By Dan Moren

January 19, 2024 6:07 AM PT

Order up: Vision Pro storage tier and accessory options

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Happy Vision Pro pre-order day to all who celebrate!

Whether or not you’re virtually lining up to buy one of Apple’s fancy new spatial computers, you may be wondering what choices will come up during the process. So, purely for science, I went through it to see all the options and tell you exactly what you’ll need to think about.

Put it in storage

As reported last week, the Vision Pro does have storage tiers, and now we know what they are and how much they’ll cost.

Those are roughly on par with Apple storage tier increases on the iPhone and Macs¹, and frankly, when you’re already paying $3500 for a device, a few hundred extra dollars doesn’t seem like quite the same percentage jump. (It’s also worth noting that Apple is, as usual, offering 0 percent financing, meaning you can also pay a low low monthly cost of $324.91 for 12 months for that 1TB model.)

The real question is why you’ll need all that storage. Apple helpfully details its rationale below the tiers:

How much storage you need depends on how you use Apple Vision Pro. More room means you can store more documents, spatial photos and spatial videos, music, and apps, as well as extensive video libraries and large data files.

Over time, you may add more content to Apple Vision Pro, so you’ll want to think about how your storage needs may change.

So, think apps and files that you want to download to the device—spatial photos, spatial video, and movies (especially 3D ones) probably being among the most likely things to eat up data if you’re downloading them to store locally. Good news, though, you won’t have to worry about storage for Netflix downloads.

Keep calm and add on

Once you’ve picked your storage tier, you’re not quite done yet. Apple is, of course, offering AppleCare+ for the Vision Pro, which will set you back a hefty $500 for two years or $24.99 per month until you decide to cancel it. But again, if you’ve paid $3500 for this cutting-edge product, the insurance may provide some peace of mind: It offers “unlimited repairs for accidental damage protection” (at a cost of $29 for accessory damage and $299 for “Other Accidental Damage”) and an Express Replacement Service, so you won’t be without a Vision Pro while yours is getting fixed.

Apple’s also selling a few accessories for the Vision Pro. Though a cover for the headset is included with the purchase, if you’re taking it on the go, you may well want the travel case, which provides a padded shell in which to put the Vision Pro, a strap for the external battery and a cozy little pouch of for your optical inserts. That will set you back a significant $199 (though I imagine it’s one place where third-party competitors will be more cheaply available).

There’s also the $49.95 Belkin Battery Holder clip, which lets you attach the Vision Pro’s external battery to a belt or pants, as well as a cross-body strap if you don’t have a convenient clipping location.

Speaking of external batteries, we know the Vision Pro’s battery life is rated for about 2 hours of general use or 2.5 hours of video watching, but don’t worry: Apple’s more than happy to sell you an additional battery pack for $199.

You can also buy a few of the other included accessories on their own, such as the Solo Knit Band ($99), the Dual Loop Band ($199). You can also buy a Light Seal package ($199), which includes two Light Seal Cushions; you’ll need to use the face-scanning process to get the right size. Light Seal Cushions ($29) are also available separately and come in four sizes: N, N+, W, and W+. (Good news: the cushion attaches magnetically and is machine washable.)

In addition to all those Vision Pro specific accessories, Apple’s also pushing other existing products that it thinks Vision Pro users might want: the Bluetooth Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, a Sony DualSense game controller, the USB-C AirPods Pro, the 30W USB-C power adapter and USB-C charge cable, and, of course, AirTags.

Top of the line or end of the line

Which may of course set you thinking: sure, $3499 is expensive, but just how pricey can I make this thing?

Again, I’m not one to shy away from science, so let’s check it out. (I’m not including extra bands, Light Seals, or cushions, since it should be a while before you wear those out. And, of course, if you need optical inserts, you’ll be adding another $99-$149.)

Hey, still well shy of a maxed out MacStudio or a base-level Mac Pro, not to mention a gold first-edition Apple Watch. So there are definitely Apple products you could spend more money on, albeit perhaps ones with a more proven track record.

Apple’s not likely to detail exactly how many Vision Pros it sells, but it will be interesting to see if it provides any further information at the company’s quarterly financial call in a couple weeks.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

January 17, 2024 12:39 PM PT

Artifact’s killer feature was rewriting bad headlines

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

[Content warning: Old Man Yells At Cloud.]

So Artifact, the news app startup from the creators of Instagram, is shutting down. There’s been a lot of analysis about the issue, and I agree with much of it.

