By John Moltz

March 10, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Stumbling into the future

Technology marches ever forward, even if it does stumble drunkenly from side to side, as it sometimes does. This week Apple contemplates its AI strategy, sets a ship date for its classical music app, and makes plans for new Macs. Reportedly.

Begun, the AI war has

Look out, Siri, because according to DigiTimes, Apple is going to re-examine its AI strategy.

It’s fine to reexamine your strategies at any time, and there are certainly some effective applications for AI, but given the current state of “AI” (which is really more machine learning than true “artificial intelligence”), this is an area where Apple should feel free to take its time.

Why? Well, let’s just pull a quote from thatMacRumors piece:

…companies like Apple, Meta, and Amazon… are purportedly making efforts to ensure Microsoft does not maintain its lead in AI.

Its what with the whatnow? Are we talking about the same AI?

“Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails”

“Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird”

“Microsoft’s Bing AI plotted its revenge and offered me furry porn”

Is it this the AI we’re talking about? This is the one that’s supposedly ahead?

If I ship a personal jetpack that’s 15 liter-sized Diet Coke bottles, each hooked up to my own patented Mentos injection system, and all duct taped upside down to a backpack, does that put me in the lead in jetpack technology?

If so, forget I said that until I secure some VC funding.

As fun as these systems are to play with right now (mostly for the laughably incorrect answers they give to simple questions like “What year is it?”), this isn’t a kiddie pool Apple needs to play in yet.

Classic Apple

While Apple missed its deadline of the end of 2022 to ship a classical music app, the company announced this week that classical music stans can expect it to hit the App Store on March 28th. You can even pre-order it now and it’ll download automatically when it’s available.

But cue up Beethoven’s 5th, because there’s a catch.

Update: I’ve confirmed with Apple that Apple Music Classical will be iOS-only when it launches. No iPad app.

You people finally got a Weather app for the iPad and now you want a classical music app, too?! Unbelievable! Next you’ll want a Mac app. And four of you will want an Apple TV app. Where does it end?

Yeah, OK, probably right there. But, still.

Given how much Apple pushes developers to ship apps for all of its platforms, “ironic” seems too casual a word to describe the company shipping this app for just the iPhone. Let’s go with “cosmironic” or “ironimitastic”. Apple likes to make it seem easy to ship apps that work on all of its platforms, but it’s still work—work that it clearly doesn’t even want to do itself, sometimes.

And it doesn’t even have to go through the app approval process, which is still like having to run an obstacle course built on an ever-changing Rube Goldberg machine. Even a classic like Untitled Goose Game was, as Cabel Sasser details, rejected twice before Panic simply gave up.

It’s nice that Apple still ships some products that are just for a segment of its customers. It’s too bad this one’s just on a segment of its platforms.

Skip counting new Macs

The Mac rumors will continue until… well, long past when morale improves. And then degrades again. Possibly until the heat death of the universe, it seems.

A 15-inch Air could arrive as soon as April, according to display analyst Ross Young. But what’s it going to run on? Is Apple really going to ship an M3-based Air less than a year after it shipped the M2-based Air? I’m not privy to Apple’s processor release schedule—despite all the flowers and chocolates I’ve sent to Johny Srouji—but that seems quick.

You’re already crushing the competition in performance per watt, Apple. Slow down. Where’s the fire?

Inside Intel-based laptops! Zing.

An M3-based iMac is also reportedly in the works, per Mark Gurman. If this is the next iMac to ship, that would mean the iMac line would completely skip the M2. And then would Apple ship a Mac Pro based on an M2 Ultra?

Of course, that would be fine, it’s just something about the numbering of Apple silicon that makes these updates seem stranger than when Macs ran on Intel’s chips with their unintelligible cacophony of lake-based names. Was Lake Wobegon faster than Crystal Lake? Who knew?

Anyway, enjoy the fruit basket, Johny.

And call me.

[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 Shelly Brisbin

March 8, 2023 11:23 AM PT

It’s not a classic era for classic movies

It happens to most of us: You search your streaming services or an aggregator site for a movie you remember fondly, or somehow never saw when it was new, only to come up empty. The withering of back catalogs has hit all of the big services, as they cut costs and execute mergers in the face of stiff competition. But for classic film fans, movies often go missing in bulk, taking forgotten-but-important titles along.

