Eshu Marneedi

John Gruber, writing on Daring Fireball:

As I wrote this week, there aren’t many un-installable apps on iOS… Vestager makes clear in her remarks what wasn’t clear in the EC’s announcement of the investigation: they have a problem with Photos… Photos is not just an app on iOS; it’s the system-level interface to the camera roll… Vestager is saying that to be compliant with the DMA, Apple needs to allow third-party apps to serve as the system-level camera roll. That is a monumental demand, and I honestly don’t even know how such a demand could be squared with system-wide permissions for photo access. This is product design, not mere regulation. Why stop there? Why not mandate that Springboard — the Home Screen — be a replaceable component? Or the entire OS itself? Why are iPhone users required to use iOS? Why are iOS users required to buy iPhones?

I’ve said this earlier, mostly as a joke, but I don’t think Gruber’s remarks here are very serious either — they’re mainly rhetorical. But from the way the European Union is handling compliance with the Digital Markets Act — not even the actual law itself, which is flawed in many ways — I can’t help but think the European Commission wants a seat in Apple’s research-and-development or engineering department.

If you asked me a year ago, “Do you think the European Union would mandate Apple to allow users to install Android on iPhones a decade from now?” I would’ve laughed in your face. Now? In a decade, anything is possible with the European Union, a body that ultimately is capitalist for its own benefit but is trying to play a hilarious game of socialism. The problem, according to Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s executive vice president responsible for technology regulation, and Thierry Breton, the antitrust commissioner of the European Union, is caused by the European Union assuming control of digital platforms. It’ll go to any length to exercise its stolen control.

The browser choice screen, which Vestager and Breton have launched an investigation into, is impartial, unbiased, and designed as elegantly as possible, but apparently, that’s not enough for the two top dogs in the European Commission — even though the law they wrote doesn’t classify Apple’s implementation as illegal. Is there no court in the European Union? Of course there is — the European Union has a full judicial branch of the government, the commission is just the executive branch. Why doesn’t the commission take this case to the courts and let a jury settle this instead of launching a stupid investigation to scare companies into changing things?

And about the Photos app: The European Commission is clearly full of technology-illiterate old people, to the point where it isn’t even able to do its own due diligence to understand that the Photos app is a core part of iOS. If the commission actually had an interest in developing meaningful technology regulation, it would probably hire experts in the field. Again, the problem isn’t the Photos app, just as it isn’t about the browser choice screen — if Apple made the Photos app un-installable tomorrow, Breton would throw himself a party, post a celebratory selfie on social media naming himself the sole provider of freedom for Europeans, then launch an investigation into why the Camera app isn’t un-installable the next morning. The commission will continue to move the goalposts; it’s playing a one-sided, rigged game while laughing manically in the corner at everyone falling face-flat on the ground. It’s full of ego and every last one of its commissioners are narcissistic maniacs.

It’s not worth it to spend more time writing about the European Union’s nonsense. Gruber’s whole piece is a follow-up to an earlier story he posted about the possibility that Apple could leave the European Union. Despite what E.U. fanboys might have you think, Apple could leave the bloc at any time and royally screw its citizens — and as soon as it does that, the commission will sue Apple (or, God forbid, launch one of its “investigations”) for some reason even though not doing business somewhere isn’t illegal. Apple has the upper hand not because it’s a monopoly but because it makes products Europeans love. Maybe those Europeans should talk some sense into Brussels this year.

Apple is in full compliance with the DMA — it’s obvious. But no matter what Apple does, it’ll never be able to change the commission’s mind. It’s obvious in the verbiage of the DMA, the commissioners’ psychotic behavior on the internet¹, and how the executive branch of one of the world’s superpowers applies laws to the world’s leading technology corporations.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple this month sued its former employee Andrew Aude in California state court, alleging that he breached the company’s confidentiality agreement and violated labor laws by leaking sensitive information to the media and employees at other tech companies. Apple has demanded a jury trial, and it is seeking damages in excess of $25,000…

In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Aude leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone’s Journal app to a journalist at The Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Tilley published a report titled “Apple Plans iPhone Journaling App in Expansion of Health Initiatives.”

Using the encrypted messaging app Signal, Aude is said to have sent “over 1,400” messages to the same journalist, who Aude referred to as “Homeboy.” He is also accused of sending “over 10,000 text messages” to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled “across the continent” to meet with her.

The fact that this former Apple employee had the journalist saved as “Homeboy” in his contacts is cringeworthy. And the fact that Aude traveled across the continent to meet with this Information reporter makes me think there was (is?) something personal between the two. Seriously, 10,000 text messages seems peculiar — perhaps that’s worth looking into in regards to journalistic integrity.

Apple believes that Aude’s actions were “extensive and purposeful,” with Aude allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could “kill” products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company’s confidential and proprietary information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to “surprise and delight” with its latest products.

This is ridiculous. Apple alleges Aude leaked the information to The Wall Street Journal and The Information so that he could “kill products and features with which he took issue.” It’s almost unbelievable — first that Aude is so stupid that he thought the public catching wind of unreleased features would end up killing them somehow, and second that he thinks leaking information is a more appropriate way to address his concerns than speaking to his superiors within the company. I’m very curious as to how Aude landed a job at Apple with this level of idiocy.

In a November 2023 interview, Apple alleges that Aude denied leaking confidential information to anyone. However, during that interview, Apple alleges that Aude went to the bathroom and deleted “significant amounts of evidence” from his work iPhone, including the Signal app that he used to communicate with “Homeboy.”

This is easily one of the most hilarious labor disputes of all time. Once Aude was caught red-handed, he didn’t — I don’t know — admit to the act, deny wrongdoing, or find some other way to rescue himself. He, like a 7-year-old child caught with their hands in the cookie jar, went to the bathroom and deleted the chats from Signal that he had on his work phone in a hurry. I truly have not encountered an Apple employee who was this stupid before; why would any moderately intelligent person leak information to the press on a corporate-monitored work phone? And if someone were to do that, why would they save the chats or applications they used to leak information?

This whole situation is beyond parody. What a total moron — and good on Apple for catching on and suing.

