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Apple TV+ comes to Prime Video, and the Diamond bankruptcy continues to disrupt the entire economy of sports. [Downstream+ listeners get: ESPN Flagship, Paramount and the NFL, the future of sports rights, and in praise of narrowcasting.]


By Jason Snell

Apple Pay turns 10, adds new wrinkles

My first Apple Pay transaction, in 2014.

It’s hard to believe Apple Pay launched a decade ago, and only slightly less hard to believe that we’ve reached the point that I can link to my decade-old story about using Apple Pay for the first time at my local Whole Foods:

“Oh, you’re going to try that?” Tyler said.

“Yep, I’m one of those people,” I said, and habitually placed my thumb on the phone, as if I was going to unlock it. Which was what I was going to do, but instead of doing that, I paid for groceries.

“Whoa, I don’t know what just happened,” Tyler said as the paper receipt popped out of the cash register’s printer.

Today Apple posted a Newsroom PR item celebrating the milestone while also announcing a few new wrinkles: additional installment loan support and the expansion of rewards support in participating cards. Unfortunately, the number of cards participating in the program are quite small—in the U.S. I believe it’s only Discover—but it does mean you can apply your Discover cashback or miles directly to an Apple Pay purchase if you want.

In the United States, Apple Pay has had the effect that I thought it would have: Tap-to-pay is now commonplace, in a way that it simply wasn’t before. The U.S. is now slightly less out of step with the rest of the world in that way. Express transit support has also been a gamechanger in about 20 cities.

However, I’m surprised that Apple’s other financial products—Apple Card and Apple Cash—have basically not gone anywhere. They’re still only available in the United States. Apple’s financial reach only goes so far, apparently.


In Praise of Keith from Sonos

I really enjoyed this story by Rachel Karten about how, amid widespread outrage about a disastrous software update from Sonos, the company’s Social Media Program Lead was doing it right:

KeithFromSonos is a Sonos employee who is very active in the r/Sonos subreddit and has somehow won over customers in a particularly tumultuous time for the brand. It’s hard for me to not use jargon here, but he shows up as a customer and not like a brand mouthpiece. When it was announced two months ago that Sonos had a big round of layoffs, someone commented “KeithFromSonos – you still around?”, he replied with a Weekend at Bernies GIF. It was upvoted 788 times. (He, of course, then posted a thoughtful note.) And when Keith isn’t solving user issues, he might be recommending his favorite A24 movies or writing paragraphs about why he loves the r/Sonos community.

I’m not sure how replicable all this is—Keith may just have a unique set of skills and worldview—but I suspect that there are still a lot of lessons here for companies that are interacting with their customers and ecosystems on modern social media.


The last Kindle with page-turn buttons is dead

Kindle Oasis
The two previous Kindle Oasis models, in happier times.

Amazon announced a bunch of brand-new Kindle models Wednesday, including a refreshed Paperwhite and a new color model, both of which I’ve ordered and will review soon. But Jay Peters of The Verge brings us the bad Kindle news of the day:

Amazon has discontinued the Kindle Oasis, which was the only Kindle still available with physical page-turn buttons. The company announced a new Kindle lineup earlier today, but Amazon confirmed to The Verge that it’s moving on from the Oasis.

The writing was on the wall, but it’s still sad. Amazon has apparently decided that there’s no place in the Kindle line-up for an e-reader that still has physical page-turn buttons.

Regular readers of this site will know that I am an ardent supporter of physical page-turn buttons on e-readers, because they allow you to rest a finger on the button and turn the page with a simple squeeze, while touch-only readers require you to constantly reposition a finger, tap, and the move the finger away. Not exactly torturous, but decidedly less optimal.

Instead, Amazon (and many other e-reader makers) seem quite keen on the idea that you can read color comics (on screens that are far too small) and that you can take copious notes (which I stopped doing after grad school). I admit that e-readers are a niche tech product and don’t fault e-reader makers from searching for new use cases to expand their markets. I’m just sad that Amazon doesn’t think there’s room somewhere in its Kindle line for buttons.

