Eshu Marneedi

Majd Bakar, writing on Google’s blog:

After 11 years and over 100 million devices sold, we’re ending production of Chromecast, which will now only be available while supplies last. The time has now come to evolve the smart TV streaming device category — primed for the new area of AI, entertainment, and smart homes. With this, there are no changes to our support policy for existing Chromecast devices, with continued software and security updates to the latest devices.

Firstly, it’s very Google-like to announce products before a separate hardware event next week, where the company will presumably launch the new Pixel lineup of smartphones. I can’t think of a company in modern history that is this disorganized with its product launches. Not even Samsung, which hosts a few events throughout the year predictably and regularly, and rarely spoils products like this.

Secondly, Google’s replacement for the Chromecast with Google TV is the Google TV Streamer — that’s seriously the name; thanks, Google — which seems like the same product, but with Matter smart home functionality and a new design that is meant to be prominently displayed on a television stand, unlike the dongle-like appearance of the Chromecast. With such minor changes, I don’t even understand why Google opted to axe the popular Chromecast name and brand identity. People know what a Chromecast is and how to use it, just like AirPlay and the Apple TV — what is the point of replacing it with “Google TV Streamer?”

People online are pointing out that Google isn’t really “killing” the Chromecast since it will continue to support them for years to come, but I don’t see a difference. Google is killing the Chromecast brand. How is anyone supposed to take this company seriously when all it does is kill popular products? Clearly, the reason is Gemini, but Google could add Gemini to the Chromecast without destroying its brand reputation. Names matter and brands do matter, too, and if Google keeps killing all of its most popular brands, people aren’t going to trust it anymore. And it’s not like Gemini requires any more processing power than the previous-generation Chromecast, since the new features — image recognition for Nest cameras and a home automation creation tool — run in the cloud, not on-device.

Further reading from Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge: Google announces the second-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, which retains the physical dial from the previous version but now supports Matter, and thus, HomeKit. I’ll buy this one whenever my Ecobee thermostat dies because I loved the rotating dial to control temperature from the previous version, which I owned before I switched to HomeKit. But I’m happy Google didn’t exclude the physical dial — I was certain that would be removed after the shenanigans it pulled with the cheaper model from 2020.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Even if a quarter of the Services revenue is just payments from Google, and a further portion is Apple taking its cut from App Store transactions there’s still a lot more going on here. Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digit percentages.

Most people still consider Apple a products company. The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sauce as the combination of “hardware, software, and services.”

Snell’s article is beyond excellent, and I highly recommend everyone read it, even as someone who expresses zero interest in earnings reports or Apple’s financials at all. But this article sparked a new spin on the age-old question: Is Apple a hardware or software company? For years, my answer has always been “hardware,” despite the Alan Kay adage “Everyone who is serious about software should make their own hardware,” but the calculus behind that differentiation has always changed over the years.

When the first Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it could be argued that Apple was a software company, not a hardware one, since the Macintosh’s main invention was the popularization of the graphical user interface and the mouse, which gave way to the web. But would the same be true for the iPod, where the software just complements the hardware — a great MP3 music player — or, more notably, the iPhone, a product more known for its expansive edge-to-edge touchscreen than the version of OS X it ran? The lines between software and hardware in Apple’s parlance have blurred over the years, and now it’s impossible to imagine Apple being strictly a hardware or software company. It’s both.

But now, as John Gruber notes at Daring Fireball, there’s now a third dimension added to the picture: services. Services, unlike hardware, make money regularly and thus are a much more financially attractive means of running a technology business. Amazon makes its money by selling products constantly; Google sells advertisements; Microsoft sells subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud computing; and Apple sells services, like Apple Music and Apple TV+. It adds up — this is how these companies make their money. Services are no small part of Apple’s yearly revenue anymore; Apple would suffer financially if it weren’t for the steady revenue services provide. And, as Snell notes, Apple’s gross profit on services is much higher than the iPhone’s.

Apple, on the outside, is the iPhone company. Ask anyone on the street: Apple makes smartphones, and maybe AirPods or smartwatches. Yet services make more money than AirPods and the Apple Watch combined, and clearly are much more profitable than both products. This is an existential question: If a company makes its money via some product predominantly, does that mean it should be known as the maker of those products? Usually, I’d say yes. As much as the Mac is critical to everything Apple does, it is not the Mac company. Apple wouldn’t exist without the Mac because the iMac propelled the company to success. If it weren’t for the Mac, the iPod wouldn’t exist, and without the iPod, Apple wouldn’t have the money to make the iPhone. The Mac is the platform on which every one of Apple’s products relies, but Apple is not and will never be known as the Mac maker.

Someday, services revenue may eclipse the iPhone. If and when that comes true, does Apple become the Apple One company or does it remain the iPhone company? Most people would say no to that because without the iPhone, what is the conduit for services revenue? But without the Mac, the iPhone doesn’t exist. Apple is indisputably the iPhone company, but without the Mac, there is no iPhone. Apple may indisputably become a services company, but without the iPhone, there are no services. As the world continues to evolve and as people upgrade their iPhones less frequently, iPhone revenue will inevitably decrease, and Apple will slowly but surely diversify its revenue to prioritize services more. (It’s already doing that.)

Yet this inevitable truth doesn’t sit right, unlike how I felt about Apple becoming the iPhone company in the early 2010s or the iPod company in the early 2000s. And that’s because of what I said at the very beginning: Most think of Apple as a hardware company that happens to make great software, not a software company that sells its software via mediocre hardware (like Microsoft). Services inevitably are built into iOS and macOS, and thus are software, so if Apple becomes a services company, it also becomes a software company. This inevitability is difficult to grasp, and I’m not even sure if it’ll ever come true; this is not a prediction. Rather, I’m just laying out a possibility: What if Apple becomes a software company in the future? How does its financials affect the public’s perception of it? McDonald’s is fundamentally a real estate company on paper, yet people only know it as a fast food giant. If Apple eventually makes more money from services, will it still be known as a hardware company? Only time will tell.

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.

I’ve been saying since this lawsuit was filed that Google has no business paying Apple $18 billion yearly to keep Google the default search engine on Safari, and I maintain that position. Google is indisputably, without question, a monopolist — the question is, does paying Apple billions a year constitute an abuse of monopoly power? I don’t think so, because even if the deal didn’t exist, Google would still be the dominant market power in search engines. Google’s best defense is that its product is the most beloved by users, and its best evidence to support that claim is its market share among Windows PC consumers: nearly all. Microsoft Edge and Bing are the defaults on all Windows computers, yet practically every Windows user downloads Chrome and switches to Google as soon as they set up their machine. The data is there to support that.

Google’s best defense would have been to immediately terminate the contract with Apple and all other browsers, then prove to the judge that Google still has a dominant market share because it is the most loved product. That’s a great defense, and Google blew it because its legal team focused on defending the contract rather than its search monopoly. Again, I don’t think this specific contract is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act, but Google fell into the Justice Department’s trap of defending the contract, not the monopoly. The government had one goal it wanted to accomplish in this case: break up Google. It conveniently found a great pathway to victory in the search deal because on the outside, it appears like a conspiracy to illegally maintain a monopoly. The deal, by itself in another case, could be illegal, but Google’s monopoly over the search market isn’t.

A monopoly is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act when it “suppresses competition by engaging in anticompetitive conduct,” by definition of the law. Bribing the most popular smartphone maker in the United States to pre-install Google on every one of its devices, by essentially every angle, looks like a textbook case of unlawful monopolization, but that is not what Google is doing. It has no reason to pay Apple — I don’t know how much I have to press this case for the world to get it. If Google stopped paying Apple, its search monopoly wouldn’t crumble tomorrow. If all the Justice Department wants is for Google and Apple to terminate their sweetheart deal, Google will still be as powerful as it was before the lawsuit. Everyone knows this — Apple, Google, and the Justice Department — which is why the government won’t let Google off so easily.

Now that Jonathan Kanter, the leader of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, has won this case with overwhelming fanfare, he has the power to break apart Google’s monopoly. Judge Mehta didn’t just rule the contract was illegal; he said Google runs an unlawful monopoly, which is as close to a death sentence as Google can receive. It is hard to overstate how devastating that ruling is for Google, but I don’t feel bad because its legal defense focused on a bogus part of the case. The contract is now the least of Google’s problems — and always has been — because it’s officially caught up in a circa-1990s Microsoft antitrust case. Either the Justice Department levies harsh fines on the company, or it will request it be broken up in some capacity. Both scenarios are terrible for Google.

I am and will continue to be frustrated at the judge’s ruling on Monday, but I also have to admire the sheer genius of the Justice Department’s lawyers in this case. It was marvelously conducted, and the department didn’t make a single mistake. It took an irrelevant side deal, shone the spotlight on it, and used that as a catalyst to strike down Google’s monopoly for no reason. Google is a dominant player in the search engine market because it is the best product and has been for years; if Google suddenly wasn’t the default search engine on iPhones, its percentage of the market would drop by a maximum of 5 percent, and that’s being especially gracious to the company’s competitors. There is nothing the government or anyone else can do to defeat Google’s popularity — period.

Who the contract impacts the most, however, is Apple, though I predict the effects of Monday’s ruling will be short-lived at Apple Park. Apple made $85.2 billion in services revenue in the fiscal year of 2023, with about $20 billion per quarter, so yes, $18 billion less in yearly services revenue will hurt, as that’s roughly a 25 percent reduction in Apple’s second-largest moneymaker. Analysts on Wall Street, as they always do, will panic about the falling apart of this very lucrative search deal, and Apple probably won’t recover for at least a year, but I also think Apple is smart enough not to base a large part of its fiscal stability on a third-party contract that could theoretically fall apart any minute and that fluctuates depending on how much Google makes in ad sales. My point is that it’s a volatile deal that a company as successful and financially masterful as Apple wouldn’t rely on too much. The much bigger threat to Apple’s business is the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against it.

Apple, writing in a motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s case against it filed earlier this year:

And the Government’s theory that Apple has somehow violated the antitrust laws by not giving third parties broader access to iPhone runs headlong into blackletter antitrust law protecting a firm’s right to design and control its own product…

As a matter of law, Apple is not required to grant third parties more access—or to build altogether new technology for their use—on the less-secure, less-private terms certain developers prefer.

Apple’s motion to dismiss, which is unlikely to succeed, is 49 pages long, and I read it all. Most of it is filled with legal jargon, and I don’t recommend anyone read it, but the company’s legal department lays out four key points:

• It is not “exclusionary conduct” to dictate the business terms of a relationship between a private company and a third-party developer interested in doing business with said private company.

• The government is unable to show harm caused by Apple’s actions.

• The government fails to show Apple has a monopoly, which is core to the entire case.

• The government brought this case via a series of lies and falsehoods.

All four points are spot on. Apple, of course, provides ample legal evidence to support these claims, relying on older cases and interpretations of the law to support the points — one of the sections is titled “Apple Is Not Microsoft” — but just the basic rebuttal alone should be enough for this nonsense to be thrown out in any functioning judicial system. The entire case, first of all, relies on a nonsensical definition of Apple’s market — “premium smartphones” — and the Justice Department failed to prove Apple was a monopoly even by that definition. Regardless, the Justice Department only has a right to sue under the Sherman Antitrust Act if a company has a monopoly market share in the sector it operates, so in Apple’s case, the market would be all smartphones, not just premium ones. If the Justice Department gets to label a market however it pleases, technically every company is a monopolist.

On top of that, the Justice Department flat-out lied multiple times in its brief when it filed the lawsuit in March. That should also be enough to invalidate the whole lawsuit because the whole thing rests on a throne of lies, and as soon as those lies are disproven, the case becomes enormously weak. It’s like if someone was accused of murder, but the person they’re said to have killed is still alive and well. While, yes, the department did correctly state some claims, especially regarding the Apple Watch’s exclusivity, the parts about super apps and messaging are just wrong. Apple doesn’t prevent cross-platform messaging — WhatsApp and many other apps are available on the App Store. The Justice Department completely ignores that fact and conveniently doesn’t even include it in its brief. It reads like something Samsung would write on a cheesy billboard advertisement.

For all the government claimed, it failed to prove in its suit that consumers were harmed by Apple’s actions. All it wrote was that Apple is a successful enterprise and that other companies aren’t as successful because consumers like Apple products better because they’re more locked down. That’s not illegal; being popular isn’t unlawful. Thus, there isn’t a reason for the Justice Department to file the lawsuit under the Sherman Antitrust Act because there’s no proof of harm anywhere in it. It wasn’t able to prove Apple committed illegal acts with the non-fabricated evidence it provided, and the rest is just deceptive nonsense.

Finally, I find it rather humorous that Apple had to explain the concept of capitalism to the U.S. government, which regulates the richest and most notorious capitalist economy in the world. “Apple is not required to grant third parties… access.” That one sentence fragment from the introduction should be enough to throw the whole case out. The United States is suing Apple for writing a contract and telling non-interested developers to take it or leave it. Writing contracts isn’t illegal, even if a company is a monopoly. (Apple, again, isn’t.) There’s a certain amount of irony in this case, and I’m glad Apple is forcefully responding to it.

(Also, I love how even the legal department writes “iPhone” without an article as if it’s a proper noun. Never change, Apple.)

David Pierce, reporting for The Verge:

A few minutes before Avi Schiffmann and I get on Google Meet to talk about the new product he’s building, an AI companion called “Friend,” he sends me a screenshot of a message he just received. It’s from “Emily,” and it wishes him luck with our chat. “Good luck with the interview,” Emily writes, “I know you’ll do great. I’m here if you need me after.”

Emily is not human. It’s the AI companion Schiffmann has been building, and it lives in a pendant hung around his neck. The product was initially named Tab before Schiffmann pivoted to calling it Friend, and he’s been working on the idea for the last couple of years.

Here’s the pitch: a $100 circular disk that hangs off a necklace chain that one takes everywhere, wearing it as part of their outfit. Aside from the fact that it looks like one of those anti-theft security tags on clothes at the mall, this entire product is idiotic, not because I don’t think it’s a great solution to the loneliness epidemic plaguing the world’s youth — particularly young men, who’ll be the most eager to purchase a robot necklace — but because it is essentially an overpriced smartphone app with an unnecessary hardware component. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is exactly the same deal as the Rabbit R1 or Humane Ai Pin, except this one literally needs a smartphone app to work.

Notice how Pierce says Emily writes a response. This pendant clearly doesn’t have a screen, so where are those words printed? In a smartphone notification, of course. This is seriously how this product works: The button is pushed at the front of the apparatus, someone begins speaking into it, and then it replies with a notification pushed to the owner’s phone. It’s just a Bluetooth gadget that sends some information to a large language model in the cloud and back down to an app. I also know of a way to replicate that functionality right now, in the comfort of my own home, by paying just $20 a month: ChatGPT, which is coincidentally rolling out its new voice mode to paying customers starting Tuesday.

Avi Schiffmann, Friend’s founder, raised $2.5 million for this project, which any middle schooler could create after taking a 20-minute prompt engineering course on Skillshare. The model is just a fine-tuned version of Anthropic’s Claude designed to act overly friendly, playful, and personable, just like a real friend. That’s all good — I appreciate the idea of virtual friends and think it’s a great use case for artificial intelligence, honestly — but what isn’t acceptable is the hardware product. It’s evident that hardware makes money since all the software has already been made by the now-big names like Anthropic, Perplexity, and OpenAI, but that’s no excuse to push a nonsense, unnecessary fashion accessory.

People are fawning all over the promotion video, which Schiffmann posted to the social media website X, eliciting an entertaining quip from Marques Brownlee, a tech YouTuber known for calling the Ai Pin the “worst product” he’s ever reviewed: “Wait, this isn’t a skit?” Brownlee is correct: it sniffs like a comedy skit or parody for a product that shouldn’t exist. This could’ve been a smartphone app — hell, it should’ve been a smartphone app, and anything more than that is just embarrassing.

I don’t want to direct my anger toward this one Harvard drop-out because that’s blatant bullying. If he wants to sell an overpriced product to suckers, so be it — this is America, the land of $1,200 ripped sweatshirts. What frustrates me is that the technology industry has become inundated by these cheaply made, unnecessary hardware gizmos that can be easily supplanted by phone apps. People love their phones, and every one of these AI hardware companies is fully aware of that, so why not take advantage of the smartphone and build a great app?

Some firms have already done this: Take Dot, by New Computer, for example. It’s got a great web domain, which I’m sure didn’t cost as much as Friend’s friend.com: new.computer. The interface is simple: a chatbot that learns from someone’s hobbies, interests, and activities. It begins by asking the user to write about themselves, almost like a journal, with a variety of introductory prompts. What do they like to eat? What do they do for a living? Do they live alone? Once it learns enough, it begins writing back, asking questions, and chatting, just like a real bonafide internet friend. Is that not exactly what Friend does? The only difference is that Friend has a voice mode, but I’m sure adding dictation to Dot wouldn’t be that complicated. Here’s how New Computer describes itself:

Our company is called New Computer because we believe that computers should feel more aware, more proactive, and more human than their current form. Dot is the first step along that pathway for us.

“Computers should feel more… human than their current form.” Eloquently put; I strongly agree. Dot costs $12 a month, a perfectly reasonable price for something that digests sometimes hundreds of messages a day, and the company is quickly iterating on it. Would I subscribe? No, because I don’t enjoy journaling and don’t have the need to, but for people who want a friend-like chatbot, I think it’s the best option. There’s room for more products like it, and I think Friend would do awesomely in the space, especially if it ran the models on-device so it didn’t have to charge a subscription. And it could add widgets, Live Activities, and Shortcuts — and it could be available on the Mac or in a web browser. The options are limitless. If I had $2.5 million, I’d put it to good use.

This leads me to what happens when you give idiots millions of dollars. Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler, reporting for 404 Media:

Friend, an AI companion company announced today, spent $1.8 million out of a total of $2.5 million it raised to start the company on its domain name, friend.com, according to its founder Avi Schiffmann and a screenshot of the transaction shared with 404 Media. 

In response to a question on Twitter from someone who asked him how much he paid for the domain, Schiffmann tweeted $1.8 million, which I assumed was a joke because Fast Company previously reported raised $1.9 million to start the company. TechCrunch reported today that Schiffmann raised $2.5 million at a $50 million valuation. Schiffmann confirmed to 404 Media he raised close to $2.5 million.

My first reaction to this product was not about the hardware itself, but about the domain — so, I guess, well done. Mission accomplished, it’ll certainly get people talking. I went, “That must’ve been a really expensive domain. Maybe he got it through a friend of a friend or something.” Nope, Schiffmann really bought the domain for $1.8 million, and that’s not even including the renewal cost I’m sure he’ll have to incur every year. How is this company even real? That’s more than half of the total capital raised spent on just one domain for a glorified smartphone app that costs $100 and looks like a cheap plastic toy. I am a technology optimist; I favor the rapid advancement of AI technology because I think it will result in a net positive for humanity. This is just a waste of time and a complete embarrassment to every maxim of business.

Hartley Charlton, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple used Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) developed by Google instead of Nvidia’s widely-used graphics processing units (GPUs) to construct two critical components of Apple Intelligence.

The decision is detailed in a new research paper published by Apple that highlights its reliance on Google’s cloud hardware (via CNBC). The paper reveals that Apple utilized 2,048 of Google’s TPUv5p chips to build AI models and 8,192 TPUv4 processors for server AI models. The research paper does not mention Nvidia explicitly, but the absence of any reference to Nvidia’s hardware in the description of Apple’s AI infrastructure is telling and this omission suggests a deliberate choice to favor Google’s technology.

Nvidia and Apple’s kerfuffle runs back to between 2007 and 2008 when Apple shipped Nvidia graphics processors, specifically the GeForce 8600M GT, in MacBook Pro models. Those graphics cards were defective and would stop functioning after a few months of normal usage, which led to a class-action lawsuit against Apple for shipping faulty products to buyers. Apple apologized and set up a repair program for affected customers to receive a repaired computer free of charge, but it wanted Nvidia to finance it, since, at the end of the day, it was Nvidia’s fault the graphics cards were defective. Nvidia refused to pay Apple back, and so, in 2012, Apple stopped shipping Nvidia cards in any of its products. That was the end of that relationship — it has never been repaired since.