Quinn Nelson, producer of the technology YouTube channel Snazzy Labs, posted on the social media website X a link to Humane’s new owner’s guide video, which, according to Bethany Bongiorno, Humane’s chief executive, was meant for Ai Pin buyers “to help them understand how to use” their Ai Pins before they arrive next month. Bongiorno said she would speak with her team about putting it up on YouTube, which I think is a good idea since I feel it’s the most interesting demonstration of the device yet. It’s produced well, the presenters are knowledgeable, it doesn’t have any discernibly sloppy mistakes, and it’s the most lengthy, detailed walkthrough of the Ai Pin’s features yet. I watched the 30-minute video after my slamming of the device in November to try to learn more about the Ai Pin, and I recommend everyone do too — it’s what Humane’s initial announcement should’ve been.

But that’s just criticism of the video. The product, the Ai Pin — an artificial-intelligence-powered lapel pin with a projector, camera, microphone, and speaker — is still lackluster at best. The video was broken up into a few sections: hardware and accessories, voice interactions, the camera and images, the Laser Ink Display — essentially a projector that displays an image onto a user’s hand — music, memory, telephone calls and text messages, and “Humane.Center,” the website used to control the Ai Pin.

1. Hardware: The battery booster appears to be compulsory in most cases and enables what Humane calls the “Perpetual Power System,” which, candidly speaking, is buzzword-filled nonsense. It’s a battery — everyone knows what a battery is — system with the ability to hot-swap boosters that clip to the underside of a shirt, holding the device in place. When the Ai Pin was fastened to a long-sleeve shirt, it didn’t pull it down, which was relieving, but Humane also sells an optional, lighter clear plastic attachment to replace the booster in case a user happens to be wearing something extra lightweight, such as workout clothing. Humane didn’t show the device clipped to a T-shirt, though, which is the most common article of clothing it’ll be attached to, and the presenters mostly wore long-sleeve jackets — for which there is a clip that can be fastened to thicker coats — and sweaters, which is concerning. (Maybe this is just because it’s spring.)
2. Voice interactions: As demonstrated in previous Humane videos, the primary method of interaction is the voice assistant, which is accessed via the touchpad and a series of gestures. There are simply way too many gestures — they’re all variations of tapping or holding down one or two fingers to activate certain features like the camera or laser projector. And again, I do not understand the point of having such an assistant attached to a shirt — the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pro does the same thing. The assistant was also slow at times, requiring presenters to continue to speak to the camera as they waited for the assistant to give a response to distract from the deafening silence of a computer sending queries to a server. It also seems to take a while for internet-related queries, such as searching for the weather. A smartphone seems like a more cost-effective and less-distracting option for most — especially when in public.
3. Camera: The Ai Pin acts like a more personal version of Google Lens, and I think it’s fascinating. This is the most compelling use case for the product yet since carrying a smartphone around for quick spur-of-the-moment shots is often cumbersome. Sometimes, something needs to be captured instantly, without distraction, and the camera on the Ai Pin executes this perfectly. (The quality of the produced images isn’t spectacular, but it’s a small device.) I also liked the feature where you can point the device at anything, such as a book or building, and have the voice assistant provide information about it, but I’d much rather be able to view and read this information rather than have a voice narrate it to me via a loudspeaker that everyone around me can hear.
4. The Laser Ink display: The only way of visually viewing and interacting with information from the Ai Pin is the Laser Ink display, as Humane calls it, a projector that activates when the device is asked a question and detects a palm out in front of it. The laser projector, while bright, seems less than ideal for dense, small text, since it isn’t very crisp — especially in broad daylight. Also, palm space is limited, so the device can only project small messages and large interface controls. Navigating the interface requires quite a bit of skill, too. There is a singular solution to all of this: a smartphone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide carry 6-inch bright, crisp, colorful organic-LED displays with powerful processors and high pixel densities in their pockets daily, and the Ai Pin seems like a compromised, unnecessary version of a technology that already exists. The Ai Pin’s laser display is worthless.
5. Music: Anyone who chooses to listen to music on this lapel pin is a psychotic human being.
6. Memory: The usefulness of this “memory” feature — which exists due to the nature of AI large language models, such as the one from OpenAI that powers the Ai Pin — is minimal because it does not interact with iOS or Android at all. Most people communicate with others and store quick notes on their smartphones, and thus, their corpus of human connections and personal anecdotes is stored in one locked-down place. Humane has no plan to access that corpus — instead, it’s relying on people to use the Ai Pin exclusively to send text messages, make phone calls, and store quick notes. (Apparently, its own employees can’t even use the Ai Pin’s notes feature exclusively.) The “memory” features of the voice assistant — which come into play when a user asks questions like, “Catch me up on message conversations,” or, “Where did I park?” — will only be useful if someone decides to store their life’s information on their Ai Pin rather than their phone, a behavior I don’t think anyone, not even Humane’s diehard users, will partake in.
7. Telephone calls and messages: Continuing on the previous theme, the Ai Pin does not connect to a user’s smartphone whatsoever — Humane instead encourages users to make telephone calls, join group messages, and do all of their communication via the Ai Pin, which isn’t even possible, since it doesn’t support most messaging services like Slack or WhatsApp at launch. It’s a ludicrous strategy that will never take off — period. The fact that Humane thinks anyone will choose to have their phone calls on a loudspeaker in public or use an AI voice assistant to write text messages is so astonishing to me. On a related note, did you know some companies sell telephones that you can take anywhere and that also happen to connect to all the instant messaging services in the world? You can get one for less than the price of an Ai Pin — groundbreaking.
8. Humane.Center: There is not even a smartphone app to manage the Ai Pin, which seems like it would be the most basic of requirements for any internet-connected product made in 2024. Humane doesn’t think so, instead developing a web portal for access to user data. This website is the only way to access images taken with the device, add contacts, view full text message threads and call logs, and change settings, like connecting to a Wi-Fi network or adding “integrations,” Humane’s term for third-party software. The on-device projection interface is so lackluster and limited that I don’t think anyone would seriously want to use it — and waving a palm around in the air seems like it would feel like a royal pain after more than a minute — so the only way to interact with the information the Ai Pin provides is a website. It’s just insulting.

