By John Moltz
November 3, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Bread and Services
New Macs are here, but not everything you might have expected to get updated was. While people try to make hay over Apple’s claims about the iPhone 15, Apple makes bank on its services.
It truly was a “Good evening!”
Well, there was no skit of Tim Cook trick-or-treating or Greg Joswiak waiting in a pumpkin patch for the, uh, Great MacBook or anything, but Apple did announce new iMacs and MacBook Pros this week, all of them running on M3 processors.
By most accounts these look like great improvements (including the ditching of the Touch Bar), but not everyone was thrilled. Some observers were put out that the bottom of the line M3 MacBook Pro only has two ports, despite coming in the more modern enclosure. Yes, it is the year of our lord 2023 and people are still surprised to find that Apple is differentiating its lineup and forcing them to choose between feature sets. Are these the same people who complain that Apple’s product line is not clearly enough differentiated? Uncertain, but it wouldn’t be Apple discourse if the company didn’t get it coming while also going.
Apple did giveth new Macs, but Apple also did not giveth. Sadly missing in action were new USB-C-based peripherals. It seems like a strange omission but the company may just have a backlog of Lightning-based peripherals it needs to clear out before it will ship new ones. In Tim Cook’s Apple, everything must go. At full price.
Are USB-C peripherals coming? Sure. When? Who knows? Will the mouse still have the port on the bottom? I doubt it but also think it would be hilarious if it did, so I kind of want them to keep it there? Is that weird?
Shot on iPhonegate
The gates, they make them out of nothing these days. At least whole cloth is carbon neutral.
After Monday’s event, Apple released a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and edited on a Mac. They say that if you are a dog food manufacturer that you should also eat the dog food that you make, which I find super weird because that stuff’s for dogs. They have way bigger appendixes than we do. Don’t eat that. Also, it just makes the dogs sad. Anyway, Apple certainly showed it uses its own products.
But did it show us that it uses its own products in an appropriate way?
Yes, some have since said “Ah, well, it’s not entirely true to say the event was shot on an iPhone 15 as you blonkity horn bloggle with the flang jamerringdingdong.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but I think I’m correctly conveying the gist of it.
The argument is that because Apple still used professional lighting and editing (did you know the moon is not actually shaped like an apple with a bite taken out of it?!), it was falsely suggesting that anyone could produce their own Apple event video with just an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
You don’t have the budget for professional lighting and editing, Randy! Also, you don’t have new Macs to introduce! The very idea of you making a Halloween-themed Mac event is laughable! Who does Apple think it’s kidding?!
Allow me to just echo all the sighs at this argument. “Shot on an iPhone 15” means exactly that and that’s what the company did.
Is there an ad-supported “The Family Plan”?
Apple also announced the release date for “The Family Plan”, a Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan action-comedy that is sure to delight. So, come this December you can watch “The Family Plan” on an Apple TV+ family plan… if you can still afford one, as the company just raised prices.
Speaking of services, Apple announced its quarterly results this week and services revenue was up a whopping 16 percent. And that’s for the quarter before the company’s price hike will go into effect. Apple’s revenue was actually down, but thanks largely to those high services margins, profit was up.
Why even sell Macs and iPads when you can sell more streaming bits of things at practically no incremental cost?
[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.]