FaceTime helps customers easily connect with those who matter most and with iOS 15, conversations with friends and family feel even more natural. With spatial audio, voices in a FaceTime call sound as if they are coming from where the person is positioned on the screen, and new microphone modes separate the user’s voice from background noise. Inspired by the stunning portrait photos taken on iPhone, Portrait mode is now available for FaceTime and designed specifically for video calls, so users can blur their background and put themselves in focus. While using Group FaceTime, a new grid view enables participants to see more faces at the same time.
Users can now share experiences with SharePlay while connecting with friends on FaceTime, including listening to songs together with Apple Music, watching a TV show or movie from Apple TV+ and other streaming services in sync, or sharing their screen to view apps together. SharePlay works across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and with shared playback controls, anyone in a SharePlay session can play, pause, or jump ahead.
FaceTime calls also extend beyond Apple devices with the ability to create a link from iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and share it through Messages, Calendar, Mail, or third-party apps, so anyone can join a FaceTime call from their web browser on Android and Windows devices. FaceTime calls on the web remain end-to-end encrypted, so privacy is not compromised.
It is incredibly tempting to glibly pass off many of these new FaceTime additions as features targeting an era that (we all hope, at least) has passed, and Apple is late to the game. I’m pretty sure I tweeted a joke to that effect on keynote day. On reflection, though, it is an unfair view.
Zoom and Microsoft Teams have dominated mindshare recently because of the surge in popularity of group video chats in 2020, but FaceTime is a huge player when it comes to video calls in general, because it is incredibly popular for personal one-on-one calls. Maybe the biggest actually.
Save for grid view which is specific to mass group chats, all of these new iOS 15 features will be beneficial to the friendships and relationships forged over FaceTime calls that take place every single day, in their millions. Rather than painting it all with a pandemic brush, I now note that many of these features were actually requested and in demand years ago … well before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Screen sharing will make FaceTime family tech support so much better. The underlying intents of screen sharing and SharePlay go all the way back to iChat AV from macOS Tiger, but they never made the leap to FaceTime until now. I guess we have the pandemic to thank for motivating Apple to move these features higher up the internal to-do list.
Maybe some friend will get together on Group FaceTime because of SharePlay. Still niche though.
The ability to join FaceTime calls via web links (including Android and PC support) is clearly Apple’s half-hearted attempt to battle Zoom and Microsoft Teams in the remote work and school videoconferencing space. I doubt it will get much traction. Products like Teams have all sorts of components to help people collaborate on projects, and arrange group meetings. FaceTime has none of that stuff. FaceTime is more like an add-on of Messages, competing against WhatsApp and traditional phone calls if anything. You also see this in how each service handles identity; Zoom and Teams have abstracted user accounts, whereas on FaceTime you connect by sharing your personal phone number or email address — information that you only want to give out to close friends.
Between the PR blitz, ad campaigns and the actual feature itself, the rollout of App Tracking Transparency means that iOS users are now more aware of the relationship between apps and third-party advertising and analytics companies. The power to deny an app the ability to do something many people were previously oblivious to — third-party tracking — with one button press is powerful and meaningful.
You won’t see an App Tracking Transparency dialog show up in any Apple app. This is because App Tracking Transparency falls solely under the purview of third-party tracking, and Apple’s apps technically don’t share data with anyone but Apple. Under the letter of the law, Apple is in the clear. But of course, it is Apple that wrote the law. It’s been niggling at me for months that App Tracking Transparency is defined in such a way that Apple’s own data collection activity is unaffected.
Apple Card needs to send your data to third-party agencies to check your credit. It just so happens that one exemption of ATT is reporting data to a third-party for the purposes of evaluating creditworthiness.
App Tracking Transparency comprises a laundry list of clauses and exemptions, but the main distinction is the first-party versus third-party thing. That puts Apple in the clear as it doesn’t run an ad network that other companies participate in; Apple serves ads to its users inside its own ‘first-party’ walled garden. Apple’s targeted advertising currently manifests itself in the News app (ad banners), the Stocks app (ad banners in integrated News stories), and the App Store (search ads).
Whilst it is true that Apple’s ad network uses far fewer signals than most of its competitors to target ads, it probably collects more than you think. Basics like age, gender, home address, current GPS location are in play. It also incorporates what kinds of media you download from the App Store to generate demographics buckets. To reiterate, Apple looks at what you have downloaded across its content stores — music, television, books and apps — and puts your Apple ID in appropriate marketing categories. For instance, this means Apple News can advertise games to you, because your account’s profile indicates that you like to play games.
