By John Moltz

July 7, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Too many socials

Pity poor Goldman Sachs, as it fails to turn a profit in the credit card racket. Also, pity yourself next year when you can’t get an Apple Vision Pro. And which social media platform will you turn to when you want to complain about it?!

Go rack up some debt, already!

All you horrible Apple people have disappointed a giant financial services company.

“Goldman Is Looking for a Way Out of Its Partnership With Apple”

What’s the problem, you wonder? What bee do they have in their bonnet? Well, it could have something to do with this:

“Apple Card Has Cost Goldman Sachs Over $1 Billion in Losses”

That’s a lot of bees.

By all accounts, the Apple Card is working for Apple, so you have to wonder why it isn’t working for Goldman. Not enough people holding huge balances? Maybe. Whatever the case, Goldman is looking to divest its entire credit card business and is in talks with American Express to take the division off its hands. The company is apparently trying to move away from dealing with consumers. Makes sense. Humans are so messy and it’s so much easier to just make billions off of money as a concept. And when that fails, you can always just get another bailout!

Because when you’re Goldman Sachs, you might be too big to fail, but you’re still young enough at heart to keep tryin’.

Vision Pro no

You can’t get the Vision Pro yet and, if these reports are true, you might also have a hard time getting one next year.

“Apple Reportedly Cuts Production Targets for Vision Pro Due to Manufacturing Complexity”

Hey, I get it. I usually give up when something gets hard, too.

Supply chain rumors also allege that two of Apple’s China-based component suppliers only have enough parts to produce around 130,000 to 150,000 Vision Pro units in the first year.

That’s a problem, as Apple was reportedly hoping to sell about a million units in the first year. It’s not exactly a new problem, though. Long-time iPhone buyers will recall having to wait for supply to catch up to demand. Personally, I will never get over the month I had to wait for an iPhone 4 back in 2010.

Sometimes I wake up at night and walk to the window in the dark. I watch the lights of ships coming and going in the bay below and think of the loss I suffered. For those four weeks I didn’t have an iPhone 4.

A single tear falls.

…

Anyway, c’mon. You probably weren’t seriously buying a Vision Pro anyway, were you?

Big Deal Social Media

I regret to inform you that it was another big week in social media.

Remember Twitter? Yeah. Anyway, over the weekend, Twitter said that it would be limiting the number of tweets people could see, ostensibly to stop data scraping, but perhaps more likely to avoid paying infrastructure costs. The company has since backpedaled a bit, but not before more fed-up users fled the platform.

Where to go, though? Fear not! Everyone’s favorite privacy grinder, Meta, has come to the rescue!

[collective groan]

Yes, Meta introduced Threads, a Twitter-like platform spun out from Instagram. The platform gets a leg up by leveraging an existing huge user base, but already has its own problems. For instance, it won’t be launched in the EU because of regulatory concerns. Also, it features the same vapid content you know and love from Instagram.

Twitter has reacted calmly to the unveiling, welcoming the ha-ha, no, it’s accused Meta of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets”.

“Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads”

This is, of course, a “trying to eat a Hot Pocket right out of the microwave” level of hot nonsense.

What does this have to do with Apple, you ask? After all, this column is titled “This Week in Apple” not “This Week in Clown Car to Online Engagement Town”. Well, Apple is one of the last few reputable advertisers on Twitter. For some reason. That’s a situation that’s unlikely to improve, as Elon Musk—the boy who sprung out of a cautionary Aesop’s fable about the dangers of becoming too rich—continues to autodrive the company into a ditch. Repeatedly. In addition to the rate-limiting, sometimes the ads users see don’t even work. One can only imagine what Faustian bargain Tim Cook struck with Musk when they met at Apple Park back in November.

Although, Faustian is probably the wrong analogy, as Faust struck a bargain with Mephistopheles who was, by all counts, a competent demon. This was probably more of a Beetlejuiceian bargain.

[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.]

By Dan Moren

June 30, 2023 2:47 PM PT

The Back Page: Hot beta summer

Kick back, relax, and grab a drink with a little umbrella in it because the summer of betas has arrived. iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, there’s a beta for you, a beta for you, a beta for everyone!¹

Look, yes, everybody will tell you not to put betas on your devices. They say it’s to protect you, but we all know it’s just because they want to keep all of that beta hotness for themselves.

Who cares about them, whoever they are? Your phone is your castle, and you should be able to install whatever leaky, drafty software on it that you want. Come on in, the water’s fine! Even if it is in a moat! Did I mix my metaphors too much? Who cares! HOT BETA SUMMER!

To be fair, I shouldn’t be too cavalier about just diving into untested software willy-nilly. It is important, after all, to practice safe beta software installation. Most critically, you should always be sure to make a backup of your existing device. For iPhones and iPads, you can do that by connecting it to a Mac, choosing Back Up in the Finder, archiving that backup, choosing a strong password for encryption that you then write on a small slip on paper and give to the most trusted bird in your backyard. Don’t tell us which one!

Once you’ve taken the necessary precautions, it’s time for the main event. Because the attraction of betas, of course, is the slew of new features they bring. Never mind that they’re unreliable, prone to crashes, and eat your battery faster than a termite let loose in an antique furniture store. That’s part of the fun.

