I love Rogue Amoeba’s Mac audio utilities, but in the Apple silicon era, installing them has been pretty rough, due to Apple requiring multiple reboots and a visit to Recovery Mode to perform a dubious-sounding reduction to a Mac’s “security policy.”
There is apparently great news on this front, however! Tucked into an otherwise perfectly nice summation of Rogue Amoeba’s year, CEO Paul Kafasis wrote:
We’ll soon be shipping updates that simplify things immensely. In fact, Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and Piezo will feature an installer-free setup that won’t even need your administrator password. Meanwhile, Loopback and SoundSource will use a new audio capture plugin called ARK that won’t require a single system restart. It’s going to be an incredible improvement to our user experience.
As someone who has had to reinstall Audio Hijack, Loopback, and SoundSource multiple times in the last few months… this is pretty fantastic news. (How in the world will Audio Hijack not even require an administrator password?! 1)
This has been a real pain point for more than three years, so kudos to everyone (presumably both inside Apple and at Rogue Amoeba) who worked on the problem and found a solution that lets some of macOS’s most clever and useful utilities run without these issues.
macOS 14.2 introduced the System Audio Recording permission box shown above, but I’ve not discovered a single app that uses it… at least not yet? ↩
The big new feature is the addition of support for ChatGPT via the same Worksheet interface BBEdit has used to interact with a command-line shell for many years. Like a Shell Worksheet, a ChatGPT Worksheet is an interactive BBEdit document: It looks like a regular text window (because it is one!), but when you type a command and press a hotkey (it’s Enter by default), that command is sent directly to ChatGPT, and the result appears right below it in the same document.
It’s a clever way for BBEdit to dip its toe into the large language model waters without implementing a Copilot-like code helper within documents themselves. Now, BBEdit users can toggle between a GPT worksheet and other documents, copying and pasting as needed, without leaving the app. I’ve used it a few times already, and it sure beats having to navigate to OpenAI’s website in order to grab some quick prototype code.
The new Cheat Sheets feature provides interactive floating palettes that can teach custom commands. For example, the Markdown Cheat Sheet not only shows various forms of Markdown but if you click on any of the examples, they’ll be automatically inserted into your document. They’re reminiscent of BBEdit’s Clippings feature, and unsurprisingly, one of the included Cheat Sheets contains all the placeholders used in building a BBEdit Clipping.
There’s also a new Minimap view, which lets you see a large thumbnail of a very long document, highlighting the portion that’s currently visible. You can navigate anywhere in a document by clicking on the Minimap. This feature will be useful for visually oriented users who need to navigate through very long documents.
As usual, there are dozens (Bare Bones says 200!) of new features in the lengthy release notes, including the addition of a grep pattern validity indicator in the Find window (so you don’t have to click before realizing you left off a parenthesis!), a big interface revision to the simple and powerful Text Factory in-app automation system, quick access to comparing different versions of the current document, a revamp of Project Settings so that they’re no longer modal, and improved Accessibility compatibility including Voiceover, Full Keyboard Access, and third-party utilities that rely on the Accessibility system such as Grammarly.
Every time there’s a new version of BBEdit, I’m inspired by the creativity that continues to flourish in a product that’s more than 30 years old. But there’s still more to do! The app’s support for Shortcuts is still quite meager, for example.
A new license for BBEdit 15 is $60, with upgrades from version 14 costing $30 and from earlier versions costing $40.
Way back when Google Reader went the way of all Google products (RIP), I ended up switching to Feedly, a web-based RSS service that had good integration with third-party clients. But this past week I decided to ditch it for good.
The truth is, I never really used Feedly’s web-based offerings, or its first-party apps on iPhone or the Mac (the latter of which was apparently quietly retired last year). Instead, I mainly used Feedly as the back-end for my RSS app of choice, Reeder.1
Lately, though, I’d noticed that certain feeds—especially those on smaller sites—just didn’t seem to update very quickly. That’s apparently by design: in part because those who paid for Feedly (which I never have) get faster updates, and in part because the polling interval seems to vary from site to site.2
Specifically I noticed that a post on my personal blog didn’t seem to be showing up, which a few people subscribed to my RSS feed let me know. That turned out to be mainly because of an issue in WordPress where my own RSS feeds were being cached, but even once I remedied that it still took a solid day for the post to show up in my own reader.
That seemed silly to me: I only subscribe to thirty-some feeds, probably about half of which are actually updated regularly, and I’d prefer for the control over when I get my items delivered to be in my own hands, not that of a middleman.
