The first major visionOS update was released Thursday, with a bunch of security fixes as well as some more substantive interface updates:
Personas are improved, and there’s a new accessibility mode you can use to capture a Persona hands-free. My Persona certainly looks better when running 1.1. (You’ll need to capture a new Persona.)
Organizations that use Mobile Device Management (MDM) to configure, deploy, and manage Apple devices can support Vision Pro.
You can delete Apple’s apps from the Home view.
iMessage Contact Key Verification, a feature recently introduced to Apple’s other platforms but not supported in visionOS 1.0, is now supported.
There are a grab bag of other items, including general improvements to the virtual keyboard, Mac Virtual Display, closed captions, and support for captive Wi-Fi networks.
Updating visionOS is weird. You use the Software Update section of the Settings app, of course, but when it’s ready to install you’re instructed to take the device off so it can reboot and install it. It’s very weird to just walk away and come back later, but I also don’t really want to sit in the dark waiting for visionOS to do its thing, so this is how it will be, I guess.
Here’s a ruling that isn’t music to Apple’s ears: the European Commission this week levied a fine of $2 billion against the company for violating antitrust regulations in the EU, specifically in terms of the distribution of music streaming apps.
Apple, unsurprisingly, was not happy, issuing a scathing rebuke of the kind rarely seen since the days of former CEO Steve Jobs. That missive insists that the EU found “no evidence of consumer harm” and “no evidence of anti-competitive behavior,” arguing that the digital music market in Europe is stronger than its ever been, in large part thanks to the App Store.
Arguments about this will be continuing ad infinitum, not least of all because the company is appealing the decision. But it’s worth taking a look at Apple’s response from a couple different viewpoints.
Alright, so obviously the first step of the process is to physically remove the screen from a MacBook, right?
🤔
Some people will call this a silly stunt, but the truth is that for years Federico has been exploring (and pushing) the edges of Apple’s platforms so the rest of us don’t have to. He’s an ergonomic astronaut, floating away into strange places where no one (outside of rooms in Cupertino with blackened windows) has gone before.
In this case, my biggest takeaway is that Apple needs to get weird and explore different ways to mix its hardware and software. The MacBook Air is a solved problem—but there may be some as-yet-unsolved use cases out there.
The other thing that struck me about Federico’s story is that he’s made a pretty great Vision Pro accessory. I’d love a keyboard and trackpad in a single slab to use with the Vision Pro… and what a great bonus if it had a Mac inside it, too!
A midnight M3 MacBook Air driving two Studio Displays in lid-closed mode.
Apple’s definitive laptop of the last decade, the MacBook Air, finally got an exterior redesign in 2022 with the release of the M2 MacBook Air. This new model traded in the classic wedge shape and rounded edges for flat sides with curved corners, restored the MagSafe connector, and dramatically reduced the size of the display bezel.
It’s a great revision, and I’m happy to report that the M3 MacBook Air, due to be released Friday, is identical to the M2 model in terms of external design. Without reading the model number printed on the bottom, I’m not sure you could tell them apart.
This is not to say that there aren’t new features, of course. The M3 chip introduced with the M3 iMac and MacBook Pro in November offers improved performance, and there are a few other wrinkles that provide a little texture to this update.
But the bottom line is that Apple did a spectacularly good job redesigning the MacBook Air in 2022, and now here’s a revision that brings Apple’s most popular Mac up to date with the latest generation of Apple silicon. If you already have an M2 Air, you probably don’t need this update (with one notable exception I’ll get to later). But if you’ve been holding onto an Intel MacBook Air and waiting for the right time to jump… the M3 Air will provide a soft and pleasant landing.
Back to basics
The 15-inch (starlight, top) and 13-inch (midnight) Air.
I’m not kidding: I can’t tell the M2 and M3 MacBook Air models apart. They’re essentially identical. There are 13-inch and 15-inch models, just as there were (eventually) with the previous generation. The 15-inch Air has slightly better speakers, but the only palpable difference is that it’s got a bigger screen than the 13-inch model. Because the 15-inch M2 model trailed the 13-inch version by a year, this marks the first time that both sizes have launched simultaneously. If you’ve always wanted a larger laptop screen but haven’t wanted to spend the money on a MacBook Pro, the 15-inch Air is a great choice.
The single change to the exterior of the M3 Air to previous versions is a new fingerprint-resistant anodization seal on the dark “midnight” models, which do show fingerprints more than the others. This is apparently the same approach that Apple took with the Space Black M3 MacBook Pro.