One complication in this otherwise severed relationship was that Nvidia launched Omniverse Cloud application programming interfaces on Apple Vision Pro in March, which was the first time the two companies ever worked with each other in more than a decade. Still, though, Apple and Nvidia arguably hate each other and aren’t on speaking terms after this (relatively minor) disagreement from a while ago. It’s just like Apple and Intel’s once-great relationship that turned sour after the launch of Apple silicon, but that one is understandable since Intel lost one of its most valuable clients, if not the most valuable.

Apple makes the best computers on the market, but before it switched to Apple silicon, it used GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia’s biggest competitor. This made gaming performance on the Mac suffer immensely, but it wasn’t that big of a deal for Apple, since game developers had already deprioritized the Mac since its user base is less gaming-inclined. But now, gaming aside, Nvidia makes the best artificial intelligence processors, and every AI firm is buying up its entire stock of H100 processors — more than it can even make. Microsoft and Google know this, which is why they’re building their own processors to try and compete, but the mix of proprietary software that runs on Nvidia’s AI chips and the sheer grunt of the processors still makes them the best. Still, though, interested firms can rent out Azure or Google Cloud neural processing units, as they’re called, directly made by one of the two companies without involving Nvidia.

Apple entered the AI arena later than most, but a few months ago, it found itself needing to train its own set of models for Apple Intelligence — and it could choose any processors it wanted. And, in the end, it opted for Google’s processors, hosted in the cloud, with no help from Nvidia. Google sells access to its NPUs — called “Cloud Tensor Processing Units,” the same ones it uses to train Gemini, its AI product — to anyone via Google Cloud, but I assume it cut Apple a deal since the two companies already have a contract to share search revenue on the iPhone. Google and Apple technically aren’t enemies, but they’re also not friends, and now they’re competing in the hottest market of the year: AI. Google has a vested interest in making Gemini better than Apple Intelligence because it has the power to sway markets and put Google back at the top financially again, but it decided to lend Apple a hand in training its models, for some reason — probably monetary.

Obviously, the most shocking deal would be if Apple hosted the end-user models on Google’s servers, which I assume Google would object to, even for an enormous sum of money. But that wouldn’t be favorable for Apple, either, since one of its biggest selling points is privacy via Private Cloud Compute, only possible with Apple silicon. Why Apple didn’t train Apple Intelligence’s foundation models, as it calls them, on Apple silicon from the get-go is unclear, but it’s most likely because it isn’t powerful enough. The more powerful an NPU is, the more complex and accurate a large language model can be, which affects how precise inference — the process of predicting the next token in a sequence — is. Thus, if Apple trained Apple Intelligence with less performant NPUs, it would negatively affect the performance of the models on the end-user side. It could choose to do so just to satiate its own ego, but that’s a bad trade-off.

So, to recap: Nvidia makes the best NPUs, but Apple hates Nvidia, so it was between Microsoft and Google — and since it was already on good terms with the latter, it trained its LLMs on Google’s servers for whatever sum of money the two corporations agreed on. It’s not that unusual once the chain of events is broken down, but from afar, it really does look peculiar. Why would Google give its computing power to its direct competitor? But it actually isn’t that odd upon close examination because companies do this all the time; Apple buys displays from Samsung, even though that same technology could be used in Samsung Galaxy phones. (In some cases, the same screens are used in computing products, like the Google Pixel.) It’s unusual, but not unheard of. Samsung makes the best displays, and Google makes the best NPUs — aside from Nvidia, of course.

Apple released iOS 18.1 Beta 1 on Monday alongside the “standard” iOS 18 beta track to release the first beta of Apple Intelligence. Monday’s beta does not include three of perhaps the biggest features coming to iOS, presumably next year, in the spring: the new App Intents-powered Siri with on-screen and in-app processing, Image Playground and Genmoji, and the ChatGPT integration. I’d reckon ChatGPT ships in iOS 18.1 before Thanksgiving, with it going into beta sometime in August, but the new Siri and image generation capabilities clearly need work and will probably become available in a further release going into beta in January.

Regardless, the iOS 18.1 beta, in its current state, has most of the Apple Intelligence features demonstrated during the Worldwide Developers Conference: the new Siri design, Writing Tools, the “Reduce Interruptions” Focus mode, call summaries and recording in Notes, article summaries in Safari, and semantic search in Photos, amongst much, much more. It clearly is half-baked and buggy, though, and it doesn’t even seem clear if all the models Apple has produced are available yet — Apple Intelligence seems to only take up 2.86 gigabytes of storage on iOS and 5.06 GB on macOS. It’s a developer beta, and it certainly isn’t ready for prime time; I don’t think I have a use for any of it yet.

One such beta limitation, and perhaps the biggest disappointment, is Writing Tools. Apple said at WWDC that it would only work in system-native text fields, but that is rather constricting, especially on the Mac, where most writing-specific AppKit apps use custom fields, like MarsEdit, Tot, and Craft. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the best experience is in select Apple-made apps, like Notes and TextEdit, where a bar appears at the top of the screen showing changes the system makes when using the Proofread feature, similar to a diff program like Kaleidoscope. This seems to only work in certain apps since I wasn’t able to replicate it anywhere else, including in some of Apple’s own apps like Mail and Pages. In those apps, only on the Mac, the text is just shown in a pop-out window with options to copy or replace. On iOS, the system automatically underlines text it has modified, and the suggestions can be accepted or dismissed. I assume this inconsistent availability is a bug and hope it’s fixed in the future.

Suggestions on iOS and certain Mac apps also explain why the system elected to rewrite the text that way. The explanations are typically only one sentence in length but are custom to the context in which they exist. In other words, they aren’t canned responses but are tailored to the specific change and are a small-yet-unique element of Apple generating text, not just modifying it.

Another element of text generation is found in Messages and Mail, when someone asks a question in an iMessage or email thread. There, similar to Gmail, Apple Intelligence provides generated responses tailored to the question — they aren’t canned, either. I’ve found these a bit too formal and verbose for my liking — you wouldn’t say “I think that’s a good idea” to a close friend — and there isn’t a way to switch tone, but I’ve already used them with friends and family who understand I’m testing an AI feature. (They were amused.) But, for instance, when “OK” would do just fine, Apple recommended “Sure, that’ll work” instead. It’s not that the suggestions are wrong, it’s just not how any person would talk. Apple does add commas for grammatical accuracy, but it does not append periods to text messages — though it does for emails — and even learns from someone’s texting style, including capitalization and some word choices, which again, is an example of fine-tuning the model for specific tasks.

Back to Writing Tools: The “toolbox” is found by selecting and Control-clicking any text in a supported app and clicking Show Writing Tools from the context menu. On iOS, just select text and choose Writing Tools from the pop-up menu. In apps where it does function, it proofreads excellently, and its summarizations are remarkable — much better than ChatGPT. It doesn’t generate text, obviously, but it edits it well. It does take a while to chug through large amounts of prose, though, and there isn’t a loading indicator to notify users when it is computing, something I assume will be fixed in a later build. For instance, my hands-on first impressions of Apple’s newest operating systems came in at 16,139 words, and Apple Intelligence on my M3 Max MacBook Pro took about two minutes to proofread it in TextEdit. Once it did, it automatically saved the changes it made to the document, which is weird, but they could all be reverted with one click.

On iOS, Writing Tools and the app it’s working in must be in focus; it is impossible to leave the app while the sheet is open. But on the Mac, where people are more likely to deal with long text and also aren’t constrained by battery life and relatively low-performance systems-on-a-chip, other apps can be open while Writing Tools is modifying text or if a summary is in progress in Notes or some other application. (Writing Tools is the one that requires the most computing power for now, anyway.) Looking at iStat Menus, an app that displays real-time system utilization information, compute and graphics usage remained steady, but memory usage peaked, presumably because the models were loaded into memory for the duration of the task. Activity Monitor just labels the app itself as using the memory, so when I was using Writing Tools in TextEdit, Activity Monitor said “TextEdit” was using 3 GB of RAM.

Apple Intelligence seems to exclusively use the Neural Engine for most tasks it does on-device, and if it needs to, offloads the data to the cloud via Private Cloud Compute. I threw thousands of words at it and observed if it was sending any data to the cloud, but it seemingly didn’t. It might have if I tried on iOS, where the Neural Engine is less powerful, or it might be that Private Cloud Compute isn’t available yet for testing. If Private Cloud Compute was used, I don’t think the model would be loaded into my Mac’s memory, and I’d also probably observe some kind of network activity. Either way, the cloud is only used when it is absolutely necessary.

Mail’s summaries work impeccably well. I had an email come in about an order being delayed, and instead of showing me the first line of the email under the subject as any other email app would, it summarized it: “Delivery time updated today, waive fee if order delivered after 4:34.” It also knew an order delay was important, so it placed that at the top of the inbox, labeled with a “Priority” heading. It doesn’t work with all emails yet, just like how Safari’s article summarization is picky about what websites it’ll touch, but it performs the best with auto-written status updates. (I wouldn’t want it to summarize a newsletter, for example.)

Safari’s summaries have been brought to all webpages, though they’re no longer automatically generated within Safari; they have to be manually created by entering Safari Reader and choosing the Summary option at the top, which I find inconvenient as someone who uses Reader only rarely. The important thing, though, is that they work on every website and appear consistently — there isn’t a way to disable them as a site owner, even if Applebot-Extended, Apple’s web scraper, is disallowed. (The summaries are created client-side.) The blurbs are generated very quickly and are astonishingly accurate, though I find them best suited for shorter articles rather than long ones with lots of intricate information, or how-tos, where the artificial intelligence doesn’t even seem to want to sum up step-by-step guides.

Notification summaries also work amazingly. They prioritize key bits of information and aren’t long, which clearly indicates some kind of fine-tuning other large language models lack. Other AI tools usually begin their summaries with “This text message reads…” or something similar, but Apple Intelligence gets right to the point: “Delivery arrival, on July 29, at 4:40 p.m.” That’s all anyone needs, and it’s much better than showing the first few lines of a text message a robot sent. It’s much less inclined to summarize human communication, which is a good thing because there is a much stronger likelihood it fails to understand the nuances of person-to-person communication. Also, people like reading text messages from other people, but status updates can be filed away and deleted.

The Reduce Interruptions Focus mode acts as any other Focus in the sense that it allows people to choose specific contacts and apps that should always be allowed through, while the rest are subject to the Intelligent Breakthrough feature, which discerns which specific messages are critical enough to warrant a disruption. As weird as this comparison sounds, it almost reminds me of the Adaptive Audio feature on AirPods Pro, which lives in between Transparency Mode and noise cancellation, permitting some sounds like human speech while silencing loud external noises. Reduce Interruptions does the same, peering into the contents of notifications rather than just where they came from. When priority notifications do come in, they’re supplemented with a badge that says “Maybe Important,” and some notifications are even summarized. This is my new favorite Focus mode because it alleviates the stress of a blanket ban on everyone but a few select contacts and apps. If there’s a contact I don’t necessarily communicate with often but who needs something urgently, they should be able to come through.

In my few hours working with it enabled, I haven’t gotten a single bad notification. Text messages came through fine, I got some updates on an order summarized by Apple Intelligence so I wasn’t distracted by them, and my unimportant apps didn’t bother me. I’ve never had a “work” Focus mode because I would just end up letting everything in out of paranoia, but now, thanks to Apple Intelligence, I’ll be using this one when I need to get away from constant pings. I was worried about how it would function under real-world scenarios, but spending a few hours with it proved my worries unnecessary. It’s a fantastic feature and perfectly ties in with Apple Intelligence’s summary chops.

Some other tidbits I’ve noticed:

• To activate Type to Siri on the Mac, press Globe-S anywhere in the operating system or double-press either Command key. It also works on iOS by double-tapping the bottom of the screen, but an early beta bug requires a restart of the device after the update is installed for it to work. Siri, for right now, works the same but understands me a lot better.

• When recording a call, Apple says to “respect the preferences of the person you’re calling” and plays an audio notification that the call is being recorded. Then, it is transcribed in Notes, though recordings begin in the Phone app.

• Any text in any app that supports Writing Tools — regardless of whether that text is editable or not — can be summarized and proofread by Apple Intelligence just by Control-clicking. Unfortunately, there is no keyboard shortcut to access Writing Tools; it is only accessible via the menu bar or text selection menu.

The biggest source of confusion online has been the waiting list, which is present even in the first Apple Intelligence beta. When it is first downloaded, Apple Intelligence is opt-in, as it will be for everyone when it ships later this year. To find it, go to Settings → Siri and Apple Intelligence, which now has a new icon. But the top item is to join a waiting list to use Apple Intelligence, and the system says it will notify the user when it becomes available to them. It took me about five minutes to be let in, but I surmise that’s because there is no list in actuality — at least while Apple Intelligence is in beta — and that it’s just a demonstration to test the functionality of the waitlist.

Either way, the waitlist exists to handle demand, presumably for Private Cloud Computer. If I had to bet, I believe Apple will eliminate the list eventually, as soon as it knows how many people are interested and can begin to build out its server infrastructure, but for now, I think it makes sense to have it in place, especially to gatekeep the ChatGPT features to prevent its Azure servers from being hammered, which Microsoft wouldn’t be very happy with.¹ Once someone is let in, their Apple account is whitelisted, so they don’t have to sign up on every device they wish to use Apple Intelligence on.

Notably, the models don’t begin downloading until a user is permitted to use Apple Intelligence, and after they’re off the waitlist, the models download in the background. This process takes quite a bit of computing power, though running the models themselves on macOS uses about 5.5 watts of power, according to Max Weinbach, an analyst for Creative Strategies, a market research firm. In my testing, I noticed a peak of about 16 watts through iStat Menus while proofreading a long text, though I would also assume the models would be more conservative on iOS and iPadOS.

As I said a few months ago, I’m very excited about this next chapter in Apple’s software history. There is a lot more work to be done, both in preparing the company’s infrastructure for the influx of new users, ironing out bugs, and expanding availability to more users, apps, and product categories. And, of course, launching the new large action model-like Siri with App Intents and Semantic Index will be a big step toward ambient computing, where the computers do the computing and we do the creating.

An update was made on July 29, 2024, at 9:27 p.m.: I’ve since discovered iMessage has the same automatically generated replies as Mail. This article has been updated to add that information.

A correction was made on July 29, 2024, at 11:01 p.m.: Type to Siri works just fine on iOS — it just requires a restart of the device. After that, double-tapping at the bottom of the display works as it should. I regret the error.

A correction was made on July 30, 2024, at 3:06 a.m.: The diff-like experience in Writing Tools is limited, but not only to TextEdit. It’s also available in Notes.

Apple Newsroom:

Today, Apple Maps on the web is available in public beta, allowing users around the world to access Maps directly from their browser.

Now, users can get driving and walking directions; find great places and useful information including photos, hours, ratings, and reviews; take actions like ordering food directly from the Maps place card; and browse curated Guides to discover places to eat, shop, and explore in cities around the world. Additional features, including Look Around, will be available in the coming months.

People have been complaining that the Apple Maps website isn’t available on mobile browsers or Firefox, but I think that criticism is missing the point. I think Apple will expand it to other browsers eventually, perhaps before the end of the summer, but its main purpose is to appear alongside Google Maps in Google Search. Google Maps has always been the standard for people looking to find new restaurants or other places of interest near them because the most useful search engine for that is Google, and obviously Google prioritizes and links to Google Maps. Thus, Google Maps has become almost indispensable — there isn’t someone who doesn’t have it installed on their iPhone.

The Maps app had a rough start and still relies on Yelp for reviews and photos, which I think is a poor choice — and the only reason I have Yelp installed — but it’s also pre-installed on every iPhone and Mac, even though rarely anyone uses it. That’s because there is no good way to access it from Google; Apple Maps results don’t appear there because it doesn’t have a website. Now, that’s changed, and the people who are most likely to click Apple Maps links on Google are those with iPhones and Macs anyway. This new website is just a catalyst for the native Maps app, which has gotten very good in recent years. It’s been my mapping application of choice for years, ever since the new map launched in the United States. The Mac app is vastly superior to the clunky Google Maps interface on the web.

I still think Apple Maps needs work, not in directions, but with other data like hours and photos. Apple’s version of Street View, Look Around, has expanded to most large cities in the United States and around the world, and its directions are better than Google’s in most cases. The app and map are impeccably well-designed, its CarPlay interface is superb, and traffic data is no longer spotty. And transit information in metro areas like New York and San Francisco is top-notch, well-labeled, and simple, unlike Google, which still looks like it’s from the early 2010s. For Americans, Apple Maps is the best navigation app by a long shot, especially since Google Maps has been bogged down with advertisements and other unnecessary information brought in from Waze, a company Google bought for $1.1 billion in 2013 and since has merged into its Google Maps team.

But looking at photos requires going into the Yelp app — which also looks like it’s from the early 2010s — and reviews aren’t well surfaced. Apple didn’t want to deal with content moderation back when Maps was the pet project of Scott Forstall, the company’s former software chief, but now that it has added ratings (thumbs-down and thumbs-up), it should also allow users to write reviews and attach images like the App Store. It’ll take a while for the reviews to accumulate, but it also has the advantage of a user base of one billion people.

To do all of this — improve Maps in ways that make it more attractive — it needs to be indexable by search engines. People need to choose Apple Maps as their desired way to explore the world, and the way most people get into their navigation app in the first place is via Google. Apple Maps for the past few years has had the potential to be a really great app, and launching it on the web is a great first step to drive up user numbers.

Kylie Robison, reporting for The Verge:

OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.

The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link…

SearchGPT is just a “prototype” for now. The service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and will only be accessible to 10,000 test users at launch, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood tells The Verge. Wood says that OpenAI is working with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to build its search results. The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT.

First, for consumers: This is amazing. Google Search, the most popular search engine by a long shot, has been degrading in quality for years, and it finally has competition in the form of a search product, first and foremost, made for searching, not chatting. SearchGPT’s interface, from the start, looks eerily akin to Google, albeit with more artificial intelligence sprinkled throughout the website. The main page isn’t a chatbot interface, but a giant, inviting text field. Entering a search shows a list of links at the left with an AI summary at the right. Yes, there is a follow-up text field at the bottom, but it can be ignored, and it’s out of the way — the main focus is the list of links.

The AI summaries themselves aren’t prose-heavy, unlike Google’s or Perplexity, where the links are buried behind a Show More button. They’re visual, using “visual responses” like graphs, images from the web, and other widgets, presumably provided by some selected partners, just like Google’s Knowledge Graph-powered info panels. Any search interface should focus on short blurbs and links to more information — search engines should not be text-generation machines. Most Google searches are short, about one to two words long, and they’re mostly for finding quick bits of information, such as a link to a news article or something else on the web. AI companies like Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity like to highlight complicated queries like “What are the best vacation spots in Italy?” but the volume of such specific and well-formatted questions like that is small.

Google has failed at its most basic job: showing 10 blue links related to a search query. What the world needs is not another AI chatbot-powered summarizer, but a search engine fully powered by large language models rather than archaic crawlers and PageRank. For example, I just typed into Google “PageRank” to grab the link to Wikipedia and make sure I got the name and capitalization correct — I would never type “What is PageLink” into Google because I know Google isn’t a chatbot, it’s a search engine; a librarian for the internet. Natural human instinct encourages speaking to a chatbot the way one would to a fellow human, but search engines are different, and their results should be, too. Google mastered this perfectly, but now it’s falling apart and going down the deep end of AI. Users want 10 blue links fetched by a smart AI crawler better equipped to understand language and filter cruft on the web, not AI summaries to upsell products or advertisements.

Perplexity aims to solve the issue of Google being so comically inept that it can’t even find 10 blue links by shoving a chatbot down people’s throats, which is not what anyone wants. There’s a reason both Google search summaries and Perplexity are unpopular by Google Search metrics: they’re too complicated. Neither product prioritizes links to other parts of the web; instead, they aim to steal the internet for themselves. This ridiculous practice has infuriated publishers, who allow Google access to scrape their sites not to book it with their content without attribution, but to help attract new visitors. Links shouldn’t be added to summaries, the summaries should be added to the links. That is what, in essence, separates chatbots from search engines. If OpenAI can nail attribution, it has won the search wars and Google is dead. And regardless, we can already begin planning Perplexity’s funeral now.