Fortunately, Reeder (like other RSS readers) at some point added the ability to subscribe to feeds within the app and have them synced between devices via iCloud. All I had to do was export the feeds from my Feedly account as an OPML file and import them into the iCloud account, something that took probably less than a minute.
It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services. I’ve relied on RSS to do my job since I first started writing about the Mac back in the mid 2000s, and even in a world that’s become dominated by social media it’s still pretty effective. I kind of wish that other services made this kind of portability so easy and painless—after all, we should be in control of our own data, not some middleman.
I don’t want to knock Feedly here: I found their service stable and reliable for more than a decade, and not only did I not pay a dime for it, they didn’t put roadblocks in my way to leave. That’s actually pretty great, as far as service goes, and frankly I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t throw some money their way. But as the year starts off, I like the idea of removing some of the little tech annoyances that I just take as a given and seeing if I can make my life a little smoother.
I was a longtime NetNewsWire user, and I still really like the app, but I’ve now been using Reeder for so long that it’s just the way my brain works. ↩
Presumably this is a sort of caching system, as I imagine it doesn’t want to hit the same site x number of times for everybody in Feedly subscribed to it? ↩
[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 are back just in time to miss the Vision Pro shipping news, but they’ve still got time to catch up on the news they missed and preview their expectations for the year to come.
The Sonos Port sits atop a pair of Niles speaker controllers and an amplifier in a custom media cabinet.
On Christmas night, my husband and I hosted a gathering of family. There was turkey. There was pie. There was music – my carefully curated holiday playlist streamed through the living room, kitchen, patio and even the guest bathroom.
It was the first time in years I’d been able to make that happen the way I wanted. And it all came together thanks to a $450 box that’s about the size of a Mac Mini.
The history part
Soon after we bought our house, we installed speakers and audio gear. I wanted to pipe music from the living room receiver to the patio, so we started with a pair of outdoor speakers. Soon, three sets of ceiling-mounted Sonance speakers sprouted around the house, along with some floor-standing Infinity cabinets in the living room. We controlled it all from a Niles SS-6 speaker controller stored under a bar in the hallway (since upgraded to a custom cabinet with a slide-out drawer for electronics). I would spend the moments before people arrived for a party twiddling wall-mounted volume knobs so that the sound was delivered at a pleasing level in different rooms of the house.
At first, audio sources were limited to a stereo receiver and a six-CD changer. (We don’t need to talk about the old tape deck in the stereo cabinet.) Somewhere in the mid-aughts, I got ahold of a Wi-Fi-enabled gadget with RCA outputs, and a matching A/V iPod dock. It all connected to an iMac and to the Pioneer receiver that controlled the house system. But eventually the little dock died, and I sought out a more robust solution.
Enter Sonos
From the first, bringing Sonos gear into the mix was about adding features to my existing setup, not creating a new one. If a few extra speakers came home to add music in new places, that would just be a bonus.
To do this, I bought a Sonos Connect – not one of the company’s most high-profile offerings, but the one that allowed a physical connection to my stereo components, and a wireless one to my iMac. I chose the Connect instead of the Sonos Amp, which does the same thing, but includes an amplifier of its own. (Shoutout to the fine folks at A&B TV in Austin, who sold us most of this audio gear, and suggested the two-box solution.)
We also bought a Niles amplifier that powered the setup. This meant we no longer needed an A/V receiver, and it also meant that if one component (amp or Sonos box) died, the other would still be on the job. As it turned out, I made the right decision there.
…then Sonos broke up with us
It happened just two months before the COVID pandemic began. Sonos announced it would drop support for some older devices. You could still use them, but you couldn’t add them to a new network or wrangle them with the company’s updated management software. The Sonos Connect was among the orphaned devices.
With no immediate plans for music-infused gatherings at home, I chose not to replace the Connect, even though Sonos offered discounts on new equipment. I focused instead on the three Sonos speakers I’d added over the years. It meant, unfortunately, that I could play music from the Sonos speakers or from the stereo—but couldn’t get all my speakers working together.
Finally, I bit the bullet in December of last year. I picked up a Sonos Port ($449, but I managed to get it on sale), which replaced the Connect, and turned out to be the one device I needed to bring my system into the modern world.
Any Port in a storm
A podcast I’ve AirPlayed from my iPhone to the Sonos Port becomes available to all speakers on my network, even those that aren’t AirPlay-capable. It appears like any other audio in the Sonos app.