My reaction is pretty much the same as the one I had to the MacBook Pro: Apple hasn’t “cured” fingerprints. It is absolutely possible to put fingerprints all over the midnight MacBook Air. I managed to cover it in streaks in a couple of minutes. It might be a little more resistant than the old model, and it might be easier to wipe the surface clean, but after a day’s use, the M2 and M3 midnight Airs in my house looked more or less the same.
It’s worth noting that the MacBook Air’s 1080p FaceTime camera is passable but not amazing—I wish Apple would tuck a nicer camera up there. These new models also have a “notch” in the display that contains the camera, so you’ll lose a little bit of menu bar space, but I’ve never found it to be a big issue. I forget the notch is there, honestly.
And proving that some changes are invisible to the eye, Apple claims that this is the first Apple product to be made with more than 50 percent recycled content, including all of the aluminum, the rare-earth elements in magnets, and the copper on the logic board. (I can’t tell the difference between recycled atoms and original ones, and neither can you.)
Dual-screen details
Two Thunderbolt ports, two displays.
A feature of Apple’s Intel-based MacBook Air models was the ability to drive multiple external monitors at once, providing a relatively affordable way to get a multi-screen workspace. When the MacBook Air moved to Apple Silicon, it lost that capability. In fact, the base M1 and M2 chips are only able to support two displays—and in a laptop, one of those is built in, so that meant support for only one external display.
This set up the frustrating situation where MacBook Air users with multiple-monitor setups were going to need to spend $2000 on a MacBook Pro if they wanted to upgrade to Apple Silicon and keep their setups. The most frustrating thing was that the Mac Mini supported two displays—but of course, it didn’t have that built-in laptop screen.
But the M3 has changed things! I was able to use the M3 MacBook Air with two Apple Studio Displays—as long as I kept the lid of the laptop closed and used an external keyboard and trackpad to control everything. I plugged the two displays into the two Thunderbolt ports on the MacBook Air, and when I closed the lid, the second of the two monitors turned on.
There’s a scaling disparity between two external Studio Displays.
There are a few quirks. The Air can support one 6K display, but the second display can only be 5K resolution. In my setup with two Studio Displays, I could only set the secondary display to use the option that scales everything down a little bit (to the equivalent of 2880 x 1620 resolution); the “main display” (in other words, the one that takes over for the internal one) couldn’t be greater than 2560 x 1440.
In any event, this is a big expansion of the functionality of the MacBook Air for a certain class of users. Apple silicon laptops make great desktop computers when tethered to an external display, and now users don’t have to buy a MacBook Pro to get that functionality. (The base M3 MacBook Pro, which strangely shipped without support for a second external display, will receive a software update later this year to bring it to parity with the M3 MacBook Air.)
The M3 Air also adds support for Wi-Fi 6E, while the older M2 models only support Wi-Fi 6. The difference is real. On my home Internet connection, I was able to get 931 Mbps down and 813 MBps up via Wi-Fi, which is more or less the same speed as my wired connection to my router. In the same spot, my M2 Air could only manage 618 up and 700 down. I wouldn’t buy a new laptop just to have faster Wi-Fi—and keep in mind that you need to upgrade your router and possibly your home internet to take advantage of these speeds—but that’s the fastest Wi-Fi connection I’ve ever experienced.
They keep getting faster
The big speed boost in Apple silicon came during the transition to Intel. Since then, things have kept incrementally improving. The M3 Max is actually a pretty decent bit faster than the M2 Max, but the low-end M3 chip used in the MacBook Air is only a little bit faster than the M2 in the 2022 model. The M3 was about 19 percent faster than the M2 in multi-core CPU tasks but a more impressive 39 percent faster than the M1. In graphics tests, it was only about four percent faster than an M2 Air with the same number of GPU cores.
In a noticeable shifting of gears from previous product launches, Apple has devoted a large amount of time to promoting the M3 Air as the best consumer computer for artificial intelligence tasks, citing the integrated Neural Engine in the M3 chip. Of course, Apple silicon Macs have had the Neural Engine since the M1, and while some AI applications use the Neural Engine, others use the GPU cores—and still others run in the cloud, entirely separate from the computer.
