll get that for free. Apple also says some third-party services, including Disney+, will offer 3D versions of movies at launch.
It also provided specific information about content available as Apple Immersive Video, a 180-degree video format that puts users in the middle of an experience. At launch, that will include an Alicia Keys rehearsal session, a series following athletes including a tight-rope walk over the fjords, close encounters with wild life, and an immersive film with dinosaurs from Jon Favreau. That last one is also the launching point for an app called Encounter Dinosaur that will let you interact with three-dimensional models of the creatures. (At least some of these experiences were demoed for press last June.)
Unsurprisingly, the primary third-party partner mentioned for Vision Pro content is Disney, whose CEO Bob Iger also appeared during the keynote introducing the device. Apple confirms that Disney+ subscribers get access to their own immersive environments for watching content, including a theater inspired by Hollywood’s El Capitan, Monster, Inc.‘s Scare Floor, the Avengers Tower, and—in a shot no doubt aimed directly at me—Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder on Tatooine.
With just three days before the Vision Pro goes up for pre-order, and about two and a half weeks from release, Apple is clearly making a push to drive home the value of the Vision Pro, in an attempt to forestall criticism that the device is expensive and doesn’t have a clear use case.
You might have seen a story making the rounds last week that the Chinese government was cracking down on people sending anti-government materials via Apple’s AirDrop feature, having compromised the security of the system.
I wondered, given the transient nature of these interactions, how exactly that was happening—sometimes these stories can be a bit overblown, especially when entities like the Chinese government—which certainly has a vested interested in looking omniscient—are involved.
In 2021, researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another.
The exploit involves the use of colorfully named rainbow tables and relies at least somewhat on the Chinese government’s ability to pre-hash every single phone number in the country, thus making it trivial to use a given identifier and link it to a person.
But, as Goodin points out, Apple has been aware of this vulnerability since 2019 and despite there being options to improve the anonymity, has not made changes to the privacy of this feature. (Apple’s software also apparently keeps logs of prior AirDrop contacts, which is ripe for exploitation if someone gets hold of the physical device—a fact that some security researchers only learned in the course of this story.) Combined with previous AirDrop changes that had negative effects on dissident activity in the country1 and Apple’s complicated relationship with the Chinese government, it certainly presents an unappetizing picture.
To a certain degree, Apple relies on stories like this staying under the radar. Inaction can be presented as either ignorance or tacit compliance, whereas taking steps to improve the privacy of AirDrop might be construed by Beijing as a challenge to its authority—a stick situation for Apple, given how much it relies upon its relationship with the country for the production of its devices. But Apple also makes privacy a huge selling point of its devices—a subject of ad campaigns, a highlighted section in virtually every keynote—and the company surely doesn’t want to have to append an asterisk to all of those claims with the footnote “Except in China.”
I still wouldn’t argue that change is a net negative, since it also prevents people from getting spammed with unwanted content, but it was first deployed in China, which certainly merited an eyebrow-raise. ↩
[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.]
Vision Pro orders are happening this Friday, with the product shipping in a few weeks. We break down Apple’s announcement strategy and our reactions to the reactions to the news.
Apple hits its Vision Pro target but Microsoft still comes out on top. And Apple is full of excuses.
Here we go, Vision Pro
If you’ve been living in cave the last week… well, that actually sounds nice for 2024. Is there any more room? But in case you missed it, the Vision Pro will officially go on sale on January 19th and be available on February 2nd. “Early 2024” indeed.
Still, you may have some questions. I know I do. Like, does the cave have running water? Trash and recycling service? But maybe your questions are about the Vision Pro.
Apple is ready for you. You can try one out at your local Apple Store. Don’t have a local Apple Store? That’s OK. You can probably fly to one and try it out and it’ll still cost you way less than buying one.
Think you’d rather go for one of the cheaper options just announced at CES? Hope you like disappointment.
Finally, if you’re worried about suffering from FOMO, I wouldn’t worry that much. You’re probably not going to know that many people who own one.
Sure, it was annoying when you knew that one kid in grade school who had the Kenner Millennium Falcon play set. But while a brand new one of those will set you back almost two Vision Pros these days, Apple headset prices are probably only going to come down in the next few years. Patience may be a virtue at this point.