Because the Port supports AirPlay, I can now send it any audio I like, and choose which of the ceiling and floor speakers plays it. The setup looks like this: In the hall cabinet, the Sonos Port is set up as an input to the Niles amplifier. That amp is connected to the various speakers in the house via the old speaker controller.
I also have three Sonos speakers on same network as the Port. And I can play my music library, Apple Music, or one of a few streamed radio stations I like, to everything. For my Christmas party, I used speakers in the TV room, living room, guest bathroom and patio, as well as a Sonos Play:3 in a bedroom where folks left their coats. I ran the playlist from the Sonos app and an iPad that I set on a shelf so people could see what was playing. It was all a big success, and the playlist outlasted the last guests, who hummed Vince Guaraldi tunes as they took their leave.
It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered my favorite new audio trick with this new setup. While retrieving all the junk I’d hidden in my office during the party. I launched Overcast on my phone and set AirPlay to output to the Port. Next, I used my controller box switch box to select only the speakers in my office.
Voilà! I can now AirPlay from my phone to my ceiling speakers. The Sonos hardware is just acting as an AirPlay middle man. When I moved into the bedroom later, I turned down the Port’s volume slider in the Sonos app, end added my old bedroom Play:3 while a podcast continued to play. I have AirPlay access to all the non-AirPlay speakers in my house.
So much of this would be simpler if I’d gone all in on new Sonos speakers after the 2020 product changes. But I like my built-in speakers, and I’ll keep finding ways to get the most out of them as long as the speakers, the amplifier and the volume knobs hold out.
Game designer Sean Bates found an iPhone in a bush Sunday that had fallen from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when it lost a part of its fuselage shortly after takeoff. The phone was undamaged, still on, and had the end of a sheared-off charging cable plugged in. Bates posted pictures of his discovery that afternoon, one of which included the screen showing a still-open email with a baggage receipt.
The goggles do…something? Well, you’ll find out soon enough: Apple announced on Monday that the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S. starting on February 2, with preorders starting next Friday, January 19.
Unsurprisingly, the spatial computer will be available at all Apple Stores in the U.S., but it’ll also be available via the online store as well—there’d been some speculation in recent weeks about whether or not that would be the case at launch, given the need for fitting particular accessories.
While we’re all plenty aware of the Vision Pro’s $3499 price tag, Apple’s also added some additional information. For one, the Vision Pro has 256GB of onboard storage (and, as far as we can tell, no options for more). For another, those users who need vision correction will be able to pick up optical inserts that attach magnetically: $99 for readers, and $149 for prescriptions, though the company doesn’t go into further detail about which prescriptions will be available or how you’ll convey that information.
And we now know exactly what’s in the box: in addition to the Vision Pro, it’ll include two different bands, a Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band; a Light Seal and two Light Seal Cushions; a cover for the front of the device; the battery and USB-C charging cable; a USB-C Power Adapter (for $3499, I’d hope so); and, most importantly, a Polishing Cloth.
The press release, which happens to drop on the same day that CES opens on Las Vegas and no doubt is intended to steal some thunder there, also suggests that the company won’t hold any further events to talk up the Vision Pro before its launch. Given that supplies are expected to be constrained, and the addressable market is on the smaller side, Apple’s no doubt banking on the fact that people who want to buy one already know all about it.
One big question mark is the retail experience, which Apple Store employees are being trained on now, according to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and others. The Vision Pro is perhaps the most challenging product from a store experience perspective, and it will be fascinating to see exactly how the company handles the sales and fit process—especially for physical stores versus online. But we’re sure to find out in short order.
[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.]
Last month, I took a bit of an odyssey and explored the idea that maybe there aren’t that many must-have third-party apps, only nice-to-have ones. I wasn’t saying that everyone should dump all their software and return to their defaults, but I was saying that macOS’s default configuration has come a long way over the years and that the right approach to setting up a new Mac might be to start with the basics and then slowly add when you find you need a little bit more.
One of the apps I was thinking about while I wrote this was Flexibits’s Fantastical, which has been my calendar app for more than a decade. As a result of that decade spent away from Calendar, I’ve largely lost track of what separates a third-party app with a $57 annual subscription fee from the stuff Apple gives me for free with my devices.
I’ve also had a general sense that most of Flexibits’s recent updates to Fantastical focused on features that don’t actually improve my use of the app. I’m not open for meetings, so the Openings feature didn’t really land, and the meeting proposal feature ended up being much heavier and Fantastical-centric than just using a lightweight scheduling app like StrawPoll. It seems like most of the company’s focus over the past two years has been on refining those features, which might be wise for serving their core audience, but it just doesn’t register for me.