So, is the M3 Air an AI powerhouse? I’m sure it’s fine, and it did manage to transcribe a podcast using OpenAI Whisper in less than 80 percent of the time it took an M2 model—but that was pretty much down to the extra GPU cores, I think. And, of course, an M3 Max MacBook Pro with 40 GPU cores polished off that same transcript in 40 percent less time than the M3 Air.
So yes, the M3 Air is faster than the M2 model and quite a bit faster than the M1 model. But in the Apple silicon era, the MacBook Air has enough horsepower for most general use cases. If you’re really pushing things with something like an AI transcript or a video encode, the MacBook Pro line offers a whole lot of performance upside, which is why I included a 16-CPU, 40-GPU M3 Max MacBook Pro in my speed charts as a comparison.
To be sure, there are other reasons to buy a MacBook Pro instead of a MacBook Air, most notably the beautiful display and the extra ports. The Pro also has a cooling fan, which the Air doesn’t. This makes the Air really nice and quiet, but in extremely taxing situations, the Air will have to restrain itself in order to prevent overheating, while the Pro can just crank up the fans and keep on churning.
Who should upgrade?
If you’ve got an M2 MacBook Air, you can stay put—unless you’re desperate to plug in a second display, that is. M1 Air users might be tempted to upgrade, and there are a lot of reasons to do so—not just that the M3 is faster, but that the entire MacBook Air redesign that came with the M2 is pretty great. (The 13-inch M2 model is still on Apple’s price list, a bargain at $999.)
If you’re still using an Intel MacBook Air, well… if you’re doing that because you have a two-monitor setup, you’ve probably already placed your order. I no longer have a late-model Intel MacBook Air to use as a comparison to these Apple silicon models, but suffice it to say that an Apple silicon Mac is a huge upgrade over the old Intel models.
The truth is, unless you’ve been waiting to plug in a second monitor to a MacBook Air, this upgrade isn’t going to blow anyone away—and that’s okay. The chips keep getting faster, 2022’s MacBook Air design refresh remains great, and the 15-inch model offers a large screen for people who don’t need MacBook Pro prices or features. The MacBook Air is Apple’s most popular Mac, and now it’s even better.
Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett of Bloomberg have a detailed story about the rise and fall of Apple’s car project. This was my favorite small bit:
The new design also incorporated a more traditional automotive interface: a steering wheel and pedals. “They finally smartened up,” says an Apple executive. “I was like, ‘Guys, you could have done this 10 years ago!’”
Sounds like a lot of people inside Apple knew this project was a disaster, and that Tim Cook failed to provide a vision and decisive leadership. Though I do appreciate the internal argument about why to start the project in the first place: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?”
The importance of encryption in messaging services, the topics we’d want to see in a prediction market, how many monitors we use, and our preferred podcast app(s).
But while Apple’s ambitious car project may have been left in the dust, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a valuable experience—nor that it doesn’t continue to pay some dividends for the company. After a decade of work, billions in investment, and the work of hundreds of engineers, you’d better believe that Apple cutting its losses doesn’t mean that everything Titan-related is packed up into a white cardboard box and thrown into Apple Park’s attic.
We already known that many of the people who worked on Project Titan will be reassigned elsewhere. But it’s more than just the personnel who worked on the Apple Car—it’s the technology developed for Apple’s automotive project that will surely work its way into other places across the company’s product lines. After all, one of Apple’s great strengths as a company that controls both its hardware and software is the ability for features and capabilities to be shared across its various devices where appropriate.
Someone new is in charge of Netflix’s film output, which lets us ponder the company’s past and future film strategy. [Downstream+ members get: Max’s new Harry Potter approach, and lessons we could learn from The CW’s mid-budget approach to superhero TV.]
One of my surprisingly favorite features of the Vision Pro is the dynamic display of photographic panoramas. Immersive environments are great, and I love that I can capture stereo video now, but I’ve got an immense library of panoramas that date back to the 1990s.
Yep, that’s right: before the iPhone made it easy to capture panoramas, you used to have to take them the hard way—namely by rotating in a circle and capturing photos every so often. What’s worse, I used to do this with film. I know! I know! But in the late 1990s my parents sold the house I grew up in, and I wanted to capture that place one last time. It was the heyday of QuickTime VR and so I took several rolls of film on my last visit and captured it all.