There’s been a lot of cheap and bad “news content” on the Web for ages now, but in recent years, it seems to have gotten worse. In certain areas—I notice it with film and TV coverage as well as sports—a single bit of original reporting is breathlessly rewritten by dozens of sites, turning a juicy one-sentence quote into a thousand-word-long analysis with lots of backstory and relevant on-site links, all with subheads that answer questions Google users might ask. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

For all its boasting about using AI smarts, Artifact didn’t really cut through the noise. Surely an AI content engine could analyze articles and determine which piece was the original and which pieces added very little to the discussion? I’d hope that, eventually, someone will try to counteract this cottage industry of rewriting other people’s scraps for SEO hits with some intelligence that weights the original story over the word salad copycats. (Paging Google—this is supposed to be your area. And Apple News… what are you doing?)

But my favorite feature of Artifact was not its AI-influenced story browsing and categorization. I found it just as weird and off-putting as most other news aggregation apps that don’t allow me complete control over what I see. No, what I loved about Artifact was that you could take a meaningless clickbait headline and have the app read the story and write a new headline based on its contents.

Back in the day, when I learned how to write headlines (for newspapers!), the goal was to give the reader enough information to decide if they wanted to read that article. The Inverted Pyramid started above the story itself, even with key information in a headline and subhead that would let the reader decide if they wanted to bother reading that story.

But in the era of the web and news aggregators, headlines that give away pertinent information have become a lost art. Whole generations of editors have been trained to write coy headlines that will earn a click, even if the people who are clicking will be immediately disappointed by the truth of the story.

What’s most frustrating to me is that once this method of writing headlines is internalized, it’s very hard to break out of the habit. For instance, I subscribe to multiple news sites where you basically must pay in order to read articles… and yet the headlines are still clickbaity! San Francisco Chronicle, when you write, “This Bay Area city has a horrible secret,” I would like to know if it’s my city and if the secret is a serial killer or the lack of a good delicatessen.

This is where Artifact ruled, because its little AI agent would read that story and write a new headline. And if enough people said a headline was clickbait, all other users of the app would now see the AI headline instead of the original. Brilliant.

So let me put this out there to other creators of news apps, aggregators like Apple News but also RSS readers—this is a feature you should knock off. I would absolutely love to be able to see rewritten headlines for news sources that have failed to be forthcoming with factual headlines. Maybe the future of browsing news is an AI-driven service that writes good headlines so that I can make up my own mind about whether I want to read a story or not!

Anyway, I won’t miss Artifact much—but I will miss the perverse joy I felt everytime I had to ask an AI to improve on the work of a human being who has been miseducated about how headlines are supposed to work.

By Jason Snell

January 17, 2024 8:45 AM PT

How I automate Focus Modes to keep distractions to a minimum

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

I’ve learned in recent years that I’ve become something of a minimalist. I like keeping things simple, preferring glanceable information to alerts that get in my face whether I want them or not. I’ve reduced the number of apps that have permission to bug me, and more recently, I’ve embraced Apple’s Focus Modes to silence the noise.

There were several situations in which I found myself often being bugged, mostly on my Apple Watch, when I didn’t want to be, including when I was working (writing or podcasting), working out, playing a sport, or showering.

I don’t blame the apps that bug me when I’m doing something else—in large part, I’ve asked them to do it. (And as for the ones I haven’t, they will be silenced immediately as punishment!)

As for friends and colleagues who text me, I don’t blame them, either—they’re treating the text message as the asynchronous medium it’s meant to be. But having a text message sitting out there, unanswered, drives me batty—I’ll want to answer it. What’s worse, if I do answer it—usually with a canned reply from my Apple Watch—that reply often serves as a sign that I’m ready to engage in a larger conversation when I’m not. But I’m the cause of the problem, not them, and I need to deal with it.

I’ve addressed these issues using a few different approaches.

I’ve got a bunch of Stream Deck buttons that I press to start a podcast recording session, all of which run some sort of shortcut. I’ve added an additional couple of steps to all of them: when the session starts, I enter a Recording Focus Mode. And when the session ends, I turn that Focus off.

For writing, it’s trickier. I use different apps to write, and I use those apps in other contexts, so I’m largely triggering my Writing mode manually at this point. When I need to stick in my headphones and concentrate on writing, I will generally remember to click that box. I’d love to figure out some other way to automate this, but it may not be possible.

To avoid typing entire conversations by swiping fingers on an Apple Watch while trying to run—it’s absurd, and I’m sure I look absurd when I’m doing it—I use an Apple-built feature. On the Apple Watch, open the Settings app, tap Focus, then tap Fitness.