But that ties into my second point: What about publishers? They’ve had their content ripped off by every LLM on the face of the planet, and now another one has taken a seat at the dinner table. What is the promise that this one will actually drive, not drive away traffic? Deepa Seetharaman, for The Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI said it partnered with publishers to build the search tool. In recent months, OpenAI representatives have shown mock-ups of the feature to publishers, who have grown increasingly uneasy about the way AI could reshape their newsrooms and newsgathering amid recent declines in online traffic for many publishers.

Publishers are broadly concerned that AI-powered search tools from OpenAI or Alphabet’s Google will serve up complete answers based on news content, eliminating the need to click on an article link and starving publishers of online traffic and advertising revenue.

It isn’t clear how much traffic a product such as SearchGPT could send publishers’ way. “We expect to learn more about user behavior” in the test, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.

Clearly, OpenAI’s main way of showing it is a more moral company (it isn’t) is by making deals with publishers, like The Journal and Vox Media. That isn’t a bad strategy, but OpenAI couldn’t possibly pay every website interested in showing up in SearchGPT results. For instance, would I show up in SearchGPT, even though I’m obviously way down the priority list of must-pay publishers? I think I will since I haven’t blocked ChatGPT’s search crawler — only its training one — but with the immense self-inflicted reputational damage AI companies have done to themselves, why wouldn’t weary publishers block SearchGPT before it even launches? OpenAI has said that it will obey Robots Exclusion Protocol directives, which is good, but OpenAI needs to do a lot of work to prove to the world that it is capable of attribution.

OpenAI has not contributed much to the open web yet, but it has the potential to do so with SearchGPT. Until it does that — until it drives traffic to publishers without blatantly ripping their content off — OpenAI will continue to be known as the company that steals from hardworking people. For users fed up with Google’s erroneous search results, SearchGPT will be great. For publishers fed up with OpenAI stealing their work, SearchGPT is just another product to bemoan, even if it might actually do good to the information superhighway in the long run. Either way, Perplexity, which clearly hasn’t even pondered this dilemma in the slightest, can go to hell, and Google has work cut out for itself.

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Apple continues to work on a foldable iPhone, which could arrive as early as 2026, according to a report from The Information. The phone is rumored to fold horizontally, like the clamshell-style Samsung Galaxy Z Flip.

In February, The Information reported that Apple was in the early stages of developing two folding iPhone prototypes. But now, it seems Apple may have settled on a design, as The Information says the device has an internal nickname, V68, indicating “the idea has moved beyond the conceptual stage” and is now ”in development with suppliers.”

If you had told me this two years ago — that a foldable iPhone would ship in 2026 — I’d be pretty excited because I was still bullish on the foldable smartphone genre back then. The kinks still had to be worked out, but the promise of a small phone expanding into a tablet-sized one was interesting because it completely negated the need for the latter product category. Imagine an iOS-iPadOS dual-use device that transforms seamlessly between an iPhone and an iPad, all with no crease in the middle of the inner display, a normal-sized outer screen, a high-resolution in-display front-facing camera, and ingress protection at the IP68 level. It seemed possible; it seemed like Samsung could pull it off first and Apple could refine it later.

Then, none of that happened. I’m beginning to feel pessimistic about the state of foldable phones again, not because I don’t think they have potential, but because they’re hitting the limits of technology. Perhaps this is apathy on Samsung’s part — I wouldn’t put it past the company — but it doesn’t seem like Apple is interested in pushing the bounds of what is possible, either, because it is engineering a flip phone, akin to the Galaxy Z Flip — not a fold-out phone, where the display expands out to a larger screen on the inside, á la Galaxy Z Fold.

When the Galaxy Z Flip first launched, I found the reintroduction of the flip phone rather intriguing, mostly for women, who have smaller pockets. (Give women the pockets they deserve, cowards.) But now, I don’t think Apple should step into a market Samsung and, interestingly, Motorola have well-covered. Nobody thinks of Samsung and Motorola as pioneers, or even competent competitors, in the tablet business, but Apple makes the iPad, the best tablet in the world. It can leverage that popularity to build a hybrid iPhone and iPad combo, but if it makes a flip phone, it’s just any other foldable device — just another one of many. It is possible, nay, likely that Apple can innovate further than Motorola or Samsung, making foldable devices more viable, but I think it should start out by conquering a market it has a chance in.

Besides that, how would Apple even market a flip iPhone? What would be the pitch? Samsung doesn’t need a selling point because nobody buys its foldable devices, but Apple does because the iPhone ostensibly has a brand attached to it — a brand people love. Apple, for the past four years, has sold four flagship iPhones: a regular, 6.1-inch iPhone, a special-sized iPhone Plus or mini model, a standard 6.1-inch iPhone Pro version, and a larger 6.7-inch iPhone Pro Max. Three of those models have sold well — the standard, iPhone Pro, and iPhone Pro Max ones — but the iPhone Plus and mini versions have never sold well. In fact, they’ve flopped. In 2025, Apple is purportedly adding a “Slim” version of the iPhone 17 at the high-end of the lineup, past the iPhone Pro Max, so where would the foldable iPhone slot in?

I would have to assume it will be more expensive than any other iPhone made, but because of the constraints of foldable displays, I’d also predict that Apple can’t fit in all the hardware it adds to the Slim model. So, it would be forced to sell a worse iPhone at a higher price than any other device it sells. What is the point of that? If it made a Galaxy Z Fold competitor instead, it could justify the higher price while also adding a much larger screen, a good selling point. But the talk of a flip phone just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m sure it’ll be good, because, again, it’s made by Apple. But at what cost?

Update, July 24, 2024: It could be possible that the foldable iPhone and iPhone Slim are the same. Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today shared alleged specifications for a new ultra-thin iPhone 17 model rumored to launch next year.

Kuo expects the device to be equipped with a 6.6-inch display with a current-size Dynamic Island, a standard A19 chip rather than an A19 Pro chip, a single rear camera, and an Apple-designed 5G chip. He also expects the device to have a titanium-aluminum frame, but with a lower percentage of titanium than used for iPhone 15 Pro models.

The analyst added that while there will not be an iPhone 17 Plus, the new ultra-thin model will not be a replacement for it. Instead, he said the device will be an all-new model, with its main selling point to be its “new design” rather than specs.

I posted about this on Threads and got some interesting responses, but the one that stood out to me the most was that this model could actually be the foldable iPhone in disguise. The price of the “Slim” model is rumored to be more than the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it also has a smaller screen at 6.6 inches. Also, it uses an Apple modem, not a Qualcomm one, the latter of which will be in the high-end iPhone 17 models. Without the folding and price elements, it looks like an iPhone SE — one camera in 2025, seriously? — but the fourth-generation iPhone SE is rumored to launch in the spring, with mass production beginning in October. So it’s not a low-cost iPhone and it will cost more than the highest-end iPhone, which only leaves one logical conclusion: it folds.

A folding smartphone would need to be thinner, and it would almost have a larger display than the standard Pro model. But it can’t fit three cameras and would probably need to be made from a cheaper material, like an aluminum-titanium hybrid. Everything I said Tuesday about the market viability of a foldable iPhone remains true, but perhaps this “Slim” iPhone speculation business can be put to rest. (See: My commentary on Apple aiming to make its products thinner.)

It’s a well-known phenomenon that submitting feedback reports to Apple via Feedback Assistant past mid-July during the iOS and macOS beta cycles basically means they’re thrown into the aluminum trash cans at Apple Park, so I’m compiling a list of all of my bug reports that still haven’t been fixed yet. I encourage readers who work at Apple to take a look at them. (I don’t include bug reports in my software hands-on articles because I feel that’s unfair.)

• From November 15, 2022, filed as FB11794397: “When using NavigationSplitView on iPadOS, tapping a sidebar item when in portrait orientation doesn’t collapse the sidebar automatically like how it does in system apps.”

• From March 25, 2023, filed as FB12080598: “Using Markdown to create inline links in SwiftUI doesn’t respect the app’s accent color — the link always stays blue.”

• From June 13, filed as FB13894182: “Widgets using SwiftData do not display data from the model context on iOS 18.” Bizarre.

• From June 13, filed as FB13879635: “Widgets from iOS apps on Apple silicon Macs do not appear.”

• From June 16, filed as FB13924370: “When tapping from a detail view in a NavigationSplitView to the sidebar, the navigation selection is set to nil briefly.”

• From June 18, filed as FB13952769: “Apps that ‘access data from other apps’ always show a permission prompt upon launch, even when Allow has been previously selected by a user.” (See: this screenshot.)

• From June 22, filed as FB14006409: “Apps that have access to screen recording permissions force a system prompt asking to re-evaluate them daily.” (See: this screenshot.)

• From June 24, filed as FB14045594: “System Settings → Storage inaccurately labels user files as ‘System Data.’” This bug has been marked by Apple as “unable to diagnose with current information,” but it has not requested more information. Feedback also says there have been “more than 10” recent reports.

• From June 24, filed as FB14045856: “Impossible to open a non-notarized app from Finder without going into System Settings → Privacy & Security.” Jason Snell wrote about this on Six Colors.

• From June 25, filed as FB14067308: “In iOS apps built with NavigationSplitView, swiping between the detail view and sidebar is not smooth.” I have a love-hate relationship with SwiftUI.

• From June 29, filed as FB14123965: “Website icons in the Passwords app fail to load often.”

• From June 29, filed as FB14124064: “Passwords often fails to ask to save a modified password after changing it on a website.”

• From June 29, filed as FB14124164: “Unable to generate a new password in an existing item in the Passwords app on iOS.”

• From July 7, filed as FB14221466: “‘Home Key & Express Mode’ pop-up in Home app doesn’t dismiss even if Set Up Now is tapped.”

• From July 14, filed as FB14307612: “After using iPhone Mirroring, status bar icons on iPhones with the Dynamic Island appear smaller and dislocated.” Fine, I’ll admit I’m being nitpicky.

• From July 21, filed as FB14429641: “When deleting a second website from an item in Passwords, the app crashes.”

Tom Dotan and Robert McMillian, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Many people who showed up at work Friday morning knew only one thing though: Their PCs had the blue screen of death, while Macs and Chromebooks were still working. Searches for “Microsoft outage” outranked “CrowdStrike outage” on Google consistently from Friday morning through Saturday morning.

Friday’s meltdown brought a trade-off inherent to Windows into sharp relief. Its open design gives developers the freedom to design powerful software that interacts with the operating system at a very deep level. But when things go wrong, the results can be catastrophic, as millions discovered on Friday.

Because Apple runs a closed ecosystem, the company has a “much healthier balance between forcing people to upgrade, forcing applications to maintain good security practices or they pull them off of the App Store,” said Amit Yoran, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Tenable…

A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets.

So maybe placing technology regulation in the hands of Luddites is a bad idea.

As I insinuated on Friday, this would’ve never happened if the world ran on Macs instead of Windows computers because Macs do not give such access to third-party applications. They never will, they never should, and if any moronic regulatory body forces Apple to do so, Apple should fight it tooth and nail and if it loses, it should pull out of that market entirely. Macs, even though they offer “sideloading” — the ability to install software outside the platform’s native app marketplace without permission or notarization — do not allow third-party software the ability to throw the entire operating system into a boot loop because they run in a semi-sandboxed environment, even if the app isn’t notarized at all. It’s just technically impossible to build software that renders a Mac useless to the point where it won’t even boot anymore.

Of course, the safest place to download software for the Mac is the Mac App Store, but realistically, nobody uses that because they don’t want to deal with Apple’s painful regulation. (I agree — the Mac App Store shouldn’t be the default place to purchase Mac software.) But even if a developer makes someone download a non-notarized, non-signed application from the web, it cannot be given root access like this¹. macOS always has a layer of security to prevent this kind of code from throwing the computer into an abyss of blueness, whether it be System Integrity Protection on Intel Macs or the Secure Enclave’s built-in security for Apple silicon computers. There is no way of gaining kernel-level, root access to a Mac — period.

It is possible to disable some security settings on Apple silicon Macs or SIP on Intel models, but it is highly discouraged and very convoluted to do. No well-intentioned IT department of basic intelligence would ever do it to “replace” macOS’ built-in security with a cruddy “enterprise-level” antivirus product, and no antivirus software available on the Mac ever recommends disabling SIP because that’s an absolutely ludicrous proposition. In stark contrast, most antivirus software on Windows recommends disabling Windows Defender — which isn’t even near as protective yet permissive as SIP or Apple silicon’s protection — to prevent conflicts, but we’ve clearly learned since Friday that Windows Defender should never be disabled over some cheaply made security software from some moronic company called CrowdStrike.

The bottom line is that if European regulators get their way, they’ll make Apple disable the software on Apple silicon Macs that disallows unsigned and un-notarized kernel extensions. Currently when put in Reduced Security mode, Apple silicon Macs can run “legacy” kernel extensions, but they have to be signed by Apple beforehand. It can be argued that Friday’s issue wasn’t due to a faulty kernel driver — from CrowdStrike: “Although Channel Files end with the SYS extension, they are not kernel drivers.” — but regardless, this “Channel File” was given root-level access in some capacity to allow it to take down the entire system. This is known thanks to this sentence in CrowdStrike’s technical explanation: “Systems running Linux or macOS do not use Channel File 291 and were not impacted.”

I can’t blame Microsoft for this, even though it is very tempting for me to do so, because it’s the European Commission’s fault for forcing Microsoft to open up its system. Thanks to some ill-informed grandparents in Brussels, the world’s infrastructure came to a screeching halt on what would otherwise be a normal summer Friday.

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:

Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly. The issue is not being caused by Microsoft but by third-party CrowdStrike software that’s widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.

Australian banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters first raised the alarm as thousands of machines started to go offline. The issues spread fast as businesses based in Europe started their workday. UK broadcaster Sky News was unable to broadcast its morning news bulletins for hours this morning and was showing a message apologizing for “the interruption to this broadcast.” Ryanair, one of the biggest airlines in Europe, also says it’s experiencing a “third-party” IT issue, which is impacting flight departures.

Here’s what happened: CrowdStrike, which makes some kind of antivirus software for businesses called Falcon, released a faulty update to the program which contains a corrupted file, called “C-00000291*.sys,” that forces Windows into a boot loop. The result is practically every commercially used Windows computer in the world receiving the update over the air and being plunged into blue screens saying that Windows is unable to launch. And the imagery is marvelous. Take a look.

I’m extremely perplexed why this software is allowed to update without manual intervention, or why CrowdStrike — evidently a technically inept company — doesn’t use staged rollouts for software that 500 of the top 1,000 companies use. App developers with 30 sales a week use staged rollouts so that if an issue is identified, the update can be recalled before it is downloaded to every device — but CrowdStrike clearly didn’t have the intuition to do this.

It’s also idiotic that these mission-critical computers are (a) connected to the internet at all, and (b) not running Linux. I understand that some machines need internet access to collect data, but airport arrivals screens, point-of-sale terminals, and other displays only need information, not internet access. They should instead be connected to a Linux computer using some sort of protected virtual private network with no third-party software, and those computers shouldn’t be updated automatically — the updates should always be verified by a trained IT department.

The amount of stupidity and callousness exhibited by every company impacted by this outage is unbridled. It isn’t just CrowdStrike’s fault: How is one singular file on a computer allowed to take down the entire operating system? Why doesn’t Windows have checks for rogue applications like this? How is one configuration file allowed to throw the entire computer into a boot loop and why isn’t it automatically killed by the system? Mac apps run in sandboxed environments unless they’re given explicit permission to run independently — which nobody should ever do.

Clearly the entire team at CrowdStrike that manages pushing out updates to important software should be fired. So should the leadership team.

Gaby Del Valle, reporting for The Verge:

The FBI has successfully broken into the phone of the man who shot at former President Donald Trump at Saturday’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“FBI technical specialists successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices,” the agency said in a statement on Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation:

The search of the subject’s residence and vehicle are complete.

Also from The Verge, a piece titled “It’s Never Been Easier for the Cops to Break Into Your Phone”:

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones. “Almost every police department in the nation has a device called the Cellebrite, which is a device built for extracting data from phones, and it also has some capability to unlock phones,” Quintin said. Cellebrite, which is based in Israel, is one of several companies that provides mobile device extraction tools (MDTFs) to law enforcement. Third-party MDTFs vary in efficacy and cost, and the likely FBI has its own in-house tools as well. Last year, TechCrunch reported that Cellebrite asked users to keep use of its technology “hush hush.”…

A 2020 investigation by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization Upturn found that more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had access to MDTFs. GrayKey — among the most expensive and advanced of these tools — costs between $15,000 and $30,000, according to Upturn’s report. Grayshift, the company behind GrayKey, announced in March that its Magnet GrayKey device has “full support” for Apple iOS 17, Samsung Galaxy S24 Devices, and Pixel 6 and 7 devices.”

When I originally read the first story, my first thought was that, had Crooks’ smartphone been an iPhone, there would be no way for the bureau to gain access to it without a non-existent backdoor, so the only possible scenario would be for the phone to be so old that the FBI was able to hack it by entering a bunch of passcode combinations until it unlocked, which is what Cellebrite does. Cellebrite only works on old iPhones and Android phones and the vulnerability that made it work has been patched, but it’s unclear if it has been amended to work with newer models and sold only to governments.

Either way, Cellebrite is the least of our concerns. I also didn’t know anything about this new technology, called GrayKey, which apparently is a more sophisticated method of hacking that extracts encrypted data from the operating system instead of brute-force attacking the passcode, something I’m unable to wrap my head around because the encryption key for a device’s information is stored in the Secure Enclave on iOS devices, even the newest of which are vulnerable to GrayKey. How this hasn’t been patched yet is beyond me.

Obviously, I condemn the shooter, who attempted the assassination of former President Donald Trump, and I want to know more about him, including his motive, but that doesn’t stop me from being immensely frustrated that the FBI was able to gain access to his phone. If the FBI is given access to encrypted information from a bad person, it’s also given de facto permission to look at every American’s private information, and that’s incredibly concerning.

There are ways for the government to access data stored in the cloud because Apple stores an encryption key for accounts without Advanced Data Protection enabled, which it is forced to hand over to law enforcement when presented with a lawful warrant. Advanced Data Protection eliminates this encryption key on Apple’s end and requires a so-called recovery key or access from a recovery contact so that when Apple is asked for backdoor access, it has nothing to give to the FBI. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the shooter did not use Advanced Data Protection as it is a relatively obscure feature, but either way, it’s like a heavily guarded gate to a 3-foot-high fence.

If law enforcement can gain access to a phone just by extracting encrypted information like magic, there’s no point in encrypting the data in the cloud and storing the key on-device, where it is supposedly immune to warrants. That’s what’s concerning about this: If there is a known vulnerability in either iOS or Android that allows anyone to extract encrypted information from a device’s Secure Enclave, that is a backdoor for the FBI and authoritarian regimes everywhere around the world.

Obviously, there is a solution to this: Don’t store anything important in the yard. But “if you want to commit crimes, erase the content on your phone” is very bad advice because it’s already inadvisable to be a criminal. The problem isn’t that criminals will be caught — that’s a good thing — it’s that the government will inevitably use this to spy on innocent people. Apple and Google should fix this vulnerability as soon as possible.

Of course, I am jumping to conclusions — we don’t know what phone this is. But that’s irrelevant information because no matter what kind of phone it is, it’s possible for the FBI to get into it. That’s concerning, and that threat should be neutralized.

Minor and meretricious modifications

Image: Apple.

The biggest announcement of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June was Apple Intelligence, the company’s new suite of artificial intelligence features woven throughout its core operating systems: iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. When I wrote about it that month, I concluded Apple amazingly created the first true ambient computer, one that proactively works for the user, not vice versa. But spending time with the newest versions of Cupertino’s software — iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia, and visionOS 2 — I feel like the brains of the company went to powering and creating Apple Intelligence and that the core platforms billions use to work and communicate have been neglected.

Don’t mistake me; I think this year’s operating system updates are good overall. The new software is more customizable, modern, and mature, following the overarching theme of Apple’s recent software updates since 2020, after the breakthrough of iOS 14’s new widget system and macOS 11 Big Sur’s radical redesign. But the updates don’t truly fit the premise of Apple Intelligence, a suite of features unveiled an hour following the new OS demonstrations. While Apple Intelligence weaves itself into people’s lives in a way that only Apple can do, iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and visionOS 2 are subtle. Power users will appreciate the minor tweaks, small feature upgrades, and increased customization opportunities, akin to Android. But most of Apple’s users won’t, leaving a huge part of the company’s market without any new “wow” features since Apple Intelligence is severely restricted hardware-wise.