Worth less
Time to stick a large, novelty fork in the side of Apple Park because the company is over.
Apple does not allow directors to stand for reelection after reaching age 75, which means that both Al Gore and James Bell are retiring from the board due to their age.
OK, this maybe the one instance where the idea that we should run government like a business actually makes sense.
Still, time to shut Apple down and give the money back to the shareholders. And no shareholder could use the money more right now than Tim Cook.
Speaking of how Apple and Microsoft are, like Indiana Jones and René Belloq, “very much alike”, Apple’s responses to regulators these days seem straight out of Microsoft’s early 2000s playbook.
The company in its argument to the EU competition enforcer said it operates five App Stores on iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, Apple TVs and Apple Watches, with each designed to distribute apps for a specific operating system and Apple device.
This is a real child-says-yes-he-can-take-trash-out-and-then-acts-innocent-when-you-notice-later-he-DIDN’T-ACTUALLY-TAKE-THE-TRASH-OUT kind of response. It’s also becoming a bit of a knee-jerk reaction for the company, as it previously said something similar about Safari.
The company’s claim is based on the argument that Safari for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are entirely different and serve different purposes.
It’s a browser, a browser and, uh, a browser.
Are you getting it?
Not really.
[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.]
BBEdit incorporates a controversial feature in a unique way; Jason and Dan discover that they’re a few keys short of a full keyboard; and we begin psyching ourselves up for the Vision Pro era.
Where and how we watch media; whether any phone app justifies a bespoke hardware piece like Rabbit R1; intriguing tech revealed at CES; and the best pointing device for screens.
Nearly eight months after its introduction at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the Vision Pro is poised to go on sale: Apple has said that preorders for the device will begin on January 19, with the Vision Pro expected to be available in stores starting on February 2.
Despite being the company’s first new major platform in almost a decade, though, the fanfare for the Vision Pro’s arrival has been decidedly muted. Apple didn’t hold another event, opting instead for a press release and teaser ad, and the company didn’t add much in the way of new information about the product and its capabilities.
That’s not entirely surprising though: while we may have been accustomed to a certain style of product launch from Apple, the Vision Pro is a very different type of device, and that necessitates a very different kind of release.
I love Rogue Amoeba’s Mac audio utilities, but in the Apple silicon era, installing them has been pretty rough, due to Apple requiring multiple reboots and a visit to Recovery Mode to perform a dubious-sounding reduction to a Mac’s “security policy.”
There is apparently great news on this front, however! Tucked into an otherwise perfectly nice summation of Rogue Amoeba’s year, CEO Paul Kafasis wrote:
We’ll soon be shipping updates that simplify things immensely. In fact, Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and Piezo will feature an installer-free setup that won’t even need your administrator password. Meanwhile, Loopback and SoundSource will use a new audio capture plugin called ARK that won’t require a single system restart. It’s going to be an incredible improvement to our user experience.
As someone who has had to reinstall Audio Hijack, Loopback, and SoundSource multiple times in the last few months… this is pretty fantastic news. (How in the world will Audio Hijack not even require an administrator password?! 1)
This has been a real pain point for more than three years, so kudos to everyone (presumably both inside Apple and at Rogue Amoeba) who worked on the problem and found a solution that lets some of macOS’s most clever and useful utilities run without these issues.
macOS 14.2 introduced the System Audio Recording permission box shown above, but I’ve not discovered a single app that uses it… at least not yet? ↩
The big new feature is the addition of support for ChatGPT via the same Worksheet interface BBEdit has used to interact with a command-line shell for many years. Like a Shell Worksheet, a ChatGPT Worksheet is an interactive BBEdit document: It looks like a regular text window (because it is one!), but when you type a command and press a hotkey (it’s Enter by default), that command is sent directly to ChatGPT, and the result appears right below it in the same document.
It’s a clever way for BBEdit to dip its toe into the large language model waters without implementing a Copilot-like code helper within documents themselves. Now, BBEdit users can toggle between a GPT worksheet and other documents, copying and pasting as needed, without leaving the app. I’ve used it a few times already, and it sure beats having to navigate to OpenAI’s website in order to grab some quick prototype code.