So yes, I’m still not bullish on the Ai Pin. It’s a bad smartphone that does less than a smartphone while being slower than one and being more annoying than any other modern consumer product. And it’s $800 with a $25-a-month subscription for a second phone number and no phone integration. Great video, terrible product. Go back to the drawing board, Humane — but please do publish this video on YouTube.

David Gilbert, writing for Wired:

Conspiracists and far–right extremists are blaming just about everything and everyone for the Baltimore bridge collapse on Tuesday morning.

A non-exhaustive list of things that are getting blamed for the bridge collapse on Telegram and X include: President Joe Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, former President Barack Obama, Islam, aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, foreign aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Covid vaccines, DEI, immigrants, Black people and lockdowns.

The Francis Scott Key truss bridge actually collapsed when the MV Dali cargo ship collided with one of the bridge supports. Six construction workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge at the time, are presumed dead. The ship is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd, and the 22-person crew were all Indian. The ship was on route to Colombo, Sri Lanka at the time of the accident.

X, the social media website owned by no one else other than Elon Musk, the billionaire who has made an effort to push the dangerous great replacement conspiracy theory on his website, has been inundated with nonsense comments from blue-check-bearing accounts with prioritized replies. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, had her account reinstated however many months ago on X after the previous Twitter ownership permanently suspended it over her barbaric coronavirus conspiracy theories — now, she insinuated the collapse of the bridge could be due to a terrorist attack. (It was not a terrorist attack.)

Leftist, progressive users have blamed the attack on U.S. support of the wars in Israel and Ukraine while also complaining about how overfunded the Defense Department is. The bridge collapsed due to a Singaporean cargo ship colliding into a pillar of the bridge — how that is the Defense Department’s fault is beyond me. Meanwhile, right-wing nuts continued to blame the president and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for spreading non-existent “misinformation.” Very few of these posts — exclusively on X and former President Donald Trump’s social media website, Truth Social — had Community Notes pinned to them, presumably because most intelligent users authorized to write notes have better things to do than debunk bizarre antisemitic conspiracies on a dying social media platform.

However, less-intelligent conspiracy theorists continue to brainwash teenagers, the elderly, and anyone who gets their news exclusively on X — all to push their political propaganda. The owner of the website, Musk, embraces it in the name of “free speech” and the “First Amendment” without actually having the intellectual capacity to understand that the Constitution only applies to the government, not private platforms. Of course, none of Musk’s sycophantic followers will understand this quirk of the legal system, though, so we’re instead stuck with the most popular real-time news website peddling racist conspiracies until enough people move to Threads, Meta’s clone of X.

If this is how it is when a bridge collapses and kills six people, imagine how it’s going to be on Election Day when half the population’s preferred candidate loses — whomever that may be.

Aaron Tilley and Kim Mackrael, in a profile of Phil Schiller, Apple’s former senior vice president of product marketing and now fellow, for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple came around to taking a 30% commission on paid apps or services purchased in the App Store. Initially, Jobs said in 2008 that the company didn’t “intend to make money off the App Store,” according to documents that came out in the Epic case.

After Jobs’s passing in 2011, Schiller kept Jobs’s philosophy alive across everything he did. The two were close, and Schiller often mirrored Jobs’s fierce competitiveness and tendency to praise Apple and disparage competitors. Inside Apple, he came to be referred to as Jobs’s “mini-me” due to the manner in which he often mirrored the company co-founder’s perspective.

“Of the people still at Apple, he is one of the few that still carry the torch of Steve Jobs’s vision,” said Tim Bajarin, a longtime Apple analyst who has known Schiller since his return to the company.

One thing Jobs insisted on in the App Review process is that the company should always have someone reviewing each app that made it into the store. Schiller continued that tradition, eschewing excessive use of artificial intelligence in favor of reviews and careful curation.

If I have this right, Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder who insisted on Apple’s tight control over the iOS App Store, only craved control over the apps that were on the App Store. As Tilley and Mackrael quote Jobs saying in 2008, Jobs never wanted to make money from the App Store’s 15–30 percent commission — he just wanted the control that came with that commission. Now that Apple is in hot water over the commission, which in my opinion is what started all of this regulatory scrutiny both in the European Union and the United States, I suggest it lower the percentage it takes to 15 percent for companies that make over $1 million a year on the App Store, and 7 percent for everyone else.

Apple doesn’t need to give up control over the App Store — it just needs to make it seem like the App Store is competitive (which it already is). The 30 percent commission has done irreparable damage to Apple’s public relations over the last several years. Anyone, even people who like Apple and think it deserves a cut of purchases, can agree that the App Store’s rules are a mess. In addition to lowering the fee, I think Apple should also further relax its anti-steering provisions specifically in the vein of payment processing. Apple has (had) to play some bargaining here if it doesn’t (didn’t) want to be caught by the ire of regulators, including the U.S. Justice Department. If it doesn’t give up the anti-steering provisions, it risks losing control over content moderation in the App Store specifically in the United States — the European Union has already busted Apple’s shackles.

Regulators are not even nearly as smart as Apple — everyone knows that. But Apple missed its chance to self-regulate, to give a little and take a little, even when relaxing anti-steering provisions would’ve still fallen within the bounds of Jobs’ App Store ethos set out in 2008.

PS: I still love Schiller.

Sarah Jong, writing for The Verge about United States v. Apple:

From cloud streaming games to CarPlay, the DOJ complaint tries to rope in the burning grievances of every kind of nerd and then some. The only thing that’s missing is a tirade on how ever-increasing screen sizes are victimizing me, a person with small hands. (At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)

You can almost forget this is a lawsuit and not just the compiled observations of a single very motivated poster in The Verge comments section — until you get to page 57. There, the document suddenly changes voice, finally pivoting into a formal communication to a judge. “Mobile phones,” the complaint reads primly, “are portable devices that enable communications over radio frequencies instead of telephone landlines.”