In iOS 15, the new Focus system and notification previews instantly became a hit. It is impossible to find someone with a modern iPhone who doesn’t know about Focus modes and how they can customize incoming notifications for different times of the day. In iOS 16, users began tweaking their Lock Screens with new fonts, colors, and widgets, and developers knew they instantly had to start creating Lock Screen widgets to appeal to the vast majority of Apple’s users. Try to find someone without a customized Lock Screen — impossible. And in iOS 17, app developers began integrating controls into their ever-popular widgets, and users immediately found their favorite apps updated with more versatile controls and interactivity to get common tasks done quicker. Each of these otherwise incremental years had a stand-out feature that the public instantly jumped on.

In iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, the stand-out feature is Apple Intelligence. Whether it is the new Siri, image editing, or Image Playground and Genmoji, people will be excited to try out Apple’s AI features. The public has shown that it is interested in AI by how successful Gemini and ChatGPT have been over the past two years, so of course people will be intrigued by the most iconic mobile smartphone maker’s AI enhancements. But Apple Intelligence doesn’t run on every device that runs iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia; thus, the overall feature set is much more muted. That isn’t a bad thing, and I know how much work goes into developing great, interactive software, and so do I understand that Apple redirected its efforts to go full steam ahead on Apple Intelligence. That doesn’t mean I’m not underwhelmed by Apple’s mainstay software, though — each of this year’s platforms is thinner than even the slowest of prior years.

I have spent the last month or so with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and visionOS 2, and I have consolidated my feelings on some of the most noteworthy and consequential features coming to the billions of Apple devices worldwide in the fall.

Customization

I’ll begin with the biggest customization features coming to iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. It has become an all too common theme that Apple brings new features to iOS first, then iPadOS the following year, but Apple surprised and brought everything to both the iPhone and iPad at once this year. The theme this year that even Apple couldn’t help but mention in post-keynote interviews is that people should be able to make their phones theirs. People care about personalizing their devices, and Apple’s sole focus was to loosen a bit of the Apple touch in return for some end-user versatility. Apple prefers to exercise control over the iPhone experience: It wants every Home Screen to look immaculate, every Lock Screen to be perfectly cropped and colored, and the user interface to feel like Apple made it no matter what. This is just Apple’s ethos — that’s how it rolls. This year, Apple has copied straight from Android’s homework, letting people change how their devices look in whacky, peculiar ways.

Take the new look for app icons. They can be moved anywhere on the screen in order to make room for a Home Screen wallpaper, for instance, but they are still confined to a grid pattern. For example, they can be put around the screen, at the bottom, or to one side. They are similar to Desktop widgets in macOS 14 Sonoma where they can be placed anywhere on the screen, but they are aligned to look nice. When holding to enter “jiggle mode,” the Home Screen editing mode, the Edit button at the top left now has an option to customize app icons. There, people can enlarge icons and remove the labels, though there isn’t a way to keep the icons at normal size and remove labels, which is a shame. Tapping and holding on an icon also shows its widget sizes so the icon can be replaced with a widget with just one tap. It reminds me of the Windows Phone’s Live Tiles feature.

App icon customization in iOS 18.

The newest, flashiest feature that veers into territory Apple can’t control is the ability to change an app icon’s color scheme. There are four modes: Automatic, Dark, Light, and Tinted. Dark is a new mode where the system applies a dark background to a developer-provided PNG icon, or, for unmodified apps, the default app icon with the primary glyph accented with the icon’s primary color. So, in the case of the Messages app, the bubble would be accented with green and provided separately by an app developer — in this case, the developer is Apple — but the background would be a black gradient. The same applies to Safari: the compass is blue, but the background turns black.

Developers aren’t obligated to opt into the dark theme, but it is preferred that they do by providing iOS with a PNG of their app’s glyph so a dark background can be applied by the system when icons are in the Dark appearance. Developers who choose not to provide specialized icons — which I assume will be a majority of big-name corporations, like Uber and Meta — will still have their icons darkened in most cases because the system automatically cuts out the center glyph from the standard icon and applies a dark background to it, coloring the glyph with the primary accent color. This is most apparent in the YouTube app’s case: The white background is turned to gray by the system, but the button in the middle remains red, just as if YouTube updated the icon and submitted it to Apple.

This works surprisingly well for many apps, especially ones with simple gradient backgrounds and glyphs, and I think it was a good decision on Apple’s part because most developers won’t bother to update their apps. Developers cannot opt out of the system’s darkening of icons, so if they don’t like it, they can’t control how their app looks on people’s Home Screens. However, apps with complex icons, like Overcast or Ivory, aren’t given the same treatment, presumably because the system cannot decipher the main glyph. Instead, apps like this are darkened by turning the brightness down on the colors and increasing the saturation, leading to a rather grotesque appearance. Apple’s automatic theming will work well for most icons, but those with many colors and images — Instagram comes to mind — will be better off with developer-provided PNGs. Artistically complex, faux-darkened icons simply don’t jibe well with optimized or simpler icons.

Dark app icons in iOS 18. YouTube, Google, Overcast, Nest, Uber Eats, and Ivory are not optimized.

Tinted is perhaps the most uncanny and controversial, maybe for the exact reasons Apple feared. The options to change where icons are placed or their light and dark appearances aren’t very risky and are bound to look fine no matter how they are used, so Apple still has a bit of confidence and control over how people’s devices look. But the same isn’t true for tinted icons, where the system applies a negative black-and-white filter to apps, then a color filter of the user’s choice to change which hue an app icon prominently displays. While just like the Dark appearance in the sense that the icon’s background will be black, the accent color — green for Messages, blue for Safari — is user-customizable so that someone can make all of their icons any color.

It looks very unlike Apple, which is probably exactly what the company feared when it developed this feature.

The colors picked in app icons are hand-selected by talented designers and are often tailored to look just perfect — some of the most beautiful iconographies in the land of computing are designed by talented independent artists who design exquisite app icons made just for the apps they represent. In iOS 18, the hard work of these designers is thrown away unless they develop a bespoke themed version of the icon, which must have transparency for the dark background — à la the Dark icon, which the developer also has to provide separately — and a grayscale glyph so the system can apply its own theming to it. In the case of the Messages icon, the file supplied to Apple would be a grayscale Messages bubble, which Apple then applies a color filter. Apple encourages developers to add a gradient from white to gray so that the icon appears elegantly in the Themed icon mode, but it doesn’t make the appearance much better.

The problem, as I have understood it to be, is regarding non-optimized icons and the saturation of the colors. When a non-optimized app is themed, the system applies a negative filter to reverse its colors — white would become black, and vice versa — and then a translucent color layer on top. This works fine for icons made from very simple colors, like black and white, almost as if the developer provided an optimized PNG for Apple to use. But apps with intricate details and prominent light colors look atrocious, nothing less than a can of paint thrown over a finely crafted painting. This is problematic for developers since it ruins the work of their designers, but also for users, who will inevitably complain that some of their favorite apps aren’t optimized and ruin the look of their Home Screens. (Again, Instagram.)

Tinted icons in iOS 18. Notice Overcast and Ivory, as well as the widget.

The common, popular argument against axing this feature entirely is, “So what?” And sure, so what? People can make their Home Screens as distasteful as they’d like because they are their Home Screens, and they should be able to do whatever they’d like to them. I guess that’s true, but it also makes iOS feel cheapened. Even Android does better than this — it does not theme icons when a developer hasn’t provided an optimized version. That’s already a low bar since Google knows nothing about design, but all this will do is encourage people to make bad-looking Home Screens with off-colored icons. Again, “So what?” is an acceptable argument, and I am not a proponent of getting rid of icon theming entirely, but I feel like it could’ve done with a bit more thinking.

The problem isn’t that it is possible to make a bad-looking Home Screen because “good-looking” is in the eye of the beholder. Rather, the default case for the majority who know what they’re doing should be an Apple-like, well-designed Home Screen. With app icon theming, it is easier to make the Home Screen look worse than it is to make it look better — the default is bad, and the onus for that is on Apple. Apple makes the paint cans and the canvas and users should be able to make a nauseating painting, but the paint colors shouldn’t encourage nausea right off the bat. The color picker in Tinted mode is too broad, so many people’s Home Screens are going to be shoddily designed and appear overly saturated because Apple didn’t put in the hard work beforehand to make tinted — or darkened — icons appear well-designed. This is a poor reflection on the human interface design team, not the “ideas” one. And it is certainly a shame when Android is more well-thought-out than iOS.

Or maybe it isn’t, circling back to this article’s trope: Apple doesn’t even tell people how to customize their icons when they set up their iPhones for the first time on iOS 18. Unlike widgets, this isn’t a core system feature and is not advertised very well. It could be a beta bug, but if there isn’t much adoption of icon customization in the first place, large developers will be further disincentivized to develop customizable icons. Unlike interactive widgets — or even normal widgets from iOS 14 — people won’t even think to try app icon theming in the first place because it is not widely advertised in iOS. In fact, I don’t even think the Automatic theming mode that switches from Light to Dark is switched on by default. Knowing how popular Apple is with developers at the moment — not very popular — I don’t think any of these theming features will take off as Apple envisions.

The same is true for Control Center, which brings back pagination for the first time since iOS 10 and is also customizable, with a suite of new controls that users can add wherever they’d like. The new controls are built on the same technology as Lock Screen widgets from iOS 16, and they even look similar. In previous versions of iOS, Control Center customization was confined to Settings, where the most people could do was reorder controls. Now, pressing and holding on Control Center will allow users to reposition controls in a grid pattern, like on the Home Screen, as well as add new ones from third- and first-party apps. Apple has even made controls more granular: Before, Hearing was one Control Center toggle, whereas now it’s separated into a main Hearing option, Background Sounds, and Live Listen for easy access.

Control Center modification in iOS 18.

Control Center options, much like widgets, can also be resized horizontally and vertically, even when they are already placed — a new addition coming to Home Screen widgets, too. Small controls — small circles with a glyph in the middle, as usual — can be expanded into medium- and large-sized toggles depending on their actions. For example, the Media control can be extended to take up the entire width of the screen, or it can be compressed to a single small control. The Text Size control can be stretched to be taller and allow inline adjustments, but it can also be compressed. The system is extremely versatile, just like widgets, and app developers can add their apps’ controls to the controls gallery, contributing a variety of sizes and types. Once a toggle is placed on a Control Center page, it can be resized; controls can also come in a “recommended” size.

Controls can also be made larger, depending on their source app.

The new Control Center is a double-edged sword, and it somewhat reminds me of Focus modes from a few years ago in iOS 15. It is very customizable, which is great for power users as well as developers — or, at least the eager ones — but it isn’t as approachable to the vast majority of users as I’d like it to be. People can add controls to the default first page, but they can also create a new page below it by creating a control larger than what can fit on the first page. There isn’t a way to create a new page with a “+” button or something similar, just like the Home Screen, which is disorienting, even to me. Controls also don’t have set sizes, unlike widgets, which only come in three or four sizes depending on the platform. Some controls can be compressed into a small circle or take up the entire page size, but it isn’t consistent — and there isn’t a way to know all possible control sizes.

In theory, I like what Apple has given the public here, but much like Apple Intelligence, it will require some work from developers who might not want to create more methods of interacting with their apps without having to open the app itself. Widgets were a must-have in 2020 not because developers supported them on Day 1 of their own volition but because users immediately wanted to customize their Home Screens to be more versatile and useful, and thus demanded developers support them. I don’t see that happening with Control Center customization.

That doesn’t mean I’m complaining just for the sake of complaining, but chances are that when iOS 18 ships in the fall, most people will stick to the default layout that has been in place since iOS 11. Control Center customization has to be actively discovered, making it a subtle enhancement to the operating system that really only applies to a small subset of developers whose apps leverage interactivity. For everyone else, it’s just too much work for too little return.

I do find it nice that Apple has finally given users the option to modify Lock Screen controls at the bottom of the screen on iPhones X and newer. Now, people are no longer restricted to the Flashlight and Camera toggles and can swap them out for any Control Center button with a small appearance. Apps that already support the new Control Center customization will have their widgets automatically added to the Lock Screen’s control gallery, too. I think keeping Flashlight¹ is probably advisable, just because of how useful it is, but I have always considered having the camera there is particularly useless because swiping left anywhere on the Lock Screen opens it anyway. I also think Apple should develop a way for makers of third-party camera apps, like the excellent Halide or Obscura apps, to automatically launch their apps upon swiping to the left, but this will do for now.

Lock Screen controls can now be customized in iOS 18.

The last of the personalization features I surmise people will find the most handy is locking and hiding apps. People have always done the weirdest things to make their apps less discoverable, even to people who know their iPhone’s passcode, such as hiding them in folders or disguising them with shortcuts, but they will no longer have to do so because iOS will allow them to be locked inside a Hidden section inside of the App Library. Interestingly, and perhaps cleverly, the Hidden section is always visible, even if someone doesn’t have any hidden apps. This way, nobody can determine if someone has any hidden apps at all — the section will always remain visible. It is also opaque, unlike the tiles — so icons of apps can’t be deciphered just from their color — and it requires Face ID or Touch ID authentication to access, not just a passcode.

Hiding apps in iOS 18.

Locked apps are similar, only that they aren’t squirreled away into a private space in the App Library; they can be placed anywhere on the Home Screen and look just like any other app. However, once they are opened, they require biometric authentication to unlock, and their contents are obscured by a blur. Some have complained that the blur still allows colors from an app’s display to shine through, making the contents visible, but I assume Apple will address this in a later version of the beta. (I propose making the app entirely white or black, depending on the device’s appearance, until it is unlocked.) If a locked app is even briefly swiped away, it will prompt the user for biometrics again — the same goes for when it appears in the App Switcher. I think the feature is well thought out, and many people will use it to hide, let’s say, private information they don’t want their loved ones looking at.

This is what a locked app looks like.

Weirdly, none of these new features — including hiding and locking apps — come to the Mac. I don’t expect Home Screen customization to be there, but the new Control Center isn’t in macOS Sequoia, which is disappointing. I could imagine third-party controls functioning as menu bar applets would, except stashed away in Control Center. (At least the new Control Center came to iPadOS 18.)

Notes and Calculator

Usually, the Notes app and Calculator aren’t associated with each other because they are so different. This time, they are closer than ever through a new feature called Math Notes. Math Notes was easily a highlight of the keynote’s first half, leaving me astonished. Here is how it works: When turned on, a user can write down an equation and append an equals sign to it. The system will then automatically recognize and calculate the equation, and then display the answer to the right of the equation inline. People can even add variables, so if the price of A is $5, B is $15, and C is $40, the system can solve the expression “A + B = $60.” It works with currency, plain numbers, or even algebra, though not calculus for some odd reason.

This feature is available on iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, and isn’t part of Apple Intelligence, meaning it is available to a broader swath of devices. It effectively “sherlocks” Soulver, an app that aims to turn natural expressions into mathematical ones automatically, and while I am sure it hurts for its developer, it’s amazing for math homework, quick budgeting, or bill splitting. On iOS and iPadOS — yes, Calculator comes to iPadOS for the first time in 14 years — Math Notes lives in Notes and Calculator, and on macOS, the feature is in Notes. They sync across devices, even if made in different applications; math notes made in Calculator are in their own folder in Notes.

Math Notes in iOS. In the last image, the math notation is being automatically corrected.

But back to iPadOS: In addition to providing a larger scientific calculator-like mode to take advantage of the iPad’s expansive display — the bare minimum for a 14-year-late entry — Math Notes works with handwriting via the Apple Pencil. Here is how it works: For a while, Notes learns a user’s handwriting through an “on-device machine learning model” and then tries to replicate it to write the answer in their handwriting rather than San Francisco or whatever other system font. It is such an excessive attention to detail that screams Apple, so remarkable that I have immediately forgiven the company for waiting 14 years to develop a calculator for a device that costs thousands of dollars at its priciest.

Math Notes works the same way with handwriting or normal text, but it is substantially more genius when calculating script on the fly, almost magically. If there is a list of numbers and a line is drawn below it, they are immediately summed. Variables and long division work flawlessly in various formats and even with the sloppiest of handwriting. And each time, the system replicates my handwriting almost perfectly, so much so that it would look like I wrote it myself if it weren’t in yellow, the color Notes uses to mark an answer as automatically calculated. There aren’t many more delightful interactions in iPadOS than this, and I think Apple did a fantastic job. Now, there is no need for a calculator in Split View with Notes when working out calculations — they are both bundled together.

Math Notes is so bright that it can even generate graphs from complex equations, à la Desmos, only it can recognize expressions from handwriting and accentuate text to correlate with the graph’s colors for clearer correlation. This still works with typed text, as well, but it is even more impressive when handwriting magically turns into a perfect graph without having to open a third-party app, paste the equation in, screenshot the output, and then paste the image into the note. Math Notes also understands mathematical syntax, both typed and written, so if a number is above another one or follows a caret (^) or two asterisks (**), it will automatically be recognized as an exponent, for example. And slashes and Xs are automatically converted into proper symbols for enhanced readability when typed — for example, “3/2” for “3 divided by 2” would be rewritten into “3 ÷ 2”; “3 x 2” for “3 times 2” would be rewritten as “3 × 2.”

The extraordinary engineering prowess of Math Notes isn’t just limited to mathematical calculations, either — it comes to all handwriting by way of Smart Script, a new feature that corrects and refines script. Messy, quick writers will know the pain of borderline illegible handwriting, and Smart Script straightens bad writing into more legible, pleasing characters while maintaining the original script’s style. In other words, it doesn’t look like Helvetica with some curvier lines — it actually looks like a person’s handwriting, but if they could write better. It didn’t look like a one-to-one replica, but it was good enough to pass — it seems like it errs on the side of making the writing look better than worse. (And yes, I tried — it works with cursive, even bad cursive.)

The advantages of enabling the system to clone handwriting are numerous. If a word is misspelled, Smart Script will offer to rewrite it correctly just as if it were typed, red squiggle and everything. It can also capitalize words and turn copied text into handwriting, so if someone pastes text from another app into the middle of a handwritten note, it will be automatically converted to fit in. (It is much like the reverse of optical character recognition.) iPadOS can also make room for new writing by way of a “touch and drag” gesture, which is much nicer than having to squeeze in a word like someone would on normal paper.

Paper is limited because it is a physical object, and the iPad has carried paper’s limitations for so long, up until Apple added the “squeeze” gesture in May to the Apple Pencil Pro. But come to think about it, it makes sense for text to be automatically restructured and spell-checked when the iPad is just a computer at the end of the day. Why should handwritten text be any different from typed text? Until now, the system couldn’t offer automatic text editing functionality because it would require the text to be rewritten, which was only possible with computer typefaces, but by treating a user’s handwriting as a font, Apple has cleverly gotten around this. I have always yearned for better text editing for handwriting, and even when Apple announced Scribble a few years ago, I still found handwriting cumbersome. Now, even as someone who has bad handwriting, I find it more enjoyable to write on the iPad.

Math Notes and Smart Script in iPadOS 18.

There are other features in Notes and Calculator coming to iOS and macOS, too:

• Highlighting and text coloring come to typed notes for better styling.

• Headers and their contents are collapsible, allowing for better organization. (There still isn’t Markdown support in Notes, which makes it useless for my writing needs.)

• Live audio transcription opens an interface to begin speaking, akin to Voice Memos, but transcribes speech into a note. Recordings don’t have to be transcribed; they can remain in a note just as an attachment and be searched. (In the future, Apple Intelligence will let users summarize them, too, which can be handy for meeting notes.)

• To erase a word in handwritten documents, the “scratch out” gesture from Scribble has been transplanted to work with any handwritten script. Scribbling over any word removes it and moves the surrounding words together.

New Notes features in macOS 15 Sequoia.

• The Calculator app has history now.

• There is a conversion mode in Calculator. Switching it on shows an interface with numerous units, ranging from currency to weight, length, energy, power, and so much more. This feature wasn’t even mentioned during the keynote, but conversions have been built into Spotlight for years now.

• On iOS, the scientific calculator can now be displayed vertically.

The new Calculator app in iOS 18.