The new Cheat Sheets feature provides interactive floating palettes that can teach custom commands. For example, the Markdown Cheat Sheet not only shows various forms of Markdown but if you click on any of the examples, they’ll be automatically inserted into your document. They’re reminiscent of BBEdit’s Clippings feature, and unsurprisingly, one of the included Cheat Sheets contains all the placeholders used in building a BBEdit Clipping.
There’s also a new Minimap view, which lets you see a large thumbnail of a very long document, highlighting the portion that’s currently visible. You can navigate anywhere in a document by clicking on the Minimap. This feature will be useful for visually oriented users who need to navigate through very long documents.
As usual, there are dozens (Bare Bones says 200!) of new features in the lengthy release notes, including the addition of a grep pattern validity indicator in the Find window (so you don’t have to click before realizing you left off a parenthesis!), a big interface revision to the simple and powerful Text Factory in-app automation system, quick access to comparing different versions of the current document, a revamp of Project Settings so that they’re no longer modal, and improved Accessibility compatibility including Voiceover, Full Keyboard Access, and third-party utilities that rely on the Accessibility system such as Grammarly.
Every time there’s a new version of BBEdit, I’m inspired by the creativity that continues to flourish in a product that’s more than 30 years old. But there’s still more to do! The app’s support for Shortcuts is still quite meager, for example.
A new license for BBEdit 15 is $60, with upgrades from version 14 costing $30 and from earlier versions costing $40.
Way back when Google Reader went the way of all Google products (RIP), I ended up switching to Feedly, a web-based RSS service that had good integration with third-party clients. But this past week I decided to ditch it for good.
The truth is, I never really used Feedly’s web-based offerings, or its first-party apps on iPhone or the Mac (the latter of which was apparently quietly retired last year). Instead, I mainly used Feedly as the back-end for my RSS app of choice, Reeder.1
Lately, though, I’d noticed that certain feeds—especially those on smaller sites—just didn’t seem to update very quickly. That’s apparently by design: in part because those who paid for Feedly (which I never have) get faster updates, and in part because the polling interval seems to vary from site to site.2
Specifically I noticed that a post on my personal blog didn’t seem to be showing up, which a few people subscribed to my RSS feed let me know. That turned out to be mainly because of an issue in WordPress where my own RSS feeds were being cached, but even once I remedied that it still took a solid day for the post to show up in my own reader.
That seemed silly to me: I only subscribe to thirty-some feeds, probably about half of which are actually updated regularly, and I’d prefer for the control over when I get my items delivered to be in my own hands, not that of a middleman.
Fortunately, Reeder (like other RSS readers) at some point added the ability to subscribe to feeds within the app and have them synced between devices via iCloud. All I had to do was export the feeds from my Feedly account as an OPML file and import them into the iCloud account, something that took probably less than a minute.
It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services. I’ve relied on RSS to do my job since I first started writing about the Mac back in the mid 2000s, and even in a world that’s become dominated by social media it’s still pretty effective. I kind of wish that other services made this kind of portability so easy and painless—after all, we should be in control of our own data, not some middleman.
I don’t want to knock Feedly here: I found their service stable and reliable for more than a decade, and not only did I not pay a dime for it, they didn’t put roadblocks in my way to leave. That’s actually pretty great, as far as service goes, and frankly I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t throw some money their way. But as the year starts off, I like the idea of removing some of the little tech annoyances that I just take as a given and seeing if I can make my life a little smoother.
I was a longtime NetNewsWire user, and I still really like the app, but I’ve now been using Reeder for so long that it’s just the way my brain works. ↩
Presumably this is a sort of caching system, as I imagine it doesn’t want to hit the same site x number of times for everybody in Feedly subscribed to 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.]
Jason and Myke are back just in time to miss the Vision Pro shipping news, but they’ve still got time to catch up on the news they missed and preview their expectations for the year to come.
The Sonos Port sits atop a pair of Niles speaker controllers and an amplifier in a custom media cabinet.
On Christmas night, my husband and I hosted a gathering of family. There was turkey. There was pie. There was music – my carefully curated holiday playlist streamed through the living room, kitchen, patio and even the guest bathroom.
It was the first time in years I’d been able to make that happen the way I wanted. And it all came together thanks to a $450 box that’s about the size of a Mac Mini.