The lawyers who wrote the Justice Department’s complaints against Apple would make for great technology bloggers — even better than me, dare I say. Together, they should create a new blog: Cowardly Snowflake. It’s like Daring Fireball, but written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I’d instantly subscribe.

The first part of the Justice Department’s complaint truly reads like a non-fiction “airing of grievances.” It reminds me of the Declaration of Independence, but instead of making good points against the British monarchy, it serves as a poorly researched fantasy of the technology landscape. Now that’s blog-worthy. Seriously, if you have three hours to kill, I’d recommend reading the entire thing just for fun.

Yours truly, writing in January about Beeper, a cross-platform messaging app that aimed and failed to add iMessage to its arsenal of services:

Shortly after Apple revoked Beeper’s unauthorized access to the iMessage service, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted the following to the social media website X, quoting The Verge’s article reporting on the changes Apple made: “Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage? Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure.”

A week later, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah; and Representatives Jerry Nadler of New York and Ken Buck of Colorado wrote a bipartisan letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter calling for the Justice Department to “investigate whether this potentially anticompetitive conduct by Apple violated antitrust laws.” “This” conduct refers to Apple’s immediate shutdown of Beeper Mini. The members of Congress collectively write: “We write regarding Apple’s potential anticompetitive treatment of the Beeper Mini messaging application. We have long-championed increased competition, innovation, and consumer choice in the digital marketplace. To protect free and open markets, it is critical for the Antitrust Division to be vigilant in enforcing our antitrust laws… We are therefore concerned that Apple’s recent actions to disable Beeper Mini harm competition, eliminate choices for consumers, and will discourage future innovation and investment in interoperable messaging services.”

In other words, the letter tells the Justice Department to investigate Apple for locking its doors to thieves. There are two main points to untangle here: that the members of Congress show apparent illiteracy in both antitrust law and technology, and that opening up messaging ecosystems is not a job of the government. It is quite obvious that these members of Congress have no clue what Beeper did to gain access to the iMessage service — nor have any interest in finding out — and that Beeper’s Migicovsky brainwashed the members into taking congressional action against Apple as retaliation for destroying Beeper’s flawed-from-the-start business model. Speaking of Migicovsky, he promoted the letter with his own commentary on X shortly after it was published. It does not require any knowledge of government lobbying to conclude that Migicovsky — and perhaps some of his cohorts — lobbied the members of Congress to get the letter published for publicity.

Thursday’s lawsuit is a direct consequence of Klobuchar, Lee, Nandler, and Buck’s letter hitting Kanter’s desk. Kanter, who leads the antitrust division of the Justice Department, filed the lawsuit yesterday — his name is listed on the suit. Due to Beeper’s aggressive government lobbying on Capitol Hill, the members of Congress wrote the letter to Kanter, who then was brainwashed by Beeper’s marketing speak and told his technology-illiterate aides to write a poorly researched, ill-informed complaint against the world’s largest technology firm.

Furthermore, the complaint includes this passage, as I wrote in my annotation Thursday:

Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users. By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.

Not only is this passage entirely false, but it also reeks of Beeper and Eric Migicovsky, Beeper’s chief executive, directly influencing the lawsuit. Migicovsky himself found this uncanny, and on the social media website X, posted: “This DOJ v Apple lawsuit is basically Eric Migicovsky v Apple. I swear I did not do this on purpose,” referring to the Justice Department. Migicovsky wrote this in response to a passage from the lawsuit which essentially served as a call-out to Pebble, the now-defunct smartwatch company Migicovsky founded that brought him into the spotlight, in the “Smartwatches” section. Migicovsky also backs the Justice Department’s incorrect complaints about Beeper Mini up on X, saying he “couldn’t have said it better” himself.

Beeper did not “fix” broken cross-platform messaging — that is what Beeper wants you to believe, but it isn’t what happened. Beeper infiltrated Apple’s private iMessage service meant to serve as a selling point for Apple devices and sold access to it with a subscription. Beeper is not a “third-party developer,” Beeper is a thief. A third-party developer (keyword: “developer”) would refer to someone who gains authorized access to Apple services to create products on Apple’s platforms. Beeper is not a developer — it is a company with the sole intention of profiting from another corporation’s infrastructure. The Justice Department is supposed to serve as the just and correct arbiter of conflicts. Instead, it has chosen to pick favorites in one of the most important lawsuits it has filed in its entire existence because some scrappy start-up founded by a failed smartwatch manufacturer lobbied Congress.

Without even describing the full facts to the court in the lawsuit, the Justice Department aims to sell a one-sided story to the jury that is simply factually incorrect. I hope and assume Apple will fight this moot, incorrect point in court to the fullest extent possible. Lying government lobbyists’ words don’t belong in a court of law — they belong in a concessions stand outside the Capitol in Washington selling T-shirts. If TikTok did this, it’d be banned in the United States a week from now.

The Justice Department, writing in its lawsuit against Apple filed on Thursday:

For example, by denying iPhone users the ability to choose their trusted banking apps as their digital wallet, Apple retains full control both over the consumer and also over the stream of income generated by forcing users to use only Apple-authorized products in the digital wallet. Apple also prohibits the creation and use of alternative app stores curated to reflect a consumer’s preferences with respect to security, privacy, or other values. These and many other features would be beneficial to consumers and empower them to make choices about what smartphone to buy and what apps and products to patronize. But allowing consumers to make that choice is an obstacle to Apple’s ability to maintain its monopoly.

Has the Justice Department forgotten that Apple is a private corporation?

Apple inflates the price for buying and using iPhones while preventing the development of features like alternative app stores, innovative super apps, cloud-streaming games, and secure texting.

Samsung’s flagship handset is more expensive than Apple’s, but go on about “inflating the price for buying and using iPhones.”

Apple’s U.S. market share by revenue is over 70 percent in the performance smartphone market—a more expensive segment of the broader smartphone market where Apple’s own executives recognize the company competes—and over 65 percent for all smartphones. These market shares have remained remarkably durable over the last decade.

“By revenue?” What nonsense! Is this how the Justice Department concluded Apple is a monopoly?

