By John Moltz
May 26, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: The flaw of averages
Hey, it’s our antepenultimate week talking about the Apple headset speculatively! New apps are a-shipping and generative AI asks “How many fingers am I holding up?” The answer may surprise you.
Will the realOS please stand up?
Cue the “IT’S HAPPENING!” gifs because it turns out that all these headset rumors have legs, unlike Meta’s offering.
[rimshot]
If you needed more proof of the actual thingness of Apple’s headset, this week did not disappoint. According to one of the outlets that received an invitation, Apple has invited a number of XR media outlets to WWDC. This is the first time the company has done so.
So, either Apple will be announcing a headset at WWDC or this is a really amazing troll. Either way, should be exciting.
Apple has also gone through a flurry of trademarking activities, including scooping up xrOS as well as realityproOS and realOS. Rest assured it will be called something.
And, no, somethingOS cannot be ruled out at this time.
The new appness
Some new apps were shipped or announced this week that really ran the gamut of the agony/ecstasy scale. First, let’s try ecstasy.
I mean…
You know what I mean.
Tapbots finally (does six months warrant a finally?) shipped Ivory for the Mac, meaning that if you are a refugee from Tweetbot you’ll feel pretty at home on Mastodon on all your devices. Unless one of your devices is a Samsung smart fridge.
Mimestream, a much-anticipated Mac app for Gmail created by former Apple engineer Neil Jhaveri, also came out of beta this week. If you’re a Gmail user, you might appreciate a native macOS client that takes full advantage of Gmail’s API instead of using IMAP.
On the agony side of things, let’s take a look at… sigh… Max. Only the remarkable clown show run by David Zaslav would foist upon users a worse app than the previous one in order to support a rebranding. The new version doesn’t use Apple’s native video player, doesn’t have Siri Remote jog support, doesn’t support “What did they say?”… the list goes on. HBO also stepped in it by lumping writers and directors under “creators” in the credits, a flaw that may be a contract violation. Nailed it.
While there is ecstasy in Bungie’s announcement that it is rebooting the Marathon franchise of the 1990s, there is also agony in the fact that it will only ship on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Meaning you will not be frog blasting the vent core on your Mac, unless you’re running the ‘90s version on an old Performa. In which case, can I come over and play? I will bring the soda and chips.
Will Apple give AI the finger at WWDC?
Apple could surely fill up an entire WWDC with just a headset announcement (“just”), but what else might it have to talk about?
For its part, Google said “AI” over 140 times at Google I/O a few weeks back. That’ll certainly fill some time. But will Apple say it at all? As Jason opined, Apple’s still got plenty of time to get its AI ducks in a row. I mean, ducks don’t even have hands, which AI image generation is notoriously bad at, so how hard could that be?
If you’re unfamiliar with this quirk, James Thompson recently asked Photoshop’s new AI feature for sample images of “a hand” and while the results did return the expected number of fingers when you average them out per hand, it seems some work remains to be done. Of course, there are people who have six fingers and people who have four, so maybe Photoshop is simply trying to challenge our normative perceptions. In which case, that’s on me.
It’s worth noting that Apple is not standing still on AI, content to have Siri slowly singing “Daisy… Daisy…” as other companies pass it by. It recently ramped up hiring of generative AI experts, posting positions for at least a dozen jobs. Still, don’t expect a lot of time to be spent on the topic at WWDC this year. Apple will be focusing instead on the previous thing everyone said it was behind in but really wasn’t.
[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.]