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How we prepare our tech for emergencies, the headphones we like best, our file organization systems, and outfitting our home theaters for spooky season.


By Jason Snell for Macworld

Apple’s new Messages features are great, but the notifications are overwhelming

Apple’s Messages app may have lost the global messaging wars, but in many countries—including the U.S.—it’s still an incredibly popular way of communicating. That’s why Apple keeps upgrading it.

This fall’s Messages updates are some of the biggest ever, with the addition of RCS messaging, true emoji and sticker tapbacks, styled and animated text, Send Later, and support for texts via satellite.

But as the people in my Messages group chats all upgraded to iOS 18 and started taking advantage of some of these new features, it all became too much for me. All these new features are good, yes, but they can also be spectacularly distracting. This is why Apple’s next big step in Messages needs to be to give users the power to control when and how we’re interrupted in ways far beyond what’s available today.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦


We discusss how Apple is so influential that even its simplest moves can make or break companies and industries. Also: Apple plans a big Halloween week, and there’s an immersive thriller coming to Vision Pro.


By John Moltz

This Week in Apple: A preview of things to come

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

A lot of news in headsets this week, plus Apple is prepping new Macs, iPads, an iPhone SE… and other things.

What’s New in Goggles?

Yes, it’s time again for another edition of “What’s New in Goggles?”, where we discuss all the goggle news that’s new in Goggletown.

Would it kill you to just play along and pretend we’ve been doing this forever? Do you always have to be so difficult, Ian?

The man I married wasn’t so difficult. There. I said it. It had to be said and I said it.

After all the hubbub about Meta’s Orion prototype glasses, at least one competitor has checked out.

“Microsoft Is Discontinuing HoloLens 2, With No Replacement”

But don’t worry, our dystopian future is still on track.

While HoloLens 2 is being discontinued, Microsoft tells UploadVR it remains “fully committed” to the militarized HoloLens IVAS.

Uh, cooool? So, Microsoft makes militarized goggles and has a nuclear reactor to fuel its AI aspirations? Has anyone checked to see if they also bought property under an extinct volcano?

In more great goggle news, some students have taken Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses and made them suuuper creepy.

“Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta’s Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers”

Yayyyy technology. Whooooo. Yeah.

Finally, the Vision Pro, not exactly awash in new apps, now has one fewer.

“Juno YouTube App for Vision Pro Removed From App Store”

Back in April, YouTube emailed Selig and said that Juno was violating the YouTube Terms of Service and the YouTube API by modifying the native YouTube.com web user interface, and used YouTube trademarks and iconography that could be confusing to customers.

Please do not confuse people by giving them a convenient way to use our service. Very rude.

Well, that’s it for “What’s New in Goggles?” Please tune in next week when I pretend this supposedly ongoing feature never existed.

[Modem sounds]

The iPhone 16 is so last month. It literally came out last month. How much more last month can you get? Sure, we’ve all enjoyed the Camera Control button and, you know, the other stuff. But it’s October now! Now about something new, Apple? How about something fresh?

Well, Apple fan who’s just like Prince’s mother, (she’s never satisfied) you’ll be happy to know that new MacBook Pros, iMacs, and all-new Mac minis—all with M4 processors—are still on schedule to ship this year. A new iPad mini may “potentially” ship by the end of 2024 as well, according to Mark Gurman, who has dialed back the confidence on that a bit.

If those devices don’t float your boat, then first learn something about buoyancy, and second, check out what Apple has in store for early next year.

“Bloomberg: New iPhone SE with Face ID and updated iPad Air launching early next year”

And are you the kind of weirdo who cares who makes the modem in your phone? Well, you’re in luck, because the next SE will reportedly feature the debut of Apple’s own, long-awaited 5G modem. We didn’t get a car, but by gum they’re gonna ship that damn modem!

One more thing…

If after that you were thinking, “Well, my dance card is now full! I shan’t need any further amusements, thank you very much!” then you may be an early 20th century debutant. Also, don’t look now because:

“‘Ted Lasso’ to Return to Apple TV+ as Season Four Allegedly ‘Confirmed’”

Yes, according to Sigmund Judge of MacStories, pre-production on a new season of the beloved Apple TV+ show will begin in January. Apple has not confirmed this nor explained how a new season would play out, with Ted having returned to his home planet at the end of season 3. Still, I believe they’ll figure something out. They’re not just going to leave good money sitting on the table like that.