Following that consent decree in October 2003, Apple launched a cross-platform version of iTunes that was compatible with the Windows operating system. As a result, a much larger group of users could finally use the iPod and iTunes, including the iTunes Store. The iTunes Store allowed users to buy and download music and play it on their iTunes computer application or on the iPod. Apple benefited substantially from this new customer base. In the first two years after launching the iPod, Apple sold a few hundred thousand devices. The year after launching a Windows-compatible version of iTunes and gaining access to millions more customers, Apple sold millions of devices. Apple went on to sell hundreds of millions of iPod devices over the next two decades.

The Justice Department attributes the iPod’s success to its consent decree against Microsoft.

Third, Apple uses these restrictions to extract monopoly rents from third parties in a variety of ways, including app fees and revenue-share requirements. For most of the last 15 years, Apple collected a tax in the form of a 30 percent commission on the price of any app downloaded from the App Store, a 30 percent tax on in-app purchases, and fees to access the tools needed to develop iPhone native apps in the first place. While Apple has reduced the tax it collects from a subset of developers, Apple still extracts 30 percent from many app makers.

“Monopoly rents” is an interesting way of describing a fee for services the App Store provides. Warranted or not, we live in the United States — a capitalist country — and the market decides what’s sane or not. Not the government.

Apple recognizes that super apps with mini programs would threaten its monopoly. As one Apple manager put it, allowing super apps to become “the main gateway where people play games, book a car, make payments, etc.” would “let the barbarians in at the gate.” Why? Because when a super app offers popular mini programs, “iOS stickiness goes down.”

Apple does not need to host content it doesn’t want to host for whatever reason. If you don’t like that, build your own phone. I like iOS, so I’ll live with the rules. It seems like my fellow iOS users agree with me.

That is not a monopoly — that’s just business.

Apple did not respond to the risk that super apps might disrupt its monopoly by innovating. Instead, Apple exerted its control over app distribution to stifle others’ innovation. Apple created, strategically broadened, and aggressively enforced its App Store Guidelines to effectively block apps from hosting mini programs. Apple’s conduct disincentivized investments in mini program development and caused U.S. companies to abandon or limit support for the technology in the United States.

The section this excerpt is from can be called the “WeChat Section,” and yet WeChat, the prime example of Apple “abusing its monopoly power,” remains on the App Store today. This is nonsense.

Until recently, Apple would have required users to download cloud streaming software separately for each individual game, install identical app updates for each game individually, and make repeated trips to Apple’s App Store to find and download games. Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.

Keywords: “Until recently.” “You aren’t speeding now, but we’ll still write you a ticket for speeding because we think you sped before.”

Apple undermines cloud gaming apps in other ways too, such as by requiring cloud games to use Apple’s proprietary payment system and necessitating game overhauls and payment redesigns specifically for the iPhone.

“…requiring cloud games to use Apple’s proprietary payment system” is wrong as of a few weeks ago.

While all mobile phones can send and receive SMS messages, OTT only works between users who sign up for and communicate through the same messaging app. As a result, a user cannot send an OTT message to a friend unless the friend also uses the same messaging app.

How is that last part Apple’s fault?

And when users receive video calls, third-party messaging apps cannot access the iPhone camera to allow users to preview their appearance on video before answering a call.

There is an application programming interface built within iOS for developers to be able to add that functionality to their apps.

“Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for “breaking” chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers—where the iPhone’s share is 85 percent, according to one survey. This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones—solidifying Apple’s smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse.

That is not Apple’s fault. Try suing Lamborghini because someone got made fun of for not having a Lamborghini.

Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users. By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.

That’s the Beeper reference.

In 2013, when Apple started offering users the ability to connect their iPhones with third-party smartwatches, Apple provided third-party smartwatch developers with access to various APIs related to the Apple Notification Center Service, Calendar, Contacts, and Geolocation. The following year, Apple introduced the Apple Watch and began limiting third- party access to new and improved APIs for smartwatch functionality.

Apple is a private corporation. Nobody is entitled to access to iOS. As I pointed out earlier on Thursday, the smartwatch argument is the only somewhat sound argument, legally speaking, but it’s still woozy.

Apple instead requires these users to disable Apple’s iMessage service on the iPhone in order to use the same phone number for both devices. This is a non-starter for most iPhone users.

Great work, Justice Department, you just contradicted your entire “Messaging” section with one sentence.

Thus, switching to a different smartphone requires leaving behind the familiarity of an everyday app, setting up a new digital wallet, and potentially losing access to certain credentials and personal data stored in Apple Wallet.

Moving to a new house requires learning where the bathroom is again.

The exclusionary and anticompetitive acts described above are part of Apple’s ongoing course of conduct to build and maintain its smartphone monopoly. They are hardly exhaustive. Rather, they exemplify the innovation Apple has stifled and Apple’s overall strategy of using its power over app distribution and app creation to selectively block threatening innovations.

“Hardly exhaustive,” probably because the Justice Department hasn’t pointed out a single “act” where Apple abuses its non-existent monopoly power.

These subscriptions [sic] services can also increase switching costs among iPhone users. If an Apple user can only access their subscription service on an iPhone, they may experience significant costs, time, lost content, and other frictions if they attempt to switch to a non-Apple smartphone or subscription service.

It’s a crime to do business in the United States in 2024, according to the federal government.

Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay.

Nobody is forcing drivers to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience. This is purely uneducated. CarPlay does not supplant an automaker’s interface, it just supplements it for iOS users who would like access to the Apple-made interface. A user is always able to disable CarPlay or opt out of using it if they don’t want to use it or don’t have an iPhone. Why did the Justice Department choose the most technology-illiterate people to file a lawsuit against the world’s largest technology corporation?

Apple’s conduct extends beyond just monopoly profits and even affects the flow of speech. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its role as a TV and movie producer and has exercised that role to control content.

Sometimes you read something so incomprehensibly stupid that it just leaves you speechless.

“If Apple wanted to, Apple could allow iPhone users to send encrypted messages to Android users while still using iMessage on their iPhone, which would instantly improve the privacy and security of iPhone and other smartphone users.

Apple already does that. You can download WhatsApp for free on iOS today.

Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets because it has the power to control prices or exclude competition in each of them.

The way the Justice Department calculated that is wrong — it calculated it by revenue, as stated earlier. Apparently, it’s illegal to be good at business and make a profit in the United States.

For example, if an iPhone user wants to buy an Android smartphone, they are likely to face significant financial, technological, and behavioral obstacles to switching. The user may need to re-learn how to operate their smartphone using a new interface, transfer large amounts of data (e.g., contacts), purchase new apps, or transfer or buy new subscriptions and accessories.

Exhibit B: When moving to a new house, you need to learn where the bathroom is again.

Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017)…

Due to Apple’s monopolistic practices, the Windows Phone and the Fire Phone both failed, according to the Justice Department. I am not making this up.

What a stupid lawsuit. I annotated this lawsuit as I was reading it on Threads and Twitter, too, if you’d like highlighted images of the excerpts.

Victoria Song, writing for The Verge:

The DOJ also notes that Apple limits third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger in comparison to iMessage. For example, you have to dive into permissions to let these apps operate in the background or access the iPhone’s camera for video calls. They also can’t incorporate SMS, meaning you have to convince friends to download the same apps if you want to use them. iMessage, however, does all this natively.

And while Apple recently agreed to support RCS to make cross-platform messaging better, the DOJ isn’t buying it. It notes that Apple not only hasn’t adopted it yet but that third-party apps would still be “prohibited from incorporating RCS just as they are prohibited from incorporating SMS.” The DOJ also takes issue with the fact that Apple only agreed to adopt a 2019 version of RCS. Unless Apple agrees to support future versions, it argues “RCS could soon be broken on iPhones anyway.”

Did the Justice Department find the most technology-illiterate, incompetent, stupid lawyers in the United States to file this lawsuit against the world’s largest corporation? “For example, you have to dive into permissions” to “access the iPhone’s camera for video calls.” I trust Song’s reporting — I know she isn’t editorializing here and this is purely how the Justice Department’s lawsuit is written. This is such a ridiculous argument — so ridiculous that I truly don’t even know where to begin to refute it.

Requiring permissions, in the words of the Justice Department, is “abusing monopoly power?” It is one dialog box that a user is faced with once to protect their privacy. It does not result in a single penny for Apple, no matter what the user selects. If the Justice Department aims to remove permission prompts — prompts that I have not heard a single American ever complain about — it is an absolute disgrace to this country.

And the Justice Department, for some reason, “isn’t buying” Apple’s adoption of Rich Communication Services because it has opted to adopt a 2019 version. That is just incorrect — the last published version of the standard by the body that controls it was published in 2019. The “latest” version, according to the Justice Department, is the one Google published. And Google participates in the duopoly. What is the Justice Department’s goal here, to push Apple to adopt Google’s standards just to sue Google for the same thing? It’s technology illiteracy at its finest.

Song continues:

While the Apple Watch can maintain a connection if a user accidentally turns off Bluetooth on the iPhone, third-party watches can’t. As with third-party messaging apps, users have to dive into separate permissions to turn on background app refresh and turn off low power mode if they want the most stable and consistent Bluetooth connection. This impacts passive updates, like weather or exercise tracking.

Does Google allow Wear OS smartwatches to connect with iOS devices in the first place? Continuing:

With digital wallets, the DOJ’s beef with Apple is that the company blocks financial institutions from accessing NFC hardware within the iPhone. (Though, Apple will begin allowing access in much of Europe because of new regulations in the EU.) That, in turn, limits them from providing tap-to-pay capabilities and, again, funnels iPhone users into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet.

Doing so means banks also have to pay 0.15 percent for each credit card transaction done through Apple Pay. Conversely, it’s free for banks using Samsung or Google’s payment apps. The result is that Apple got nearly $200 billion in US transactions in 2022, according to a US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report. The same agency estimates that digital wallet tap-to-pay transactions will increase by over 150 percent by 2028.

Apple is not the Mint; it has no obligation to let anyone use its technology to make near-field communication payments. It does not funnel “iPhone users into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet” because these users can continue to pay for things with regular currency. Using Apple Pay is a feature — a selling point — of the iPhone. Apparently selling products with features is against the law according to this brain-dead Justice Department. President Biden should fire Attorney General Merrick Garland, a failure of an attorney general who hasn’t even been able to prosecute a rapist for stealing confidential government secrets, then lying to the government about those secrets.

Lauren Feiner, reporting for The Verge:

The US Department of Justice accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in an expansive new antitrust lawsuit that seeks to upend many of the ways Apple locks down iPhones.

The DOJ, along with 16 state and district attorneys general, accuses Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its phones. The parties allege that Apple “selectively” imposes contractual restrictions on developers and withholds critical ways of accessing the phone as a way to prevent competition from arising, according to the release.

“Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others,” the DOJ wrote.

The government points to several different ways that Apple has allegedly illegally maintained its monopoly:

• Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices
• Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware
• Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android
• Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues
• Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone

Alright, let’s break this ridiculous lawsuit down piece by piece:

Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices…

What the hell is a “super app?” Quit making up new terms.

Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware…

That was changed two months ago. Try again.

Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android…

Completely incorrect — it’s just absolute nonsense. Apple allows every popular third-party messaging service, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Viber, Skype — you name it, the App Store has got it — on the iPhone, allowing free, interoperable, high-quality messaging between platforms. Those apps are allowed to use Apple-built application programming interfaces to integrate with Siri, the Phone app, notifications, and to display calls and text messages just like ones from Apple-made services, such as iMessage. Apple not only allows these apps to function fully on iOS but also recommends them on the App Store. Completely false — Beeper’s lobbyists have taken control of the Justice Department.

Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues…

That is literally the only good point made in this entire article. Regardless, it does not make Apple a monopoly.

Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone.

That is ludicrous. Apple Pay is an Apple technology and third-party developers have no right to it because Apple does not want them to have access to it.

