By John Moltz
January 5, 2024 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: All the wrong answers
2024 kicks off with all new Apple acquisition fan drafts and even larger iPhones. And is Apple poised to join the AI arms race? Why?
Peloton and on
Last year’s Apple acquisition porn focused on the company acquiring no less than Disney. 2024 seems to have more realistic goals.
“Deepwater predicts Apple acquisition of Peloton”
Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?
Minneapolis-based investment firm, Deepwater Asset Management, predicts that in 2024 Apple will finally acquire Peloton – the firm is headed by former tech analyst, Gene Munster.
Oh, of course. Answering the question “Does Gene Munster still writes Apple fan fiction?” Yes. The answer is yes.
The article then raises the question: can Betteridge’s Law of Headlines also be applied to sentences that appear in the article?
Would Apple acquire a business that hasn’t shown growth in nearly three years?
It’s not completely out of the question for Apple to buy Peloton. It did buy Beats, after all. But it also didn’t buy a car company and didn’t buy a home automation company and didn’t buy a thousand other companies you’ve heard of because it tends to buy the ones you haven’t heard of.
If Apple does acquire Peloton, you can bet that Tim Cook will mandate the trainers not provide reviews of Apple TV+ shows during the exercise sessions.
iPhones will get larger until morale improves
Well, another iPhone launch quarter is behind us so it’s time for this suffering iPhone mini fan to take a big mouthful of water and see what’s in the news headed into 2024.
“iPhone Sizes to Change Next Year: What to Know”
According to multiple sources, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will feature an increase in display size compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max…
PFFFFFFFFT
With iPhones getting larger, you may wonder how long it will be be before they are the size of iPads? Well, don’t worry, because Apple apparently wants to make those bigger, too. It’ll all work out.
If you’re one of the group of large-phone fetishists that Apple is targeting here, you can always buy one of those attachments that will put a physical keyboard on your iPhone that were announced this week. That’ll make your phone bigger. Then maybe some of us could get the small phones we want.
Keeping up with the Joneses
Get ready to read a mess of “SAMSUNG LEAPFROGS APPLE” headlines because the company is way ahead in the race to ship phones that give you catastrophically bad answers.
“Samsung to Unveil New Galaxy S24 Smartphones With Enhanced AI on January 17”
Parents can’t wait!
“ChatGPT bombs test on diagnosing kids’ medical cases with 83% error rate”
Whoops. Look, you can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few Tide pods into a pan, placing the metal pan in microwave, setting the microwave to HIGH, microwaving for 45 minutes to an hour, then enjoying your delicious omelette.
Sorry, I let the AI finish that paragraph. Wait, when you ask an AI for a recipe, does it make up a whole backstory first about how it learned this recipe while living abroad in Tuscany during its junior year before finally showing you the recipe? If only Philip K. Dick were still alive to tell us.
Despite all this, Apple seems set to throw its hat into the ring of fire.
“New Version of Siri With Generative AI Again Rumored for WWDC”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this rumored but I was amused by MacRumors’s note that this comes “from a user with a track record for posting Apple rumors.” Hey, some of us have even longer track records for posting Apple rumors, so that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement.
[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.]