[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.]


Did Godzilla just step on a bad idea?

Nick Heer comments on a spectacularly weird New York Times story titled “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?,” which is actually about how Apple has ratcheted up contacts-sharing security in iOS 18:

What I do not understand is granting Bier’s objections the imprimatur of a New York Times story when one can see the full picture of Bier’s track record. On the merits, I am unsympathetic to his complaints. Users can still submit their full contact list if they so choose, but now they have the option of permitting only some access to an app I have not even decided I trust.

I didn’t originally link to the NYT story because I thought it wasn’t worth the kick. (It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.) I’m glad, though, that Heer was willing to write the takedown. The more I think about it, the more off-balance the entire story seems. Apple increases user choice and privacy, and we’re worried about the startup bro?

But as Dan Moren pointed out to me on the Six Colors podcast earlier today, the one thing the article does point out is that Apple’s scale is so enormous these days that any move the company has potentially huge ramifications. They are a Godzilla, and you don’t want them to step on you.

That said, if Apple feels it’s beneficial for its customers if it occasionally steps on creepy tech bros who want to violate our privacy in order to build their next business, I might be okay with the crunching.


By Joe Rosensteel

Lost In Space

a screenshot a Messages conversation it says that it's an iMessage from Ry, and the message content is 'I'm connected via 5G' but underneath that it says 'Ry is only connected via satellite.'

Sometimes there are bugs that happen and hit wide swaths of devices causing serious problems for users, and other times a teeny tiny thing breaks and it only affects a handful of people. It doesn’t really matter, though. Bugs are still frustrating.

On October 1st my friend Ry went on a hike. He completed his hike, and I sent him the usual, terrible, canned fitness response that we send one another ironically. “Way to take a hike. 🌳” He said thanks, and then the Messages app in iOS said Ry was only available via satellite. I thought he was being a fancy lad on a hike using satellite messaging, but he was no longer on a hike, and was on 5G cellular.

A screenshot of the iOS Messages app showing a conversation with Ry. His side of the conversation is coming through as iMessage and my side of the conversation is being sent via satellite. There's a warning at the bottom that Ry is connected only via satellite

He tried force-quitting Messages, and restarting his iPhone, and reseting his network settings, but no matter what he did, my iPhone insisted Ry was only reachable via satellite. So then I restarted my iPhone, and I tried turning off and on all the various connection methods at my disposal.

That’s when I found out that everyone else having a one-on-one conversation with Ry from an iOS 18 device was also experiencing what I was experiencing. Anyone on 17.4, or using macOS Sonoma1 just had messages pop through with the usual iMessage tag.

What gives? How could only conversations with him be stuck in satellite mode and only on iOS 18 devices? This is a very annoying problem, because every time you send a message “via satellite” it bugs you about it, and you can’t do things like send images or media. Naturally, if he was really on satellite, you wouldn’t want to do that.

I did what everyone else does in this scenario and went to bed with the expectation that the passage of time would reset something.

October 2nd was the same deal. Ry was still stranded over Earth like a modern-day balloon boy.

I opened his contact info and messaged the email address tied to his Apple ID, instead of the phone number. It went through as a regular iMessage. I tried switching back to the phone number and it went back to satellite. Another friend tried the same trick, but stayed on the email address only to have it switch to satellite a few seconds after he messaged.

I was on to something, though, right? Maybe the problem was on the receiving end (our iOS 18 iPhones) instead of the sending end (Ry’s iOS 18 iPhone).

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and so I turned iMessage off and on again. Hold onto your butts.

Fortunately, no raptors were released, but the conversation thread with Ry split into two. One thread had some messages and was stuck in satellite mode. The other thread had some other messages and was in normal iMessage mode. I force-quit Messages for the zillionth time in two days, and when I relaunched it, the conversations had merged back together and the satellite mode was gone.

It was all iMessage, baby.

I relayed this information to the other friends, and they did the same thing. Messaging Ry returned to normal… but I hadn’t noticed one side effect, reported by another friend.

A screenshot of a lock screen notification on iOS 18. The notification says, 'Maybe: Ry Amidon To you & Ry Amidon' and the message content is 'Oh no'

On the lock screen of the iPhone, and only the lock screen of the iPhone, notifications from Ry were now labeled “Maybe: Ry Amidon To You & Ry Amidon”. As if Ry and I were in a group text with Ry.