I’d refer to this as Apple’s ad tracking. Apple officially calls this “Personalised Ads”, because it wants to define tracking as a third-party concept. The behaviour of Personalised Ads is not conveyed through any kind of user-facing dialog or permissions prompt, unlike Apple Tracking Transparency. In fact, Apple enables ads personalisation by default. The setting to turn it off is buried in Settings, tucked away at the bottom of the Privacy screen (conveniently positioned below the fold).
I don’t really have a problem with News targeting ads based on stuff I read in news. I think what irks me the most about this situation is that an Apple ID is a prerequisite to owning an iPhone and you can’t download any application from the App Store without one. Apple’s delineations of first-party and third-party allows the App Store to share any information it pleases with the News app, without telling the user at all. It feels wrong that News silently target ads to me based on the apps I download, the music I listen to and the television shows I watch.
The data Apple is collecting is relatively boring and benign … but it still is data collection for the purposes of advertising. This goes against the principles Apple advocates in its commitments to privacy and data minimisation. Again, it’s not that Apple is applying one rule for itself and another for developers. After all, Facebook is allowed to share as much data as it wants with Instagram and WhatsApp as they all fall under the first-party rule. But I have come to expect Apple to be better than Facebook, and I expect them to do more than the bare minimum.
It is self-serving that Apple classifies the App Store as first-party and therefore its ad network avoids the friction of App Tracking Transparency. As it stands today, the vast majority of iOS users have ads personalisation de facto enabled and they don’t even know what it is or that it is happening.
One way for Apple to behave better about this would be to treat the App Store as if it was a third-party operation. In accordance with its own rules, this would mean the App Store would need to get explicit permission before it could show targeted ads. The permissions dialog would educate users about the kinds of data Apple collects for advertising purposes and let them make up their own minds about whether they are comfortable with it.
Apple today announced Apple Music is bringing industry-leading sound quality to subscribers with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos. Spatial Audio gives artists the opportunity to create immersive audio experiences for their fans with true multidimensional sound and clarity. Apple Music subscribers will also be able to listen to more than 75 million songs in Lossless Audio — the way the artists created them in the studio. These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost.
A couple of months ago, Spotify announced that they were working on a paid hi-fi tier to launch later this year. Spotify is actively seeking ways to increase profitability of its large pool of active users, and hi-fi looked like one way to do that. Seemingly simultaneously, Apple and Amazon were campaigning to the labels (who ultimately dictate streaming pricing) that they wanted to promote lossless quality options as a way to increase the overall number of people streaming, rather than as some incremental upsell. Apple and Amazon’s negotiations evidently succeeded and so both Apple Music and Amazon Music HD will be offering lossless at no extra cost. Apple and Amazon are able to focus on growing subscriber counts because they can afford to aggressively subsidise their streaming divisions. In contrast, Spotify is an independent company and draws all of its income from that subscription price. Therefore, it is much more sensitive to things like ARPU. Making hi-fi a commodity feature is not what Spotify wanted to happen.
In addition to the ruthless war of competitive business, I also think Apple recognises that lossless is a very niche thing. Similar to the App Store Small Business Program, lossless-as-free is a huge win for Apple in goodwill with very little associated cost to the company. It’s an attractive feature on paper but I doubt many people will ever stream Apple Music lossless in practice. Beyond just issues of bandwidth, I’d guess less than one percent of Apple Music subscribers actually have premium audio equipment that can reproduce the additional details found in lossless music compared to standard Apple Music AAC encoded tracks. This is reflected in the fact that streaming lossless will be an entirely opt-in feature.
The spatial audio tracks with Dolby Atmos is going to have a more meaningful impact on users. This will be on by default and can be experienced by the millions of AirPods owners. Apple says it will stream Atmos songs to any Apple or Beats headphones with the H1 or W1 chip, although I’m sure certain models (like AirPods Max) will do a better job at creating a 3D soundstage than others. Interestingly, Spatial Audio for video content specifically requires AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. I think the difference is that the latter uses the gyroscope and accelerometers to position the music relative to your iPhone or iPad. Apple Music won’t try to do relative positioning, and so the simulation of Dolby Atmos surround sound is purely done by the headphones themselves. This also means that any third-party headphones that tout Dolby Atmos support can also benefit.
The all-new Siri Remote features an innovative clickpad control that offers five-way navigation for better accuracy, and is also touch-enabled for the fast directional swipes Apple TV users love. The outer ring of the clickpad supports an intuitive circular gesture that turns it into a jog control — perfect for finding a scene in a movie or show. And with its one-piece aluminum design, the new Siri Remote fits more comfortably in a user’s hand.