Developer David Smith gets it. He has detailed how, even now, it’s often superior to capture a bunch of stills and stitch them together rather than use the iPhone’s convenient panorama feature:
Unfortunately right now these panoramas are limited to roughly the width of a standard 12MP capture…
Looking at these iPhone panoramas on a Vision Pro is lovely, they have barely enough resolution to give a good sense of being back at the place where the image was captured. However, after the initial WOW! factor has worn off I started to really notice the fuzziness of the presentation. Presenting an image which is around 3900px tall at a conceptual height of about six feet tall just isn’t enough resolution to really feel immersive.
His solution is mine, too: Take a bunch of photos vertically as you swivel around, then use Photoshop to merge them into a panorama. (The command is File: Automate: Photomerge.) His resulting panoramas were 304 megapixels in size!
If you’re in a spectacular location, it’s totally worth the trouble.
(Left to right): A transcript playing back, selecting a paragraph in the transcript view, and sharing a quote from a podcast.
As was foretold back in January, with the release of iOS 17.4 Apple’s Podcasts app now supports podcast transcripts. This is a pretty big breakthrough in terms of access to podcast content and accessibility of podcast to audiences who might not be able to listen.
The way Apple has implemented transcription is very clever. It’s all happening up in the cloud—the moment it detects that a new episode has arrived, Apple kicks that episode into its transcription queue and quickly generates a full transcript. (This is why, if you start listening the moment an episode drops, you won’t be offered a transcript—but very soon thereafter, it should appear.) Apple supports transcripts in English, Spanish, French, and German, which should cover 80 percent of overall listening in Apple Podcasts.
Apple’s not just running that podcast through a standard transcription engine like the one I use to generate transcripts on my Mac, but one that’s been built to detect some detailed information about how the podcast is structured.
That’s important, because many modern podcasts use something called Dynamic Ad Insertion to insert different ads depending on where you are, who you are, and when you downloaded the episode. A traditional transcript file won’t keep sync with a podcast if the time codes of the ads keep changing. Apple’s engine should be able to detect the beginning and end of those ads and adjust its transcript accodingly, inserting a filler animation (three slowly filling dots that will be familiar to users of lyrics in Apple Music) until the podcast content resumes, at which point the transcript should pick up right where it should.
Apple’s processing also detects content down to the word, so that (again, Apple Music style) it can highlight every word in the transcript as it’s spoken. It detects speaker changes and breaks paragraphs to improve readability, though it can’t identify the speakers. Episodes with chapter markers should see those reflected in the transcripts as subheads.
You can also select a paragraph from a transcript and share it (including a link back to the podcast), or even view the entire podcast transcript on its own without playing audio.
Podcasters who would prefer to use their own transcripts—I could see it happening in podcasts where there are some highly specific spellings and terms that they want to get exactly right—can do so by using the <podcast:transcript> field in their podcast RSS to point at a subtitles file in SRT or VTT format. Apple’s backend systems will pick that file up, run it through their own special processes, and supply it in the same interface.
The only thing that’s really missing is support for private podcast feeds, which is where most members-only versions of podcasts live these days. (Full disclosure: I produce several podcasts with members-only versions, and subscribe to several more!) I realize that there are some complicated technical isuses with members-only podcasts—technically each one is unique for each member, which is a real complicating factor—but between the file download URL and the URL of the transcript file, it should be doable for Apple to group all the members-only podcast episodes together. If it wants to transcribe those episodes itself, it’s more than welcome—but I’m also happy to provide my own transcript. I just don’t want my members missing out on this really great new feature.
It’s time to say goodbye to the M1 MacBook Air (hello, new M3 models!) and our Upshift segment (RIP Apple Car project), but our in-depth coverage of Apple being regulated and fined by the European Commission rolls on!
If you’ve been keeping your powder dry for Apple’s most popular laptop models to get its latest processors, well, time to light that candle. The company announced on Monday that it has updated its MacBook Air line with M3 processors, bringing not only faster performance but also a much desired new capability: support for two external displays.
The new 13-inch model comes in three basic configurations: all three feature an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. While the $1099 base configuration includes an 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, the $1299 and $1499 versions include a 10-core graphics processor and a 512GB SSD—you can get up to 2TB of storage on any model. Just to mix it up a bit, the two lower configurations start with 8GB of memory, compared to the highest model’s 16GB—all are configurable with up to 24GB of memory at max.
Meanwhile, the 15-inch model also comes in three configurations, though all use the same 8-core GPU/10-core GPU configuration. As with the 13-inch version, the lower two models both includes 8GB of memory with the highest offering 16GB and the higher two configurations have 512GB SSDs with the lowest having only a 256GB.