So, I decided to spend a few weeks without Fantastical, just using Apple’s Calendar app. Here’s what I learned.
Surviving on the default
Unsurprisingly, the moment I switched back to Calendar, I lost a whole bunch of features. I was used to Fantastical’s split interface on my Mac and iPad, which lists all events on the left side of the screen and then displays my preferred interface, the Week view, on the right side. Apple just wants to show you the floating colored blobs. (On the iPad, Apple’s calendar also doesn’t display the start time of events in Week view, which was a drag.)
Apple’s got a bunch of Calendar widgets, but they’re inferior to Fantastical’s. The List view, in particular, is not nearly as information-dense as Fantastical’s list widget. Still, I switched over to Calendar’s.
I have a default set of calendars that I want to view at all times, but sometimes, I need to briefly toggle on other calendars so I can coordinate with my wife’s calendar or place something on a shared podcast calendar. I used Fantastical’s Calendar Sets feature to toggle between views, but there’s no such control available in Calendar. Instead, I built a Keyboard Maestro macro that clicks on specific calendar locations to make them disappear and reappear.
Three copies of every event.
Speaking of multiple calendars, it’s baffling to me that Calendar is unable to display multiple identical events on different calendars as a single item. When I toggle into my podcast scheduling view, every Incomparable podcast becomes a cramped stack of three identical items: one for my calendar, one for the calendar used by panelists, and one for our public-facing calendar used by listeners and various automations.
But my biggest adaptation came in the menu bar. Fantastical offers a powerful menu bar app that lets me quickly add events and, more importantly, view a list of events for the next few days without needing to open the app. Calendar has… nothing?
Fantastical (left) and Itsycal (right) dropping down from the menu bar.
I ended up solving this problem by using Itsycal, a free app by Mowglii Apps. Itsycal hit the spot, though it’s not quite as pretty as Fantastical’s menu bar item, and adding a new event requires a second keystroke and doesn’t support natural-language entry of events. You also can’t edit events from within Itsycal.
Starter calendar
So, after three weeks of using Apple’s apps on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, what’s the verdict? I feel like my original suggestion about defaults was pretty accurate, actually. Apple’s Calendar app is fine. It works, it’s serviceable, the widgets are fine, and with a free third-party utility, you can even get a nice quick-access calendar in the menu bar.
That said, it was also clear to me that Fantastical offers a much more useful and refined experience than Apple. Calendar feels pretty old and static, and some of its gaps are really baffling—especially quick access in the menu bar! Is Fantastical $57 a year better? (I should mention that there’s a free version of Fantastical, but it omits some features that Calendar offers.)
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? If you schedule a lot of meetings and have people schedule meetings with you, it’s probably a no-brainer! But for me, it was a little tougher. Still, after three weeks without, I feel like I’m willing to spend $57 a year just to get a nicer, better calendar experience than Apple offers. But I also would not hesitate to suggest that any new Mac user start with Calendar (and maybe Itsycal!) and try it out before considering spending extra on a fancier calendar app.
I wish Fantastical had given me more of a sense of forward motion and value over the last four years for my subscription fee. I wish Apple would take some lessons from Fantastical and strive to make the default Calendar app a little less generic.
Minneapolis-based investment firm, Deepwater Asset Management, predicts that in 2024 Apple will finally acquire Peloton – the firm is headed by former tech analyst, Gene Munster.
Oh, of course. Answering the question “Does Gene Munster still writes Apple fan fiction?” Yes. The answer is yes.
The article then raises the question: can Betteridge’s Law of Headlines also be applied to sentences that appear in the article?
Would Apple acquire a business that hasn’t shown growth in nearly three years?
It’s not completely out of the question for Apple to buy Peloton. It did buy Beats, after all. But it also didn’t buy a car company and didn’t buy a home automation company and didn’t buy a thousand other companies you’ve heard of because it tends to buy the ones you haven’t heard of.
If Apple does acquire Peloton, you can bet that Tim Cook will mandate the trainers not provide reviews of Apple TV+ shows during the exercise sessions.
iPhones will get larger until morale improves
Well, another iPhone launch quarter is behind us so it’s time for this suffering iPhone mini fan to take a big mouthful of water and see what’s in the news headed into 2024.