Really old movies—which I define as being released between the dawn of the sound era and roughly the end of the decade I was born—are what make me happy. They’re my comfort food, my geeky hobby, my excuse to host a podcast. I’ve loved this stuff since high school. And while media mega mergers mean libraries of old films get valued as assets when the deals are made, that doesn’t mean they’ll pop up on a streamer anytime soon. That’s not just a problem for me and fellow followers of the #TCMParty hashtag. It’s a loss for culture and film history—a memory hole for the 21st century.

Sure, you can find classic films on Amazon, HBO Max, or for rent or purchase on iTunes. But you can’t always watch the specific one you want to, much less take a deep dive into the catalog of a director or actor whose studio’s library is locked up by the current owners, or by a tangle of cascading legal rights. Truthfully, it’s been that way for years. It’s just the names on the buildings that change, as the number of ways you might be able to see a classic you love continues to shrink.

Right cross

The first thing to know about why a film is or isn’t available to stream is that it’s complicated. Last year, Amazon closed a deal to buy MGM, including a 4,000 film library that includes Rocky and James Bond properties. These aren’t MGM films from my classic era, but the deal is a good example of why owning a thing doesn’t mean it’s immediately available for your customers to stream. Rights to stream, remake, or make discs containing many of these titles are tied up for years to come, not to mention the costs associated with remastering and marketing a back catalog. So for viewing purposes, mergers and acquisitions of vast movie libraries just create delays, while the new owners wait out rights deals, or negotiate new ones.

Even within large film libraries, individual titles are caught up in rights disputes all the time, with the estates of directors or producers owning veto powers, or the chain of custody becoming murky over 80 or 90 years. Clearing rights is a legal specialty for a reason.

Locked in the vault

The pre-1986 MGM film library belongs to Warner Brothers, as do its own classics, and RKO’s, too. That’s a legacy of Ted Turner’s purchase of these assets from Kirk Kerkorian back in the 80s. Turner wanted to show the movies, and did so on his various cable channels, eventually including Turner Classic Movies. When Warner bought Turner out, it began selling physical media, creating the Warner Archive. They spent a lot of money to restore and remaster films, too, which was a great investment while people (like me) were buying physical copies of the movies they loved to be sure they would have a one.

Other classic film libraries haven’t been as available. Many of Paramount’s pre-1949 films were locked in Universal vaults for years before the company began various projects, including a YouTube channel, to release selected films. And the 20th Century Fox library is now owned by Disney, which is typically stingy with its own content, and has so far not brought those piles of old Fox films to Disney+.

The trouble with holding up Warner Archive as a model for other classic library owners is that its early success didn’t last. The business was built on physical media, and when Warner and TCM tried a classics-focused streaming service, FilmStruck, it failed.

Today, the closest we have to a streaming service with classic content is TCM, a commercial-free cable channel. Its availability on many over-the-top services means the majority of the MGM/Warner/RKO library content, plus other films the channels gets rights to show, have been relatively available to view. But the seas looked rougher for TCM fans following the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery. In January, Discovery president David Zaslav stated very publicly (while flanked by TCM on-air hosts) that the channel will continue. Plenty of us who love the channel could be heard muttering a skeptical “for now” when we read the news.

And as great as TCM is—with an on-demand component you can use to stream films shown in the past few weeks—the entire library is not (and has not been) available all at once, whether on a dedicated service or on a service like HBO Max.

Defensive Collecting

Long before streaming took complete hold of the media landscape, I was a physical media collector. I bought Warner Archive VOD releases, crummy transfers of public domain film noirs from a bin at Fry’s Electronics, and fancy box sets devoted to John Ford or to forgotten film noir.

I’m glad I did, because those discs form the backbone of my home Plex server, a library that can grow as big as the hard drives I have available to store them, assuming the movie made its way into some digital format, and I was there to grab it. I still collect discs. So Kino Lorber, Criterion and Warner Archive get the money streaming services do not. Choosing between access to the very old instead of the very new is not ideal, but it’s what I’m doing for now. And for the future of my access to classic film.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]