In the meantime, if you want a new e-reader with page-turn buttons, I recommend (with reservations) the $220 Kobo Libra Colour or the $270 Kobo Sage. Neither is cheap, I know. (The Oasis was $250, though, so in the ballpark.) Of those two, the Sage is larger, has a flush screen, and doesn’t suffer some of the contrast issues of the Libra Colour.



Our experiences with Passkeys and thoughts on their upcoming portability, opinions on Threads showing online status by default, views on Amazon’s new Kindle lineup including the color model, and our preferred methods and platforms for consuming news.


By Jason Snell

Review: AirPods 4 with ANC no replacement for AirPods Pro

AirPods 4 with ANC (left) are great if you can’t bear AirPods Pro 2 (right), but are inferior in every other way.

It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since AirPods first arrived on the scene. After years of avoiding Apple-branded earbuds for better-sounding headphones, I was really skeptical that Apple could build something that sounded good, but it sure did, and it was rewarded with a hit. I went from being skeptical to using them everywhere except mowing the lawn or riding on an airplane.

But in 2019, the AirPods Pro barreled in, with their in-ear design and active noise cancellation, and they became my go-to earbuds for everywhere. That noise cancellation made a huge difference and was enough for me to turn my back on the original AirPods design forever.

But in a bit of a surprise, this year, Apple has introduced the $179 AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, a slightly pricier version of the $129 AirPods 4 that throws noise cancellation into the more affordable AirPods for the very first time. I’ve been able to use the AirPods 4 with ANC over the last few weeks, including on an airplane, and my feelings are… well, they’re mixed.

On the one hand, the fact that you can get noise cancellation on base AirPods is amazing. Their hard plastic body means that they can’t make a soft seal like the silicone tips on the AirPods Pro can, so there’s more outside audio leakage to compensate for. However, there’s a huge advantage there: If you can’t stand silicone ear tips sticking into your ears, maybe the AirPods 4 will let you finally use ANC AirPods for the first time.

I found the shape of the AirPods 4 to be perfectly acceptable, but every ear is different. Apple says it’s upgraded its database of global ear shapes in order to craft a shape that’s the best for most people, but there’s literally no way to generalize something like this: The only way you’re going to be able to tell if the shape of AirPods 4 is better or worse than previous AirPods is to try them for yourself.

Apple’s made a few other changes from the previous-generation AirPods, too. The H2 chip powers noise cancellation as well as conversational awareness, transparency mode, voice isolation, and adaptive audio. There are also a few downgrades: battery life is rated an hour lower, and the skin-detect sensor to reduce the number of times your music or podcasts keep playing when you shove the earbuds in your pocket has been replaced with a more primitive optical sensor.

But here’s the thing: While AirPods 4 with noise cancellation are a step up from the base model and from previous models, that $70 difference (only $20 if you can find AirPods Pro 2 on Amazon for $199, as I can right now) between the models comes with a huge leap in quality.

When I put the AirPods 4 with ANC in my ears while the house next door was being loudly power washed, I could hear my music and the faint sound of power washing. On an airplane, the hum of the engines was tamped down. Great! But in contrast, when I used my AirPods Pro 2 in those situations, the power washing sound was gone, and so was the hum of the engines. Apple’s claim that the AirPods Pro are twice as good at noise cancellation might be a bit of a head-scratcher in terms of how it’s calculated, but it’s not wrong.

And a few years of using AirPods Pro have also spoiled me when it comes to audio quality. The sound on the AirPods 4 is… fine? In a vacuum, I’d say that they sounded good. But the AirPods Pro sound better, and it’s not really close. I also missed the ability to adjust the volume on the fly by moving my fingers on the AirPods Pro—you have to use Siri, your iPhone, or your Apple Watch to adjust the volume on the AirPods 4.