For crying out loud. The Watch notifications, Mac notifications, and even the display name in iOS were all singular Ry. That’s when I remembered the email address tied to the Apple ID that I had messaged earlier.

I blew away the email address and then the “Maybe” went away. Everything was normal.

I typically don’t open Feedbacks when I can’t reproduce something (and I absolutely can’t reproduce whatever this is) but I put together one with system logs and screenshots and fired it into the void2.

If I had to guess (and it’s probably better if I don’t) it seems like Ry’s phone pushed some status to Apple’s iMessage servers which was pushed to our iOS 18 devices… and stuck. I can’t think of another reason why the satellite messaging state was preserved until we each toggled off iMessage support on our individual devices. There’s no toggle to disable sending and receiving satellite messages in Settings. In fact, if you search Settings for “satellite” it doesn’t return any results at all.

Having satellite messaging is definitely a boon to people that have experienced real emergencies and have been otherwise disconnected from the world. Ry, however, wasn’t experiencing any such issues—so we all just got some puzzling inconvenience.

I can’t even say for certain that I fixed anything, because in the grand tradition of internet problem-solving, all I can report is that it “works for me!”

If anyone does eventually run across this weirdness (hello, Google searchers!), I hope you can at least learn from what I tried. If you’ve got an easier fix, or you happen to work at Apple and can just toggle this stuff from the heavens, then drop me a line.


  1. I’m not upgrading to a .0 OS release. I have real work to do. This policy has never lead me astray. 
  2. Feedback ID FB15362065 

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]


Mac Pro emotion and spooky earnings

Dan comes from the Mac Pro; creepy glasses expose how much the Internet knows about you; Apple’s new A.I. ad is both bad and… good?


Brian Williams will bring live news to Prime Video, but what’s the future of streaming news? Also: More cable bundles include streaming services; Amazon programs a night of game shows; Netflix’s coming compensation crunch; and a Diamond/MLB update.


By Dan Moren for Macworld

These three pieces of old Apple tech have overstayed their welcome

Apple’s often got a reputation as an uncompromising driver of new technology. Look no further than the classic example of shipping the original iMac without a floppy drive or legacy ports, or designing the iPhone without a hardware keyboard, or even killing off the iPod mini to make way for the iPod nano. The company certainly puts forth an image of pushing technology forward without dwelling on the past.

But while those examples might get a lot of attention, the Apple of these days is a bigger, more ponderous organization—a battleship that can’t simply turn on a dime. As a result, the move to any new technology takes time, and often what came before isn’t excised in months, or sometimes even years.

So as much as Apple might like to see itself as an unstoppable force barreling ever forward, you don’t have to look too far through its lineup to see plenty of places where it’s still clinging to the past, even if it’s out of sheer practicality.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦


Our preferred devices for listening to music out loud, recent frustrating tech-related customer service experiences, current social media habits, and examples of technology that have recently impressed us.


Turning Meta’s smart glasses into instant people identifiers

From The Verge’s Victoria Song, a fascinating and disturbing project that turns Meta’s smart glasses into a system for immediately doxxing people:

In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.

It’s really creepy stuff. Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the tech behind it, but most of this system is built on top of publicly available information from online databases and LLMs that anyone can use. The pair have also detailed the places you can go to try and opt out of some these databases (but there are a lot of them and not all of them make it easy).

As Song points out, part of what makes this extra unsettling is the fact that Meta’s smart glasses are largely indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses, and the only indication that they’re capturing video (a small privacy light) is subtle and hard to notice in daylight. (At least Google Glass was pretty obvious.)

In some senses, we’ve all gotten used to having cameras all around us all the time, but the even more sobering fact is that if this is what two college students can cook up with mostly off-the-shelf ingredients, it’s not hard to imagine what a giant company or government agency with a lot more resources could do.

Meta, however, seems less than concerned:

For its part, Meta cautions users against being glassholes in its privacy policy for the Ray-Bans. It urges users to “respect people’s preferences” and to clearly gesture or use voice controls when capturing video, livestreaming, or taking photos.

Yeah, don’t be creepy when using Meta’s smart glasses. That’s Meta’s job.



By Dan Moren

Croissant simplifies social media cross-posting on iOS

Croissant for iOS

It’s rare that I find a new app that immediately becomes part of my workflow, but it’s just as rare that an app as useful as Croissant comes out.