It feels a little silly to be commending something as primitive as a TV remote, but the new Siri Remote deserves it. When Apple responded to the butterfly keyboard backlash, they simply reverted back to a tried-and-trusted design. The Magic Keyboard in the 2019 MacBook Pro was near-identical to what they shipped before — prior to the butterfly fiasco that is. It was a crowd pleaser but also a little boring. Had they really learned nothing in that four year span of misery?
The new Siri Remote is not retracing the past. It’s a robust combination of the Apple Infrared Remote and the trackpad Siri Remote, squarely addressing the failings of the latter. There’s no glass surface anymore, so it should be more durable and not prone to breaking upon being dropped or knocked off the coffee table. There’s asymmetry that you can feel with your fingers, so your brain can know which way is up just by touch. There is a physical D-Pad arrangement with labelled indicators, so you can do traditional up-right-left-down navigation like every other TV remote on the planet. And yet, at the same time, Apple didn’t lose the best bit of the trackpad: the ability to swipe the trackpad to zoom through a list of items. The circular D-Pad doubles as a capacitive touch surface (the “clickpad” as named by Apple marketing) so you can still do the same gestures on it. A new innovation: if you move your finger in a circular motion around the outer edge, it scrubs through the playing video just like an iPod clickwheel.
One let down is the lack of Find My integration, or even a simple beeper so you can make it ping if you misplace it. The omission of this functionality was made only more stark by the fact Apple chose this same event to sing the item-finding praises of the long-rumoured AirTag tracker. This remote should be harder to lose though; it is less likely to fall down a sofa simply because it is bigger and chunkier. Switching from an all-black finish to silver aluminium also makes it easier to see in the dark.
The other let down is the price: $59 for a remote is exorbitantly high. You can buy an entire Chromecast for less than the price of the Siri Remote. Unfortunately, the entire Apple TV product remains poorly priced. They refreshed the Apple TV 4K’s internals with an A12 chip, but it’s still sold at the same $179 price point and more ridiculously still, the Apple TV HD remains on sale — hardware unchanged aside from bundling the new remote — for the same (inflated) price it debuted at in 2015.
The A12 chip and the overhauled Remote do just enough to serve as a signal that Apple is committed to keeping the Apple TV around. I can allay my fears about its discontinuation. But clearly, there’s a lot more to be done in the living room and I hope Apple has more coming down the pipe in both hardware and software.
Kuo says the 5.4-inch size is gone but there will still be four phones in total. It will just be a simpler affair: two high-end ‘Pro’ phones with 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch screens and two lower-end models with the same 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch sizes.
Before the 12 came out, I pondered quite openly whether the Mini was going to meet the market appropriately. It intuitively felt slightly off. Smartphone users like big screens and the Mini simply doesn’t deliver that. There’s been a lot of reporting around how the iPhone 12 mini has lagged behind the other iPhone 12 models in sales. It’s not an outright flop but it doesn’t seem to have performed up to Apple’s expectations either.
I continue to believe the Mini’s existence was largely motivated by concerns of price point rather than form factor. Apple needed a new phone to sell at $699 and it couldn’t match what it achieved with the iPhone 11 series this time around. For various reasons that probably involve OLED and/or dreaded 5G demons, the base model 6.1-inch iPhone price increased by $130 this year. So, the Mini was introduced to keep the $699 placeholder, as it were.
The news from Kuo backs up that theory. Apple doesn’t really care for the smaller size, they want the price points. By 2022, the components of the 6.1-inch model will have gone down and Apple will be able to sell it as the cheap flagship again. Moreover, the report alludes to the existence of a non-Pro 6.7-inch device. This new device SKU mean Apple will make the biggest iPhone screen size accessible to more people than ever. Using the current lineup’s pricing as a guide, the 2022 6.7-inch iPhone would be almost $300 cheaper than the 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max Apple sells today.
HomePod mini has been a hit since its debut last fall, offering customers amazing sound, an intelligent assistant, and smart home control all for just $99. We are focusing our efforts on HomePod mini. We are discontinuing the original HomePod, it will continue to be available while supplies last through the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple will provide HomePod customers with software updates and service and support through Apple Care.
When the iMac Pro was discontinued a week ago, there wasn’t much to fuss about. It is going away for obvious reasons. The iMac Pro was already feeling squeezed by the existence of high-end iMacs and the Mac Pro, and it will soon be unnecessary altogether with performant-yet-near-silent Apple Silicon iMacs in the offing.
The discontinuation of the HomePod is not so straightforward. The statement Apple gave to TechCrunch makes it very clear that there is not a new model just around the corner. This is the end of the road.
