By John Moltz

October 6, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Nothing can stay gold

We’ve got the hot news about search engines (I hear great things about that AltaVista), the woes of watch ownership, and we’ll catch up on all the -gates this side of Bill.

Browser’s Castle

Last week brought us the news that back in 2020 (is something that happened three years ago “news”?), Microsoft held exploratory meetings with Apple to discuss selling Bing. The deal did not happen largely because Google shoots a firehose of money at Apple in order to keep its search engine as the default on Apple’s platforms.

Also, something about “quality and capabilities”, yadda-yadda-yadda.

Apple, of course, didn’t let such trivialities concern it when it walked away from Google Maps back in 2012, but Google was demanding more user information. Which is why two years prior to discussing Bing with Microsoft, Apple was interested in making DuckDuckGo the default search engine for private mode in Safari, conducting around 20 meetings and phone calls with the company. Ironically, one of the reasons the company didn’t do the deal was that DuckDuckGo relies on Bing for search results.

All this information is brought to you by the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Google. So, hug a federal agent the next time you see one. (Disclaimer: do NOT under any circumstances attempt to hug a federal agent. Even if they’re a family member.)

So, Apple didn’t use DuckDuckGo because of Bing. Then it didn’t buy Bing because of Google. Perfectly clear.

A Tale of Two Watches

Quick, what’s $17,000 divided by 8?

“Original Apple Watch, including $17,000 gold model, no longer eligible for repairs”

It’s tempting to laugh at people who bought an incredibly expensive watch that everyone knew was going to be deprecated at some point, but it’s likely that, for the people who actually bought a gold Apple Watch, its cost was a smaller portion of their net worth than a $399 aluminum Watch is of its average buyer’s net worth.

So, technically, the joke’s on us, not them.

Sssorry.

Is Apple end-of-lifing a $17,000 Watch that came out eight years ago better or worse than the fact that Google won’t repair a $280 one you bought yesterday?

“Google won’t repair cracked Pixel Watch screens”

What’s $280 divided by zero?

#DIV/0

Opening the FloodGates

A fun thing to do when you’re killing time is to see how fast you can name all the purported iPhone 15 scandals.

You got your Casegate, of course. That’s easy. Then there was Lipgate for a minute. Hotgate was hot for a while. That’s three. But have you heard about Bendgate 2, The Rebendening?

Bendgate 1¹ revolved around our plucky hero the iPhone 6 which, if you applied pressure to the center in one direction and the ends in the opposite direction would (I know this is a long sentence, are you still with me?)… bend.

Weird, but true.

Not to give too much away about the sequel but… (if you’re spoiler-averse you may want to skip ahead) I hear…

…this time it’s personal.

No, really. I heard that.

Fortunately, like kind of all of these (except Casegate), this appears to be much ado about nothing.

“Does the iPhone 15 Pro Max bend and crack easily? Consumer Reports says no”

Huh, looks like they build headlines out of all of Betteridge’s Law these days.

There’s even a video of Consumer Reports cracking an iPhone 15 Pro Max, if you can stand to watch it. I couldn’t. Horrible. Just horrible. How about a content warning next time, Consumer Reports?

[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.]