The history part
Soon after we bought our house, we installed speakers and audio gear. I wanted to pipe music from the living room receiver to the patio, so we started with a pair of outdoor speakers. Soon, three sets of ceiling-mounted Sonance speakers sprouted around the house, along with some floor-standing Infinity cabinets in the living room. We controlled it all from a Niles SS-6 speaker controller stored under a bar in the hallway (since upgraded to a custom cabinet with a slide-out drawer for electronics). I would spend the moments before people arrived for a party twiddling wall-mounted volume knobs so that the sound was delivered at a pleasing level in different rooms of the house.
At first, audio sources were limited to a stereo receiver and a six-CD changer. (We don’t need to talk about the old tape deck in the stereo cabinet.) Somewhere in the mid-aughts, I got ahold of a Wi-Fi-enabled gadget with RCA outputs, and a matching A/V iPod dock. It all connected to an iMac and to the Pioneer receiver that controlled the house system. But eventually the little dock died, and I sought out a more robust solution.
Enter Sonos
From the first, bringing Sonos gear into the mix was about adding features to my existing setup, not creating a new one. If a few extra speakers came home to add music in new places, that would just be a bonus.
To do this, I bought a Sonos Connect – not one of the company’s most high-profile offerings, but the one that allowed a physical connection to my stereo components, and a wireless one to my iMac. I chose the Connect instead of the Sonos Amp, which does the same thing, but includes an amplifier of its own. (Shoutout to the fine folks at A&B TV in Austin, who sold us most of this audio gear, and suggested the two-box solution.)
We also bought a Niles amplifier that powered the setup. This meant we no longer needed an A/V receiver, and it also meant that if one component (amp or Sonos box) died, the other would still be on the job. As it turned out, I made the right decision there.
…then Sonos broke up with us
It happened just two months before the COVID pandemic began. Sonos announced it would drop support for some older devices. You could still use them, but you couldn’t add them to a new network or wrangle them with the company’s updated management software. The Sonos Connect was among the orphaned devices.
With no immediate plans for music-infused gatherings at home, I chose not to replace the Connect, even though Sonos offered discounts on new equipment. I focused instead on the three Sonos speakers I’d added over the years. It meant, unfortunately, that I could play music from the Sonos speakers or from the stereo—but couldn’t get all my speakers working together.
Finally, I bit the bullet in December of last year. I picked up a Sonos Port ($449, but I managed to get it on sale), which replaced the Connect, and turned out to be the one device I needed to bring my system into the modern world.
Any Port in a storm
A podcast I’ve AirPlayed from my iPhone to the Sonos Port becomes available to all speakers on my network, even those that aren’t AirPlay-capable. It appears like any other audio in the Sonos app.
Because the Port supports AirPlay, I can now send it any audio I like, and choose which of the ceiling and floor speakers plays it. The setup looks like this: In the hall cabinet, the Sonos Port is set up as an input to the Niles amplifier. That amp is connected to the various speakers in the house via the old speaker controller.
I also have three Sonos speakers on same network as the Port. And I can play my music library, Apple Music, or one of a few streamed radio stations I like, to everything. For my Christmas party, I used speakers in the TV room, living room, guest bathroom and patio, as well as a Sonos Play:3 in a bedroom where folks left their coats. I ran the playlist from the Sonos app and an iPad that I set on a shelf so people could see what was playing. It was all a big success, and the playlist outlasted the last guests, who hummed Vince Guaraldi tunes as they took their leave.
It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered my favorite new audio trick with this new setup. While retrieving all the junk I’d hidden in my office during the party. I launched Overcast on my phone and set AirPlay to output to the Port. Next, I used my controller box switch box to select only the speakers in my office.
Voilà! I can now AirPlay from my phone to my ceiling speakers. The Sonos hardware is just acting as an AirPlay middle man. When I moved into the bedroom later, I turned down the Port’s volume slider in the Sonos app, end added my old bedroom Play:3 while a podcast continued to play. I have AirPlay access to all the non-AirPlay speakers in my house.
So much of this would be simpler if I’d gone all in on new Sonos speakers after the 2020 product changes. But I like my built-in speakers, and I’ll keep finding ways to get the most out of them as long as the speakers, the amplifier and the volume knobs hold out.
Game designer Sean Bates found an iPhone in a bush Sunday that had fallen from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when it lost a part of its fuselage shortly after takeoff. The phone was undamaged, still on, and had the end of a sheared-off charging cable plugged in. Bates posted pictures of his discovery that afternoon, one of which included the screen showing a still-open email with a baggage receipt.