Hailing from indie developers Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, Croissant aims to simplify the process of posting to multiple social media sites. You know what I’m talking about: in the wake of Twitter’s X-ification, many of us are dealing with a splintered social media landscape. I, personally, have been reading and posting on no less than Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, and boy am I tired.

This came to a head last week as I was promoting the launch of my latest book and various ancillary projects like new t-shirts and a live event. Copying and pasting posts between those three sites was practically a full-time job1, especially when they included pictures with attendant alt text.

But I got a chance to try Croissant in beta last week and it absolutely saved my sanity. It supports text and images, complete with that alt text, as well as threaded posts, and lets you choose which services you want to post to each time. You can also archive drafts for later, choose post visibility on both Mastodon and Threads, and add content warnings for Mastodon.

There are some limitations, however. For example, right now, while you can insert images from your Photos library, you can’t copy and paste, which can be frustrating. There’s also no support for GIFs or videos as attachments. And it’s currently only designed for the iPhone.2 Many of those are on the app’s roadmap, according to the developers.

There are also issues that are beyond Croissant’s control: for example, tagging other accounts can work, but you won’t get autocomplete, and if a username doesn’t exist on a service it’s just going to show up as text. And ultimately it’s still only an app for posting to multiple networks, not for reading all of them in one place. But such are the vagaries of social media in 2024.

Croissant’s free to download and give a whirl, but it requires a subscription for posting to multiple services: either $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $59.99 forever.


  1. On the iPhone with its—sigh—still very limited copying and pasting abilities, it felt less like a job than something that I was paying for. My sins, perhaps. 
  2. The app does sort of work on the Mac, though not without some interface quirks (pop-up sheets that you can’t dismiss, for example). 

[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.]


Jason and Myke break down Meta’s preview of its Orion AR glasses project and what it says (or doesn’t say) about the future of Apple’s Vision product line. Also: An Apple Intelligence timeline, Masimo board intrigue, and a million-dollar celebration.


By Dan Moren

The Back Page: Are your AR glasses half empty or half full?

Dan writes the Back Page. Art by Shafer Brown.

Say what you will about them being ridiculously expensive to build or not actually a shipping product, but Meta’s AR glasses, shown off last week, have accomplished a feat I thought utterly impossible: they have stopped us from talking about AI for at least two, maybe three days. To be honest, that may be the best feature they’ll ever have.

Remember just a few years ago, when wearables was the hot new market we were all obsessed with? Before AI and crypto and NFTs and the increasingly rapid destruction of our environment? Well, kudos to Meta for kicking it old school and going full retro.

But if you’re going to keep the wearables market fresh and new, it’s time to push the envelope. Smart glasses are so obvious. Google tried its hand with Google Glass a decade ago. We know Apple’s been trying to build them for years. It’s all old hat.1

No, if a company is looking to really rejuvenate the wearables market, then it needs to think outside the box. No more smart watches, or smart rings, or smart nose piercings2. Here are my modest pitches for five smart wearables that will change the

Smart belt: First, let’s get it out of the way: Orion should have been the codename for Meta’s smart belt.3 Come on, we all know they’re working on it. Keep track of your waistline? Automatically expand after a big meal? Could they have made one that wouldn’t have been so bulky it looked like Batman’s utility belt? No. Would that have been a dealbreaker? Also no.

Smart cufflinks: Honestly, the casual cufflink market just never really had its day. But that’s all about to change with smart cufflinks. They’ve got all sorts of useful potential features, like letting you track how many times you’ve rolled up your sleeves in a day. Or…actually, no I think that’s it? Look, they’re not all going to be winners.

Smart socks: Socks make the man, as the expression does not go but definitely should. I’m always torn between buying basic black athletics socks and zhuzhing up my wardrobe with more fun footwear. Smart socks are clearly the way to appeal to everyone. Color changing, pattern changing, throw in the ability for a quick foot massage and maybe even automatically moisturizing and you may never take off your socks again. Did I mention anti-odor technology?

Smart monocle: The primary purpose of a monocle is as a status symbol, to let everybody out there know that you are rolling in dough. Look what kind of icons you could bring out to advertise: The Penguin? Uncle Moneybags? Mr. Peanut? And the only thing that says “rich” more than a monocle is a smart monocle. Plus, the most obvious advantage? Half the cost of smart glasses.

Smart anklet: It’s like a smart watch for your leg. (This pitch writes itself!) That means even more accurate tracking of your steps, helping you improve your soccer game, and most importantly, being something unobtrusive that you can wear at all times with a built-in GPS to share your location with important peo—you know what? I see where this is going and I’m going to stop right now. Really sorry.


