By John Moltz
April 5, 2024 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Ghost in the machine
Apple hasn’t given up on moving things that have AI in them, the iPhone 16’s genesis is nigh, and clean the house because spatial personas are coming over.
What could go wrong?
Look, you’re worried about AI. I get it. It’s impeding researchers who track language use, it’s being used to send out phony-baloney cease and don’t-desist-but-instead-link-to-our-site orders, and it dishes out bad medical advice.
But, lemme just run this by you. I think it’ll make it all more appealing.
What if we put the AI… in a robot?
Killer, right?
Ooh. I mean… uh… not… er…
“Apple Exploring ‘Mobile Robot’ That ‘Follows Users Around Their Homes’”
Apple is investigating the use of AI algorithms that would help robots “navigate cluttered spaces within people’s homes,”…
If they’re looking for a place to test them, my office would present quite the challenge.
Apple’s car may have been a lemon, but imagine how much lemonade you can squeeze out of something that big. Still, not everyone’s going along for the ride. Apparently it doesn’t take as many employees to make robots as it does cars since Apple is reportedly laying off more than 700 employees, many from its car division.
Other divisions affected including those working on micro-LEDs and some in a Siri data operations center. Somewhere a Siri manager is telling a team they’ll just work smarter, not harder, to peals of uproarious laughter.
Sweet 16
It’s only five months until the iPhone 16 is unveiled! Probably a little too early to start lining up for it, but to pass the time you can take a gander at some dummy models milled from solid pieces of aluminum. I have been assured that these are not liquid metal Terminators and pose no threat to John Connor.
But, of course, that’s just what a liquid metal Terminator would say.
tmttc/dla (too much trouble to click, didn’t look at), they look like iPhones. The base models feature an iPhone X-type vertical camera arrangement and they’re allll tooo biiig (lovingly caresses iPhone 13 mini).
The images don’t show the front side but rest assured that Apple’s war on bezels continues and some iPhone 16 models are expected to have even thinner bezels than previous generations. Sadly, as we have learned from Zeno’s paradox, Apple can only ever halve the bezel, it can never reach the edge of the phone, making it completely bezel-less.
At least until it is able to bend the phone into higher dimensions, achieving a true tessaphone that folds into N-space. Alas, some of the people working on Apple’s foldable space project were also laid off.
Or, possibly, they disappeared into another dimension. It happens.
A very spatial guest
After two lackluster Vision Pro offerings last week (the MLS Cup immersive video and MLB for Vision Pro), Apple unveiled spatial personas this week which many reviewers seemed pleased with, some going so far as to claim placing personas inside whatever space you happen to be in made them feel “more real”.
Those of us without a Vision Pro will simply have to take their word for it as from the outside it looks like a nerd haunting.
“Doooon’t forget to baaaaack uuuuup! Whaaaaaahaaaaa!”
“Honey! We’ve got ghosts again!”
“[sigh] I’ll call the exorcist.”
Spatial personas seem to solve a major criticism of the Vision Pro by allowing you to share an environment with someone else using a Vision Pro, whether it’s watching a movie or collaborating on a presentation. As Apple adds experiences like this, the Vision Pro moves from being a bleeding edge device to one that’s more broadly applicable for general use. At some point the device that has been chided as isolating could become the one that puts you in the same room as someone far away.
Provided your ghost friends have $3,500.
[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.]