By John Moltz
October 20, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Non-starting lineups
From the land of Magical Thinking comes the windowless Apple car! This from a company that can’t even keep its pencils straight. And how did Tim Cook look at the iPad lineup over the last year and say “Hmm. Needs more iPads.”?
The eyes of all our cars
From the “Sure, why not?” files comes this new Apple patent filing, hopefully never arriving on a street near you.
“Vision Pro could let you see out of an Apple Car with no windows”
What? Could? Go? Wrong?
A number of years back we were told that there was no reason to store all our stuff on a hard drive, just put it in the cloud and you can have it all the time from any device! Clearly the people pushing this idea never went to a secluded beach or mountain cabin and also never thought about what happens when it doesn’t work as designed.
Even when things do work as designed, that doesn’t mean you can’t have problems. True story: mere moments ago I sat down with my iPhone in my pocket playing music to my AirPods. Somehow my leg applied pressure to the VOLUME UP BUTTON ON MY IPHONE MAKING THE MUSIC QUITE LOUD I ASSURE YOU.
That is an example of a device doing exactly what it was supposed to do — turn up the volume when the volume up button is pressed — yet delivering a completely undesirable outcome. So let me just suggest that cars without windows are almost certainly a bad idea even if they work as designed.
Not to worry, though. The best part of this patented design is your giant simulated eyes splashed across the windshield that let pedestrians and other drivers know you’re fully awake and paying attention to the road.
OK, I may have made that up, but… do we really know for sure?
Apple patents lots of things that never see the light of day. Here’s hoping this is one of them.
Pencil time
Have you heard about this stupid pencil Apple released this week? Everyone is really angry about it.
Yes, despite expectations to the contrary, Apple declined to introduce new iPads this week, sticking a Pencil in the eye of the rumor mill instead of a finger. The new Pencil, jauntily dubbed “Apple Pencil (USB-C)”, came with a chart to clear up any confusion about the muddled mess of Pencil features Apple currently offers.
Reaction to the Pencil was pretty harsh. Tapbots’ Paul Haddad quipped:
If you see a stylus chart, they blew it.
This, of course, is a riff on the famous Steve Jobs line from 2010 about the iPad’s competitors that goes “I came here to chew gum and denigrate our competitors and I’m all out of gum.”l
OK, this Pencil doesn’t make a lot of sense now, but I think it will in the future. Apple is phasing out the Lightning connector so it will soon get rid of the 1st generation Apple Pencil and this new one will take its place at the bottom of the lineup at a more reasonable price. When compared to the 1st generation Pencil, Apple gave the new Pencil magnetic attachment and the hover feature on the iPad Pro and took away pressure sensitivity. This makes more sense for general users, as pressure sensitivity is more important for artistic uses, and most people couldn’t draw their way out of a box.
As the base Pencil, this is a better option, the right set of features for most users and no caps to lose. Does the whole lineup currently make sense? Noooo. It’s as if Apple designs lineups outside of the linear progression of time. Possibly if we were to fold time and space into a 12-dimensional hypercube, it would become clear to us. Maybe there’s a Vision Pro app for that.
The iPad SKUs will proliferate until morale improves
Speaking of iPads that Apple didn’t introduce this week, the rumor mill is still chockablock with upcoming entrants to the iPad lineup (motto: “If you think the Pencil lineup is confusing, you’re going to hate this lineup.”).
“Apple Working on Larger iPad Air With 12.9-Inch Display”
Not to go all Gene Munster (never go full Gene Munster) but I’ve always thought the once-rumored Apple television should actually be a big iPad. While the iPad can be used as a creative device, probably a lot more people just use it for watching their stories.
But that’s not the oddest iPad rumored to be currently running through the Rube Goldberg machine of Apple design!
“Foldable iPad Now in ‘Intensive Development,’ Could Be Announced as Soon as Next Year”
[DEVELOPMENT INTENSIFIES]
“Next year”?! Wow. OK. OK, rumor mill. I mean, I don’t believe that, but OK.
So, with no new iPads having been introduced in 2023, a new iPad Air and iPad mini expected soon, and two new waaacky iPad rumors, 2024 could be the year of the iPad.
On the desktop? Could be. Depends on where you put yours. Seems like a lap is more likely.
[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.]