There should be very little surprise about these options, given that they mimic the same versions of the M3 chip found in the latest version of Apple’s iMac, including the 16 core Neural Engine, hardware ray tracing, and 100GB/s memory bandwidth.
Where they do differ is one place that many vocal users have been upset: the new M3 models not only support an external display at up to 6K resolution but now also support a second external display at up to 5K resolution…if you close the MacBook Air lid. While that may not appease all critics of the display limitations, it’s likely to make many users happy.
The only other change is the addition of Wi-Fi 6E (aka 802.11ax), which offers better performance. Otherwise, specs—including size, weight, and available colors—are unchanged across the line.
There’s one last footnote, though: in true Apple fashion, the 13-inch M2 Air has been kept around to hit that sub-$1000 price point. For $999 you can get a 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage; there’s also an $1199 configuration with the 8-core CPU/10-core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That means there’s effectively a configuration at every $100 interval, so you can buy as much MacBook as you need. The M1 Air, meanwhile, has shuffled off this mortal coil, bidding adieu to its Intel-era design.
All models are available for order today and will ship this Friday. The company also announced a new assortment of Silicone iPhone cases and a refresh of Apple Watch bands as it generally does in the spring.
[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.]
There was a moment when it seemed like an Apple Car made sense. Ten years ago, when the Apple Watch wasn’t anything more than a rumor (and I still worked at a magazine), it seemed like the entire automotive industry was on the edge of an enormous change, and the traditional players just weren’t ready.
In 2014, Tesla was sort of the only one out there trying to bring that future into existence, and back then, Tesla only really sold one consumer car—the expensive Model S. If the future of cars was that they were going to be computers on wheels, wasn’t there a chance to catch the auto-industry giants sleeping and elbow them out of their own industry?
That’s not how it worked for a multitude of reasons. But as Apple begins the process of tearing down all the pieces of its fruitless quest to build its own vehicle, it’s worth remembering that at one point, it almost made sense.
In defense of the gamble
It’s 2014, and you’re Apple. You’ve got all the free cash and ambition in the world, and you know that as the iPhone matures, it’ll cease to be a major generator of the growth that Wall Street demands. (To be clear, there was a lot of growth still to come for the iPhone: Apple wouldn’t even introduce the first “big” iPhone, the iPhone 6 Plus, until the fall.) You’ve got the Apple Watch on the horizon, and a grand plan to dramatically boost Services revenue, but you know that investors want growth to be infinite and eternal.
You’ve got the Innovator’s Dilemma buzzing in your mind, as well as Steve Jobs’s maxim that it’s always best if you’re your own replacement. You and your fellow tech giants have enormous amounts of money and a commitment to not become so complacent that some new tech company comes along and turns you into a historical footnote.
So what do you do? You place your bets. You put money down in the hope that you will stave off irrelevance and maybe even discover the Next Big Thing. In 2014, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that in 2030, most new cars would be computers on wheels, using new electric technologies that were foreign to the big automakers. What was more likely, that Ford and GM would learn the vital synthesis of hardware and software, or that Apple could turn the talents of its hardware design team to an auto chassis?
(Just an aside: Could Apple have just… bought Tesla? Or Rivian? Or Lucid? Perhaps the timing never quite worked, but it also feels like there’s some strong “not invented here” syndrome at play here. Apple didn’t want to buy the revolutionary electric car and popularize it; it wanted to invent it.)
The dangerous distraction
Apple may have had a decent reason to make a speculative dive into the car business, but it seems like the effort lacked leadership and direction. If someone with authority had put a stake in the ground and said the company should ship its own Tesla-style car by, say, 2019, that might have been something. Given the eccentricity and distraction of Tesla’s leadership, Apple might have ended up even beating Tesla at its own game in a few years.
But it sure seems, based on various reports over the years, like Apple’s strategy kept swerving into other lanes. Any observer of Tesla has noticed that Elon Musk has spent the last decade hyping the just-around-the-corner promise of true self-driving cars. Alphabet and other companies have invested in the dream, too, and as an outside observer, it sure seems like what we’ve learned is that the technology just isn’t there yet—and might never be. Human streets are messy.
But as much as a hype man for self-driving as Musk has been, and as questionable as his taste in hardware driving interfaces has been, Tesla has continually designed its cars with, you know… steering wheels. What if we just can’t crack the entirely autonomous vehicle? Steering wheels. They’re a great fallback.