Honestly, the decision to cancel it feels like a misstep. The HomePod was overpriced but it was differentiated. The HomePod mini doesn’t really excel at anything. The mediocrity of the Mini’s sound quality means it leans much more heavily on the ‘smart’ component of being a smart speaker, and we know that Siri lags behind Alexa and Google Assistant in many ways. By focusing on the HomePod mini, Apple is implicitly focusing on Siri. Whether they actually make meaningful progress there is an open question.
The HomePod mini’s sound is fine for its size but its bass response and clarity — particularly at higher volumes — do not compare. I regard the Mini as something you put on your bedside table or in the kitchen, whereas the HomePod is a nice voice-controlled living room speaker. I’m not sure a replacement for that product exists, at least for Apple Music users. The closest I think you can get is the Echo Studio … which looks like a knock-off HomePod.
Apple has clarified that the iOS 14.5 beta is not actually allowing users to select a new default music service, as has been reported. Following the beta’s release back in February, a number of beta testers noticed that Siri would now ask which music service they would like to use when they asked Siri to play music. But Apple doesn’t consider this feature the equivalent to “setting a default” — an option it more recently began to allow for email and browser apps.
Instead, the feature is Siri intelligence-based, meaning it can improve and even change over time as Siri learns to better understand your listening habits.
When you swipe down on the iPhone’s home screen, you enter Spotlight. You type characters into the search field to quickly find an installed app on your phone. Before you type anything though, at the top of this view, there are four apps instantly visible: Siri Suggestions. Siri, or stripping the personified branding away, the operating system analyses your behaviour patterns to try and show you the app that you want, right upfront. I find it useful. A lot of the time, the app I intended to search for is actually just there, waiting for me. Swipe down, see the app icon, tap to launch, done.
Imagine instead that if upon opening Spotlight, Siri would launch the app it thought I wanted immediately. It would be infuriating. When it got it right, it would be cool but it won’t be able to get it right every time. These systems are always going to make mistakes, so you can’t go all in on a feature like that. Suggestions or recommendations are about as far as you can go without being frustrating. Even if it is was correct 49 times out of 50, that one time it is wrong will mean you will never use it again.
This latest music app situation falls directly in that latter camp. Through this TechCrunch article, Apple is very determined to say that the app picker UI is only a guide for Siri rather than a strict default app setting. If the actual behaviour of the feature reflects that, and Siri will sometimes change its mind about which app to use for a music request … that’s simply dumb. The central point of this feature is to make it so people don’t have to append ‘on Spotify’ / ‘on Pandora’ to the end of their voice requests. But if the unqualified form can’t be relied on to do that and work the same way every time, it’s pointless. The moment Siri decides to go off-piste and chooses an app you don’t expect it to, user confidence in the feature will crater and everyone will revert back to saying each command out in full.
Removing the need to specify the name of the third-party app is a good idea. Tying arbitrary and opaque machine learning decision-making to it is not. This feature should be implemented in the boring but reliable way: let the user pick a default app for each category of media from a list in Settings.
In the end, I’m left with the same feeling I had yesterday: Even after Apple has removed the two biggest reasons to buy an Apple TV (exclusive access to AirPlay and Apple’s video content), there is a whole collection of small reasons to buy an Apple TV. But of course, they all require that users pay a large premium—not the usual step-up for Apple products over the competition, but a fivefold increase in price. (Imagine if AirPods Max cost $1800.)
Some people will pay that premium. A lot of people won’t—and aren’t.
First off, Apple deserves some credit for cannibalising its own product so freely. Part of the reason the Apple TV feels a bit irrelevant at the moment is because Apple has chosen to convert some of its proprietary features into commodities. Whilst they had to relinquish control to some degree to broaden the availability of its TV+ original content, it didn’t have to offer ways for long-time iTunes Store customers to access their library of purchases from non-Apple devices .. but it did. A company that can cannibalise itself without fear is not a common thing.
All that being said, the current Apple TV hardware proposition is not good. It’s simply too expensive. A box that offers music, movies, photos, workouts and games through an Apple-designed interface is a desirable product, but it’s not worth $179. It’s not worth $149 even; the price that Apple still charges for the 1080p Apple TV.
That doesn’t mean Apple should get out the set-top box business. They totally should make one. Just like Apple thought it was worthwhile to make an entry-level smart speaker, there’s space in the market for an Apple streaming device. It supports all of Apple’s content services, from fitness workouts to photos, videos and games. Plus, it helps Apple participate in the connected living room, something that will become even more significant as the company prepares a renewed push for HomeKit and the wider Apple smart home ecosystem.
I’m not saying Apple has to stoop to the levels of $40 bargain bucket streaming sticks like those from Amazon and Roku. They are perfectly respectable products for what they are but that low-end isn’t worth Apple’s while.
