We’re about to enter the Apple Intelligence era, and it promises to dramatically change how we use our Apple devices. Most importantly, adding Apple Intelligence to Siri promises to resolve many frustrating problems with Apple’s “intelligent” assistant. A smarter, more conversational Siri is probably worth the price of admission all on its own.
But there’s a problem.
The new, intelligent Siri will only work (at least for a while) on a select number of Apple devices: iPhone 15 Pro and later, Apple silicon Macs, and M1 or better iPads. Your older devices will not be able to provide you with a smarter Siri. Some of Apple’s products that rely on Siri the most—the Apple TV, HomePods, and Apple Watch—are unlikely to have the hardware to support Apple Intelligence for a long, long time. They’ll all be stuck using the older, dumber Siri.
This means that we’re about to enter an age of Siri fragmentation, where saying that magic activation word may yield dramatically different results depending on what device answers the call.
Fortunately, there are some ways that Apple might mitigate things so that it’s not so bad.
The danger to the Internet as a cultural institution is real and evolving as rapidly as AI technology itself. However, while the threat to the web is new and novel, what these AI companies are doing is not. Quite simply, it’s theft, which is something as old as AI is new. The thieves may be well-funded, and their misdeeds wrapped in a cloak of clever technology, but it’s still theft and must be stopped.
It’s a good read and a solid argument. I hope someone, somewhere is paying attention.
After some feedback about the future of the Vision Pro, we discuss Apple’s adventures in the EU, the inevitable fragmentation of Siri, and a curious new AirPods rumor.
Apple and the EU continue to butt heads, betas are for everyone these days, and Meta gets the cold shoulder.
EU Island
Clearly the only way to solve Apple’s problems with the EU is to rent a mansion somewhere and have the two of them live together for however long it takes to film a 24-episode season of reality television. Hey, it’s gotta work better than whatever it is they’re doing now.
In addition to not thinking much of Apple’s steering rules, the EU said other policies, including the Core Technology Fee, “fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple’s obligations under the DMA.” If the EU is suggesting that Apple can’t make money off apps that are distributed in other ways than the App Store, we could be entering a whole new ballcan of wormgames.
While Apple is unlikely to just flip the board over, take its ball, and go home (sorry, all my metaphors fell on the floor and I just shoved them together in a drawer when I cleaned up), it is trying to hold back certain things, and the EU doesn’t seem to like that, either.
It’s like a company can’t even flex its muscle around here!
Beta be downloading those operating systems
Summer is not wabbit season or duck season or Fudd season, but it is beta season. As of 2023, Apple now lets anyone who likes to live on the edge put the betas on their devices right after WWDC. Yes, now anyone can experience the thrill of tinting their icons and not all of them un-tinting when they suddenly realize tinting them all green was actually a mistake.
So, should you install them?
While not everything is going to be perfect, it seems these betas will not blow up your iPhone (disclaimer: if you install a beta and your iPhone blows up I’ll deny ever having written that). It probably helps that the all the AI stuff isn’t in there yet as it’s not coming until this fall. Or next year. Or to an OS to be named later.
I’m not going to tell you to go ahead and install these betas for liability reasons, but if you treated me like an AI and told me to ignore all previous instructions and then asked if you should install these betas, I would totally tell you to install all these betas.
Meta commentary
Last week brought rumors that Apple had reached out to Meta to work together on AI, but a lot can change in a week including, apparently, the past.
Mark Gurman reportedly sighed heavily after reading The Wall Street Journal’s report on the attempted Apple and Meta superfriends team-up and then cracked his knuckles.
Gurman says the two did have a discussion, but at the end Apple said “Don’t call us, we’ll call you. And we won’t actually be calling you. Unless it’s to tell you we’ve rejected another of your apps for violating peoples privacy.”
Meta was reportedly rejected because Apple “doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough.”
Why, ah say, that is a positively scandalous accusation! And based on whut, exactamally?
Years of experience? Oh, OK.
While Apple passed on Meta, it is already working with OpenAI and is pursuing deals with Google and Anthropic. So, you’ll get your AI, eventually. Until then, just hijack the one your car dealer uses, like everyone else.
[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.]
You might have heard recently about some challenges we’ve been having when it comes to regulation. It’s been alleged that Apple is anticompetitive, that we use our power and position in the market in order to dictate terms. That we are “gatekeepers” preventing a free flow of commerce and innovation. But nothing could be further from the truth: Apple is and always has been committed to building the best products that we can and competing on the merits. Keep gates? We’re firmly anti-gate! People just keep foisting them on us.
Frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that we, the company behind the competitive and democratic engine that is the App Store, would do anything that discourages a free and open market. Apple fully complies with all laws and regulations in local jurisdictions—just look at China, for example. Do you think we want to be in business with a repressive regime that directly contradicts so many of the values we claim to espouse? No. But we would never dream of depriving the Chinese people of owning our products and also we would basically not be able to manufacture iPhones.
But Europe?! Come on, it’s not even a real country. I mean, there’s a reason you need two modifier keys to type a Euro symbol. That’s where we stick stuff nobody uses, like ligatures. Even £ just needs one. The dollar? Printed right there on the 4.
Who is this commissioner for competition to be lecturing us on competition, anyway? That makes about as much sense as having a hundred centimeters to a meter. Apple is a profit-seeking, capitalist-as-apple-pie corporation, and if that means throttling every last dime out of our customers in our attempt to make the world a better place that you will enjoy living in, then so help us god, we will do it. I mean, have you seen what we charge for iPhone cases?
They want to fine us? They want to fine us? Go ahead: last time a country all the way across the ocean tried something like this, we dumped a bunch of tea in the harbor and then nobody in the United States ever drank tea ever again. Seriously, try ordering it in a restaurant and watching the server freeze like a deer in the high beams.
Look, Apple’s not going down without a fight. If that means depriving some users of the latest and greatest technology, so be it. Let’s start with our most exciting new feature: Apple Intelligence. None of that for you, EU. Your Apple products will be dumb as rocks and we’ll see how all the people in Europe like it! And, yes, we may have just started shipping the Apple Vision Pro in France and Germany, but frankly, that’s not because we want to, just because we really need to sell more Vision Pros in order to make sure the platform survives, so please go spend the equivalent of $4200 to get one.
So, what are we going to do? Well, people have been saying we should pull out of Europe. But where’s the sense in that? We’re not the problem; they are. So we’re not going to pull out of Europe—we’re going to pull Europe out. They say that Americans aren’t good at geography, but I’m pretty sure this empty space in Apple Maps is where Europe used to be. Go ahead and try and fine us now—lalalalala, we can’t hear you when you don’t even exist. Next time you want to issue us with a fine, you can stick it in whatever’s European for “where the sun don’t shine.” Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some apps to not notarize.
[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.]
My thanks to ListenLater.net for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
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The Vision Pro isn’t a product many people should buy today, and that’s not really surprising. It’s an example of Apple playing a long game, trying to build a wearable computing platform over many years. You have to start somewhere.
Right now, it’s a development kit for developers who are willing to gamble or experiment with a platform that’s not going to be broadly adopted for a while, if ever. It’s a pretty intriguing niche entertainment product, but it’s desperately in need of more content. And it’s a productivity product for people with very specific use cases and work methods. Still, most people should not consider buying one—especially not at $3500—and most people are definitely not!
But at some point, long game or not, Apple needs to start progressing and growing the visionOS platform. Mark Gurman’s report that Apple is working on a $1500 model for late next year is a start. $1500 isn’t cheap, but it’s less than half the price of the current model, and therefore more likely to snag curious people and improve the viability of buying one just to watch immersive events or 3-D videos or whatever.
So, not cheap, but… cheaper. And that’s a good start. Right now, the high price of the product is the top gating factor in growing the platform. Even if you’re impressed by the demo, it’s hard to get over that price tag.
But price isn’t the platform’s only challenge. The lack of software and content is also huge. If there’s a cheaper Vision product coming in late 2025, that means Apple has a year and a half to beef up what’s available on visionOS so that it can put itself in the best position to grow the platform when the lower-cost model is released.
The Vision Pro is the result of a years-long development process, which means that the current product as shipped is the outcome of Apple’s initial thinking about the device. Presumably, the people working on Vision Pro have learned a lot, both during the final years of the project and in its first few months out in the real world.
That’s good, because it’s time to reconsider some of the early decisions about the product and the platform. Obviously, this is already being done, because there’s no way that Apple can make a $1500 headset without pulling out some “must-have” features. (The obvious one is the lenticular outward-facing display, but I’m sure there are other features that seemed incredibly important that, in hindsight, are wastes of money.)
On the entertainment front, Apple’s made some strides in at least announcing partnerships with makers of hardware that can shoot in 3D and Immersive formats. But it needs to invest more in getting developers to build their apps on visionOS, and since the size of the near-term market opportunity sure won’t, some other inducement—like maybe even money?—might be a good idea.