Apple is a private corporation, for heaven’s sake — has the Justice Department forgotten that? Is this the European Union? The United States has thrived due to a free market where corporations are allowed to be corporations. The Justice Department blatantly ignores that Apple has (a) made a product and (b) is now using it how it wants to use that product. What is the government to control how a corporation does business as long as it is not attacking competition? Blocking access to your product is not attacking competition. Making deals with other corporations to enhance your product is not attacking competition. You know what is attacking competition? Buying WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus and owning the most egregious monopoly in the history of “Big Tech.” Maybe the Justice Department should go after Meta next — and drop this ridiculous lawsuit that will irreparably hurt Americans if won by the government.

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters:

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Tuesday warned Apple and Meta on their new fees for their services, saying that this may hinder users from enjoying the benefits of the Digital Markets Act which aims to give them more choices…

Vestager said the new fees have attracted her attention…

“There are things that we take a keen interest in, for instance, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating,” she told Reuters in an interview.

Being “attractive” is not a requirement of the DMA. The DMA requires openness — it doesn’t actually care about the feelings of whoever the beneficiaries of the law are supposed to be. Vestager, once again, is bending the rules of her own law to make it do things it doesn’t do. The Core Technology Fee might make the new DMA-mandated contract less “attractive,” but that was never the point of the DMA. There is not a single line in the DMA that tells so-called “gatekeepers” that their new rules need to be morally correct and attractive. The new, alternate rules gatekeepers impose on developers just need to fit within the poorly written bounds of the DMA.

The European Parliament and European Commission are absolutely terrible at writing laws. That might sound hypocritical coming from an American, knowing Congress’ inability to do anything correctly, but no legislature in our current global political climate is particularly good at legislation. The European Union wrote a terrible, broad, non-binding, free-for-all, good-for-nothing law and is now trying to enforce it after lobbying attempts from successful companies.

At the end of the day, the DMA was written to be anti-Apple. There has not been a company that has suffered more under this ridiculous law than Apple because it was written to attack Apple and no other company. By contrast, Vestager didn’t make half as much of a fuss about Google’s anti-steering provisions or Meta’s insidious advertisement tracking technologies. Just more whininess from the European Union to discourage U.S. companies from doing business in Europe.

As pointed out by John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, Kay Jebelli has written an insightful, detailed thread on the social media website X all about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act compliance workshop with Apple. I won’t bore you with most of the details, and I’ve already written about the Core Technology Fee earlier, but there were a few more tidbits from the meeting.

The commission began the second section of the meeting — the section where developers by way of the commission itself are allowed to make suggestions to Apple’s DMA compliance — by asking Apple to change the verbiage on the alternative app marketplace choice screen, i.e., the view that appears to a user when they decide to download an app from a marketplace that is not their “default marketplace.” Currently, the screen either asks a user to confirm the download, which is affirmative, or “skip” the screen, which simply closes it and cancels the app download. The commission instead requested that the two options be affirmative, providing users with a clear-cut “yes-or-no” choice.

Apple responded to criticism from the commission regarding the browser choice screen and how users can easily opt to skip the screen, therefore setting Safari as their default browser without scrolling through the options. The commission instead asks that Apple display Safari as one of the randomly displayed options alongside other browsers, like Brave and Google Chrome, and remove the button pinned to the bottom of the screen that allows users to skip it. The commission appears to want to create unnecessary friction for users here and it’s baffling and upsetting. The complaint read by the commission states that Apple will “institute mandatory forced scrolling,” which is not present in the current version of the sheet.

Perhaps most infuriatingly of all, the commission tells Apple that it is not allowed to notarize apps that are distributed via third-party app marketplaces to protect users. Instead, app moderation can and should be only done by government authorities, the commission says. Apple can only ensure no illegal content is in the apps — it cannot remove apps if they are broken or have security vulnerabilities. This throws an unnecessary wrench into Apple’s DMA compliance plans and will degrade the user experience significantly, leading to a massive uptick in scams and broken, malicious apps available for download on iOS. It’s incredible to me that the commission does not see how this could possibly go wrong.

The rest of the session was interesting, but again, I couldn’t sit through it even if I wanted to. I recommend reading Jebelli’s posts instead. The commission continues to impose onerous and ludicrous demands in the guise of “openness” — even though it can’t even be open enough to let the public view the commission’s workshop live without a password.

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

During a workshop event in the European Union today, Apple shed new light on how the Core Technology Fee plays into its compliance with the Digital Markets Act. In particular, the company acknowledged concerns that the CTF could ultimately end up bankrupting small developers who have a free app go viral.

Apple’s explanation came in response to a question from Riley Testut, the creator of AltStore. Testut explained that in high school, he created an app – which was distributed outside the App Store – that received 10 million downloads. Under the new App Store Guidelines, Testut would owe Apple €5 million due to the Core Technology Fee.

Apple’s Kyle Andeer explained that Apple hasn’t yet figured out a solution to this problem, but it’s something it continues to work on. Andeer also pointed out that, based on the data, Apple “didn’t see many of examples” of situations like Testut’s.

Andeer is Apple’s chief compliance officer, also known as the person who ensures Apple complies with regulations from various governments around the world. Testut asked Andeer during an E.U. workshop between Apple — an E.U.-designated “gatekeeper” — and third-party developers about the CTF and how someone, say, a high-school student whose app suddenly went viral overnight would comply with the CTF. Andeer, while not revealing any new changes, told Testut: “And it is something we’re working on. So I would say on that one, stay tuned.”

I heavily doubt Apple would get rid of the CTF entirely, but perhaps it would waive it for developers enrolled in the App Store’s Small Business Program created in the summer of 2020. That would allow developers who don’t make over $1 million a year to be exempt from the CTF, even if their apps went viral. I think that’d be a perfectly adequate solution to this problem E.U. fanboys have been decrying since January. I still think Apple deserves a cut from developers who make the big bucks off of their apps on iOS. The platform isn’t free to maintain — pay or get out.

Lauren Feiner, reporting for The Verge:

During oral arguments on Monday, both liberal and conservative justices on the Supreme Court appeared wary of imposing broad limits on how the government can communicate with social media companies about problematic content it thinks should be removed.