I reckon Math Notes will be beloved by many because it is in the Notes app rather than confined to Calculator — I know I will use it daily. And Smart Script is truly impressive technology, especially for messy writers like myself.

Photos

If I had to guess, Photos is one of the most used apps on the iPhone, probably below Messages and Safari. So when Apple announces a massive redesign that is not only unlike anything that has ever graced the Photos app but any app in iOS, it is bound to be controversial. I don’t think the new Photos app is bad, but it is a fundamental shift in how the company wants people to view and resurface their photographs over decades. The Photos app in its original form was a simple grid of images, chronologically sorted, with some albums and automatic media type sorting, and it was great for photo libraries mainly consisting of a few hundred pictures, all taken on iPhones. But as iPhoto became an app of the past and iCloud Photo Library replaced My Photo Stream — which synced photos between Apple devices on the same iCloud account — photo libraries have ballooned into hundreds of thousands of shots encompassing people’s entire lives.

So, Apple built on Photos to surface old pictures and help people scroll back in time. It built filters at the bottom of the grid to make it easier to view photos by year and month, and perhaps most noteworthily of all, a Memories feature to recollect old images and create custom videos of trips, events, and people. But here’s the dilemma: nobody uses them. Memories were always hidden in a For You tab beside the main photo library, so many people would only access them via widgets, which the company thought was problematic since iOS does a ton of work to automatically categorize photos in the background and make them visible for viewing. What’s the point of taking photos if it is arduous to view them? In iOS 18, Apple changed that.

Now, Apple’s ML-created Memories are front and center, and iOS automatically generates “collections” of memorable days, people, the “Memories” videos themselves, memorable photos, and trips. The idea is for Apple’s ML to function as a librarian for photo libraries, per se, revisiting old memorable moments while keeping their form as photos intact. Take trips, for instance: Photos uses geolocation data to categorize vacations away from home and associates them with the trip. These groups are all categorized by year and month, so they will be labeled descriptively, such as “New York, July 2018.” All of the years are shown at the top for easy access, and each trip is turned into its own bespoke album of sorts, with only the best shots placed at the top.

The Days filter works similarly to the Days view in the old Photos app from iOS 17, but it also shows the best images first, as the Photos widget does. It also shows videos and other types of media, as well, but is smart enough to exclude screenshots and other detritus unless that was the only media taken that day. It will also filter images based on where they were taken, so if one part of a day was spent in one city and the rest in another, they will be separated into different sections for better clarity. Photos also considers national holidays and personal events, like anniversaries and birthdays, and properly labels them. The entire system is very well thought out, and I say that even as someone who dislikes smart ML-powered photo categorization.

In older versions of iOS, Photos would usually fixate on events that I don’t particularly care for. I don’t need to see hundreds of photos of when I was 4 because that’s not particularly memorable to me. Instead, I want to see what pictures I took a year ago, or what I did on my birthday during the pandemic. The older photos get, the less attachment I have to them — that doesn’t mean they aren’t special, or that I don’t want to look at them, but I don’t want to be reminded of them every second as if my only joyous moments were when I was young. The older version of Photos spiraled into nostalgia and ignored recent moments. In contrast, the app’s new design focuses more on recent events since each filter is laid out in reverse chronological order, from newest to oldest.

When going to Days or Trips, the newest events show first, so I can look at my latest travels before I go back in time to ones from long-ago years. It isn’t hard to see old ones, and they are still personalized equally well, but they are not upfront. If I want to see trips from decades ago, I can by just tapping the button I want, but they are not presented forcefully in the ways Memories still does. I have never liked the thought of personalized AI-generated videos of Ken Burns effects on photos I have taken from years prior — they seem artificial and I have never enjoyed looking at them. Now, there are more ways to utilize Photos’ intelligence while actually being able to enjoy the photos themselves rather than having them be converted into an uglier, in my opinion, inferior format.

I have read a lot of takes online that the new Photos app is less pleasant for people who strictly use the chronological grid and custom-made albums since it pushes categories iOS creates by itself more prominently. I disagree, however: What Apple did is reorganize the app to make the automatic librarian, as I like to call it, more friendly for old-school users, such that the system isn’t telling anyone which pictures to look at, but surfaces old times. Photos before used to choose the best images from moments it thought were precious. It still does that, but it also shows all moments and makes the events themselves easier to find. The Moments (capital-M) movies are still there for the few who enjoy them, but the new filtering is, to exemplify the library example, more akin to a librarian helping someone find the book they are interested in than one helping someone discover a new genre of books. Both kinds of assistance can be helpful, but old-school users who know what they want and just want easier access to it will much rather prefer the former.

To facilitate this broad rethinking of Photos, the design needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. If all of this precious work was limited to the For You tab, it would feel too busy; similarly, integrating it into user-made albums would blur the lines between the user organization of photos and system suggestions. The librarian is only a librarian, and it shouldn’t interrupt the patron’s work. So, Apple thought of perhaps the most peculiar circumvention of this problem: eliminating the tab bar entirely. The result is a very flat navigational structure in a typically hierarchical app. Think about it: the grid is a tab, which is then segmented into Years, Months, Weeks, and Days; Memories had section headers for different kinds of media; and Albums had different media types and albums, which each had their own subviews. Now, all three tabs are merged into one modal sheet.

This design isn’t inherently a bad idea, but it is confusing. At the top, the grid remains, but the Days filter is now missing because it has been added to the sheet below, reminiscent of the one in Maps. Albums now live near suggestions from the system, but media types open a second sheet atop the main navigation sheet which slides in below the grid of photos. Together, the new changes make me feel a bit claustrophobic, where every item is too confined and I want some of the clutter to be segmented into separate tabs, just like any other app. I am one to enjoy the chronological grid because it reminds me of a real photo library, where albums function like real physical albums, and I only want the system to help me catalog them — not tell me what pictures are the best to look at.

The new design is intrinsically pushy because its creators wanted it to be that way, but I’m unsure of how quickly it is growing on me. Firstly, I don’t appreciate how the sheet is always visible when all I want to see by default is the grid of photos. It is possible to hide the navigation sheet by tapping an X in the right corner, expanding the grid to take up the full screen, but I want it to remain hidden by default upon the app’s launch.

The sheet takes up much more vertical room on iOS than the tab bar when it doesn’t necessarily add much new functionality, which makes the grid feel cramped when it never did before. Rarely do I have a use for the items in the sheet — just because they’re more prominently placed doesn’t mean I need them more — so I would like to be able to collapse it when the app is first opened. For an update that prioritizes customization so prominently, I’m surprised to see that such a simple feature wasn’t implemented. I’m sure I’m not the only one yearning for such an option.

Even before the new Photos app redesign, I have long wanted to hide the tab bar, mostly because I don’t use it for anything — it wasn’t that long ago when searching photos was a fool’s errand and I rarely look at albums on iOS. Apple has seemingly realized this, but instead of moving the navigation design to a split view style, akin to Mail or Messages, which would allow for a combined view while making the grid front-and-center, it instinctively decided to artificially diminish the importance of the grid, which is still most people’s favorite way of looking at photos on a small screen.

Talking to project managers or marketing executives from Apple makes the motivation for this change sharply apparent: Apple is disappointed that users don’t take advantage of its intelligent ML, so it wants to bring it front and center. But that is a flawed approach because Apple should work for the people, not vice versa. I don’t think Apple’s enhancements to the Photos app are bad — it built a librarian into it, which is commendable — but the company needs to tame the showiness a bit.

The new Photos sheet can be customized.

My lede for this article was that Apple’s newest software platforms require users to discover for themselves the “wow” factor, and the same is true for the Photos app — even more so, I’d argue, due to how radically different it is. People will be off-put by the elimination of the tab bar and the aggressive positioning of system-generated content without realizing that most of it can be hidden, which is entirely new in iOS 18. For example, I despise Memories, so I have scrolled down, tapped Customize, and removed that section from the navigation entirely. Every section can be removed and rearranged, making the entire app much more flexible than ever before, which is a godsend to remove clutter and simplify the interface.

Moreover, sections can also be added and prioritized: The top area of the screen which the grid usually occupies acts as a swappable stack of views, like the Home Screen, so users can add albums, Trips, Days, and certain media types like videos into the stack and swipe between collections. This makes the entire Photos app infinitely customizable; no longer is it a simple grid and tab bar because the tab bar is rearrangeable and the grid is pseudo-replaceable. (It isn’t possible to remove the grid or select a collection as the default primary view.) I have set mine to allow easy access to videos, and when a collection is displayed in place of the grid, it cycles through various pieces of media from it. It adds to the complexity yet versatility in a way that ties into the motif of this year’s OS updates, for better or worse. I’m interested to observe how the broader public views this reshaping of a quintessential iOS app.

There is a reason I specify that the new Photos app is an iOS app: it isn’t available on the Mac. The Mac does receive the new categories, like Trips and Memorable Days, and they are displayed in the sidebar alongside user-created albums, but there isn’t a redesign anywhere to be found in the app. I think this is a good thing because the mobile version of the Photos app on iOS and iPadOS is designed for quick viewing, whereas the Mac version should be broader in nature to let the user manage their libraries. Users value ease of use and speed on mobile platforms but prefer to be unobstructed by the system’s preferences on the Mac while also retaining access to the niceties of mobile interfaces. Still, though, it seems incongruous that the Photos app is so drastically different on two of Apple’s flagship platforms, so much so that they don’t even feel like the same product. The iOS app has a flat navigational structure, whereas the Mac’s is more traditional.

More modifications to the Photos app in iOS 18.

I also feel that because more iPhone users have iPads than Macs, Apple should have brought split view-style navigation to the iPad app rather than the sheet design from iOS. The iOS app is by far the most known of the three versions, but it is used much differently than the iPad and Mac variants — the iPhone’s is used to check on recently taken images, whereas the iPad and Mac versions are, due to the devices’ larger screens, pleasant for consumption. The bottom sheet in iPadOS feels like it occupies too much space on the larger screen when it could be used instead to display a larger grid of photos while keeping a compact sidebar to the left, similar to Shortcuts. The iPad version does have a sidebar, but it is more of a supplementary interface element than the main design.

The new design is controversial and changes how numerous parts of Photos work. The media view in the Camera app differs with modified buttons and layouts, the video player is also replaced with the standard iOS-native one rather than the Photos-specific scrubber which displayed thumbnails of the video, and the editor is slightly modified, with item labels removed from some icons for a simpler look. The whole app is bound to garner attention — and perhaps controversy — when it ships later this year, and I still think there is a lot more room for improvement before the operating systems are out of beta.

iPhone Mirroring

The problem is simple yet insurmountable: Many developers don’t make Mac apps. The reason for this isn’t necessarily Apple’s fault, but the Mac is a smaller platform than iOS and iPadOS, and most iOS apps from well-known developers like Uber and Google aren’t available on the Mac. These services have desktop websites, but they are subpar — and more often than not, people just use their iPhones to access certain apps when there isn’t a desktop app available. The disadvantages of this are numerous, the most obvious being if a person’s phone is in another room or a bag. Apple has devised a clever yet obvious solution to this predicament: iPhone Mirroring, a new feature in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia which mirrors an iPhone’s screen via a first-party app to macOS.

When I first saw Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, demonstrate this feature during the WWDC keynote, I instinctively felt it was lazily implemented. I still do mostly, but I also don’t think that is inherently a bad thing.

When a compatible iPhone and Mac are signed into the same Apple account², the iPhone Mirroring app becomes available through Spotlight in macOS, and opening immediately establishes a connection to the phone. I haven’t tested iPhone Mirroring using an Apple account with multiple iPhones signed in, but I assume it will connect to the iPhone within closest proximity since I have found it fails to connect if the iPhone is far away. For instance, it isn’t possible to connect to an iPhone in another building. The iPhone and Mac don’t have to be on the same Wi-Fi network, however; the iPhone can be connected to cellular data as well.

Once connected, which generally takes a few seconds, the iOS interface is displayed in an iPhone-shaped window, even down to the Dynamic Island and corner radius, though the device’s frame — like the bezels and buttons — isn’t displayed, unlike the iOS simulator in Xcode for developers. The status bar, Spotlight, and the App Switcher are accessible, but Control Center and Notification Center aren’t because they require swiping down from the top to open and that isn’t a supported gesture. To close an app, there is a button in the iPhone Mirroring Mac app’s toolbar to navigate to the Home Screen or the Home Bar at the bottom of the virtual iPhone screen can be clicked. (The same is true for the App Switcher.)

iPhone Mirroring in macOS 15 Sequoia.

When iPhone Mirroring launches, the app navigates straight to the Home Screen and there is no need to authenticate with Touch ID on the Mac to unlock the device, except for the first time when the iPhone’s passcode is needed, just like when an iPhone is initially plugged into an unfamiliar computer. As the phone is being used via a Mac, a message appears on its Lock Screen indicating iPhone Mirroring is in progress. If it is unlocked during an iPhone Mirroring session, it disconnects and the Mac app reads: “iPhone Mirroring has ended due to iPhone use. Lock your iPhone and click Try Again to restart iPhone Mirroring.” On the iPhone, a message is displayed from the Dynamic Island saying that the iPhone has been accessed from a Mac recently with a button to change settings.

There are some other limitations beyond not being able to use the iPhone’s display while iPhone Mirroring is active: there isn’t a way to use the iPhone’s camera, authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID, or drag and drop files between macOS and iOS yet, though the latter is coming later this year, according to Apple. I assume the reason for these constraints is that Apple wants both the Mac and iPhone users to know both devices are linked so people can’t spy on each other. To access iPhone Mirroring, the Mac must be unlocked and iPhone Mirroring must be approved in Settings on both devices for the first time after updating. The feature also can’t be used while the iPhone is “hard locked,” i.e., when it requires a passcode to be unlocked, such as after a restart.

iPhone Mirroring notifications in iOS 18.

Interacting with iOS from a Mac is strange, and it doesn’t even feel like iOS apps on Apple silicon Macs. The closest analogue is Xcode’s iPhone simulator, even down to the size of the controls, though the device’s representation in macOS isn’t to scale; it’s smaller. The best way to use iOS on macOS is with a trackpad since most iOS developers don’t support keyboard shortcuts, so swiping between pages or clicking buttons feels more natural on a Mac laptop or Magic Trackpad. Scrolling requires two fingers and is inertial, just as it is on iOS, so it feels different from scrolling in a native Mac app. Clicking Return doesn’t submit most text fields or advance to the next page, and some apps, like X, don’t even open in iPhone Mirroring for some bizarre reason. The Mac’s keyboard is used for text input.

Otherwise, it mostly feels like connecting a mouse to an iPhone, which most people probably have never done, but I think it feels right after some adjustment. I believe iPhone Mirroring should be used for niche edge cases where it is best to use the iOS version of an app, like ordering an Uber, when pulling out a phone would otherwise be an unnecessary workflow distraction. Otherwise, I still think websites and iOS apps on Apple silicon Macs are a better, more polished experience; I wouldn’t use the Overcast app on the iPhone via iPhone Mirroring over the iPad version available in the Mac App Store, for instance.

This will easily be the most used and appreciated feature of macOS Sequoia, which, upon introspection, is somewhat of a melancholy statement. If developers made great Mac apps, as they should, there would be no need for this feature — but Apple realized that it couldn’t bet on every developer making a great desktop experience, so it invented a way to bring the iPhone to the Mac. Think about it: The iPhone was made to be an accessory to the Mac for on-the-go use, but so many companies have made a footing on the smartphone, so now the iPhone needs to be on the Mac for desktop computing to be as capable and practical. I’m unsure how I feel about the technology world becoming more mobile-focused, and I don’t think Apple does either, but for the best feature in macOS Sequoia to be literally the iPhone itself is an interesting and perhaps disappointing paradox.

If I had to bet, I think Apple conceived iPhone Mirroring right after Continuity Camera was introduced as part of macOS 13 Ventura in 2022. While an iPhone is used as a webcam, its notifications are rerouted to the Mac to which it is connected. iPhone Mirroring builds on that foundation and diverts all iPhone notifications for apps not installed or available on the Mac to authenticated computers. When an iPhone is connected, the Notifications pane in System Settings displays a section entitled “Mirror iPhone Notifications From,” where individual apps can be disallowed. Apps whose notifications are already turned off in iOS are disabled with a message that reads: “Mirroring disabled from your iPhone.” I’m happy this exists because, without it, notifications that would otherwise be too distracting would appear on my Mac.

Both notification rerouting and iPhone Mirroring aim to lower distraction on the Mac, and it works: I use my phone less, as indicated by my iPhone’s Screen Time charts³ for the past few weeks, and I’m able to quickly look at notifications without having to look down and authenticate with Face ID. This also addresses one of my biggest iOS pet peeves: using Face ID while the iPhone is on a desk. If facial recognition fails, the iPhone must be picked up and tapped again to retry Face ID, which is inconvenient when I’m working and already distracted by a most likely unimportant notification. I have always preferred Mac notifications to iOS ones because I can simply swipe them away; now I know that if a notification has come through on my iPhone and hasn’t appeared on the Mac, I can ignore it.

I rarely click into notifications unless they are text messages, but when clicked, notifications from iOS on the Mac automatically open the iPhone app they were sent from in a new iPhone Mirroring window. This system of notification management I have become accustomed to since iPhone Mirroring launched in the second iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia betas has been helpful, and I think many people will feel the same way. It is a perfect way of minimizing distractions and truly something only Apple could pull off. It is flawless — I have never had it fail, not even once — the frame rate is smooth, notifications are instant, and it has made me less reliant on my physical iPhone, allowing me to leave it in another room while I work elsewhere. It elegantly ties into the theme of this year’s OS releases: minor, appreciated by the few, sometimes meretricious, but mostly superb.

Passwords

Usually, iCloud Keychain — Apple’s password manager — is a forgotten-about, taken-for-granted part of iOS and macOS, mostly because it has always been buried in Settings only to be used in Safari and supported Chromium-based browsers. Now, iCloud Keychain has its own app, aptly named Passwords, available on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS. Functionally, it works the same as the pane in Settings, but it shows that Apple is serious about making the password manager on Apple platforms as good as possible. My biggest complaint with passwords in Settings was that it was always hard to find what I needed when I needed it the most, and the new Passwords app makes the experience more like third-party password managers, though made by Apple.

The Passwords app isn’t revolutionary, but no Apple service is; Apple caters to the bottom 80 percent, and power users can enjoy the versatile tools third parties make. I don’t think Apple “Sherlocked” any third-party password manager here — all it did was make its app more reliable and better for the people who use it, which is most iPhone users who use a password manager at all, already a minority. The new Passwords app adds login categorization, some basic sorting, and a menu bar applet on the Mac for easy access, which I’ve found quite handy after switching away from 1Password. It is an alright password manager and does what it needs to do acceptably, but I wish it were more fully featured and allowed for more customization.

For example, the Passwords app doesn’t add custom fields to items, which I would argue isn’t a power-user feature at all. There is only a Notes field for adding other information, such as alternative codes for two-factor authentication. And my biggest gripe now with Apple’s password manager entirely is that there isn’t an “emergency kit,” per se, so if someone loses access to all of their devices and Apple account, there isn’t a way for them to gain access to their password manager — both are intrinsically coupled. Third-party options, like the aforementioned 1Password, allow users to print an emergency kit they can store with other important documents so that if they lose access to their devices, they can still log into their password manager, and thus, all of their various accounts. With Apple’s password manager, the canonical “master password” is the Apple account password, and if someone can’t get into their Apple account, they’re also locked out of every one of their accounts. (This especially applies to those with Advanced Data Protection enabled.)

This is why, though I still recommend Apple’s password manager to almost everyone, I keep a backup of my passwords in 1Password and will continue to do this until Apple offers a better way to access passwords — and perhaps only passwords — without an Apple account password. I also recommend everyone enable Stolen Device Protection on iOS because it requires biometric authentication to gain access to the Passwords app; without this feature enabled, anyone with a device’s passcode can access Passwords since there isn’t a master password. Stolen Device Protection isn’t available on iPadOS, which is problematic, and perhaps Apple should consider allowing people to set a master password for the Passwords app, like the Notes app, where a device’s passcode isn’t the only option to lock notes.