Just imagine being able to exchange your fancy new contact card with…other people who are on the betas, I guess. But at least you can finally share your iCloud Keychain passwords with…uh, there must be someone on the beta that you don’t mind having your passwords. Well, at least you can add stickers as a reaction to any messag—wait, that’s not even in there yet?

How about that improved autocorrect? Not a single duck in sight!

Of course, hot beta summer isn’t just about fun; it’s also about being productive. That means reporting a bug whenever you encounter one, using Apple’s very friendly system. Just launch the Feedback app on your device, make a small incision on your hand, and drip six and a half drops of blood onto the screen while whispering the sacred words: “in Craig confidimus.” Will your prayers to Apple be answered? It is ever uncertain! Pretty much the same odds as any other prayers!

But ultimately, all of your pain and suffering will have been worth it. Fall will roll around, and all your friends and loved ones will be installing the software you’ve had on your devices for months. Think of all the hard work you’ve done for them, making sure the experience is as smooth and bug-free as possible. Thank heavens you don’t have to go through that again.

…iOS 17.1, you say?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By John Moltz

June 30, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: You can’t spell “Grimace” without “iMac”

Phil Schiller is ruining everything! And a tale of two Macs: one real that maybe shouldn’t be, the other not yet real that really should be.

Meaty paws make light work

What’s wrong with the App Store? Turns out it’s simpler than we thought.

In an interview with mobilegamer.biz, former head of App Store review Phillip Shoemaker laid the blame for the App Store’s faults at the hands of Phil Schiller.

”Phil just needs to get his meaty paws off the App Store.”

Shoemaker’s tone is incendiary enough for one to think that he might have a book coming out soon, but it’s never very hard to get a platform if you’re a former Apple executive and you have something bad to say about the company. Heck, half the time you don’t even have to have worked at Apple.

“AREA RANDO BELIEVES THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SHOULD BREAK UP CONTROL CENTER”

(That sounds like a joke, but then there’s the time The Wall Street Journal asked a standup comedian about Apple Pay.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean Shoemaker is really wrong about the App Store. Its appreciation of the zeitgeist does seem to be stuck in the late George W. Bush administration era. While it’s made small concessions over time, Apple still takes a large percentage of revenue, requires developers to jump through complicated and arbitrary hoops, and offers little recourse when it makes decisions other than going to the press, which the company has insisted “never helps”.

Phil Schiller does not operate in a vacuum. Point of fact, few humans operate in a vacuum for very long, let alone as long as Schiller has worked at Apple. He might be impeding progress on the App Store, but even if he completely retired tomorrow, it’s unlikely the company would make sweeping changes. Despite Tim Cook’s paeans for the App Store being where the customer meets the developer, it’s Apple that it’s really working for.

The Mac No

The Mac Pro reviews are in and… eh?

It certainly seems to be a fine machine. Very capable. Fast. Uh, shiny. Very shiny.

Just… why?

As The Verge’s Monica Chin put it:

“The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook”

It seems the MacBook Pro is such an exceptional machine for pros, providing all the speed they need along with portability, that the Mac Pro isn’t really needed. And there just isn’t that much advantage in paying thousands more for a Mac Pro when you can get the same processor in the Mac Studio.

Of course, at these prices, Apple doesn’t need to sell them to most professionals. It just needs to sell them to some professionals. Heck, if someone maxes out a Mac Pro, possibly just one professional.

The expandability offered by the Mac Pro is nice, but not worth the premium it used to command when it doesn’t allow you to add GPUs.

Why doesn’t the new Mac Pro offer GPU expansion? At least one reason is that since Apple no longer ships AMD GPUs in its systems (most importantly, the ones that sell in volume), AMD has no incentive to write drivers for macOS. And the company hasn’t had an Nvidia GPU in a Mac since almost a time before remembering.¹ It’s possible Apple could write the drivers itself, but then it’d have to spin up a group to do that. And a first step would be at least feigning the slightest bit of interest in doing so, all to support a capability on a Mac that few people buy to sell someone else’s GPUs. The small numbers the Mac Pro ships in probably aren’t worth the effort for anybody.

Apple may have checked a box with the new Mac Pro, but it’s a box not many people are going to open.

Big iMac

McDonald’s introduced a Grimace Shake this month (don’t worry, each shake only contains a minute trace of Grimace-based material), but it’s Apple that will be introducing a Big i-Mac, if the rumors are true.

(Look, you try to come up with three ledes every week.)

While discussing future products that may come after the first half of 2024, Mark Gurman said:

The company is also conducting early work on an iMac with a screen over 30 inches…

You read that right: over 30 inches. And unlike the Big Mac, which looks like it’s 8 inches tall in the ads but is only about three inches of coronary-inducing delight when you actually take it out of the box, “over 30 inches” means over 30 inches.

Gurman doesn’t go into any more detail than that, but “early work” would seem to indicate this machine is probably well more than a year away, so we could assume that the current 24-inch iMac will get refreshed before it appears, if it ever does.

A larger iMac does make sense in Apple’s lineup (probably more sense than the new Mac Pro). Sure, the 24-inch iMac is a whole real-life Big Mac’s worth of more screen real estate than the previous 21-inch iMacs, but Apple also discontinued its previous large adult son, the 27-inch iMac. When big-box stores are crammed with reasonably-priced TVs in huge dimensions and companies are literally giving away 55-inch TVs, people are simply used to larger screens now. Big screens are not just for pros anymore. Go big or go home, Apple.

[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.]