By John Moltz
June 2, 2023 3:34 PM PT
This Week in Apple: The keys to the note
In the waning days of the Apple headset as a rumor, please remember to tip your local rumormonger. Remember, they survive on tips. If you’re worried about Apple’s keynote being too long, don’t. It may be our last if AI takes over.
My conspiracy theory board is now full
Have you heard about this headset thing? Big deal. Supposedly getting announced next week. Huge, if true.
Even Apple is… “subtly” is not the word… ham-fistedly teasing big things for next week’s keynote, tweeting that a “new era” will begin. The company also dropped the tag line “Code New Worlds”, perhaps a reference to VR opportunities for developers. (If it’s supposed to be a Star Trek reference, I give it a “B”.)
Certainly other headset vendors believe Apple’s going to announce one, as both Oppo and Meta rushed out some “Hey, look at us!” announcements this week.
Apple execs are on the record as stating that they will not use the term “metaverse”, which makes sense when one of your primary competitors has the first four letters of that as its name. That would be like Pepsi calling its soft drink “a Coke beverage”. Or, more likely after Apple’s offering hits the market, Coke calling its soft drink “an RC Cola beverage”.
This week Hello Games released No Man’s Sky for the Mac, a seven-year-old game that the company promised to ship for the Mac in 2022. I’d give it a “finally” but as they’re teasing another announcement in “the VERY near future”—hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Monty Python reference—the timing seems like it might be tied to an announcement next week that the VR version will be available for the Apple headset.
And if you needed even more evidence, doubting Thomas—if that is your real name—display analyst Ross Young has some specs on the new device to share, including that the display has 5000 nits of brightness.
That’s a lot of nits, none of which you can pick with this rumor.
Go long
The question is, will Apple even have time to announce the headset? Because it looks like the keynote is going to be jam-packed with stuff. Of course, Apple will have to preview the upcoming versions of its operating systems; that’s kind of the point of WWDC.
But, according to Mark Gurman, Apple may also be announcing two desktop Macs with M2 Max and Ultra chips. Is this a new Mac Studio, or will a new Mac Pro finally make its appearance? If it’s the latter, that seems like the kind of thing that might take some time. We have questions. How are they handling graphics and expandability? Also, where the heck has it been? What took so long? Was it stuck in traffic?
Meanwhile, the company is widely expected to be introducing a 15-inch MacBook Air in the near future. Will that also be unveiled at WWDC? Maybe the company could do one of those Oscars things where it holds a second-string keynote to announce all the stuff it can’t jam into the main presentation. John Ternus can get up and say “Earlier today, at the Courtyard by Marriott across the street from Apple Park, I was thrilled to present the stuff we couldn’t jam into the keynote.”
This is all to say that maybe you should hit the restroom before the keynote.
We had a good run
I regret to inform you that Apple is woefully behind in a technology that experts say could kill us all.
Yes, according to the Center for AI Safety…
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Uh… wow. OK. That’s… concerning. Is… is it still OK if I use DALL•E to make images of cats in suits holding business meetings?
While Apple is roundly criticized for not keeping up with the “let’s destroy the world” Joneses, that doesn’t mean it’s sitting on its hands. As Mark Gurman noted, the company is looking to hire people “interested in ‘Conversational and Generative AI’”.
So, relax, investors and over-eager members of the tech press! Apple is also speeding us toward our endgame!
Look, if Siri ends up killing us all, we probably deserve it.
[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.]