The Passwords app itself is quite barebones, though now it is usable for people with large collections in a way the Settings pane wasn’t due to the lack of organization. Most people will still search for items, and six categories are also displayed in a grid in the sidebar for easy access: All, Passkeys, Codes, Wi-Fi, Security, and Deleted. This is helpful because finding passkeys is simpler now and security codes are all on one page, similar to third-party offerings. I wish Apple would allow people to create custom tags or folders, though, as well as pin favorite items for quick access at the top of the sidebar. Still, however, this is a welcome enhancement to the usability of Passwords — it is possible to find particular items now, whereas the version nestled in Settings was nearly impossible to use.

The Passwords app also finally allows for items without a website, which is helpful for computer passwords or other logins not on the web. Wi-Fi passwords stored in iCloud Keychain by Apple devices automatically are saved in the Wi-Fi section, finally coming to iOS after being confined to the arcane Keychain Access app in macOS for decades.

The new Passwords app in iOS 18.

I have a few interface complaints with the Passwords app, and while not dealbreakers, they might make people reconsider switching from 1Password, which already has a terrible enough interface:

• The app locks after a few seconds, even on the Mac, which is inconvenient when copying information between apps. It shouldn’t lock on iOS immediately after a user has switched to another app or lock on macOS at all unless the computer has been inactive. More bafflingly, it locks on visionOS, which is truly inscrutable; as if there is a security risk to exposed passwords on visionOS.

• Since the app is built in SwiftUI — Apple’s newest cross-platform framework for programming user interfaces — text input fields in macOS are aligned right-to-left in left-to-right languages. This isn’t a quirk limited to the Passwords app, but it is the most irritating there, especially when manipulating case- and character-sensitive passwords: Normally, the text cursor moves to the right after every character beginning at the left because English is a left-to-right language. In Passwords and other SwiftUI apps, the text cursor stays at the right edge of the field and does not move rightward — instead, characters always appear to the left of the cursor. This is not how any English text field should operate, and it flummoxes me.

• Options for creating new passwords are limited to normal strong passwords and ones without special characters, referring to the periodic dashes Apple adds to system-generated passwords. Automatically generated passwords never include other symbols, like punctuation, to make the password more complex — oftentimes, websites have requirements for these characters, and Passwords isn’t accommodating of them.

• Passwords is very fastidious about when it auto-fills passwords on a website. For example, if the saved website for a login is set to the root domain of a website (example.com), but the login page is a subdomain (login.example.com), it will not auto-fill the password; all domains must be added to the item in advance. If it is not added, Passwords will offer to add it automatically, but it will create a new item instead of adding the new domain to the existing item. (This might be a bug.)

Overall, despite my numerous niggles, I find the Passwords app to be much more workable and flexible than when it was limited to Settings, as well as a suitable replacement for 1Password. I still use the latter, but I have only opened the app a few times since June to keep passwords up to date, and I enjoy using the functional AutoFill in Safari and Chromium browsers with Apple’s Passwords app. I recommend it for most people, even if it is limited at times, and I think it is well overdue for Apple to pursue a standalone password application. It says a lot that I felt a whole section for Passwords was warranted in this year’s OS hands-on.

The new Passwords menu bar applet in macOS 15 Sequoia.

macOS Productivity Updates

While Apple didn’t sherlock any password managers this year, it did sherlock window organizers and video background apps for macOS, two features people have been using for years but that Apple somehow hasn’t integrated into the system.

Window management on the Mac has historically been sub-par, or at least second-class to Windows, which has long had options for tiling windows to preset sizes and positions by clicking and dragging a window to the side of the display or using a host of keyboard shortcuts. On macOS, third-party apps like the free and open-source Rectangle and paid Magnet were required to reorganize windows this way, but Apple has now built this functionality into macOS Sequoia, ending a decades-long window management nightmare on the Mac.

macOS has enshrouded basic window management within the maximize button at the top left of windows since OS X 10.11 El Capitan; it must be clicked and held to reveal a context menu to go full-screen and tile a window to the left or right of the screen. But this method had compromises: the window would always be in full-screen, which hid the menu bar and dock and opened a separate space on the desktop. It was also limited to two windows which could only be split half and half, so this method was never preferred over third-party options. As a decades-long Mac user, I have never used the maximize button because I prefer to resize windows than go into full-screen mode, which is only useful for focused work sessions in one app. In macOS Sequoia, Apple has added window tiling — automatic resizing and repositioning of windows — into the maximize button context menu alongside split screen mode.

Clicking and holding on the button presents a few options: tiling to the left, right, top half, or bottom half. Additionally, there are four options to manipulate the chosen window and other windows in a space, like half and half, half and two quarters, or four quarters. These modes use the last focused windows in order, so if the current window is Safari and the second most recently focused one is Mail, the half-and-half mode would tile Safari to the left and Mail to the right of the screen. There is also an option to maximize the current window to the full size of the screen, which can also be done by clicking the window’s toolbar twice in any app. This suite of controls mimics but does not entirely replace Rectangle and Magnet’s, which also offer centering and more tiling options for more windows, but they’re overdue and good enough for a first attempt for the vast majority of users — sherlocking.

These commands are not only restricted to the maximize menu, which most seasoned Mac users don’t even bother using — they are also in the menu bar within the Window and Move & Resize menus. However, I’ve found them sometimes to be missing when an app has added custom items to the Window menu, such as BBEdit, which is why they are also accessible via keyboard shortcuts involving the Globe modifier, macOS’ new modifier key for window management available on newer Mac keyboards from late 2020 onward. Pressing Globe and Control and the correct arrow key will tile the window to the top, bottom, left, or right halves of the screen, while holding Globe, Shift, Control, and an arrow key will move the current and last most-recent windows to pre-defined tiled configurations. Quarter-tiling windows can only be toggled via the menu bar and maximize button; there is no keyboard shortcut, unlike Magnet and Rectangle.

Options for window tiling in macOS 15 Sequoia.

Most people will choose the left and right tiled option in most cases, which is easy to access with a simple keyboard shortcut — or two to tile two windows. macOS also remembers the last window position when using the tiling shortcuts, so dragging the window out of its tiled spot on the screen will return it to its prior size. (The keyboard shortcut Globe-Control-R will also return the focused window to the last size and position.) When a window is tiled, it moves to the correct position with a graceful animation and leaves some space between the edge of the screen and the beginning of the window, though that can be disabled in System Settings, which I recommend to maximize screen real estate. Windows can also be dragged to the screen’s left, right, top, or bottom to be tiled automatically, just like Windows, which ought to be the most popular way of using this feature.

Window tiling in macOS 15 Sequoia.

It is quite comical that it took Apple so long to integrate basic window tiling into macOS, but, alas, it is finally here. I’m not going to switch away from Magnet because it still has more features, and I don’t think Apple’s offering will be sufficient for power users, but it certainly will slow sales for window management apps on the Mac App Store. File this one under the list of features people won’t really notice until they know about them, just like much of this year’s software improvements from WWDC. (I can’t wait for when Apple inevitably introduces this to Stage Manager on iPadOS in five years and the crowd goes wild.)

In a similar vein, Apple also outdid Zoom and Microsoft Teams by bringing virtual video backgrounds system-wide to every app that uses the camera in macOS. Apple is exercising the upper hand it gained with its work in Portrait Mode from macOS Ventura and presenter effects from macOS Sonoma by using the Neural Engines in Apple silicon Macs to separate people and objects from the background with decent accuracy — much better than Zoom — allowing people to set backgrounds for videoconferencing. The algorithm does struggle when wearing over-ear headphones in my testing, as well as in low-light conditions, but in well-lit rooms, it works well. It even works with complex backgrounds, such as against a bed’s headboard or in a busy room, and I think people should use it over Zoom’s offering. People can choose from various system offerings, such as the macOS 10.13 High Sierra wallpaper, pre-installed color gradients, or their own photos from the Photos app or Finder.

Backgrounds can also be combined with other video effects from previous versions of macOS, such as Studio Light, which changes the hue and contrast of the background and a subject’s face. I do, however, wish there were a green screen mode for better accuracy as I find the system to be a bit finicky with hair, exhibiting the typical fuzziness around the edges. But mostly, it works just like Portrait Mode, except instead of a blurred backdrop, it is replaced with an image. Curiously, Apple does not offer videos as backdrops, unlike Zoom, but I find those distracting anyway.

Building on presenter overlays from last year, macOS will also display a screen sharing preview in apps like FaceTime and Zoom from the menu bar. There, users will also be able to allow participants on a call to control the screen without the need to give the app accessibility permissions — the application programming interface, or API, introduced in macOS Sonoma for screen sharing sandboxes screen sharing so the system handles it — or change which window is broadcast. Screen sharing has always been arduous in macOS, and putting all controls in one menu is convenient.

Messages

Aside from Image Playground and Genmoji, Messages received some subdued improvements on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS that perfectly tie into this year’s WWDC keynote: minor, meretricious announcements. Apple added text formatting and emoji reactions to iMessage, so users can add bolded, italicized, struck through, or underlined text to their messages⁴, as well as Tapback to messages with any emoji — something the entire world has collectively been requesting for ages. iMessage effects can also be added to “any word, letter, phrase, or emoji,” according to the company, and the system will suggest them as a user types into the text field.

Connectivity-wise, Apple finally expanded satellite connectivity beyond Emergency SOS: People with iPhones 14 or later can send text messages without cellular or Wi-Fi service with select carriers by aligning their iPhones with satellites in Earth’s orbit via the same wizard used for Emergency SOS. I couldn’t try this feature because it doesn’t seem to be in beta yet, but there isn’t a limit to how many messages can be sent. This seems like a perfect opportunity for Apple to begin charging for satellite connectivity — or add it to iCloud+ — so it can remain free for emergencies, but for now, Apple has indicated that it will remain free for two years after the purchase of a new iPhone. I predict this will change by the end of the year — Apple should always keep the emergency service free, but it has the opportunity to turn off-the-grid niceties into paid features.

Text messages can now be scheduled to be sent in the future, a feature Android has had for years that has become a laughingstock. Send Later is a new module in the iMessage Apps drawer — see: last year’s commentary on the awkward design of this part of the Messages app — and when opened, a straightforward interface appears to set a date to send a message later. Multiple messages can be scheduled, too, even when the device is off or out of charge since they are uploaded to iCloud first. Night owls and early risers will appreciate this feature greatly, and it is massively belated.

Updates to Messages in iOS 18.

But the most underrated, behindhand, and its-about-time feature is the introduction of Rich Communication Services on iOS. Finally, irrevocably, and decisively. RCS enables standard messaging features like read receipts, high-quality media, and Tapbacks to chats with Android devices, practically ending the iMessage-on-Android debate that has engulfed the technology industry since iMessage’s 2011 introduction. RCS is mostly functionally equivalent to iMessage, and while it is obvious that its introduction won’t spur any defections from iOS to Android, it will make iOS-to-Android chats more up to standard with 2024’s messaging requirements.

RCS threads are colored in green, just like SMS ones are, but they are indicated with an “RCS” label in the text message input field. They sync between devices like SMS messages do and work with satellite connectivity. Most carriers in the United States, like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, support RCS, and most smartphones running the latest version of Android do, too — though Google Voice doesn’t, for some puzzling reason. When someone contacts an Android user on iOS 18, the message thread will be automatically converted to RCS from SMS, allowing for inline Tapbacks — no more “[Contact] reacted with a thumbs-up” — full-resolution images and videos, voice messages, read receipts, and more. While it isn’t a one-to-one replica of iMessage’s feature suite — iMessage is still the preferred messaging standard, I would say — it comes near enough.

The largest omission feature-wise is end-to-end encryption: Like SMS messages, but unlike iMessage, RCS is not encrypted. Android-to-Android RCS communication is encrypted because Google, the maker of Android, has built a special Google-exclusive version of RCS with end-to-end encryption for use on its operating system. Google welcomed Apple to use the standard it built, but Apple refused for blatantly obvious reasons, opting to remain with the Global System for Mobile Communications Association’s open-source RCS standard, left without encryption. Apple, Google, and the GSMA have said that they are working together to build encryption into the public, non-Google version of the standard, but currently, RCS chats remain unsecure. This is easily the most important exclusion and differentiator between iMessage and RCS, and why using third-party apps, like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, continues to be the best method of cross-platform messaging.

But in the United States, as I have written about and bemoaned many times, people use the default messaging service pre-installed on their device, whether it be Google Messages or Apple Messages, not a third-party offering. This is the closest the United States will ever get to true cross-platform messaging, and it is already maddening enough that it took this long for Apple to adopt it. RCS is a plainly better user experience than SMS: chats feel more like iMessage, group messages feel more like iPhone-exclusive ones did, and the world is one step closer to global messaging harmony. RCS sounds like a nice trinket, but it is truly a monumental leap toward a synchronized text messaging ecosystem. It won’t stop the classist bullying epidemic in America’s high schools, nor is it more secure, but it is a good first step and one of the biggest features of iOS 18.

No, it won’t stop the bickering amongst so-called technology “enthusiasts,” but it negates the need for iMessage on Android. When encryption comes to RCS, it will be even better and more secure, but for now, this is the best cross-platform messaging the United States will ever realistically see — and I am content with it. It also has the side benefit — and perhaps the main benefit for Apple — of expelling regulatory scrutiny and is something Apple can point to when it argues its case against the Justice Department, which has sued Apple for “intentionally” making cross-platform messaging impossible on iOS, a point I have described as moot due to the thousands of texting apps on the App Store. It is a win for consumers, a win for regulators, and even a boon in a backhanded way for Apple. Now, please, no more belaboring this point.

visionOS ‘2’

I will be frank: Five months later, I still do not think of visionOS as a major Apple software platform alongside iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS; I feel it is more akin to tvOS, wherein it exists but doesn’t receive the attention Apple’s flagship operating systems do. App support is scant, the first version is buggy and slow, and it still feels unintuitive. But the biggest problem thus far with Apple Vision Pro is that there isn’t much to do on it, whether content, apps, or productivity. visionOS isn’t a computing platform like macOS due to its iPadOS base; it isn’t as comfortable or sharable as a television, not to mention the significant lack of Apple Vision Pro-exclusive films and immersive videos; and the remaining apps are fun to toy with but aren’t substantiative in value.

Long-time readers will recall I promised a review of Apple Vision Pro and visionOS after my second impressions from February, but that never materialized struggled to write anything positive about the device, and I don’t use it often enough to be able to compose a review because there isn’t a compelling reason to go to the effort to put it on. Every one of my complaints stems from the price — developers have no interest in making great apps for visionOS due to the lack of adoption — and comfort, two factors tied to the hardware, not visionOS, so it is quite difficult to be able to assess the state of visionOS currently.

This year’s visionOS update is visionOS 2, which seems odd at first glance since the product just launched, but I think it is sensible because the software development kit was launched last year. I will be upfront: I had high expectations for visionOS 2 because it should address every major complaint I have had with the software, but to say Apple fell short of these hopes would be an understatement.

visionOS 2 feels more like visionOS 1.2 because it does address some bugs but doesn’t hasten feature parity between visionOS and iOS. There are still plenty of features available on Apple’s more mature platforms and it is unacceptable Apple hasn’t been able to add them to the second generation of its newest OS. visionOS 2 is a smoother, more refined version of the current visionOS 1, but it is not a second pass at visionOS as I had presumed it would be — it is far from it. It doesn’t even add things that should have shipped with the first version of visionOS, like native Calendar or Reminders apps, which still run as unmodified iPad versions in Compatibility Mode. Nothing Apple introduced in visionOS 2 is compelling enough to inspire potential customers to purchase an Apple Vision Pro.

If it seems harsh I am grading the second version of a $3,500 virtual reality headset’s software on the premise that it should inspire new sales, hearken back to this: iPhone OS 2 brought the App Store to the iPhone. That was how monumental the second generation of iOS was, and Apple’s newest product doesn’t even have a Calendar. This is laughably embarrassing: I was willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt for the first few months thinking that it would address in June users’ myriad gripes with visionOS, but it didn’t. Instead, it is already regarding visionOS as a mature platform, adding minor knickknacks here and there when it desperately begs for major features. Truth be told, there are gaping holes in visionOS’ software ecosystem being willfully ignored by Apple in pursuit of maturity. Platform maturation happens naturally and cannot be forced, and Apple seems to either be oblivious to this concept or is purposely employing a different strategy for the development of this device.

For every feature visionOS 2 adds, there are zillions of grievances Apple didn’t address. For example: Spawning the Home View, Control Center, or Notification Center no longer requires reaching up to the Digital Crown on the physical device — it is replaced with a hand gesture, performed by glancing at a hand, flipping it over palm-up, and tapping to open the Home View or flipping it back down again for Control Center. The gesture is incredibly fluid and fun, but Notification Center is still useless at displaying notifications properly, opting to lay them out horizontally in oddly organized stacks in an unusual departure from iOS. The Home View can now be reorganized, but it is onerous and requires staring at an app icon and holding it in mid-air to drag it to a different page, which is even more cumbersome than iOS. And, of course, many of Apple’s apps are still left unchanged in Compatibility Mode, though iPad apps are no longer restricted to the Compatible Apps folder and dark mode can be enabled system-wide for non-optimized apps.

visionOS lacks an app library, nor is there a way to quickly access Spotlight as on the Mac and iPhone to search for apps. Neither is there an App Switcher or App Exposé mode to view currently open apps, which is exacerbated by the fact that closing an app, much like macOS, only hides it from view and does not quit it. But unlike macOS, there isn’t a way to temporarily hide or minimize windows, so to momentarily remove one from view, it must be repositioned out of view, such as to the side or ceiling. When a keyboard is attached, Command-Tab does not cycle between windows, and oftentimes, windows will appear atop each other so moving back to a window that has been occluded requires repositioning the frontmost window and bringing the old window back so it can be seen. App Exposé feels like such a godsend after using visionOS for more than five minutes.

Mac Virtual Display now gets an ultra-wide display mode, supposedly coming later this year, which Apple says is the equivalent of two 4K displays side-by-side. Yet there isn’t a way to bring macOS windows into visionOS as if they were Mac apps floating in a visionOS Environment, which is inconvenient. Also, looking at a Mac laptop while in visionOS still doesn’t reliably show the Connect button — the best and most dependable way to open Mac Virtual Display is by going to Control Center on macOS, and then choosing to mirror the screen to Apple Vision Pro via the Screen Mirroring menu.

A new Bora Bora Environment has been added to visionOS, but one is still marked as “coming soon,” which really just cheapens the interface — I would prefer it be removed until the new Environment ships. When in an Environment, Mac laptops and Magic Keyboards are purportedly visible when in an Environment, but the feature rarely functions for me, though that hiccup could be a beta bug. I also don’t understand why Apple could only build an image recognition algorithm for its keyboards; it seems to me like it wouldn’t be that difficult to train a model on what a generic, English-language QUERTY keyboard looks like. When it does work, it is not like hand passthrough in visionOS, but rather, a portal to the outside world with soft, hazy edges is shown where the keyboard is positioned, a design choice I think is preferred in low light.

None of these features are particularly revolutionary or fix visionOS’ shortcomings — instead, they reek of Apple egotistically believing visionOS is already mature enough to take the iOS approach to its development, which is to say, sprinkle minor refinements throughout the OS so much not to offend anyone currently satisfied with the system. That approach works well on a user base of one billion people, but Apple Vision Pro only services less than 100,000 power users wealthy enough to spend thousands of dollars on a first-generation product. If Apple can fundamentally rethink visionOS’ windowing system, it should, because early adopters will put up with it no matter what. Apple needs to bring its most scrappy, forward-thinking engineers and managers to the Vision Products Group — the team at Apple responsible for Apple Vision Pro — who are ready to innovate and make changes even if they don’t stick long-term because that mentality has historically always made Apple products best-in-class.

Apple is not Meta, and I don’t expect it to “move fast and break things,” and I believe its company culture embraces design purity and maturation — two qualities which have also equally made the company successful. But as Steve Jobs, Apple’s late founder, insisted on having complete control over the iPhone’s app environment when it first launched, he also succumbed to Phil Schiller, the marketing chief at the time who said an App Store would be a good idea and allow Apple to make money and still exercise control over the developer ecosystem unlike the Mac. Jobs’ change of heart happened in just a year, whereas the same company 15 years later is unable to be so flexible in its design, presumably because its leadership holds a preoccupied notion that it is correct all of the time.