What I want, what everyone wants, is a modern Apple TV with an updated processor. We will pay for the niceness. At $99, we’re sold. Like all of Apple’s products, the Apple TV should aim to fill the segment of the market that toes the line between being accessible to the masses and being aspirational luxury.
Apple today released the first developer betas of iOS 14.5 and watchOS 7.4, bringing a major change to the integration between iPhone and Apple Watch. For the first time, you can now use your Apple Watch to unlock your iPhone when you’re wearing a face mask.
As of iOS 14.5, if the iPhone detects you are wearing a mask, you can use your unlocked Apple Watch as the identity key to let you in to your phone. Even for a first beta, it works really well. It’s fast. Written down, it sounds analogous to the macOS feature, but it feels very different when you try it.
Unlocking your Mac with your watch is comparatively sluggish. I guess this because the Watch is always passively ‘connected’ to its paired iPhone when in Bluetooth range, whereas when the Mac login screen wants to authenticate, it is searching for the user’s nearby Watch afresh each time. Moreover, the iPhone benefits from iOS’s slick lock screen transitions that guide the user smoothly through the unlocking process and the nice animations help to mask over some of the wait period.
I can only assume this has been on the cards ever since the pandemic reared its head. In iOS 13.5 last year, they rushed out what they could to improve the Face ID experience in the context of the pandemic. Many months later, they now have had the time to achieve a more sophisticated implementation of that goal, and that’s what we are seeing in iOS 14.5.
Some of the community reaction to this feature appearing in the beta can be summed up as follows: this means the iPhone 13 will not sport a fingerprint sensor, as Apple is resorting to fix the mask problem through software. Personally, I can’t make that connection.
The iPhone 13 feature set is independent to the needs of the current iOS user base. Even if you assume that Apple has always planned for this year’s iPhone to have Touch ID, they couldn’t not do this in the meantime once COVID hit. Apple has hundreds of millions of active Face ID-only phones out in the world to support. Plus, it will sell hundreds of millions of Face ID-only phones in the months leading up to this fall’s iPhone season, and hundreds of millions more for several years after that. (And not everyone has a Watch, of course.)
Any current customers with free trials set to end in the February to June period will now see those subscription renewals pushed out to July. Similarly, customers with an annual subscription that expires between February and June will also get the same additional months of service at no additional charge.
I am not surprised that they have to do this. Even before COVID struck, I was mentally modelling that they would need to repeat the free year trials at least one time over. The mechanics are slightly different to what I had predicted. In my head, I expected them to simply re-up the hardware offer; buy another Apple device, get another year.
What Apple has done instead is push back the renewal dates of those active trials. If you subscribed on the same day as the service launched — November 1st, 2019 — your free promotion essentially lasts nine extra months.
A subscription that was originally set to end on November 1, 2020 will now continue until July. However, anyone subscribing for the first time sees no such benefits. If you activate a new Apple device from today, your renewal date will be exactly one year out. Reading between the lines, Apple believes (or at least hopes) a TV+ subscription will be worth paying for in July.
Again, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. A library of exclusive newly-made originals takes time to build up. What is a little bizarre is why they didn’t announce the July date in October. It is surely a little embarrassing for Apple that they have trot back to the press to announce another extension of the ‘one year’ trials so soon, when the first extension happened so recently that it is still fresh in people’s minds. It feels like a public echo of internal flip-flopping.
Marking TV+ down as a failure at this stage is simply premature. I don’t know if it’s going to be a long-term success … but I recognise it’s too early to call it either way. It is true that If the TV+ strategy was adopted by a startup, of course it would fail; a standalone company simply doesn’t have the resources to backstop the early years of growth. For Apple, financials are not a practical concern. As long as it is committed at the executive levels to invest fiercely in originals for three-to-five years, accepting little to no monetary return in the meantime, it should be fine.
They did a good job with this. It’s not a deeply technical proposition but sometimes simple ideas and good execution are all you need. Fitness+ is high quality and well produced workout videos overlaid with live metrics readouts from a connected Watch. Straightforward, technologically trivial, but effective.
I’m not sure if I would pay a dedicated $9.99 per month subscription plan for it. I have never subscribed to any other online fitness scheme stuff. However, Fitness+ is incorporated into my Apple One Premier plan and it is undisputedly a solid value add that makes me less likely to cancel.
This would be less of a sticking point if Apple had a reasonably-priced Apple TV for people to buy.
One of the few issues with this 1.0 release is that Fitness+ workouts do not work with AirPlay. When you select a fourth- or fifth-generation Apple TV from the outputs list in the Fitness app video player on iPhone or iPad, it seamlessly launches the tvOS Fitness app on the big screen and navigates to the same place. It’s like a deep link shortcut. This is fine if you are an Apple TV household, but owners of other AirPlay compatible devices — like the plethora of smart TVs that now integrate AirPlay 2 natively — are left out in the cold. When you try to connect to one of these outputs, Fitness+ sends the audio stream but the video signal is simply black.