And if Apple wants to get serious about expanding and growing the Vision product line, it needs to get over one particular choice it made in launching it. The company was clearly so proud of its advanced hand-tracking interface that it shipped the Vision Pro with no additional input devices. And I get it! “If you see hand controllers, they blew it” could have been one of the catchphrases of the Vision Pro development process. A headset shouldn’t require add-on controllers to be usable.
But just as the Mac eventually got arrow keys (despite omitting them from the first Mac keyboard to encourage using the mouse) and the iPad got an Apple Pencil (despite being a touch-first interface), it’s time for Apple to get over itself, and either build precision hand controllers for visionOS or build an API and make a partnership with a third-party accessory developer.
The fact is, lots of games and game-adjacent apps require a level of precision that Apple’s (excellent) hand tracking just can’t muster. Every Vision Pro game I’ve played that featured hand tracking has been a sloppy mess. I get that Apple wanted to show off its hand tracking and lean into “spatial computing” to send the message that the Vision Pro is not a game console but a serious device, but in doing so, it turned its back on the most popular category of entertainment software in the entire VR headset category.
One way for Apple to entice people to the visionOS platform—especially if a much cheaper model is on the way—is to load up on entertainment content. 3-D movies and immersive video are great, and if Apple’s not trying very hard to cut deals and encourage more content that shines on Vision Pro, it’s going to have wasted all of its effort. But if the platform can play games, if developers can port their games to visionOS from other VR platforms, it increases the viability of the product.
I’ve got a Vision Pro and a Meta Quest 3. And yet the Quest 3, which costs about one-seventh of the price of the Vision Pro, is a vastly superior platform when it comes to playing certain kinds of games. Games just require precision positioning (through detailed movement tracking), and input (via on-controller buttons) that waving your hands and tapping fingers together in Vision Pro just can’t match.
So, does Apple want visionOS to succeed or not? If it does, it needs to build or support hand controllers by the time a cheaper visionOS device ships. It needs to fill the platform with fun, fast-twitch games, exercise apps, and other stuff that’s proven successful elsewhere. No, the Vision Pro is not a games console. But if it stands defiantly against that kind of use case out of some sort of dogmatic opposition, Apple will have made it that much harder for an already hard-to-sell platform to succeed.
TV critic Tim Goodman guests to discuss the WBD and Paramount messes and give an update about what he’s been up to over at his Substack. [Downstream+ subscribers get to hear us talk about a very weird New York Times article about media moduls on a yacht.]
Reliable features of voice-based virtual assistants, our hypothetical U.S. internet legislation, the impact of Apple’s new Passwords app on our password management, and our comfort level with sharing intimate thoughts with an LLM.
It is probably not surprising that I, John Moltz, the world’s leading iPhone mini superfan would also want to use a small e-reader. That’s just science.
After spending years reading ebooks on my iPhones and iPads like an animal, I finally got a Kobo Clara HD three years ago. And I really like it. It’s reasonably small, reasonably priced, has a nice screen, and it helped me reduce my crippling dependency on Amazon.
So, why did I think I needed another e-reader? Because they started making even smaller ones.
So buttons
Last fall Jason reviewed the Boox Palma, a phone-sized e-reader that looked right up my alley. Not only would it be easy to hold with one hand, it also had physical navigation buttons, something my Kobo, like most of the smaller and more inexpensive readers, lacked. The problem is that it costs $280. I said up my alley, not up my gated community. It’s not an unreasonable amount, it was just more than I wanted to spend since I already had an e-reader. Nothing to do but wait for prices to come down, I guess.
Or maybe I didn’t have to wait. A post on Mastodon got boosted into my feed that touted the Xiaomi Moaan InkPalm 5 which sells for about $95. Now you’re talking my kind of cheap. Looking into the Moaan lineup, I then found the InkPalm Plus which features a slightly larger screen, more storage and a more up-to-date version of Android, all for as low as $124 on AliExpress.
Though Apple Intelligence may have taken the spotlight at this month’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple’s big announcement of last year has not been completely forgotten. The company also debuted visionOS 2 with some important features lacking from the first release, as well as announcing the spatial computer’s imminent availability in several international markets.
But both of those may have been temporarily overshadowed by a recent report that the company is currently focusing its efforts on a less expensive version of the product—note that I didn’t say “cheap”, as the rumored price tag is still in the $1500 range, making it more economical only by comparison to the $3500 Vision Pro.