The moment that I realized Apple’s car effort was completely off track was when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple’s car design did not hedge: “Apple’s ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals, and its interior would be designed around hands-off driving,” Gurman reported.
Was Apple convinced that it could beat everyone to the self-driving holy grail? Had it decided that if it couldn’t build a roving autonomous salon on wheels, it didn’t want to make anything at all? Was the project hijacked by a bunch of idealistic designers fed by unearned confidence that Apple could achieve anything it set its technological mind to?
It took two more years for the sword to fall on the project. If reports are to be believed, the team was issued an ultimatum to come up with a product to ship in the next few years. My guess is that they came up with that product and realized it would be a more expensive Lucid Air. That might have been great in 2017 or even 2019, but at this point, not only are there numerous companies trying to use the Tesla playbook, but most of the major automakers have awakened from their slumber. A $100,000 Apple sedan in 2018 might be the start of something big. The same car in 2028 is a footnote. The opportunity to change the world has passed.
Mistakes were made
It seems like Project Titan lacked a leader with a clear vision (or at least lacked a leader with the ability to implement their vision), and then someone steered the entire project off course while chasing an unattainable dream. (Apple would’ve been better off shipping that Tesla-like sedan in 2018 and then iterating for a decade.)
But was Project Titan’s whole existence a mistake? Not so fast.
If you’re an incumbent like Apple, your biggest threat is your own complacency. Apple should constantly be trying to identify areas of interest where it could make a difference in the world with an investment of the company’s enormous resources.
Take visionOS. The Vision Pro is an interesting experiment that might have some fascinating applications today and in the next few years. But where it makes the most sense, and where it justifies Apple’s massive investment, is as a long-term play designed to stave off any possibility of some other company cracking a future wearable item that makes the iPhone obsolete.
The iPhone is half of Apple’s business. Apple should be spending money and time trying to envision its replacement—and ensuring that Apple is the company that’ll popularize that product.
I like Apple taking bets like Project Titan. Of course, there was an opportunity cost to it. If Apple wasn’t dallying with computer vision models, perhaps it would have invested in large language models. Probably not, but there’s no way to know. The longer the project continued, though, the more opportunities were missed. And it does feel like the project went on too long.
At least there’s a silver lining. You never know what will be salvaged from the wreckage of Apple’s car project. I would imagine that quite a bit of what was learned in Project Titan will benefit future Apple products. Of course, it’s unlikely that any of that will justify the enormous cost of the project—but that’s not the point.
Apple made a bet. Maybe the odds were bad. The bet was probably too large. And Apple threw some good money after bad in the hopes of chasing a jackpot. You win some, you lose some.
When it comes to planning the future, the only thing worse than making some bad bets is making no bets at all.
I’m so old I remember when the Apple car was coming in five years.
Technically, you’d only have to be nine years old to have been alive when people were saying that, but then there’s the issue of cognition and when earliest memories form… Well, you get the point.
Anyway, time’s up. In a step we haven’t seen since 2019, Apple has canceled a product development project. If you’re a fat cat automotive executive who said the PC guys were not just gonna knock this out, give yourself an extra dollop of caviar on that cracker.
Were these wind-up cars? No wonder they killed the project. But, man, think of the carbon neutrality of a wind-up car.
Despite several strategy pivots, Apple has ultimately determined it simply couldn’t make the car it really wanted to make: one that was fully autonomous. Not without running a bunch of people over, anyway. Sure, they could probably make a standard electric car, but what would be different about it? Or different enough that it would be worth the Apple price premium?
Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project…
That sounds like a lot but remember, this is Apple. They can’t make an omelette without breaking some Fabergé eggs.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Tripp Mickle article without at least a soupçon of Apple doom.
The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011.
Apple Watch. AirPods. HomePod. TV+. Vision Pro. All in 13 years. But… you know… other than those things, what have they developed? Practically nothing.
…it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.
But Elon Musk said fully autonomous driving is only six months away! He said that for like 10 years!
Ohhh, I see, right. I get it now.
Early ideas for the car were maybe a little too optimistic.
It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri.
They still haven’t found several of those early prototypes. The Pacific is a big ocean.
After that the project seems to have changed focus and mangers several times, before finally being canceled. When even the loving but meaty-handed ministrations of Bob Mansfield can’t save a project, you know it doesn’t have a chance.