You’ll see an option to Turn on automatically when starting a workout. Flip this switch on, and you’ll be in a Fitness mode when you’re exercising. When the workout ends, the Focus Mode turns itself off!

You might think I don’t need to turn off notifications when I’m in the shower because how could they possibly affect me in there? But here’s the thing: First, some notifications have the strange effect of dipping the sound playing from my podcast player—as if they’re going to make a noise, but they’re silenced, so they don’t! But the dipping still happens. It’s very distracting.

Also, I leave my iPhone just outside the shower in case I need to skip to a different podcast mid-shower, or back up, or whatever. My shower is transparent glass. When a notification comes in, I can see my phone light up. It doesn’t matter that I shouldn’t notice—I do, and it drives me batty. I suppose I should put it face down, but that doesn’t address the dipping audio issue.

It doesn’t matter, though, because I’m using two triggers in iOS 17 to run shortcuts that solve the whole problem. One of the most underrated features of the Shortcuts app on the iPhone is Personal Automations, which are triggered when the iPhone experiences some specific conditions. As of iOS 17, you can trigger a shortcut when your phone connects or disconnects from a specific Bluetooth device.

So I built a simple shortcut called “DND Toggle” that gets the current Focus status, and if there isn’t one, turns on Do Not Disturb. If there is one, it turns off that Focus Mode. Then, I specified that the shortcut should run every time my iPhone connects to my Bluetooth shower speaker. That’s it! Now, when I turn on the speaker, the automation runs, and my iPhone enters Do Not Disturb mode—which it remains in until I turn the speaker back off.

To address getting bugged while curling, I’m using a different Focus feature. I created a new mode called Curling (it’s got a snowflake icon, how cute!) and scrolled down in the settings for this mode to the Set a Schedule setting. Now, when I pull into the parking lot at the curling club, my phone enters Curling Mode. There’s a custom curling-themed wallpaper (for fun!), but more importantly, my notifications are silenced. When I leave the club, the mode ends. (In reality, it ends when I finish curling, assuming I’ve set a curling workout on my Apple Watch. As detailed above, the act of starting that workout means I’ll be placed in Fitness mode, and when I’ve finished, it’ll take me out of all Focus Modes.)

Now, as I write this, I’m realizing that maybe I could do with fewer Focus Modes since all of my modes are trying to do the same thing and have most of the same settings: let messages from my immediate family through, but nothing else. Maybe simplifying my Focus Modes will be a future project. But for now, I’ve got what I want: I don’t see interrupting messages until I’m done doing what I’m doing. It’s better this way. I recommend it!

By Dan Moren

January 16, 2024 5:43 AM PT

AirDrop security weakness exploited by China

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

You might have seen a story making the rounds last week that the Chinese government was cracking down on people sending anti-government materials via Apple’s AirDrop feature, having compromised the security of the system.

I wondered, given the transient nature of these interactions, how exactly that was happening—sometimes these stories can be a bit overblown, especially when entities like the Chinese government—which certainly has a vested interested in looking omniscient—are involved.

But as usual, Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin did an excellent deep dive on this issue and helps explain why, yes, this is a real problem:

In 2021, researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another.

The exploit involves the use of colorfully named rainbow tables and relies at least somewhat on the Chinese government’s ability to pre-hash every single phone number in the country, thus making it trivial to use a given identifier and link it to a person.

But, as Goodin points out, Apple has been aware of this vulnerability since 2019 and despite there being options to improve the anonymity, has not made changes to the privacy of this feature. (Apple’s software also apparently keeps logs of prior AirDrop contacts, which is ripe for exploitation if someone gets hold of the physical device—a fact that some security researchers only learned in the course of this story.) Combined with previous AirDrop changes that had negative effects on dissident activity in the country¹ and Apple’s complicated relationship with the Chinese government, it certainly presents an unappetizing picture.

To a certain degree, Apple relies on stories like this staying under the radar. Inaction can be presented as either ignorance or tacit compliance, whereas taking steps to improve the privacy of AirDrop might be construed by Beijing as a challenge to its authority—a stick situation for Apple, given how much it relies upon its relationship with the country for the production of its devices. But Apple also makes privacy a huge selling point of its devices—a subject of ad campaigns, a highlighted section in virtually every keynote—and the company surely doesn’t want to have to append an asterisk to all of those claims with the footnote “Except in China.”

[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.]