By John Moltz
May 17, 2024 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Going hard on the software
The new iPad Pros are astounding, fast, and durable machines that run an operating system. In other news, the new chatbots are here and we’ll never hear the end of it.
It’s a real good news/bad news situation
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week… well, I have a lot of questions. First, I hope this is just a hatch-type situation where the rock is simply hiding the door to a silo or bunker because otherwise that sounds really uncomfortable. Unless it’s a very small rock, in which case why bother? We can see you. But I don’t want to get distracted because we have Apple news to talk about, so let’s circle back around to this living-under-a-rock situation later.
The Apple web’s main discourse this week revolved around reviews of the new iPad Pros (tl;dr very impressive, hecka fast, lighter than air because they are literally lighter than the iPad Airs) and thoughts about the overall iPad experience. The consensus is the hardware is awesome, it’s just a shame it’s wasted on iPadOS.
“Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right”
Can you do pro work on an iPad? Sure. As long as you don’t want to do anything else while you’re doing it. As Steve Troughton-Smith points out, if you try to switch to another app while exporting a video from Final Cut Pro, it just stops. Like a lightweight but bizarrely fast baby, iPadOS has not yet developed object permanence.
Surely all the speed of that M4 can’t just be for processing whatever task is in the foreground. It’s possible Apple has another story to tell when WWDC rolls around next month.
Will it b[l]end?
You’ll be happy to know the new iPad Pros perform well in the blend test.
“New iPad Pro performs well in extreme bend test, beats previous-gen”
I don’t know what kind of maniacs are putting iPad Pros in blenders or, indeed, where they find blenders large enough to…
What?
Oh, it says bend. OK, that makes more sense.
But didn’t we just talk about that “Crush” ad? I get that it’s for science, it’s just a little gut-wrenching to me to see people attempting to destroy a device I now can’t stop thinking about after only briefly holding one in an Apple Store yesterday.
They’re really thin. I don’t know if you’ve heard. And apparently pretty strong. And fast. Sadly, they’re not giving them away.
I suppose if you work in the field somewhere—like an actual field, possibly one covered with stampeding rhinos—then maybe you’d want to be concerned about how much damage an iPad Pro can take. But normal users won’t be putting this device in their back pockets and trying to sit down.
Not even Todd. And we all know what he did with that Xserve all those years ago. I didn’t even know that was physically possible.
It’s an AI world, we just live in it
Both OpenAI and Google held events during which they announced some astounding new AI features that are exciting, raise a fair number of questions, and will have you scrambling to opt out of having your online presence scraped for free.
OpenAI came out swinging with its very chatty GPT-4o chatbot that exhibits a remarkable ability to converse with human users. On the other hand, I noticed several instances where a presenter had to talk over it to get it to shut up and at one point it said “Announcements are always a big deal!” It’s like having your own MBA at home! (Before you get mad: MBA, University of Washington, 1992.)
Google held its I/O event this week and it also led with some astounding AI features, including a home study session with two chatbots that had previously gobbled up an “open-source textbook” and were able to jovially regurgitate it back and forth to each other. Google’s examples generally leave out its intent, which is to eat the entire web and obviate your need to go those troublesome websites at all.
Which brings me back to the beginning. Tell me more about this rock.
[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.]