There’s no denying it: AirPods Pro are superior to the AirPods 4 in every way, and if you’re buying a new pair of AirPods, you should really consider if it’s worth spending a little bit more to get the very best. (See Quinn Nelson’s YouTube review for a lot more detail on these issues.)

Everyone’s priorities are going to vary. At $129, AirPods 4 are a pretty good buy. At $249, AirPods Pro 2 are pricey but great. I’m not sure if these $179 AirPods 4 with ANC really make sense. If they’re the best fit for your ears and the AirPods Pro aren’t an option, great. But don’t make the mistake of buying AirPods 4 with ANC, thinking that they’re an easy way to save on AirPods Pro 2. They aren’t.


We’re about to find out if Apple’s big bet is going to pay off

Apple Intelligence is about to hit the mainstream. Within the next couple weeks, Apple is likely to ship iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, all of them bringing the first in the suite of features that Apple has been talking about since June. If you have any doubt, just go watch a TV show with ads and I guarantee you’ll see Snoop Dogg hawking it as a selling point of the new iPhone 16 in fifteen minutes or less.

Apple isn’t usually the first to enter a brand new market, but it does have a reputation for helping usher technologies into the mainstream, and for setting the bar for its rivals—including being often imitated. With millions of Apple Intelligence-capable devices already in customers’ hands, it’s sure to make a big splash.

But as Apple is prepared to embark upon this new venture, it might be worth zooming out a little bit and looking at the company’s overall strategy. That includes both how it’s rolling out these features as well as where the company is ultimately aiming.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦


By Jason Snell

The new iPad mini’s surprising not-new processor

iPad mini 2024

I suppose it’s telling that the most interesting and surprising thing about the just-announced 7th-generation iPad mini is the processor Apple put inside.

For fans of the iPad mini who were hoping that after three years there would be some substantial upgrades, this announcement is undoubtedly disappointing. This is absolutely a minor upgrade, with some (disappointing) color changes, slight improvements to Wi-Fi and HDR, added support for Apple Pencil Pro, and not a lot more—except for the big one.

The big one is that it’s using an A17 Pro processor, the same one found in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, and that means it’s the first iPad mini to be compatible with Apple Intelligence.

The surprise is that they’re using that A17 Pro processor, rather than the A18 found in the new iPhone 16.1 The A17 Pro was the first chip built on TSMC’s first-generation 3nm chip process, which was a milestone in chip design—but also, as it turns out, a dead end. TSMC shifted to a newer, more efficient second-generation process, and that’s what Apple is using in its 2024-vintage processors: the M4, A18, A18 Pro. The forthcoming M4 Pro and M4 Ultra processors will be on that process, too.

Based on various reports, it seems like Apple’s goal is to turn over its entire Mac product line to the M4, so they can leave the old process (used on the M3 as well as the A17 Pro) behind. And yet… here’s a new product that uses a chip on the old process that everyone is trying to drop like a hot rock? What?

That’s why my guess is that the new iPad mini is using this chip for non-technical reasons. Here are the possible explanations:

  • Apple ended up with excess A17 Pro chips after discontinuing the 15 Pro
  • These are all just binned versions (with five GPU cores instead of six) that didn’t make the cut for the iPhone and were sitting around to be repurposed in another product
  • Apple has a contract with TSMC that includes enough capacity for them to continue building this chip until that deal runs out
  • The design of the iPad mini predated the arrival of the A18 chip generation
  • Apple didn’t want to divert any of a presumably limited quantity of fresh A18 chips to the iPad mini when it had iPhone 16s to build

Regardless, I feel like there are a few nuggets of good news for iPad mini fans here. First, the new iPad mini does support Apple Intelligence, and the A17 Pro is quite a bit faster (25 percent in single core, 40 percent in multicore) than the A15 Bionic overall.