Some have speculated this limitation is in place is because of DRM and piracy concerns. I don’t think that is the reason. First released in 2010, AirPlay was designed with Apple’s content licensing requirements in mind from the beginning. That’s why you can freely AirPlay content from the iTunes Store like your purchased movies or stream from Apple TV+, Netflix and countless other services. AirPlay is a DRM friendly technology. I think the reason Fitness+ currently does not support it is because of how the metric overlays are implemented. My understanding is these are not being encoded into the realtime video stream, but superimposed by the GPU as separate layers and rendered as iOS views. Therefore, Apple needs to do a bit more work to get the transmitted AirPlay stream to include these elements.
In terms of the future of Fitness+, there are obvious routes for Apple to follow. To better compete with the likes of Peloton, Apple needs to embrace the social gamification aspects of online fitness with things like friends leaderboards and broadcast live workout sessions, which would allow the hosts to shoutout participating members. And as beautifully dressed as the Fitness+ studio is, I would welcome a change of setting every now and again; perhaps film trainers running around a park or visiting famous sites like Olympic stadiums. These are the kind of avenues that Apple should explore if it wants to give Fitness+ longevity beyond the COVID-induced fad of at-home fitness.
The M1 chip is so fast that I have zero doubt — zero — that Apple can make a higher-end chip to easily supersede its entire lineup of Intel laptops and desktops in performance. As an owner of an ageing 2016 MacBook Pro with a mostly-broken keyboard, I’m so looking forward to it.
The M1 runs inside a 10-15 watt power budget. The fanless M1 MacBook Air already bests the high-end Core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro on most single-core CPU tasks. There’s no need to imagine about if Apple can deliver a high-performance chip; you literally can go into an Apple Store and already buy it. The definition of an existence proof.
What is still up for speculation is how much higher can an “M1X”, or whatever it’s called, push the performance inside the larger thermal envelope enclosures of iMacs and 16-inch MacBook Pros. For reference, the current 16-inch uses Intel CPUs that are designed to run at around 45 watts, or about triple what the M1 requires.
This is where the guessing comes in. I think Apple can eek out more from the current chip architecture. By letting the cores run slightly hotter at moderately faster clock speeds, those 1700 Geekbench scores can be bumped up to the 2000-2200 range. At least for this first generation, that’ll more than suffice. Then, they can invest the rest of the power budget into boosting multi-core performance. A Bloomberg report published today suggests Apple is working on of 12-core, 16-core and even 20-core CPU designs for the ARM MacBook Pro. That’ll certainly do the job. Remember, the highest-spec MacBook Pro you can buy today features an 8-core CPU.
Frankly, Apple could use the exact same CPU cores in the M1X as they have shipped in the M1, and just have way more of them. They are plenty fast enough for single-core tasks after all. The only areas the M1 falls short in comparison to the current Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro’s is on the multi-core benchmarks. An M1 with a souped-up core count would be perfectly appropriate for the 2021 MacBook Pro. If they can go further, by increasing clock speeds as well, that’s just gravy.
The TV app is pretty bad across the board, as I have discussed many times before and will seemingly have to talk about it again with no announced changes on the horizon.
The degree to how bad it is varies per platform. The available features and UI differ wildly depending on which device you are using to access the Apple TV app. The tvOS Apple TV app version is by far the best expression of the app. Then, you have the app for smart TVs and Amazon Fire/Roku (and soon, games consoles) which try to mirror the tvOS experience and somewhat achieve it. The iPhone and iPad interpretation of the TV app trails significantly behind that, and even further back you have the primitive Mac app which doesn’t support the basics like the ability to autoplay the next episode or skip the intro. I’d argue the implementations of those features on tvOS and iOS are mediocre, but the Mac doesn’t have them at all.
However, the award for the worst experience belongs to the Apple TV+ website found at tv.apple.com. Since the service launched on November 1st 2019, the website has always been incredibly barebones. It is a single flat list of Apple TV+ shows and movies, there’s no Channels or iTunes Store content here, arranged in a seemingly random order with no way to filter by content type, genre or release date. At launch, this was just about passable because the service had only 8 titles. A year on, it is simply embarrassing.
There’s no Up Next queue, no search field and also no support for autoplaying the next episode or skipping intros. You can’t even access all the content that is on TV+ through the website: library titles like Long Way Down, Long Way Round or the classic Fraggle Rock episodes are not listed at all. Occasionally, flagship Apple originals like Servant are inexplicably missing.