People who have interviewed Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, about Apple Vision Pro and how consumers use it have always received a rehearsed and rehashed answer: We think people love it, developers are building for it, and enterprise customers are buying tons of units. Apple never admits fault publicly, but it also doesn’t privately, so much so that it is letting its new star product fall apart in the market because it is treating visionOS akin to iOS rather than a new platform altogether. Apple has had a year to address feedback, both from within the company amongst staff and externally, but it hasn’t even bothered to optimize its own apps for its platform. Why would developers build for this device if Apple itself doesn’t express interest in doing so either? Apple’s lethargy affects the whole visionOS ecosystem.

The problem isn’t a lack of capability or understanding, but misplaced priorities. I can’t deny Apple has added some personal, groundbreaking features to visionOS, like the new Spatialize Photo function, which allows users to add 3D depth effects to any photo in their photo library — not only ones taken with a new iPhone, which is impressive. This is not an Apple Intelligence feature, but it works remarkably well with most pictures, especially those taken of nearby subjects — and the effect is even more emotionally profound the older the photo, where it almost feels like reliving the moment the image was captured.

The Neural Engine in Apple Vision Pro’s M2 processor perceives the location of a subject and interprets it to give it depth when looking at it stereoscopically, and the result is a portal-like depth map added to any photo taken with any camera, similar to Spatial Videos. I have tried spatializing hundreds of images by now, and in most cases, the system does a great job — I only noticed it tripped up on some images where the subject and background were less clear to differentiate, and I think this is the new best way to revisit photography, period.

Entertainment-wise, Safari will detect videos on websites like YouTube and Netflix to open them in a native visionOS video player for full-screen expansion as if they were played in a custom-built app, relieving some pressure for the app market to adopt Apple Vision Pro. Websites that support WebXR, the industry standard for displaying 3D immersive web content, are also displayed properly, so 360- and 180-degree videos from many places on the web will play in Apple’s immersive video player. WebXR support in Safari was previously a developer option in visionOS 1, but it has now been polished and works great, even for websites that require motion data and hand tracking to perform properly.

Other improvements can be summarized in some mundane bullet points:

• Mice are now supported across visionOS, including third-party ones. I have never understood what functional difference between mice and trackpads prevented them from working in visionOS 1, but I am glad both work now in visionOS 2.

• Guest User will now remember the last user’s eye and hand data, though there is still no proper multiuser support like macOS. visionOS only remembers the most recent user’s data, so more than one guest cannot have their details saved on one Apple Vision Pro. I guess this is acceptable, albeit less flexible than I had wished, but what I truly want is the ability to preview content locked via digital rights management on an AirPlay device when Guest User is enabled. Currently, if Apple Vision Pro is mirrored to an external device via AirPlay, DRM content isn’t displayed in visionOS; it must be disconnected, which is inconvenient when trying to walk a family member through how to watch immersive content.

• Travel Mode now works on trains. Great, I guess.

• Content from iOS can now be mirrored to Apple Vision Pro as if it were an Apple TV, a good feature for apps that aren’t available natively on visionOS and whose websites are lackluster or nonexistent. Content cast via AirPlay opens in a visionOS-native video player.

• Swiping between Home View pages is much smoother thanks to a faster frame rate, making the entire visionOS experience more enjoyable. This is by far one of the most noticeable yet deviously subtle improvements in visionOS 2.

None of what Apple announced in visionOS 2 is bad, it just fails to meet the high standard Apple has set for this product. visionOS needs a fundamental rethinking before it will ever reach mass market adoption, and Apple has failed to develop the platform in a way that appeals to a broader audience or developers, two markets Apple Vision Pro pressingly needs attention from. Windowing is a mess, there isn’t enough subsidized content tailor-made for the device, and Apple’s favorability amongst developers is at a record low due to its shenanigans on the App Store and in the European Union. When the iPhone was announced, it was developers who were itching to gain access to it to market themselves — but now, Apple needs third-parties’ help and isn’t doing a good job of garnering it.

That social problem can’t be addressed with a software update, but what it can do is give people more uses for the product from Apple to encourage developers to support it reluctantly. It can make Apple Vision Pro more useful for productivity by making visionOS more like the Mac; adding hand controller support to enable 3D, immersive games like “Beat Saber”; and developing innovative ways of using the device that other Apple products can’t match. Right now, Apple Vision Pro feels like an iPad floating in space even though its hardware is loads more complex and enables it to do so many more things. Comfort and usability are hardware problems that can’t be addressed in the technology’s current state, but software can and should — the answer to how can be found in the annals of Apple’s most successful products. Until Apple nails visionOS, Apple Vision Pro will continue to be a limping half-success, half-failure. visionOS 2 is not enough.

Miscellaneous

This year’s OS hands-on has been organized by app rather than platform, so I wasn’t able to add miscellaneous features that don’t fit in a certain category at the end as I usually do. Here are some small quality-of-life changes bestrewn throughout the operating systems.

• Safari Highlights will “automatically detect relevant information” on a website, such as addresses and telephone numbers, which is helpful for hotels or restaurants whose information is usually placed in the footer. I have thoroughly been enjoying this feature.

  • In the nature of visionOS, Safari on macOS will detect videos on certain sites to expand them into a large, native video player, similar to Reader but for videos.

• The Maps app now has topographic hiking and trail maps that can be downloaded for offline access. Custom routes can also be created and downloaded, adding AllTrails to the list of sherlocked apps this year at WWDC.

• Game Mode comes to iOS and iPadOS for increased performance while playing mobile video games, lowering Bluetooth latency for controllers and AirPods and increasing frame rates. This feature was introduced to macOS last year.

• Tap to Cash in the Wallet app for iOS builds on NameDrop from last year to allow the ability to exchange money between two iPhones with ultra-wideband chips (U1 and U2; iPhone 11 and newer) by simply tapping them together. Tap to Cash must be enabled for every session in Wallet or Control Center first, so there isn’t a risk of accidents.

  • Event tickets will now show venue information like restaurants, merchandise, and seating charts for supported arenas.

• Second-generation AirPods Pro can now recognize head gestures, like shakes or nods, to speak with Siri. For example, if Siri asks for confirmation, a simple nod will affirm the action. This is available on all Apple platforms so long as the AirPods are on the latest version of their software.

  • The newest AirPods Pro also gain support for Voice Isolation to silence background noise.

• The Journal app for iOS finally receives a search bar, but there still aren’t versions for iPadOS and macOS, two operating systems where a writing app would be the most useful. Relatedly, there is no Apple Sports app for iPadOS or Apple Music Classical for macOS.

• InSight is a new feature similar to Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray which displays actors and music currently on-screen in an Apple TV+ show. It also visualizes this information on iOS via a Live Activity. I am curious how this operates: Did Apple manually sift through each scene of every single Apple TV+ program and manually label actors, or is a machine learning model analyzing each frame in real time? (I presume it is the former since InSight does not work with non-Apple TV+ programming.)

  • When something is playing on a nearby Apple TV logged into the same Apple account as an iPhone, the show will be displayed on the Lock Screen via the same Live Activity on iOS. It can be swiped away, but I haven’t found a way to disable it automatically appearing.

• Similar to photos, users can now restrict a third-party app’s access to contacts by choosing only a few people. Developers do not have to adopt a new API for this; when an app requests access to contacts, users can choose to allow access to all or a select group.

• Apps that connect to Bluetooth devices can use a new API to connect to only that app’s peripheral without needing to be granted local network permissions. When an app is given access to the local network, it is given data about every client connected to the network even when it is unnecessary, and this new Bluetooth pairing process attempts to alleviate that. It also assuages regulatory concerns by providing any company with an AirPods-like pairing sheet and intuitive setup flow.

Safari Highlights, hiking in Maps, and updates to contact sharing.

My lede for this piece, over 15,000 words ago, was that Apple failed to bring a “wow” feature to any of its operating systems this year since it funneled its efforts into sculpting Apple Intelligence, a trade-off I think is justifiable knowing the stakes financially for the company. But that makes for a rather boring series of operating systems this year, so much so that I, a few weeks into using the betas on all my devices, sometimes forget I am using the next generation of Apple software. Last year was the closest Apple has gotten to a rerun of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard — a small, marginally improved yet refined version of each operating system — but this year’s releases introduce plenty of bugs with few noticeable changes.

Again, I am not complaining for the sake of it, and neither am I ardently dissatisfied with iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, but Apple could’ve done more. After reading thousands of words about every minute detail Apple modified, it might not seem like it, but for the broad public, it is just another version of iOS. It’s a departure from the Apple of the past four years — meretricious and minor for just another year. I’m already excited to see what Apple has in store next year at WWDC, and I’m even more excited to try Apple Intelligence when it partially ships later this year and fully in January 2025.

An update was made on July 23, 2024, at 6:32 p.m.: iPhone Mirroring, as of macOS 15 Sequoia Beta 4, now allows users to enlarge the iPhone window. This article has been updated to reflect that change.

The European Commission:

Today, the Commission has informed X of its preliminary view that it is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency, and data access for researchers…

First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark” in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users. Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a “verified” status, it negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the “verified account” to deceive users.

Second, X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository, but instead put in place design features and access barriers that make the repository unfit for its transparency purpose towards users. In particular, the design does not allow for the required supervision and research into emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online.

Third, X fails to provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out in the DSA. In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service. In addition, X’s process to grant eligible researchers access to its application programming interface (API) appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their research projects or leave them with no other choice than to pay disproportionally high fees.

I strongly agree with the letter of the DSA in regard to the second and third points: Being upfront with advertising is a law that should exist, does exist, and should be enforced, and any user of X knows that the company is not transparent with its advertising and employs dark patterns to encourage people to click ads. And X does not provide data access via the API to researchers, either, making it difficult to combat illegal content, especially related to child safety and elections. These are good reasons to ding X under the DSA, and I support them — an unusual position coming from me. But then, Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the E.U. market, had to ruin it with an impudent post on X, in typical Breton style:

Back in the day, #BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information ✔️🐦

Now with X, our preliminary view is that:

❌They deceive users

❌They infrige #DSA

X has now the right of defence — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines & require significant changes.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, responded quite embarrassingly:

How we [sic] know you’re real?

Unfortunately, I have to admit I agree with Breton’s frustration regarding blue check marks, something I can’t believe I just wrote. But the law, the DSA, is another crock of nonsense. Why isn’t a private company not allowed to sell a badge for $8 a month, even if that badge previously meant something else? That isn’t even capitalism, that’s just the ability to conduct business. Does the European Commission not want companies to do business in the European Union? It sure seems like it. Once again, I don’t disagree with the fact that blue check marks on X are misleading, but regulators can’t regulate with spite. The only way for this fine — $500 million, 10 percent of X’s global revenue — to be justifiable would be for the European Commission to add a clause to the DSA that says: “The European Commission is given the sole right to modify a company’s user interface however it pleases.”

The European Union’s punitive action has made me take the side of the worst companies I know: Meta and X. Alas, here we are. But Breton was right about two points — and correct about the first in spirit. The worst commissioner you know made a great point.

Samsung announced a perfect summer quintet of products on Wednesday, live from its Unpacked event in Paris: the Galaxy Z Fold 6, Galaxy Z Flip 6, Galaxy Ring, Galaxy Watch Ultra, and Galaxy Buds 3. I’ve stopped caring about Samsung’s foldable smartphones because they mainly have turned into iterative marketing ploys rather than beta versions of promising phones, so this year hasn’t gotten me particularly excited. My favorite and perhaps the most memorable Z Fold update was the second generation, announced in 2020, which brought significant display improvements to the cover and inner screens as well as better battery life and durability, but for the past four years, Samsung has followed a vicious cycle of rinsing and repeating the age-old normal phone strategy: update the processor, add some more megapixels to the camera, switch up the colors, hike the price, and that is the next generation. That cycle isn’t inherently bad, it just kills any hope for actually useful and practical foldable phones.

Here’s Allison Johnson, who, for The Verge describes iteration No. 4 of this pattern:

If you had any remaining hopes, despite leak upon leak, that Samsung’s foldables would get a major update this year, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news. They’re a little more durable, a little lighter, and come with a handful of tiny upgrades. Even so, both models got a boost of a certain kind: higher prices, with the Galaxy Z Fold 6 now starting at $1,899 and the Z Flip 6 at $1,099.

Both phones use a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset specially tuned for Samsung, and like the S24 series, they both include seven years of OS and security update support. They’re both a little bit sturdier, claiming better resistance to drops thanks to improvements to the hinge design and materials. The inner flexible glass is also more durable, and both phones are now rated IP48. That definitely looks better on paper than the previous IPX8 rating — the X indicating a lack of dust resistance — but the “4” only means the devices are officially protected from foreign objects of 1mm and greater, not against dust.

The cover display of the Z Fold 6’s aspect ratio has changed slightly to be more comfortable, but that is entirely it. Oh, and, of course, it sells for an astonishingly high $1,900. Why anyone would buy this version of a nearly $2,000 smartphone when last year’s model is practically the same — even down to the camera system — I don’t understand. Refurbished Z Fold 5 models will probably sell for much cheaper; I’ve seen “regular” phone upgrades more innovative than this.

The Z Flip 6’s cover screen measures 3.4 inches, same as the Z Flip 5, and it’s now significantly smaller than the 4.0-inch screen on this year’s Motorola Razr Plus. Samsung hasn’t focused a lot of energy on outer screen software improvements, either — there are new smart reply suggestions when responding to messages from the cover screen, more options for widgets on the cover panel, and some new interactive wallpapers that respond to the movements of your phone.

That’s great, Samsung is being beat out by Motorola of all companies, and all of the new features are software-related. And, of course, a price increase for more memory, a larger battery, and more storage, all of which the more expensive Z Fold 6 omits — but the latter still gets a price increase.

There’s also a new “sketch to image” feature that uses AI to turn S Pen doodles into images, and interpreter mode gets an update to take advantage of the foldable form factor to display translations on the cover and inner screens.

“Sketch to image” reminds me of Apple’s “Magic Wand” feature, but it was probably conceived earlier.

Speaking of carrying an unusual resemblance to Apple products, the Galaxy Watch Ultra. It might be a real mystery where Samsung found the “Ultra” name for its watch to some — and the Samsung fanboys will certainly be the first to point out that Samsung used “Ultra” first, not Apple — but what isn’t a mystery is where the company picked up on design cues. Victoria Song, reporting for The Verge:

Last month, Samsung announced a cheaper, entry-level Galaxy Watch FE. And today, it announced a refreshed $299.99 Galaxy Watch 7 and the all-new $649.99 Galaxy Watch Ultra. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Samsung’s taking a page from Apple’s smartwatch playbook — and nowhere is that more obvious than with the new Ultra.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra replaces the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro as the premium smartwatch in Samsung’s lineup. Like that watch, this one caters to the outdoor athlete. But whereas the Pro had its own distinct vibe, the Ultra isn’t exactly hiding where it got its inspiration from.

I’m not exaggerating or being a hater, either. It’s in the name! Apple Watch Ultra, Galaxy Watch Ultra. Everything about this watch is reminiscent of Apple’s. Samsung says this is its most durable watch yet, with 10ATM of water resistance, an IP68 rating, a titanium case, and a sapphire crystal lens. There’s a new orange Quick Button that launches shortcuts to the workout app, flashlight, water lock, and a few other options. (There is a lot of orange styling.) It’s got a new lug system for attaching straps that looks an awful lot like Apple’s, too.

Just look at the watch: Go to The Verge and look at the image or watch the YouTube video. This is not homework copying from that old joke, this is plagiarism and copyright infringement. The watch, down to the orange accent color plastered throughout the buttons, bands, and software, is a one-for-one replica of the Apple Watch Ultra, aside from the slightly more rounded corner radius. Samsung’s watch is a squircle, and Apple’s is a square for all intents and purposes. Other than the minor semantics, both products look exactly the same, only one came two years before the other. How is this legal? Are there no copyright laws in South Korea? It is almost uncanny how similar these products are, and it truly segments Samsung’s name as a blatant rip-off artist just like Xiaomi, which copies Apple’s software features down to the pixel.

Samsung is the second largest smartphone maker in the world, and it had the audacity to pirate Apple’s design so unashamedly that it makes the company look like a cheap Chinese-state subsidized spy agency disguised as a legitimate corporation. I remember when Samsung was original in its designs just a few years ago and people were in awe at how it beat Apple to the punch every year in innovative, feature-packed, lust-worthy products. For a while, Samsung was at the top and Apple was the one playing catch-up, but that is no longer the case not because there isn’t more room for improvement, but because Samsung has decided to play cheap games instead of doing its job. This rip-off branding is South Korea’s finest now, and it is truly unbelievable and upsetting.

It’s also not totally fair to call this an Apple Watch Ultra knockoff. Samsung does bring its own flavor. The 47mm titanium case is a squircle shape. Next to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the squircle shape was chonkier overall. I had mixed feelings as to the style — I miss the rotating bezel!

Is Song kidding her readers? Samsung eliminated a feature from its flagship smartwatch just so it could emulate Apple, but stopped halfway so that it wouldn’t be sued. This is a new low for this company and I do understand how anyone can make excuses for it. Samsung didn’t put a spin on anything, it just tried not to get caught, and it failed laughably. It is as if the company fired its entire marketing department and brought in junior interns with amateur Photoshop skills to copy Apple’s products and give them new names. This is not just imitation, it is thievery.

This isn’t even the worst of Wednesday’s theft. Chris Welch, reporting for The Verge:

Alongside its latest folding phones and wearables, Samsung is introducing the new Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Galaxy Buds 3. As leaks (and early sales) confirmed, the company has moved away from the subtle in-ear design of past generations to a stemmed look that gives these an AirPods-esque look and feel — especially in white. Both earbuds also come in a gunmetal gray finish that, combined with the angular “blade” design, makes me think of Tesla’s Cybertruck. But there’s no denying the overall similarities to Apple’s massively popular AirPods.

Samsung’s press release says the switch was the direct result of “a variety of collected statistical data” that showed a stem form factor produces better comfort and in-ear stability. So, here we are. I’ll miss the vibrant purple Buds 2 Pro, not to mention the bean-shaped Buds Live.

To see Samsung’s design team go so far in the other direction and settle on such a familiar, same-y design here is rather disappointing, though it’s possible the end product will be significantly better because of it. The Galaxy Bud controls are also now basically identical to those of the AirPods Pro, with pinch gestures for play / pause / track and swipes.

This “statistical data” can be chalked up to navigating to the AirPods section of Apple’s website, putting it up on a projector at Samsung’s headquarters, and then saying, “Hmm,” before taking a screenshot and sending it to the factory. Again, this is another shameless rip-off with no explanation given for the striking similarities between the two competitors. Look at the images: the standard Galaxy Buds 3 look almost exactly like third-generation AirPods from 2021 and the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro are similar to AirPods Pro down to the silicone ear tips. Even the charging cases are alike: They’re both made of white, glossy plastic and have an indicator light at the center.

Samsung used to make innovative in-ear monitors, beginning with the Galaxy Buds Live, which were bean-shaped to mimic the soundstage of open-back over-ear headphones. They weren’t the best, but reviewers loved them for their unique design and form factor. While the AirPods Pro were still a better product overall, the Galaxy Buds Live were an extraordinary example of true innovation, whereas Samsung’s current-day products are poorly made knock-offs based on the world’s most successful technology brand. Clearly, the new strategy is working for the company’s financials, but it is a net loss for consumers to be faced with two brands whose products look the same.

Samsung also revealed the Galaxy Ring, its competitor to the Oura Ring, after teasing it at the last Galaxy Unpacked in January. Again, Victoria Song, reporting for The Verge:

Right off the bat, the Galaxy Ring hardware is quite nice, though its overall design doesn’t stray too far from other smart rings… It comes in three colors: gold, silver, and black. All have a titanium frame and look fetching, but like a magpie, I found myself partial to the gold, as it had the shiniest finish. I can’t quite speak to the durability yet, but it’s got 10ATM of water resistance and an IP68 rating.

At 7mm wide and 2.6mm thick, it felt slimmer when worn right next to my Oura Ring, though that might be because the ring itself is slightly concave. It’s also lightweight, though not noticeably so compared to other smart rings. It weighs between 2.3 and 3g, depending on the size. Speaking of sizes, there are nine total, ranging from size five to 13.