  1. Unless that hat…is a smart hat. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Which is, in fact, my smart hat, because it is too heavy to wear for more than about twenty minutes. 
  2. Aromatherapy-enabled, obviously. What, you don’t have one? 
  3. For glasses, they should have gone with something like Argus if they were married to the whole Greek mythology angle. Or maybe, I dunno, Scorsese, if the wanted to go pop culture. 

[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

This Week in Apple: The executive suite, in D minor

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

Executives are in the news this week as Tim Cook discusses pressed meat products, Jony Ive is what you’re not wearing and Sonos… hoo, boy, those ding-dongs at Sonos.

The Timmy and Jimmy show

You won’t believe this. In an amazing coincidence, TV’s Jimmy Fallon happened to be first in line at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, and who should come out to deliver his new iPhone to him? Guess. You’ll never guess in a mill-

Yeah, it was Tim Cook. How did you know? That’s so weird!

The result is a five minute ad for Apple that ran on The Tonight Show in which Fallon touches Cook’s face as part of a Vision Pro gag. This is not something I would personally want to have done to me knowing where that hand’s been, but your mileage may vary.

Still, it’s very informative. For instance, did you know that Tim Cook will sometimes get a hot dog while in New York? True story. Or… maybe. Who knows? It’s a thing he said. Fallon then correctly guessed that Cook likes mustard on his hot dogs which, wow, might as well have also guessed that he likes a bun.

Fallon: You don’t just eat the hot dog bare with your hands?

Cook: Noooo. Noooo ah doooon’t.

What’s harder to believe is when Cook, in touting the benefits of Apple Intelligence, says he personally likes it because it can summarize all the emails he gets. Does Cook really use that feature, though? I’ve seen some of those summaries. I don’t think I’d bet the most valuable company in the world on them. Or a New York hot dog.

Jony’s jackets

Who’s got $3,000 I can borrow?

“Here are Jony Ive’s $3,000 jackets”

Thanks to a collaboration between Ive’s LoveFrom and a French fashion brand, you can get these nylon jackets with revolutionary new buttons made from magnets, the thing where no one knows how they work. It’s nice that they’re made from recycled materials, but if I’m paying $3,000 for a jacket, it better be made out of something rarer than nylon, like the silk of an extinct spider or the dreams of children stolen throughout history by a time-traveling sword mistress and her sassy robot sidekick.

The magnetic buttons are cool, though.

Ive was also in the news this week for confirming in an interview with The New York Times that he is working with OpenAI’s Sam Altman on an AI hardware product. That’s quite a feat in and of itself as no one else seems to be able to work with Altman for very long. But with the track record of these AI hardware devices to date, I hope Ive’s getting paid up front. Otherwise he’s going to have to sell a lot more $3,000 jackets.

Facing the music

Apple updated its Apple Music Classical app this week, an app which is now already a year and a half old. They grow up so fast. The new version adds liner notes, orchestra information, and composer biographies. Yes, now you can easily see whether the composer died from consumption, war, lead poisoning, or just patron neglect. At least Apple is paying them some respect.

Apple commissioned high-resolution digital portraits of famous composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Johann Sebastian Bach for the app…

What, they didn’t use Image Playground? What happened to eating your own dog food?

(By the way, as someone who once ate a Beggin’ Strip just to see what all the fuss was about, I can say the analogy is appropriate. Both look like the real thing but lack all the essential quality and taste that make them the real thing.)

One app that hasn’t received a much-need update (right into the sun) is the Sonos app. Despite the company’s promise to update it every two weeks until it’s just right (or all the yelling stops), the company has failed to keep up with that schedule. What’s more, according to Bloomberg, Sonos shipped the app over the protests of its employees.

Executives. You can’t live with them, you can’t… uh, live with them? I don’t have another option.

[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 Jason Snell

Meta and Apple: Same game, different rules

Meta's Orion prototype
Meta’s Orion prototype. (Image: Meta)

The game is to create a wearable, augmented-reality device that takes everything that’s great about a smartphone and overlays it on your vision, making the entire world a smartphone canvas. It’s part of a larger strategy, which is to own the next must-have technology device that supplants or augments the smartphone.

This game has no rules. There’s no single accepted way to play it.