Apple cancels car project!
OK, so the car project has been canceled. (Have you heard?) But what does that mean for those of us still stuck in this stupid Apple-car-less timeline? Don’t worry, they’re not throwing out the AI baby with the car bathwater.
This would be the ground where they salted over the car project, as Apple has indicated that some of those working on Project Titan would be moving over to AI while others would be moving to…uh, unemployment.
It’s a smart, if belated, move to focus on things that are achievable with AI rather than things that are not achievable with AI. Apple tries a lot of things that never see the light of day; that’s part of how it comes up with great products, so you can’t fault it for trying.
Adding an extra space to my garage? That’s on me.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
The dominant narrative has been that a single phone call hacked MGM, but that help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols. And there’s another factor that could have stopped the hackers in their tracks: it’s all about the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what Kolide learned when they researched the MGM hack (like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story), check out the Kolide Blog.
Mysteries, Apple cars, and web apps
Jason’s computer keeps dying after login; virtue of Apple trying to make a car even if the project ended up failing; and a surprise reversal on homescreen web apps in the EU.
Aa a longtime Mac user, I’m just as aware of the platform’s limitations as I am its strengths. Chief among those limitations is—and has been for many years— gaming. Personally, though I played my fair share of Mac games throughout my teens and college years, I haven’t been an avid Mac gamer for a couple decades, first leaving for the greener pastures of PC gaming and then, eventually, the simpler world of consoles.
That’s why I found last year so interesting. Not only did Apple spend some significant time talking the talk about games with the release of its M2 Pro and Max chips and how good they were for gaming, but it even walked the walk with the WWDC release of its game porting toolkit.
As this year’s annual platform updates grow closer, Mac users are left wondering whether this is another flash in the pan from a company that has historically never gotten games, or if Apple might instead be poised to demonstrate that its commitment is more than just lip service.
Coming into port
Last summer I tried giving the game porting toolkit a whirl on my M1 MacBook Air, which was then running the required macOS Sonoma beta. At the time installing the toolkit meant following a series of technical instructions, involving no small amount of command line work. Though I’m no stranger to spending time in Terminal, I ultimately didn’t even manage to get to the point of firing up a game.
This week, though, I noticed that one of the classic games of my teen years, Star Wars: Dark Forces1, had gotten the remastered treatment. That updated version was available for many of the consoles, as well as for Windows…but not for the Mac.
An updated version of a many years-old game seemed like ideal pickings for another stab at Apple’s toolkit: the gameplay wouldn’t be very demanding, but would also no doubt highlight any shortcomings in Apple’s technology.
Whisky makes it incredibly easy to install PC games—perhaps too easy.
What a difference eight months makes. That’s in no small part due to Whisky, an app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder. It installed all the necessary under-the-hood software, leaving me with nothing but time on my hands.
So I grabbed the standalone installer for Dark Forces that I’d purchased from GOG.com2 and simply ran it. Less than ten minutes later, I was running around blasting pixelated stormtroopers.3 I even connected the Xbox controller I keep in my office and it worked seamlessly, with no additional setup (I was surprised to see that even Dark Forces‘s in-game UI knew I was using an Xbox controller and changed to reflect that).
Stormtroopers would be scarier if they could actually hit anything.
The only issue I ran into was that the MIDI sound stuttered somewhat—all the sounds and music were intelligible, just with this additional audio artifact. Some digging around suggested workarounds involving replacement DLLs, which I gave a half-hearted shot at but had no luck.4
The once and future king of Mac gaming
Windows gaming on the Mac is hardly new: over the years enthusiasts have used tools ranging from Apple’s Boot Camp to emulators like Parallels and VMware Fusion to translators like Wine and CrossOver to finagle PC games into running on Mac hardware. But all of those solutions were cumbersome to different degrees and served to alienate the people who just wanted playing games to be as simple as everything else on the Mac—nobody wants to hear that games work great if you just install these four pieces of software and tweak endless settings.
Apple’s said that its game porting toolkit is designed specifically for developers, to help them enable running their titles on the Mac. The idea being that it takes care of a certain base-level compatibility—to make sure titles are optimized and run well, companies have to put in some time.
What I wonder is just how well that’s paid off. There certainly hasn’t been an explosion in Mac gaming in the past several months, though, to be fair, games have long development timelines and large shops are probably not about to throw caution to the winds and embrace the Mac after all these years.