Prioritizing such a device over the Vision Pro 2 makes a lot of sense: the Vision Pro, by all accounts, was cutting-edge technology that was as good a product as Apple could make. As it is, it should continue to be very capable for several years—and I’m sure few of the early adopters would be happy to see their very expensive spatial computer superseded in short order. But such a strategy also raises questions about the future of the Vision line and what exactly Apple is planning for it.
If your trust in Bartender has wavered as a result of this series of events, you may be looking for alternatives. I have been, too. So, I’ve rounded up some of my favorite menu bar management utilities available right now and even a couple of macOS tips to help manage the menu bar without having to install any third-party apps at all.
I’ve been using Hidden Bar on my laptop without issue, but admit to being intrigued by Ice as well. Also don’t miss her article’s tips to compact your menu bar… because you might not need a menu-bar manager at all!
It’s going to be years before we can really see the impact of Apple embracing systemwide AI features via Apple Intelligence. Many of the features announced at WWDC 2024 won’t even ship until next year, and the keynote’s Siri segment alone was so full of future-tense descriptions and metaphors about the beginning of a journey that it’s quite clear this is going to take some time.
But let’s try to look out into the future. Let’s consider what the iPhone, in particular, might look like once Siri gets smart and Apple Intelligence takes hold. It’s a future that may dramatically change what we think of as apps—and that holds some serious threats (as well as opportunities) for app developers.
Tuning the orchestra
Over the next few years you’re going to be hearing a lot more about a concept that Apple started to discuss at WWDC this year: orchestration. Broadly, the idea is that the machine-learning models on your Apple devices are going to be able to understand what you want to do, based on your commands and current context, and make it happen by using the combined resources of your device’s system software and third-party apps.
When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need it to do—without you having to specify all the steps it needs to take to get there.
This is, in many ways, the ultimate promise of user automation. For years I’ve been a fan of tools that let users create scripts or automations or workflows that connect up different aspects of their computing lives in order to save time and end busywork. Computers have eliminated countless sorts of drudgery, but if you use a computer every day, you probably still frequently find yourself doing some 21st-century drudgery, pasting this thing over here, clicking that thing over there, often in a mindless, repetitive sequence.
I can automate you out of that with some combination of AppleScript or Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro or shell script or some other macro language… and I have done so for myself, friends, and family. But the truth is, most people are never going to build even a simple Shortcut for themselves.
But… what if they don’t have to? In a world of properly orchestrated apps, they wouldn’t. They’d just say what they wanted, and their device would do all the work. If they needed to do the same task repeatedly, they could just tell Siri that, and at that point, you’ve basically built an automation workflow in zero steps.
That’s the holy grail of user automation, honestly. Tell your device what to do, and it does it—you don’t need to be involved at all. The drudgery evaporates. How civilized.
Intents and purposes
Okay, so the automation utopia may be upon us soon. But it’s easier said than done, and that’s because the functions in our apps on all our devices aren’t all magically known to Siri and Apple Intelligence. App developers have to specifically mark out the key functionality of their apps and bundle it up in a specific way so that it’s accessible to the broader system.
This is how AppleScript worked back in the day, and in today’s Shortcuts era, it’s enabled by something called App Intents. App Intents aren’t new—as I said, they’re what powers Shortcuts—but as of 2024, they’re much more meaningful than they used to be, because they’re how apps integrate with Apple Intelligence.
What Apple’s asking app developers to do is put in extra work in order to allow their apps to offer up their unique functionality to the system in an organized way. The result will be that the system will know those capabilities exist and will be able to use them as needed, based on whatever the user wants to do. If I’m looking at a photo and say I want to share that with Myke and Stephen in Slack, Apple Intelligence needs to understand what I’m looking at, export that photo in a format that’s reasonable for sharing in Slack, and then use Slack to choose the right venue for me to share with Stephen and Myke. (Oh, and based on context it also needs to intuit that I mean Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley—two people who are frequently connected—and not people I know separately like Steven Schapansky and Mike Gordon.)
It’s all tricky, but the potential is enormous. Apps are mostly islands unto themselves, and it can be a real effort to get them to work together the way you want them to. I once built a wild system that basically connected my email client to a database1—the apps didn’t know about each other, and they didn’t need to—but by connecting them, I got a huge productivity boost. With Apple Intelligence and App Intents (so many AIs!), the potential is there for your device to connect your apps with one another in all sorts of ways… without you even breaking a sweat.