Earlier this year, Apple made a move: It launched the Vision Pro, a headset that emulates augmented reality in a limited way. It is a finished product shipping to anyone who wants one, but it’s very expensive and has a very limited selection of software and content. It’s also a stake in the ground, suggesting that Apple thinks there’s something to “spatial computing” and that this is the first tentative step on the path to creating something more broadly appealing.

This week, Meta made another move.

Meta has been a leader in VR headsets for a while now—it’s a small market that attracts outsized interest because it’s surrounded by a cyberpunk-tinged cloud of possibilities that it might augur something about future of computing.

Originally pitched as a game console you put on your face, the Meta Quest series has increasingly also been pitched as being productivity-related. I don’t think that’s a coincidence—productivity is a use case that Apple has emphasized, so Meta is countering. And the new $300 Meta Quest 3S sure sounds like a compelling new device. I’ve got a Quest 2 and Quest 3, and they’re both pretty impressive in their own ways, especially given the price. The Quest 3S seems like it might be a great holiday purchase.

But, of course, the Quest 3S is not what people are talking about. They’re talking about Orion, a pair of chunky augmented-reality glasses that show that Meta really gets where this is all going. It’s a real punch to Apple’s jaw, one that makes the Vision Pro look dowdy and pointless. Media coverage of Orion has been really strong. People who tried it were impressed. It’s a win for Meta.

But look closer, and you can see exactly what game Meta is playing. Meta says that Orion would cost about $10,000 today, and that the company couldn’t see itself shipping the product. Orion, as used this week by various media influencers, is a tech demo—not a product that will ever ship. Meta says that it has backed off any plans to ship it and instead expects that it will ship a product sort of like it between 2027 and 2029.

This is all part of the game, of course. For decades now, competitors have made hay over Apple’s refusal to make public demonstrations of what it’s working on behind the scenes. Apple’s silence is assumed by many to indicate the company is behind on some innovation or another. And sometimes it’s actually behind—but other times, it’s not. It’s just keeping quiet.

I have no idea what the current state of the art is inside Apple. And while visionOS has seen some nice updates including the introduction of Spatial Persona, the excruciatingly slow rollout of immersive content and the dearth of new apps in the visionOS App Store leave the question of Apple’s commitment to this platform a bit murky.

Still, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been working on AR glasses alongside Vision Pro:

At one point, Apple aimed to release the glasses in 2023, before delaying the launch until around 2025. Now, Apple has postponed the rollout indefinitely and pared back its work on the AR device.

That’s a report from early 2023 that suggests that Apple was trying to build AR glasses presumably very much like Orion, but realized that the tech wasn’t yet at the point where they could release anything. So instead, they shifted work to Vision Pro.

In other words, Meta and Apple—both committed to the idea that AR glasses we wear in our daily lives might be a huge part of future computing tech—tried to make the product happen, and realized that the time just wasn’t right. Apple didn’t say anything. Meta showed off a product that will never ship (but might lead to something that will ship at the end of the decade) and gained some nice press coverage this week.

These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ever comment on unannounced products is beneficial or not, but it’s a Steve Jobs-created bit of Apple personality that is very unlikely to be countermanded any time soon.

I was impressed by what Meta showed with Orion. It absolutely gives me the sense that there is a product here, and it might actually be closer than I thought it would be. I sort of assumed wearable, powerful AR glasses in the style of Vision Pro would be more like a full decade away, but the end of this decade now seems plausible.

Of course, that’s for a first version—which will be expensive and compromised. It will take more years for the price to come down and for the utility of such a device to overcome resistance from people who don’t want to wear glasses and don’t want to be seen as a cyborg navigating the human world. If that resistance can ever be overcome enough to make that product category a hit, it’ll take years. Like, mid-2030s at the earliest.

This is a long game. We already knew Apple had the pieces to play (Meta’s system features a wristband that’s like a simplified Apple Watch and a compute puck that’s basically an iPhone), and now Meta has shown that it’s planning its own strategy, including working on custom hardware and silicon.

The game is afoot. Meta has shown they’re working on it. Apple remains characteristically silent. But there’s no one right way to play the game… and the clock doesn’t even start ticking until someone ships a product that people can buy.


Jet lag and bad passwords

Jason’s back and recovering from his big trip, but we’ve got time to discuss Shortcuts and the Action Button, the defenestration of Masimo’s founder, and some very bad passwords (and worse password policies). [More Colors and Backstage members get an extra 20 minutes about Meta’s announcements this week.]



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