According to multiple sources, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will feature an increase in display size compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max…
PFFFFFFFFT
With iPhones getting larger, you may wonder how long it will be be before they are the size of iPads? Well, don’t worry, because Apple apparently wants to make those bigger, too. It’ll all work out.
If you’re one of the group of large-phone fetishists that Apple is targeting here, you can always buy one of those attachments that will put a physical keyboard on your iPhone that were announced this week. That’ll make your phone bigger. Then maybe some of us could get the small phones we want.
Keeping up with the Joneses
Get ready to read a mess of “SAMSUNG LEAPFROGS APPLE” headlines because the company is way ahead in the race to ship phones that give you catastrophically bad answers.
Whoops. Look, you can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few Tide pods into a pan, placing the metal pan in microwave, setting the microwave to HIGH, microwaving for 45 minutes to an hour, then enjoying your delicious omelette.
Sorry, I let the AI finish that paragraph. Wait, when you ask an AI for a recipe, does it make up a whole backstory first about how it learned this recipe while living abroad in Tuscany during its junior year before finally showing you the recipe? If only Philip K. Dick were still alive to tell us.
Despite all this, Apple seems set to throw its hat into the ring of fire.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this rumored but I was amused by MacRumors’s note that this comes “from a user with a track record for posting Apple rumors.” Hey, some of us have even longer track records for posting Apple rumors, so that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement.
[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.]
Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.
Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus.
Not only do I empathize with Warzel’s situation (we lost a beloved dog in August 2022), but as I wrote about last year, my wife and I also recently started using the Photo Shuffle feature that was introduced with iOS 16… and it’s pretty powerful.
Not a week goes by where my wife doesn’t show me one of the pictures of our kids (her phone is set to shuffle through photos in which either of our children’s faces has been identtified) that have surfaced on her phone’s lock screen. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of these children over two decades, and while many photos are familiar (the ones that we’ve printed out and framed, or put on calendars, or added to a Favorites list), the vast majority of them have largely gone unseen, filed away in an infinite iCloud Photo Library filing cabinet.
One of the magical thing about Photo Shuffle is that those obscure photos also keep floating to the top. They’re not necessarily the best or most polished, but they’re surprising and delightful.
Warzel writes that iOS has “taught me how to grieve,” and while I haven’t used Photo Shuffle to grapple with that particular emotion, just a few weeks after our dog died, our youngest child went off to college and we officially became empty nesters. I suppose the Photo Shuffle is filling a particular (but different) emotional need for us, too.
Where we’re putting our social media energy in 2024, which subscriptions we’re canceling, our opinions on the Apple Vision Pro, and what feature we want for our devices this year.
Last year was a little quiet for Apple, but 2024 is going to be loud. The launch of the Vision Pro, a new product running a new operating system in a new category (for Apple), more or less guarantees it. But there’s a lot more than the release of the Vision Pro to Apple’s 2024.
Let’s take a look at what this year will offer through the lens of your longtime Apple-watching columnist and his somewhat cloudy crystal ball. How better to think about the future, after all, than to predict it on a website?
The Apple Watch is back, baby! Meanwhile, Apple is still looking into this whole “AI” thing you might have heard about and what is that I see dimly on the horizon? Is it the first Vision Pro?
A Watch plot that continuously boils
The Apple Watch patent saga is such a rollercoaster ride it’s surprising it hasn’t set off anyone’s crash detection. On Boxing Day, it looked like Apple was out of options.
And just like that, Watches are back on sale at Apple, just in time for… January birthdays, I guess.
Quoted in the piece by NPR is our old pal, Gene “Apple TV set” Munster, who says that if Apple can work around the patent, that will go a long way toward showing it did not violate the patent, depending on a judge’s definition of temporal mechanics.
If you can show you didn’t have to violate a patent, does that mean you ever violated it in the first place? Let us call this Schrödingmunster’s Dependency.
Paying for things? In this economy?
While all of the tech world and investors and Apple’s perpetually disappointed parents are probably wondering why the company is sooo laaaate to the AI arms race, Apple seems more intent on doing it the right way rather than the fast way. The company’s approach to AI appears to be the same as it was throughout 2023: slow and steady doesn’t necessarily win the race, but it stays in the race and also makes sure people don’t get hilariously and catastrophically wrong answers.
Apple has even taken the laughably naive stance that it should [scoff] license the material it trains its AI on! How jejune! How effete! How positively Milhousian!
The company has discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative A.I. systems on publishers’ news articles.