But has Apple done everything it can? I think the company’s only fighting half the battle here. The Mac has always suffered from a chicken-and-egg gaming problem: developers don’t want to commit resources to making games for a platform because there aren’t enough customers there; but the reason there aren’t enough customers is because there aren’t enough games.
The game porting toolkit attacks the developer side of the equation, but only brushes up against the other side: consumers.
If Apple really wants to jumpstart gaming on the Mac, it should bake the underlying technologies of the game porting toolkit directly into the system. Make installing and running a PC game as easy as if it were a Mac native title.
Make Moff Rebus canon again, cowards!
Are there risks with this approach? Definitely. As I mentioned, the audio in my version of Dark Forces was sub-par and, from what I can see online, these kinds of edge cases are not uncommon. It’s not hard to imagine blame being leveled at Apple’s hardware and software for “not being up to the task” when the truth is that the titles simply need some extra care and attention to play at their best. Whisky already does a good job of trying to package in a lot of the ancillary software that can help make the right tweaks; there’s no reason Apple couldn’t apply a similar approach.
In the end, I’d argue that the potential benefits outweigh the risks: running PC games on the Mac at all is a pretty big coup, to say nothing of them running pretty well. If Apple’s really worried about a bad experience reflecting poorly on its products, it can throw up a splash screen disclaimer—come on, you guys love splash screen disclaimers!
The more demand from folks who are willing to play their games on the Mac, the better the chance that developers will be willing to at least invest the time to make sure their titles run well. And if that ends up being a gateway to making games that run natively on the Mac, well, then, mission accomplished. As impressive as Apple’s tools are, just chucking them at developers and expecting them to jump at the chance of being on the Mac doesn’t cut it.
A title, let it be noted, that I actually owned for my Mac on CD-ROM! ↩
GOG has its own GOG Galaxy client, but I wasn’t sure how that would play with Whisky, so I opted for the simplest route. ↩
Almost 30 years of gaming means I am much, much better at this now. 🤣 ↩
Though when I loaded it up later and listened through the headphones connected to my audio interface, it was much better. Weird! ↩
[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.]
In these difficult times, hard decisions sometimes have to be made. Not by anybody specifically, you understand—just in general. That’s why we are shutting down the Special Projects Group and its effort to develop autonomous driving systems. After more than a decade of work of thousands of people, with several billion dollars spent, the Apple Car is driving off into the sunset via a convoluted route that may or may not involve collisions with cyclists.
This decision was not taken lightly. At Apple we pride ourselves on creating products that surprise and delight our customers, but there was some concern that the car’s tendency to ignore stop signs and lane markers was perhaps putting too much emphasis on the “surprise” part of that equation.
In times like this, we’d like to follow the example of a true Apple icon, Project Titan’s namesake, the world’s former tallest dog, may he rest in peace. While our project, like Titan, was only in this world a relatively short time, we’d like to believe it made an outsized impact on the many lives it touched.
It is, we all agree, a shame that our reinvention of the automobile will never reach the consumer market of people who could afford $100,000 cars, which had a not insignificant overlap with the consumer market of people who could afford a $3,500 device for watching movies by themselves while on the moon. But despite this, we continue to persevere in related areas, including both our upcoming launch of partner vehicles featuring the next-generation of CarPlay 2 as well as our busy schedule of uproarious laughter at GM’s Ultifi system.
Many of you are surely wondering about your futures. Rest easy: those with relevant skills are being reassigned to our teams working on generative artificial intelligence, a technology that can also create a car, but in far less time and with square wheels. This work is of the utmost significance to Apple’s strategic goals and we believe it is just as important to the future of humanity as self-driving cars, except instead of removing people from making risky decisions while in a fast-moving vehicle constructed from several tons of glass and steel we are removing people from making risky decisions that produce staggering works of art and creativity. We can all agree that the key detail is “taking humans out of the equation.” In the end, Project Titan simply was not proving efficient enough at this on the timescale required.
We can’t overstate how important AI is and how pleased we are that you will all be contributing to its integration through Apple’s product lines. There is nothing more critical to our company than the success of this venture. Though our automotive endeavor may be at an end, we are still committed to delivering a product that will move all of us forward.
Do you see what we did there? Move forward?
Anyway. We look forward to working with you in your new capacity, bringing this important work to fruition and ensuring that humans can be eliminated in the most effective means possible.
Sincerely,
Apple Generative AI
[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.]