Second, while it’s certainly possible that Apple has stockpiled enough five-GPU A17 Pro chips to make three years’ worth of iPad minis, this model feels more like a holding action that gets the iPad mini onto Apple Intelligence… while also using up some amount of chip excess. If I had to predict when we’ll see a next-next-generation iPad mini, I think I’d guess that it will probably be sooner than three years from now.

But for people like my pal Sparky who really want an iPad mini pro, this release is understandably deflating. Apple continues to view the iPad mini as an iPad air-class device in a smaller case, and the high-end features seem likely to remain out of reach for quite some time.


  1. Update: Several people pointed out that the A18 doesn’t support USB 3 speeds, which the previous iPad mini supported. Fair enough—but they didn’t choose the M2 or the A18 Pro either! 

Passkey industry group releases draft standard for import and export

The FIDO Alliance, which oversees the specifications for passkeys, has released a draft standard for the import and export of those cryptographic keys:

FIDO Alliance’s draft specifications – Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) and Credential Exchange Format (CXF) – define a standard format for transferring credentials in a credential manager including passwords, passkeys and more to another provide in a manner that ensures transfer are not made in the clear and are secure by default.

Once standardized, these specifications will be open and available for credential providers to implement so their users can have a secure and easy experience when and if they choose to change providers.

Currently, there’s no easy way to move your passkeys from one password manager to another. So if you generate a passkey in Apple’s Passwords app, for example, it can’t easily be moved to 1Password—or vice versa. In fact, the only way to currently share a passkey at all from Apple’s Passwords app (aside from via a Shared Password group) is via AirDrop. And because these are large cryptographic keys, it’s not as if you can simply memorize them and enter them somewhere else.

Passwords, by comparison, are easily shareable, but that same ability makes them easier to compromise, because they’re generally just exported as plaintext. The standards proposed for passkeys, by comparison, would allow for secure exchange between applications.

These standards are in draft format, meaning it will be some time before they are approved and then eventually implemented in various programs. Apple has not specifically commented on whether it will adopt the standards for its own app—notably, the contributors to the standard includes reps from 1Password, Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google—but the company is a member of the FIDO Alliance.

[via 9to5Mac]


By Dan Moren

Apple revamps iPad mini with A17 Pro processor, Apple Pencil Pro support

Seventh-generation iPad mini

If you had a square on your bingo card for a new iPad mini during an October Apple event, well, partial credit: the company today unveiled the seventh-generation of the diminutive tablet, adding the A17 Pro processor and support for the Apple Pencil Pro.

In addition to those headline features, the new mini also gets Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and starts at 128GB of storage (twice as much as the previous generation’s 64GB), with upgrades available to 256GB and 512GB. Its size and weight remains unchanged from the previous model, as does its 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display, 12MP cameras on front and back, and button-based Touch ID. The cellular model also no longer supports a Nano-SIM, going eSIM-only, like most of the rest of Apple’s tablets and phones.

The new mini is also available in four finishes, including the same Space Gray and Starlight as its predecessor. There’s also a new blue finish that replaces a previous pink, and a different purple that appears much paler than the sixth-generation’s purple. There’s also a new $59 Smart Folio in charcoal gray, light violet, denim, and sage.

The addition of the A17 Pro processor, which debuted in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, allows for the new mini to support Apple Intelligence—presumably that also means 8GB of RAM under the hood, though Apple isn’t advertising that fact.

The new iPad mini is available for pre-order today, starting at $499 for the 128GB Wi-Fi configuration, with upgrades to 256GB and 512GB costing $599 and $799 respectively. Adding cellular will cost another $150 on top. They’ll be available in stores starting October 23.

This announcements comes only a couple weeks before a rumored Apple event introducing a slew of new Macs based on the M4 processor; it seems likely that Apple didn’t want to spend stage time talking about a very minor update to one of its less popular products. But it is also possible that Apple will choose to eschew an event in favor of press release announcements sometime in the next couple weeks.

[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.]