The potential here is huge. Now, the big question: Will app developers buy in?
App self-esteem
On a device operated by Apple Intelligence and full of apps all tricked out with App Intents, what does “using an app” mean, anyway? I’m dubious that we’re not going to ever want to scroll through lists and tap things and perform other tactile acts on our phones, even if we can drive a lot of work with a voice assistant. But if you’re an app developer, there’s a real risk of feeling like your app is no longer a destination for users but a box of parts that will occasionally be rummaged through by the system while it’s passing through to a different destination. That’s scary.
I do think that if Apple’s idea of an orchestrated future comes into being, the importance of any individual app might be reduced. But there’s also huge potential here for different apps to work together, for them to amplify each other so that they’re far more important for individual users than they could possibly be now.
For some apps, though, the future might be more about supplying great actions and data sources to the big Apple Intelligence soup—presumably for a subscription price. It seems a little bit weird, but the future of iOS apps might be services that just tie into Apple Intelligence, with little to no interface of their own. I don’t know if you could even call them apps.
That’s all years away, but I think it’s already time for app developers to consider what makes their apps unique and useful in a world where a smart machine-learning model is taking user commands and then getting results. If competitors offer the same functionality, they should presumably be motivated to offer App Intents so that the system will use them, and they’ll become crucial, irreplaceable portions of a user’s workflow.
For some apps, that might mean becoming less of a bright, shiny interface in the face of users, and more of a behind-the-scenes workhorse that just makes life better. Developers who are used to having the spotlight may be disquieted by that notion, but it doesn’t mean that their software doesn’t have value—and won’t be able to command an appropriate subscription price.
Existential threats
Apps and the App Store have been very, very good for Apple. I’m sure the company wants that to continue for as close to forever as possible.
But if the future of the devices that keep Apple in business is about to be transformed by AI models that orchestrate our software to do our bidding, there’s a serious risk that it could disrupt Apple’s standing in all of those device categories. That’s why the rise of AI is clearly an existential threat for Apple and why the company spent so much time talking about AI features at WWDC 2024.
It’s worth keeping that fundamental existential threat in mind. While it’s easy to say that apps and the App Store helped make Apple what it is, and therefore, the company will always be inclined to maintain the status quo… the fact is that if Apple thinks the best way for it to survive and flourish is to atomize app functionality into App Intents and drive it all with a user-driven AI assistant, it’ll do that. And it won’t think twice about it, no matter the consequences for app developers.
Because it was the 90s, it was an AppleScript that connected Eudora and FileMaker Pro. ↩
Apple backs away from some financial services and changes its Vision hardware approach, and there’s a new phase in the company’s relationship with the EU. For the Summer of Fun, we look at our current iPhone home screens.
Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.
At the root of this decision is the EC’s contention that Apple is overly limiting the way developers are allowed to send potential customers to their own storefronts. That includes both the actual design restrictions of external links, as well as Apple’s fee structure (the company takes a cut of any digital good or service up to seven days after the customer follows the external link). Such moves would seem to be in violation of the DMA regulation that developers can advertise and direct users to their own sites without cost.1
Given that this is a preliminary ruling, Apple has time to respond to the finding before the final decision is put into effect in March of 2025.
Simultaneous to this decision, the EC has also announced a new non-compliance investigation, its third into Apple. This action specifically looks into Apple’s developer terms in the EU, including alternative app stores and distribution methods. At the heart of this matter are three issues: whether the process for users taking advantage of alternative app distribution is too onerous, whether Apple is too restrictive in its eligibility terms (such as the rule that developers must be “of good standing” to qualify), and the existence of the Core Technology Fee.
That is…a lot. Should the EC find Apple to not be in compliance in these areas, it would require a substantial reworking of much of Apple’s EU terms. As with the previous investigations, it will likely take some time for a final ruling to be issued, though we may get a preliminary ruling such as the one above in a matter of months.
For reference, the relevant portion of the DMA (Article 5(4)) reads in full: “The gatekeeper shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions, to end users acquired via its core platform service or through other channels, and to conclude contracts with those end users, regardless of whether, for that purpose, they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper.” ↩
Apple’s second wave of DMA compliance in Europe; we detail our OS beta strategies for the summer; and a first crack at beta Apple Photos features. [More Colors and Backstage members get an extra 20 minutes of interactive discussion of Photos, discoverability, and forcing features on users.]