While publishers are concerned that Apple’s entreaties are too expansive in their desire to gobble up all of their content, it still stands in rather stark contrast to how other tech companies rushing headlong into AI have approached this. Let’s just thumb through The Times and see if there are any other stories on AI. Hmm. Sportsball. Politics. Ugh. Gross. Ah! Here’s one!
What’s the deal, publishers? You don’t want tech companies to pay you for all-encompassing rights to your content and you don’t want them to just take it without asking! You can’t have it both ways!
Wait.
Vision Pro FOMO
Hey, who likes puns? Well, too bad, because the Vision Pro’s future is getting brighter, there, that’s the pun, I hope you’re happy, you ruined it.
Oof, really? That’s a little soon for me. So far I only have… lemme just pretend to check the ol’ bank account here… zero dollars saved up for one.
Whoops, no, sorry, that’s negative dollars. I have negative dollars saved up for a Vision Pro. Forgot to carry the #DIV/0!.
This may seem like financial malpractice but it’s actually part of a clever strategy on my part. See, I’m waiting for the Vision Pro 3. The lenses on those babies… well, let me tell you.
[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.]
Look, the simple truth is that when you get to be a company the size of Apple, you can’t help but butt up against certain other entities, whether they be competitors, nation states, or the occasional megalomaniacal social-media purveyor. We’ve come to expect it—frankly, it’s built into Apple’s cost of doing business.
But while most of these conflicts may be predictable, every once in a while you run into one that’s most decidedly not on anybody’s radar. The good news is that it’s my job to expect the unexpected; I’ve consulted my patented heirloom, Jony Ive-designed jet black polycarbonate spherical oracle1 and it’s provided five fracases awaiting Apple that neither you, nor I, nor Tim Cook’s council of seers are going to see coming.
Apple farmers: It was only a matter of time, but after almost half a decade of existence, Apple Inc. will end upin the crosshairs of apple inc…ome.2 Orchards around the country will tire of repeated calls asking when the new crop of iPhones arrive, explaining to people that cider donuts are not a hot new wearable, and dealing with the customers who stand for hours comparing specs of two McIntoshes to decide which one to buy.
Marvel: Disney and Apple, once the best of friends, will find themselves at odds when the Mouse House issues a cease and desist over the release of Apple’s latest new technology category, pointing out that the company’s spatial computer infringes upon a comic character dating back to 1968. As part of the eventual settlement, Apple concedes to have all future versions of Siri voiced by Paul Bettany. No one complains.
Parisian tour guides: With Apple Maps finally coming into its own around the world, it’s due to run into local conflicts. In France, the Fédération Nationale des Guides Interprètes et Conférenciers (FNGIC) will charge Apple with disenfranchising its members, licensed tour guides, by not only providing expert directions but also with its impeccable 3D renderings of Paris tourist attractions, allowing everyone to visit the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame cathedral from the comfort of their own hotel room overlooking the Champs-Elysées. Just remember: it’s only tourism if it’s actually in France, otherwise it’s sparkling virtual vacationing.
Extraterrestrials: Getting into the satellite business was replete with risks, but not even Apple could have reasonably expected that its foray into emergency communications would irk intelligent life passing through our galaxy on their way home for the holidays. The bad news is that aliens have knocked Apple’s satellite systems out of commission for terrestrial customers—the good news is that they did so via a high volume of prank calls to the company’s emergency operators by requesting several thousand tow trucks in orbit. Respect, ET.
European orcas: Despite Apple’s stated goal of prioritizing the well-being of the environment, the company will be targeted by the pod of radical orcas off the coast of Europe, who—not satisfied with sinking yachts of the super rich—are now taking on boats carrying Apple goods. In an attempt to broker a peace, Cupertino devotes a big chunk of its 2024 platform updates to adding “Whalesong” to its Translate app, only to reveal that it’s just teenage orcas who are sick of showing up as green bubbles in chats with their fellow marine mammals.
Those are, of course, only the most prominent fights awaiting Apple in 2024—I didn’t even delve into the company’s clash with the Tolkien estate over the glowing eye in the next HomePods or whether or not Apple Watches will still be on sale or even the eternal battle with the awoken dread god Glog-Raggopth, who is quite nippish after several thousand years of slumber. Rest assured, it’s going to be a contentious year, so dust off your chamfered brass knuckles and sharpen your MacBook Airs to a blade-like finish before the fight comes your way.
Legally distinct from a toy that might resemble a certain pool ball. ↩
[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.]
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