What AirPods Adaptive mode is for, Apple’s first immersive narrative film, tricky executive retention efforts, the Vision products roadmap, Apple TV+ goes to Amazon channels, and the trouble with iPhone 16 Camera Control.


By John Moltz

This Week in Apple: From very late to too soon

John Moltz and his conspiracy board. Art by Shafer Brown.

You can finally rent that pressure washer with Apple Pay, Apple offers more entertainment options, and are the M4 MacBook Pros here already?

Tapping out

I am pleased to report that the last Apple Pay holdouts have surrendered and the great Mobile Payments War of the 2010s is at last over.

“Home Depot quietly begins rolling out Apple Pay support”

“H-E-B caves to the pressure and begins rolling out Apple Pay to all stores”

Welcome to 2015, merchants! You are not going to like the next 9 years.

It’s possible that these companies weren’t so much holdouts as they just made bad technology bets back in the day and were stuck with them.

Of course, it’s also possible that there is some retailer in a cave on an island somewhere still demanding customers use CurrentC, but rest assured that we will rout out these pockets of resistance and bring peace to a divided nation at last.

Here we are now, entertain us

You ever have that dream where you’re drowning? No? Would you like to? It’ll only cost you $3,500.

This week Apple released “Submerged”, a bespoke submarine nightmare for Vision Pro owners. Don’t say they never did anything for you. The reaction has been pretty favorable, so maybe Apple can make some other immersive nightmare fuel, since they don’t film in Sensurround anymore.

If you don’t have a Vision Pro, do you at least have Amazon Prime? Because starting later this month you will be able to enjoy Apple TV+ through Prime Video. Apple is seemingly looking to increase the number of viewers of its streaming service if not at any cost then at least at an additional $9.99 on top of your Prime subscription.

Getting TV+ through Prime is all well and good, but if you really want to get the premium brand experience, you’ll log in via a Chromecast device or Xbox plugged into the back of a Roku TV. Like the pros do.

Putting the cart M4 the horse

In an almost (but not quite) unprecedented turn of events, a Russian YouTube channel posted video this week of what appears to be the upcoming M4-based MacBook Pro. Apparently the base model with a non-Pro or Max processor, the laptop sports 16 GB of memory, implying that Apple will be doubling the RAM on the entry level.

It’s not 100 percent clear if this is real or more like this CNBC video of an Ozempic official—and I must emphasize here that I am not making this up—discussing the dangers of counterfeit drugs while sitting in front of a Dell laptop with an Apple sticker over the Dell logo (hat tip to Reddit via Paul Kafasis). RIP, irony. Also, RIP those stickers.

The laptop has since been offered up for sale (the M4, not the Dell), lending further credence to its claims of validity. I mean, it’s not like someone would offer to sell something over the internet that didn’t actually exist, right?

Don’t bother firing up eBay to look for ill-gotten M4 MacBook Pros, though, because soon enough you’ll be able to buy one the honest way: by paying full price from Apple and way too much for additional RAM and a larger hard drive.

As God intended. (The part of God will be played by Tim Cook.)

Mark Gurman says the company will announce new Macs around the end of October and ship them on November 1st. Which is just in time for my birthday, if you were still wondering what to get me.

Not that you’ve asked.

[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.]


iPhones, “Submerged”, and the Sun

Jason finishes his iPhone review, which is basically a series of short essays about Camera Control, Photographic Styles, and Apple Intelligence; some reactions to the immersive short film “Submerged”; and the Solar System has a new solar system (menu bar script).



By Jason Snell

Putting my solar (power) system in my menu bar

It was a busy summer at the Snell house. Our roof predated our purchase of our house, and we’ve been in this house 25 years, so… yeah. We needed a new roof. Getting a new roof was an opportunity to add a rooftop solar power system and update our HVAC system, so we went all in, and all summer I coordinated with three different companies, all of whom wanted to spend time on my roof, or attaching things to the side of my house, or rewiring things on the inside.