The web app, if you can call it that given how it is just barely more sophisticated than a static HTML page, also suffers from reliability issues. Many people are unable to actually play content successfully on the website, as odds on you will be presented with a black screen where the video is supposed to be. This issue occurs most frequently when using browsers other than Safari and Chrome. Apple also requires the logged-in account to have a credit card on file before you are allowed to attempt to watch anything, even with an active paid subscription. This restriction does not apply for any of the platform apps.
Apple doesn’t release usage statistics but I expect the web is a popular way people try to access TV+. For one thing, the web app is the only option for Windows and pre-Catalina macOS users. Moreover, with no native Android app in sight, I’ve seen a lot of people try the website on their non-Apple phones and tablets to catch Ted Lasso or the Peanuts specials or whatever. These are all potential customers, ready and willing to pay for Apple’s services.
As a company, Apple has never been known for its web apps, but it’s not like it doesn’t know how. Apple Music has a decent web client. The iCloud.com apps are technically sophisticated and reasonably feature-rich, particularly the iWork web apps.
Perhaps even more frustratingly, Apple’s very own marketing pages for TV+ feature a dynamic and appealing carousel of TV+ content; you have to scroll down a little to see it. This layout should be the basis of a TV+ web app, and frankly the richness and aliveness of it should inform the future of all the native Apple TV apps too.
At the beginning of the year, before rather more world-threatening matters took hold, I was toying with an idea to make a review compilation of all the 5G adverts being shown on TV by carriers. What I’d noticed is just how many of these ads would demonstrate things that had nothing to do with 5G at all. Invariably, they would depict feats that would have been perfectly achievable on a LTE network, or take place in contexts where people would have had access to fast broadband and WiFi anyway. It would have been a fun video.
Just like how television manufacturers forced 3D onto the market because they needed something new to try and entice buyers, 5G is driven by carriers trying to find reasons for customers to upgrade their plans and their phones in an age of ever-elongating phone replacement cycles. Carriers have also had to commit to huge outlays in order to get 5G deployed, so they are basically forced to promote it to reclaim their investment.
5G is the future, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no rush. Last year, Android phones started cropping up with first-generation 5G support. The 5G coverage area was so small, it basically wasn’t available to anyone and it didn’t matter at all. Fast forward a year, and coverage is better. Not ubiquitous by any means, but at least it exists.
I'm not exaggerating on the number by the way. I CMD-F'ed the YouTube closed captions file. "5G" was said seventy times during the event.
Enter the iPhone 12. One of the first slides projected on the Steve Jobs Theater stage by Mr Verizon read “5G just got real”. But has it? I still can’t muster up one reason why anybody needs 5G today. Even if you assume universal network availability, there is nothing that you do with a phone that demands higher download speeds than what a decent LTE connection offers. I look to Apple to introduce new technologies and show us why we need them. Apple may have said the word 5G seventy times during its hour-long presentation but at no point could it come up with a meaningful use case. Usually, Apple only adds features to the iPhone when it has end-user motivation to do so. Unfortunately, with 5G, I think they are participating in the smoke and mirrors 5G racket just as much as the carriers are.
I get it. Market forces mean they kind of needed 5G in the iPhone this year, especially to keep up in geographies like China where 5G deployment is further along. The carriers are thrilled they now have four mainstream phones to push the 5G agenda with, and that will undoubtedly benefit Apple’s bottom lines too. I’m not saying Apple shouldn’t have done 5G now. I guess I am disappointed that they have joined in on the charade. 5G should have been presented as an arrow in the quiver of iPhone 12 features, not the primary reason to upgrade your phone.
Apple has spent so much of its feature budget this year on 5G, their hand is forced to act like it’s something that it is really not. At one point, Cook tried to argue that 5G is good for security because it will mean iPhone users won’t have to connect to public unsecured WiFi as often. Like, come on. It’s a nice to have as far as future-proofing the device is concerned, but that’s about it.
A new fitness experience for everyone, powered by Apple Watch. World-class workouts by the world’s top trainers. New workouts every week. Work out how and where you want.
There are some people who miss the days when Apple only made shiny pieces of metal. I am not in that camp. I have no problem with Apple rolling out new services, as long as they are made with purpose and care. Fitness+ fits the bill. It’s a really nice integration of Apple’s ecosystem to bring something new to home fitness courses. The interaction between the recorded video and the user’s on-screen health metrics is useful and simple for prospective subscribers to understand.
In all likelihood, the Fitness app will do a better job at presenting a catalogue of video than the TV app.