The goggles do…something? Well, you’ll find out soon enough: Apple announced on Monday that the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S. starting on February 2, with preorders starting next Friday, January 19.
Unsurprisingly, the spatial computer will be available at all Apple Stores in the U.S., but it’ll also be available via the online store as well—there’d been some speculation in recent weeks about whether or not that would be the case at launch, given the need for fitting particular accessories.
While we’re all plenty aware of the Vision Pro’s $3499 price tag, Apple’s also added some additional information. For one, the Vision Pro has 256GB of onboard storage (and, as far as we can tell, no options for more). For another, those users who need vision correction will be able to pick up optical inserts that attach magnetically: $99 for readers, and $149 for prescriptions, though the company doesn’t go into further detail about which prescriptions will be available or how you’ll convey that information.
And we now know exactly what’s in the box: in addition to the Vision Pro, it’ll include two different bands, a Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band; a Light Seal and two Light Seal Cushions; a cover for the front of the device; the battery and USB-C charging cable; a USB-C Power Adapter (for $3499, I’d hope so); and, most importantly, a Polishing Cloth.
The press release, which happens to drop on the same day that CES opens on Las Vegas and no doubt is intended to steal some thunder there, also suggests that the company won’t hold any further events to talk up the Vision Pro before its launch. Given that supplies are expected to be constrained, and the addressable market is on the smaller side, Apple’s no doubt banking on the fact that people who want to buy one already know all about it.
One big question mark is the retail experience, which Apple Store employees are being trained on now, according to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and others. The Vision Pro is perhaps the most challenging product from a store experience perspective, and it will be fascinating to see exactly how the company handles the sales and fit process—especially for physical stores versus online. But we’re sure to find out in short order.
[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.]
Last month, I took a bit of an odyssey and explored the idea that maybe there aren’t that many must-have third-party apps, only nice-to-have ones. I wasn’t saying that everyone should dump all their software and return to their defaults, but I was saying that macOS’s default configuration has come a long way over the years and that the right approach to setting up a new Mac might be to start with the basics and then slowly add when you find you need a little bit more.
One of the apps I was thinking about while I wrote this was Flexibits’s Fantastical, which has been my calendar app for more than a decade. As a result of that decade spent away from Calendar, I’ve largely lost track of what separates a third-party app with a $57 annual subscription fee from the stuff Apple gives me for free with my devices.
I’ve also had a general sense that most of Flexibits’s recent updates to Fantastical focused on features that don’t actually improve my use of the app. I’m not open for meetings, so the Openings feature didn’t really land, and the meeting proposal feature ended up being much heavier and Fantastical-centric than just using a lightweight scheduling app like StrawPoll. It seems like most of the company’s focus over the past two years has been on refining those features, which might be wise for serving their core audience, but it just doesn’t register for me.
So, I decided to spend a few weeks without Fantastical, just using Apple’s Calendar app. Here’s what I learned.
Surviving on the default
Unsurprisingly, the moment I switched back to Calendar, I lost a whole bunch of features. I was used to Fantastical’s split interface on my Mac and iPad, which lists all events on the left side of the screen and then displays my preferred interface, the Week view, on the right side. Apple just wants to show you the floating colored blobs. (On the iPad, Apple’s calendar also doesn’t display the start time of events in Week view, which was a drag.)
Apple’s got a bunch of Calendar widgets, but they’re inferior to Fantastical’s. The List view, in particular, is not nearly as information-dense as Fantastical’s list widget. Still, I switched over to Calendar’s.
I have a default set of calendars that I want to view at all times, but sometimes, I need to briefly toggle on other calendars so I can coordinate with my wife’s calendar or place something on a shared podcast calendar. I used Fantastical’s Calendar Sets feature to toggle between views, but there’s no such control available in Calendar. Instead, I built a Keyboard Maestro macro that clicks on specific calendar locations to make them disappear and reappear.
Three copies of every event.
Speaking of multiple calendars, it’s baffling to me that Calendar is unable to display multiple identical events on different calendars as a single item. When I toggle into my podcast scheduling view, every Incomparable podcast becomes a cramped stack of three identical items: one for my calendar, one for the calendar used by panelists, and one for our public-facing calendar used by listeners and various automations.