Anyway, it’s all done now. We survived, and our house got a big upgrade! But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wasn’t also excited to figure out how to integrate my new home tech into my life in a custom way.

The new HVAC system was easy—there’s a Homebridge plug-in, and boom, it’s now integrated with HomeKit. On the solar side, things were trickier. I found a few Homebridge plug-ins, but looking in the Home app to see my solar status didn’t really make sense? I wanted it in my Mac’s menu bar. Just because. Why did we pay for three big solar batteries on the side of our house if I can’t see a battery icon that represents my house? C’mon.

Anyway, what I ended up doing was digging through loads of documentation—most of which involved querying the solar system manufacturer’s API, which is delayed and limited to about one query per hour unless you pay a subscription fee. But I did finally discover, by looking at the code for one of those Homebridge plug-ins, that there’s a local API for my solar system. Yep, it’s true—my solar system, the one inside my house, has its own web server and will respond to properly formatted queries with blobs of JSON.

After a lot of wrangling, I got it to work. So if you’ve got an Enphase Energy solar system of recent vintage (hello, Google searchers!), feel free to check out my Python SwiftBar script, which shows me how much power my house is using, the status of the battery, how much power the solar panels are generating, and what (if ever) we’re taking from or sending to the grid.

And so there it is. My house has a battery, and that battery icon is in my Mac menu bar. It feels… right? Yes, that’s it. It feels right.


By Jason Snell

“Submerged” brings immersive narrative to Vision Pro

I just watched “Submerged,” the new immersive short film directed by “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger, on the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the first scripted, narrative-driven piece of immersive video on the platform, and after the failure of Apple’s MLS video highlights, I was curious to see what choices Berger would make in using a medium with a very different grammar than traditional filmmaking.

By the time I was done with “Submerged,” I was convinced that Berger is a very talented director who knows how to adapt his skills to a different format. There are no quick takes in “Submerged”—I’d wager the average length of a shot is multiple times longer than your regular 2024 blockbuster—because quick takes are disorienting in the immersive format. Instead, Berger allows shots to linger, occasionally toggling between one shot and its reverse angle, which allows a perspective shift without a complete loss of the understanding of the scene’s geography.

In a format that can’t really use century-old tricks for focusing a viewer’s attention—like focus shifts and zooms and pans and close-up cuts—Berger tries a few different approaches to focus our attention. I was struck by his use of extreme close-ups, which get us very close to the actors a few times—and make it impossible to look at anything else. There’s also a lot of short depth of field, allowing the out-of-focus background to drop away from our attention—or even to entice us without distracting us.

I wondered if “Submerged” would be a series of static shots or if the director would find a way to be a little more dynamic, and Berger seems to have figured out that pushing in or pulling back (on a smooth track) is not as likely to trigger motion sickness as a completely handheld shakycam would. (I will admit to feeling a little bit of vertigo during one shot, which was a very fast-paced pull-back down a corridor.)

Still, most of the shots are more static, and seeing actors performing in those shots reminded me much more of a live theater performance than a film. This is not a bad thing, but it sure felt different. It was all on the performer, in those moments, and on me as the viewer to observe their performance. Similarly, the sets in “Submerged” are intricate and beautiful—and because of the immersive nature of the project, I think that was a necessity. It felt like looking at an amusement park experience, with detail in every corner you look.

The film also makes excellent use of Spatial Audio to further immerse you in the scene of a submarine during World War II. It’s got a score, which I didn’t expect but which didn’t feel unwelcome, even though I was watching immersive scenes—mentally, I knew I was watching a movie, just one playing by some very different rules.

Obviously, the film was short—there’s really just a prologue for us to meet some key characters, one long action set piece, and a brief denouement—but it worked for me. It also left me wanting more. I’m not sure the world is ready for an immersive feature film, but I could absolutely imagine what a feature-length version of a taut submarine thriller would look like, and it would be extremely fun.