But while the Galaxy Ring didn’t stand out from the other smart rings on my finger, its charging case is eye-catching. Samsung isn’t the first to put a smart ring in a charging case, but the ones I’ve seen don’t have this futuristic transparent design and LED situation going on…

Like the Oura Ring and the vast majority of currently available smart rings, this is primarily meant to be an alternative, more discreet health tracker. If you were hoping for something that can give notifications or has silent alarms like earlier smart rings — you’re out of luck. There are no vibration motors, LED light indicators, or anything like that. As for sensors, you get an accelerometer, optical heart rate sensor (including green, red, and infrared LEDs), and skin temperature sensor. Broadly, you’ll be able to track sleep, heart rate data, and activity, though Samsung is introducing some new Galaxy AI-powered metrics to the mix.

I’ve never really understood the concept of smart rings, but for $400, this one is overpriced and only viable with Samsung phones. (It does work with other Android phones, but the feature set is narrow.) Maybe the Justice Department should sue Samsung for locking its wearable devices to its popular smartphones next since harassing technology companies seems to be global governments’ largest priority despite the myriad geopolitical, economic, and social threats the world faces daily. The ring also doesn’t have nearly as many functions as the Oura Ring, showcasing that adding artificial intelligence to a product doesn’t necessarily mean it is more intelligent. Energy Score, much like Oura, uses Galaxy AI — Samsung’s bespoke AI suite — to use various vitals collected by the device to provide a readiness score each day. The ring also displays live heart rate readings, can track sleep, and can read skin temperature.

The biggest advantage the Galaxy Ring has over Oura is Samsung itself and the brand exposure that comes with it. This ring is made for Samsung users, so people who already own Samsung phones will be inclined to purchase it over the Oura Ring, especially since it doesn’t require a subscription and integrates with Samsung’s other fitness and health offerings. Moreover, from what I have seen, Oura is a relatively small and obscure start-up and cannot be trusted, whereas I have relative faith in Samsung maintaining support for this product — not as much faith as I would have in Apple, but enough. Personally, that guarantee is enough for me to spend $400 on this product, but I don’t use Android so I have no use for it. From Unpacked on Wednesday, this is the only device that seems to have a solid footing.

Camilla Hodgson and George Hammond, reporting for The Financial Times:

Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI while Apple will not take up a similar position, amid growing scrutiny by global regulators of Big Tech’s investments in AI start-ups.

Microsoft, which has invested $13bn in the maker of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, said in a letter to OpenAI that its withdrawal from its board role would be “effective immediately”.

Apple had also been expected to take an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a deal to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone maker’s devices, but would not do so, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple declined to comment.

OpenAI would instead host regular meetings with partners such as Microsoft and Apple and investors Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures — part of “a new approach to informing and engaging key strategic partners” under Sarah Friar, the former Nextdoor boss who was hired as its first chief financial officer last month, an OpenAI spokesperson said.

The news of Phil Schiller, an Apple fellow and the company’s former marketing chief, joining OpenAI’s board as an observer only broke earlier in July by Mark Gurman for Bloomberg, but nonetheless, he will no longer observe OpenAI’s operations. This move is so sudden that it’s giving me flashbacks to when Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, was ousted on a random Friday afternoon in November, just a week before Thanksgiving: Why would Schiller agree to join but then abdicate the seat just a few days (eight days, to be specific) later? After all, Apple and OpenAI only announced their partnership in June, and ChatGPT’s iOS integration hasn’t even shipped yet.

I agree with Microsoft’s assessment, which Keith Dolliver, the company’s deputy general counsel, describes as Microsoft witnessing “significant progress from the newly formed board.” Microsoft has held that seat for over seven months, but Schiller presumably didn’t even take his seat yet. The news of both companies forgoing their seats dropped simultaneously, which leads me to believe none of this is a coincidence.

I’m not leaning toward the side of suspicion yet — these are just board shenanigans, not major organizational changes like Altman’s ouster — but this news, according to an OpenAI spokesperson, collides with OpenAI providing updates to partners like Apple and Microsoft. The whole situation is unusual and leads me to believe some kerfuffle happened internally that again, OpenAI isn’t being direct about.

My best guess is that Microsoft was frustrated by Apple’s seat on the OpenAI board, which it got after paying absolutely nothing to OpenAI whereas Microsoft has invested billions into the company. The Financial Times reporters seem to surmise this is due to antitrust scrutiny, but I just don’t buy that. Instead, I have to believe Microsoft and Apple struck a deal where they would both leave their seats to settle the dispute. That makes reasonable sense to me.

As soon as I heard Apple wasn’t paying OpenAI for the deal, I knew Microsoft would be exasperated, and it seems like that was the case from this preliminary reporting. I very well could be incorrect — I have no sources within any of these companies — but that’s just my two cents.

(Also, I wouldn’t read into Apple not commenting on the Financial Times story much. This just doesn’t seem like something Apple would comment on, especially since the terms of the deal and the observer seat haven’t even been confirmed by the company — they’re just leaks. I don’t think it means Apple got the short end of the stick.)

No amount of damage control can undo this.

Former President Donald Trump and President Biden on the debate stage. Image: Gerald Herbert/The Associated Press.

Thursday night’s presidential debate was an unmitigated disaster.

On the Republican side, the United States had a wannabe dictator who didn’t speak a single truth during the 90-minute debate. Every last sentence that came out of his mouth was not even rude, not even outrageous, but just a complete fabrication of the news cycle for the past three-and-a-half years. It was as if The Onion trained a large language model to take the news from President Biden’s years in office and turn it all into a sensationalist, populist parody. He lied about abortions, immigration, jobs, the economy, inflation, foreign policy, Russia, Israel, and pretty much every single debate topic the moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN, probed the two candidates on.

And former President Donald Trump did it all in such a manner that was brazen and unmistakably Trump. Orange Jesus turned the debate stage into a campaign event, saying the most vile, misogynistic, and racist nonsense known to man in front of an audience of tens of millions, graciously provided to him free of cost by CNN. He, for all intents and purposes, was not on a debate stage — he was in Mar-a-Lago, right off the coast of Florida, surrounded by a bunch of his mega-donors spewing the most bombastic lies possible. And he successfully delivered his lines in a confident, strident, and striking tone. It sounded exactly like a campaign event.

On the Democratic side, Biden performed worse than anyone could’ve imagined. Republicans set the bar obscenely low to cater to their base. They suggested he snorted cocaine, that he was senile, and that he’d fall apart midway onstage. For all we know, if Biden performed like a normal 81-year-old, he would’ve shocked every last Republican watching at home with his strength and resilience. Unfortunately for us, the Democrats, watching at home, he didn’t do that.

Over the course of Trump’s 90-minute hit piece, mostly filled with fabricated information, Biden wasn’t able to refute a single one of his pompous and abhorrent lies. When the former president said — not suggested — that women in blue states were having their babies then murdering them via “late-term abortions,” he turned what was a slam-dunk of a campaign theme for the Democrats into a Republican rally talking point. He painted the Democrats as the extremists, not the Republicans, who want to punish 9-year-old girls by forcing them to bear the children of their rapists. But in actuality, his point about babies being murdered is one of the most misogynistic, vile, cruel things a person of power could ever utter in fair conscience. It’s a horrific, criminal lie.

In response to this turning of the tables, so to speak, Biden wasn’t even able to call his opponent a misogynistic rapist, which he literally is. He just muttered a simple line: “Late-term abortions aren’t real.” I’m sorry, but the former president of the United States of America, found guilty of raping a woman in a department store, just launched a completely false attack on millions of women suffering from the painful procedure of abortion in the third trimester, and all you could do was barely stutter a one-liner before practically falling asleep in front of the entire country? It’s not just Trump who should take the blame for such misogynistic bile being uttered at 10 p.m. on national television, but Biden for being mentally unable to point out what would, in a normal country, be an unfathomable thing to say.

When prompted to answer questions about the January 6 coup attempt, when a crowd of pro-Trump violent criminals broke into the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and crown their messiah the dictator of the United States, Trump blustered. Instead of condemning the protestors, or even calling them “hostages” as he does in his rallies, he turned the tables on Biden by saying how “great” the economy was on January 6, 2021. Firstly, the economy was dead thanks to the coronavirus pandemic Trump failed to control and that killed over a million Americans. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the issue of the economy is entirely irrelevant to the conversation about January 6. Trump turned the “question” he was given by the two Warner Bros. Discovery television personalities into an invitation to begin a campaign rally, but instead of a limited amount of people crazy enough to waste their time on watching a rapist felon spew nonsense, his messages were broadcast to the entire world.

Biden could’ve and should’ve immediately seized on this attempt at distraction by pointing out the horrific crimes carried out by the domestic terrorists on that fateful day when the president of the country tried to overthrow democracy. He could’ve stressed how Trump failed to control the mobsters, how they dug through the private documents of lawmakers, and how something like that could happen again if Trump were given power once more. And he should have pointed out that Trump dodged the question, presumably because Trump knows it’s a political liability for him. And he could’ve tuned his message to entice a broader audience who isn’t keen on bringing a dictator to power. These are all ways Biden could’ve taken Trump’s not-so-sly diversion of the subject, loaded it back into the pistol, and shot it directly into the former president’s skull.

Instead, he didn’t do any of that. In fact, his answer was so bad that I can’t even remember what it was. Biden stuttered and mumbled his way through the debate, but the physical ailments that come with age — and the cold his moronic campaign didn’t disclose until 50 minutes after the debate began — can be excused, because humans are humans and humans age and aren’t perfect. What can’t be excused is Biden’s absolute inability to refute the former president’s shameless lies and falsehoods. Trump talked about immigrants being released from mental institutions and prisons into the United States, about how the wars in Ukraine and Gaza wouldn’t have started if it weren’t for Biden’s supposed weakness, and about how he “gave” the president the “greatest economy in the history of our country.” He even said he “didn’t have sex with a porn star,” a crime for which he has been convicted. These points are so memorable because they’re so audacious. They’re entirely incorrect lies that can be disproven with simple Google searches, but they land so perfectly in people’s brains.

Biden needed to segment himself not as a “fit” person, I’d argue. Instead, he needed to paint the former president as the dictator he now aspires to be. Trump turned CNN into Newsmax and One America News for 90 minutes, whereas Biden practically fell asleep and embarrassed the entire Democratic Party. He was a guest on his own show, while Trump commandeered the entire debate and set the stage for the conversation of the next four months. It’ll be possible for Biden to recover from his showing, not because he’s old or senile — though those things might be true, they’re also true for Trump — but because he was a genuinely terrible advertiser. Debate watchers on Thursday came away from the program with a bunch of lies from Trump and utter conviction that Biden is a good-for-nothing weakling. Great work.

The job of the president on the campaign trail is to advertise his administration’s accomplishments and achievements. Biden failed to do that. He played defense from the get-go while his predecessor played a vociferous offensive. Biden didn’t have to suffer this fate because Americans already know how bad Trump is — they know him so well that they voted against him in 2020. Biden has the advantage of Trump being a loser. Biden beat Trump, yet he plays the game of politics as if he’s a third-party newcomer with no track record. More than tout his own administration’s work, he needs to portray the former president as a man without moral character, a liar, and a cheater — because that’s exactly what he is. When Trump said Biden was bringing in rapists via the southern border, Biden’s first natural instinct should have been to point out that Trump is the rapist in actuality. When Trump talked about migrant killings, Biden’s gut should’ve gone straight for the hundreds of thousands who died of Covid under his predecessor’s watch.

When Trump talked about his economy being the best in the nation’s history, Biden should’ve talked about how people lost their jobs and struggled to pay their bills during lockdown in March 2020. When Trump falsely accused Biden of persecuting his political opponents, Biden should’ve immediately opened with Trump’s line of being a dictator on Day 1. And when Trump said Biden was a criminal, Biden should’ve clapped back with that famous New York jury’s verdict in May. Trump is projecting because Republicans always project, and it’s Biden’s job to expose his insolent lies to the American public. “They’re coming after you and I’m protecting you.” Biden’s job is not to be the fact checker of the debate — he’s there to disprove his opponent’s incessant attacks on his successful administration. While Trump was trying to put on a campaign event for his fellows, Biden should’ve thrown a dart in his plans and flipped the script.

Moves like this, even if delivered slowly and in a geriatric manner, show strength when it’s so desperately needed. It wasn’t Biden’s age or mannerisms that made him lose Thursday’s debate — it was the fact that he failed to put a nail in Trump’s coffin. He could’ve really screwed Trump up and bruised his campaign to the point where it would be a more logical decision to commit political suicide than go on further, but he just let Trump hold a rally in front of millions. He lied incessantly, almost impulsively, and certainly pathologically, but Biden wasn’t able to shoot any shots back, and when he tried, he just shot blanks. He flubbed the most important topic for Democrats, the one that wins elections: abortion. He let Trump deliver the killer line of “Democrats are the extremists, not Republicans” when anyone with two functioning brain cells knows that’s a trumped-up story. If Biden went on the offensive and actively tried to shut down Trump’s rambling nonsense, Americans would’ve been proud to have a president who stood up for them.

Trump used the incredibly impactful populist tactic of scaring the public to garner votes, and it worked impeccably. When your political opponent does that, you’re supposed to do the same. “He’s letting cartels into the country.” He killed your closest family members by botching the most powerful country’s response to a deadly pandemic. “Migrants are stealing Black jobs.” You’re a racist sack of garbage who has the audacity to call jobs “Black” while on your watch millions of Black people lost their jobs thanks to one of the worst economies in American history. “My economy was the best ever.” Tell that to the children who suffered from hunger on the streets while you did a photo shoot with bibles in front of a church. And remember when you tear-gassed protestors who objected to the murder of an innocent Black man? You have the impudence and shamelessness to say you’ve done more for Black Americans since former President Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery and fought a war for the freedom of Black people. You’re a shame, Donald Trump — you’re a shame to this country and the American people won’t forget what you did to them.

No, Biden said none of this. Instead, he focused on abstract ideals regarding the border and the economy, two of his weakest areas. Biden has some very strong talking points about chaos, law and order, democracy, and abortion — yet he decided to play defense on his least favorable issues instead of attacking the madman compulsively perjuring about the state of the country. That madman is trying to scare people, telling them World War III is about to erupt and that migrants are committing a holocaust of white people. It’s hard to describe how criminal these words are, yet he was able to peddle them without objection from the president of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet. How ashamed are we supposed to be as Democrats? What are we supposed to think after our president lost to a man whose campaign message is literally “I Am Hitler?”

Biden didn’t interject enough, he didn’t bring up Trump’s felony convictions enough, he didn’t bring up his E. Jean Carrol defamation case much, and he certainly didn’t talk about how Trump is a convicted rapist enough. He let his top political opponent run a 90-minute hit piece on his watch while stumbling through half-prepared talking points like a bumbling idiot. Biden’s problem isn’t that he’s old at all, because anyone can win with a stutter and cold. His problem is that he’s a great president and a terrible politician. I think Biden has done wonders for this country, getting us out of the pandemic, building back our economy, adding a surplus of jobs, projecting power to the world militarily and financially, and creating a more just world for all Americans. Trump, on the other hand, plunged us into darkness, despair, and embarrassment under his tenure. But it sure didn’t sound like that on Thursday.

Trump’s strategy was to say the most disprovable complete nonsense he could to fire up the public and pump his ratings, while Biden’s aim was to tout his accomplishments to show he is a successful president. One strategy worked; the other didn’t. I understand how that strategy could’ve worked during debate preparations, but it sure won’t work with a moron like Trump. What we saw on Thursday wasn’t a debate, it was a 90-minute Presidential Edition of “The Apprentice,” where Trump, in a roundabout way, tells Biden he’s fired at the end. Biden brought some facts, but that just positioned him as the nerdy student who sits at the back of the class and never gets called on. Trump is the bully, and as the old-yet-flawed story goes, all the girls love the bad boys. (The girls are America.)

Now, of course, the teacher is the one who is supposed to send Trump to the principal’s office, and in this classroom scenario, the teachers are Tapper and Bash, the CNN moderators, who acted less like neutral arbitrators in the debate and more like plants courtesy of the Republican Party. The job of a cable news network is to fact-check the heinous lies spun up by the candidates, but CNN didn’t do that until hours after the debate — hours after people stopped watching. When Trump talks nonsense, Tapper or Bash should immediately come up with answers and additional information to inform the American people. That is their job as representatives of a news corporation. They make the news, for heaven’s sake. How can you let one guy run the circus on your network? Preventing Trump from turning CNN’s headquarters into Mar-a-Lago isn’t “taking sides,” it’s being the moderator of a consequential presidential debate.

CNN misinformed the public, Trump ran a campaign rally, and Biden wasn’t even able to hit his opponent in the places where he’s shown he’s the most vulnerable, poll after poll. Biden didn’t lose because he’s old — he lost because he’s a bad politician. Am I going to say he needs to be replaced? As a Democrat who wants to keep the country away from an authoritarian dictator, my answer is unfortunately “yes.”

Adam Liptak, reporting for The New York Times:

The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory on Wednesday, rejecting a Republican challenge that sought to prevent the government from contacting social media platforms to combat what it said was misinformation.

The court ruled that the states and users who had challenged those interactions had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue.

The decision, by a 6-to-3 vote, left for another day fundamental questions about what limits the First Amendment imposes on the government’s power to influence the technology companies that are the main gatekeepers of information in the internet era.

I wrote about this case, Murthy v. Missouri, back in March. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden administration sent notes to social media platforms like Twitter, now known as X¹, and Facebook, now known as Meta, to take down vaccine misinformation that had the potential to kill people. President Biden even said publicly that Facebook was “killing people” because it wasn’t controlling misinformation on its platforms, and his administration urged the platforms to proactively remove disinformation to control the public health emergency. Officials would point out specific posts they categorized as harmful and sometimes used colorful yet professional language to make their point clear to the platforms. Usually, the social media companies would oblige and remove the misinformation.

Most of this misinformation was spread by conservative vaccine critics who said there were microchips in them, that the government was trying to alter people’s DNA, and that people would get autism from being vaccinated. None of this nonsense was even remotely true, but it had the potential to undermine the government’s efforts to reopen the country. But that bit of logic didn’t stop Missouri Republicans from suing the government — the case was originally called Missouri v. Biden, but it was renamed to Murthy v. Missouri upon appeal — alleging that it “coerced” social media platforms to remove posts it didn’t like, which would be a violation of the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

The justices, in a 6-to-3 decision, denied the states’ right to sue because it would reverse years of legal precedent. That isn’t necessarily the correct way to frame that position in this case, but it’ll do. More broadly, the plaintiffs failed to convince the court that the government coerced the platforms to remove content — the government argues that it was simply requesting the content be removed. Stripping the government of its right to request content be deleted would be a violation of its speech protections, and the court’s distinction from the executive branch prevents it from abridging the government’s right to speech, says Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion. That is entirely correct.

The only time the states would have the right to sue would be if the platforms chose not to remove misinformation and the government threatened (or levied) some kind of penalty in response. There isn’t any evidence the administration penalized private corporations because they failed to remove misinformation — in fact, vaccine lies still run rampant on Facebook and X today, and neither platform has been fined because of it. Removing the government’s ability to speak to private corporations would throw the country into a state of chaos and anarchy, where the world’s richest corporations have no oversight or regulation. Apparently, lawlessness was a step too far for the conservatives that rule the high court, which in and of itself surprises me.

Justice Samuel Alito, who flew an upside-down American flag in front of his house — a universal distress signal — “respectfully” dissented while parroting the talking points of the moronic Republicans who sued. Justice Alito wrote: “For months, high-ranking government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech.” Justice Alito needs to resign from the Supreme Court to go back to law school, because “unrelenting pressure” is not the same as suppressing “free speech.” It was the social media companies that suppressed Americans’ “free” speech, not the White House, and both parties had the right to speak to each other. Justice Alito gives no rationale for his nonsensical dissent, but I guess that’s to be expected from the Supreme Court’s most seasoned sleazeball.

Finally, as I wrote in March:

The executive branch does not have the right to demand speech be taken down unless that speech is illegal, i.e., child sexual abuse material, but it certainly has the right to request that speech be de-platformed, just like any other citizen who utilizes a reporting feature on one of the websites or a nonprofit pointing out problematic speech.

The Supreme Court did not necessarily enshrine that right in legal precedent, but it came close enough. Let’s hope this keeps Republicans from badgering “Big Tech” for a while.