But my biggest adaptation came in the menu bar. Fantastical offers a powerful menu bar app that lets me quickly add events and, more importantly, view a list of events for the next few days without needing to open the app. Calendar has… nothing?
Fantastical (left) and Itsycal (right) dropping down from the menu bar.
I ended up solving this problem by using Itsycal, a free app by Mowglii Apps. Itsycal hit the spot, though it’s not quite as pretty as Fantastical’s menu bar item, and adding a new event requires a second keystroke and doesn’t support natural-language entry of events. You also can’t edit events from within Itsycal.
Starter calendar
So, after three weeks of using Apple’s apps on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, what’s the verdict? I feel like my original suggestion about defaults was pretty accurate, actually. Apple’s Calendar app is fine. It works, it’s serviceable, the widgets are fine, and with a free third-party utility, you can even get a nice quick-access calendar in the menu bar.
That said, it was also clear to me that Fantastical offers a much more useful and refined experience than Apple. Calendar feels pretty old and static, and some of its gaps are really baffling—especially quick access in the menu bar! Is Fantastical $57 a year better? (I should mention that there’s a free version of Fantastical, but it omits some features that Calendar offers.)
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? If you schedule a lot of meetings and have people schedule meetings with you, it’s probably a no-brainer! But for me, it was a little tougher. Still, after three weeks without, I feel like I’m willing to spend $57 a year just to get a nicer, better calendar experience than Apple offers. But I also would not hesitate to suggest that any new Mac user start with Calendar (and maybe Itsycal!) and try it out before considering spending extra on a fancier calendar app.
I wish Fantastical had given me more of a sense of forward motion and value over the last four years for my subscription fee. I wish Apple would take some lessons from Fantastical and strive to make the default Calendar app a little less generic.
Minneapolis-based investment firm, Deepwater Asset Management, predicts that in 2024 Apple will finally acquire Peloton – the firm is headed by former tech analyst, Gene Munster.
Oh, of course. Answering the question “Does Gene Munster still writes Apple fan fiction?” Yes. The answer is yes.
The article then raises the question: can Betteridge’s Law of Headlines also be applied to sentences that appear in the article?
Would Apple acquire a business that hasn’t shown growth in nearly three years?
It’s not completely out of the question for Apple to buy Peloton. It did buy Beats, after all. But it also didn’t buy a car company and didn’t buy a home automation company and didn’t buy a thousand other companies you’ve heard of because it tends to buy the ones you haven’t heard of.
If Apple does acquire Peloton, you can bet that Tim Cook will mandate the trainers not provide reviews of Apple TV+ shows during the exercise sessions.
iPhones will get larger until morale improves
Well, another iPhone launch quarter is behind us so it’s time for this suffering iPhone mini fan to take a big mouthful of water and see what’s in the news headed into 2024.
According to multiple sources, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will feature an increase in display size compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max…
PFFFFFFFFT
With iPhones getting larger, you may wonder how long it will be be before they are the size of iPads? Well, don’t worry, because Apple apparently wants to make those bigger, too. It’ll all work out.
If you’re one of the group of large-phone fetishists that Apple is targeting here, you can always buy one of those attachments that will put a physical keyboard on your iPhone that were announced this week. That’ll make your phone bigger. Then maybe some of us could get the small phones we want.
Keeping up with the Joneses
Get ready to read a mess of “SAMSUNG LEAPFROGS APPLE” headlines because the company is way ahead in the race to ship phones that give you catastrophically bad answers.
Whoops. Look, you can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few Tide pods into a pan, placing the metal pan in microwave, setting the microwave to HIGH, microwaving for 45 minutes to an hour, then enjoying your delicious omelette.
Sorry, I let the AI finish that paragraph. Wait, when you ask an AI for a recipe, does it make up a whole backstory first about how it learned this recipe while living abroad in Tuscany during its junior year before finally showing you the recipe? If only Philip K. Dick were still alive to tell us.
Despite all this, Apple seems set to throw its hat into the ring of fire.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this rumored but I was amused by MacRumors’s note that this comes “from a user with a track record for posting Apple rumors.” Hey, some of us have even longer track records for posting Apple rumors, so that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement.
[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.]