Apple’s got a making-of video on YouTube, and in a press release it touts some forthcoming Immersive content, including highlights from the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend (which took place eight months ago!), an intimate concert with English singer Raye that is destined to make me just as uncomfortable as Alicia Keyes did, an immersive story about a free diver who is swimming under ice (just in case “Submerged” wasn’t enough underwater for you), a spotlight on a free solo climber, and a travelogue soaring over Maine.

I’ll watch it all. But “Submerged” has made me really interested in the next immersive narrative film, whatever it might appear.


By Jason Snell

iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence

We’re getting closer to the end, presumably, of the most static design era in the iPhone’s history. While Apple continues to iterate on the specs of its most important product, the iPhone 16 product line is visually part of a generation that dates back four years to the iPhone 12.

On the one hand, it’s a fact that reveals just how the pace of smartphone design innovation has slowed. This is the longest time Apple has been stuck on a design generation in the history of the iPhone. On the other hand, Apple largely stopped redesigning its laptops in 2010, and nobody seems to mind too much. There’s something there about a device slowly iterating toward its ideal form, and I do wonder if Apple thinks that the iPhone 5-esque stylings of the iPhone 12/13/14/15/16 are the equivalent of the classic MacBook Air/MacBook Pro design.

The problem is this: History suggests that every time Apple does a physical redesign of the iPhone, there’s a surge in iPhone sales. That’s quite a motivator, given the iPhone’s place as the generator of more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue.

So what do you do if you’re Apple? You (again, presumably) try to work on new technological breakthroughs that will let you change things up more dramatically—the introduction of Face ID in the iPhone X let the home button go away, for instance—while you keep pushing forward with the specs and internals in the meantime. It’s not exciting, but neither is it a moral failing.

I’d sure rather be using an iPhone 16 Pro than an iPhone 12 Pro, because the newer model is better in almost every way. That’s what years of iteration will do. Since most iPhone buyers do not upgrade once a year, those individual iterations only really matter in the cumulative sense. So before I dig into this year’s collections of choices and iterations, it’s worth considering the grand sweep of time (iPhone Pro edition):

  • iPhone 13 Pro: ProMotion, 3x telephoto lens, chip improvements
  • iPhone 14 Pro: Dynamic Island, Crash Detection, SOS via satellite, 48MP camera, always-on display, brighter display, Action Mode, chip improvements
  • iPhone 15 Pro: Action Button, USB-C port, 24MP fusion image, chip improvements, titanium exterior, and (in hindsight) Apple Intelligence support

This year, that list grows to include larger displays, a new 48MP camera, 4K120 video support, 48MP ultrawide camera, new Photographic Styles workflow, surround audio, 5× telephoto lens (which arrived last year on the Pro Max model only), and (of course) chip improvements courtesy of the new A18 Pro chip.

Would it be fun if Apple unveiled an entirely new, never-before-seen iPhone design? Yes, it would. Maybe next year. But the company needs to sell phones in the meantime, and as ever, it has taken the last year to add a bunch of improvements that will provide a solid set of upgraded features that, when added to those from previous years, make for a solid update.

Continue reading “iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence”…


Apple TV+ comes to Amazon Prime Video

On Wednesday Amazon and Apple announced that Apple TV+ will be available inside Prime Video as an add-on subscription:

Later this month, Apple TV+ will be available via Prime Video in the U.S. as an add-on subscription for $9.99 per month. Prime members who subscribe to Apple TV+ via Prime Video will have access to premium entertainment including Severance, Slow Horses,The Morning Show, Presumed Innocent, Shrinking, Hijack, Loot, Palm Royale, as well as global hit films such as Wolfs, The Instigators and more, plus Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball sporting events.

Both Apple and Amazon have made efforts to resell other services within their own apps, which can simplify billing and user interface. This step suggests that Apple, which has struggled to broaden the appeal of TV+, has decided that it’s more important to get TV+ in front of more potential viewers than it is to use it as an inducement to get more people to use Apple’s own TV app.



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