Although we can’t test the app yet, the marketing screenshots are promising. It looks like a well made app, with some signature Apple niceties sprinkled on top. There are some obvious paths for future expansion, such as offering live sessions or audio-only workouts for when you are exercising outside with your Watch and AirPods, which I’m sure Apple will get to in the fullness of time.
Until I can try it out for myself (“by the end of the year”), the only criticism I have is that the service will require a Watch. The Fitness app on iPad and Apple TV won’t let you do anything unless it can sense that a nearby Watch is present. This seems like an unnecessary artificial limitation. It is true that the unique parts of the service do depend on the Watch, but I think it’s stupid that the rest of my (non-Watch bearing) family won’t be allowed to use the Apple TV to follow along with the virtual classes and do some exercise.
When I was watching the presentation live, before the denouement of the Fitness+ section, I was expecting a $4.99 per month price point. Fundamentally, Fitness+ is workout videos with some overlaid metrics. Apple can pump these out with relatively low overheads. So, $5 felt about right, to match the value proposition as Arcade and TV+.
With that expectation in mind, I was taken aback when they said it was $9.99 per month (or $80 a year). Music is $9.99 because you get truly unlimited music and streaming music market is tightly controlled. News+ is $9.99 because Apple has to pay publishers. The content offered by Music and News has a marginal cost, which is not true for TV+ and Arcade. Those services have fixed cost financials; Apple doesn’t pay each time a user consumes games or TV shows, it only has to lay down the upfront cost of commissioning them. Hence, only $5.
Fitness+ is a fixed cost service, but it has higher-rate pricing. From the business side, Apple is going to singing for the hills if they can accrue millions of Fitness+ subscribers. It will easily be their most profitable service per customer. In the scheme of things, producing a set of fitness videos on a weekly basis is relatively inexpensive. Their outlay on a single TV+ show will easily cost more than running the entire the Fitness+ service for years.
That being said, it doesn’t matter how much it costs to make, it’s what the market can bear. At $9.99, Fitness+ is legitimately competitive with other workout plans. I clicked on a handful of fitness apps in the App Store, and Apple’s offering is coming in at the same price or sometimes slightly cheaper. For instance, Peloton’s digital subscription is $13. Fitness+ is not a direct competitor to Peloton’s business, but it plays in the same space.
Moreover, Apple has an ulterior motivation. It’s the bundle. As soon as I saw the Apple One pricing slide, any doubts I had about the chosen pricing were explained away on the spot. By making Fitness+ cost a lot, the Premier bundle looks way more appealing. The Premier bundle boasts a $25 saving on a $29.95 monthly price. Almost half of that discount is enabled by Fitness+ being part of Premier, a service that costs Apple almost all no money. Brilliant.
Streaming games are permitted so long as they adhere to all guidelines — for example, each game update must be submitted for review, developers must provide appropriate metadata for search, games must use in-app purchase to unlock features or functionality, etc. Of course, there is always the open Internet and web browser apps to reach all users outside of the App Store.
Each streaming game must be submitted to the App Store as an individual app so that it has an App Store product page, appears in charts and search, has user ratings and review, can be managed with ScreenTime and other parental control apps, appears on the user’s device, etc.
Firstly, I’m not convinced that any of these rules are actually new policy, I think it’s just the first time Apple has formally written them down. Remember, the iOS beta for the Xbox Game Pass app passed the TestFlight review process precisely because it allowed the user to access one game and one game only.
New or not, these rules suck. I highly doubt Microsoft or PlayStation are going to show any interest in submitting each of their titles separately, which entails uploading hundreds (possibly, thousands) of nearly-identical app binaries that differ only in which game they connect to on the backend.
Apple is also requesting that a new version of the game app is submitted to the App Store when the game is updated, a silly endeavour when the game logic is wholly living on a remote server anyway. At the very least, managing the individual app listings is pointless busywork.
For end-users, it means cluttering your home screen with pages of app icons that all need to be logged into when you launch them. Nobody would choose to use a cloud service in this way. A defining characteristic of the game streaming model is how easy it is to play something new; no waiting for gigabytes of assets to download. Apple’s requirements add barriers to entry which will make the experience less enjoyable for players.
Apple’s current position on this matter is indefensible. Simply, companies should be allowed to make an app that comprises a catalogue of games, and have those games be playable inside the same app. ‘100-in-1 minigames’ apps actually already exist on the App Store. The only difference with streaming services is where the game is physically being rendered.
If Apple was telling these services that they need to be notified when their game library changes, I’d get it. If they mandated a 17+ age rating for the container app’s listing on the App Store, fine. Even if they said game streaming services can only feature titles that have been tested and rated by an official body, like the ESRB which almost all console games are ratified by, I’d understand.