The case at issue is called Murthy v. Missouri, and it asks the court to determine whether the Biden administration’s communications with platforms coerced the companies to take down content, like misinformation about covid vaccines, thereby violating the First Amendment. It also asks the court to consider whether the government’s encouragement to take down such posts actually transformed the platforms themselves into state actors…

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked Aguiñaga a hypothetical that demonstrated concerns with how a ruling squarely in the states’ favor could play out. She imagined a social media challenge among teens that encouraged them to jump out of windows, leading to injuries and deaths. “Is it your view that the government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?” Jackson asked.

Aguiñaga said the government could use the bully pulpit to publicly encourage the platforms to do that. But he took issue with private communications instructing platforms on what they should do.

As a stalwart supporter of the First Amendment, restricting the government’s access to speak with “Big Tech” companies seems problematic at best and dangerous at worst. The government is not aiming to silence speech, it’s just providing recommendations to the social media platforms about how to moderate dangerous speech. Notably, the concerns the government has voiced to the platforms have been about safety, not specific viewpoints, but right-wing nuts have interpreted “silencing” Covid vaccine conspiracies as somehow being against a viewpoint. It’s not silencing any viewpoint — it’s public safety. Just as the government could take down a poster posted on the side of the street that read, “Take off your seatbelts, they’re bad for you!” the government can also ask social media platforms to take down dangerous content.

One notable detail here is the word “ask,” not demand. This case does not center around a specific action the social media platforms took, because social media platforms reserve the right to moderate their content however they please according to the First Amendment. The subject of this issue is communication, i.e., the federal government asking social media platforms to take down content in a manner that has been perceived by the lawyers as “coercive.” The government does not have the right to take down speech hosted privately unless it is illegal — nobody is arguing to the contrary here. The government is just asking for the speech to be taken down in the interest of public safety. Good on the justices for noticing this distinction — they clearly aren’t the most intelligent characters on the planet.

When the justices issue a ruling, presumably in the summer before the court’s annual recess, they should specify this distinction in it, because it’s important. 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 difference is notable because it’ll prevent future nonsense suits like these from being heard.

Mark Gurman, reporting breaking news for Bloomberg past midnight Eastern time:

Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry.

The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.

I’m not entirely surprised by this news, knowing Apple’s years-long default search engine deal with Google, which has attracted regulatory scrutiny. I’d imagine the integration would look like something like how the default Google search engine works on iOS today. If someone asks a question to an AI chatbot via Spotlight or some other app — perhaps even Safari, in the Smart Search field, along with search results from Google — it would be redirected to Gemini, which would possibly generate the answer on-device using Google Search for in-line links to the web.

Google DeepMind has open-sourced a simplified model behind Gemini, called Gemma, and Apple could potentially strike a deal with Google to gain access to that model and integrate it into iOS and macOS, running it on the device rather than sending queries to Google’s servers. Aside from adding AI integrations into system apps, like Pages and Keynote, akin to Microsoft, I think the big opportunity is to leverage the already mighty search deal between the two companies, adding in-line Search Generative Experience-like answers in the website and search query suggestions. Safari already recommends websites, called Top Hits, so why not add a small AI-generated blurb before search results? I think it makes perfect sense — and Google is a great partner for this.

This potential deal does give way to two concerns, however: regulators and Apple’s own AI efforts. Regulators have already expressed concern about Google and Apple’s search deal potentially stifling competition in the search engine market — which I strongly disagree with, but that’s a different story — and this could potentially add fuel to the fire. Perhaps, if the courts don’t strike the search engine deal down in the coming months, the two companies could add new benefits to the contract including AI models and blurbs so that they wouldn’t have to write an entirely new contract just for the AI stuff? I find that likely.

The concern about Apple’s own AI efforts, though, is potentially more warranted. Apple is already falling behind in the generative artificial intelligence race, and we’ve been expecting/anticipating Apple to finally come out with a model of its own called Ajax come the Worldwide Developers Conference, presumably in June. Gurman says in a post on the social media website X that the deal and the potential integrations that may come with it would supplement, not supplant Apple’s own efforts, saying that some experiences will still be powered by Apple’s large language model, Ajax. However, this effectively means that we won’t be seeing an Ajax-powered Siri, even if Siri will now provide LLM-generated responses from search results because I don’t think Google would be particularly happy with helping Apple build a competitor to Assistant with Bard, debuted alongside the Pixel 8 Pro last year.

I’m also unsure, aside from Safari or perhaps Spotlight, how Gemini would be used, and where Ajax would take over. Perhaps Gemini will be used for more web-dependent queries, whereas Ajax will instead serve as the new underlying architecture for what Apple currently calls “on-device machine learning?” I think that’s possible — Ajax would handle more lightweight tasks like recommendations or Siri Suggestions, for example, especially tasks that require access to sensitive on-the-fly user data, like Photos recommendations. I think the tie-in could be good.

Though the deal with Google operationally makes sense, I would’ve liked to see a deal with OpenAI instead, since I find the generative pre-trained transformer line of models from OpenAI to be more reliable and accurate, especially with complicated, precise data. Though DeepMind’s Gemini is quicker and is less reluctant to link out to the web — which is why I use it almost exclusively for web-related queries — I would’ve liked integrations with the latest version of OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer model, GPT-4, into iOS 18 better since OpenAI and Apple are culturally and design-wise quite similar, in my opinion. Both companies care about the user experience, unlike Google, which has no reluctance to kill services whenever it pleases.

I do think that OpenAI would be less inclined to strike a deal with Apple, however, since Microsoft is also involved through and through with the company’s balance sheets, but who knows — I can still hold out hope. I’m unsure if any deals will be signed before WWDC, but here’s hoping.

It might be propaganda, but is that a reason to ban it?

TikTokers voice their opposition to a TikTok ban last year on Capitol Hill. Image: Bloomberg

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024, also known as H.R. 7521, after it was unanimously passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee earlier in the week. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in the House and that President Biden said he would sign if passed, says it aims to protect Americans from applications controlled or owned by countries deemed by the State Department as “foreign adversaries,” which currently includes China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Russia. But clearly, the bill has one target: Chinese-controlled ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

TikTok’s corporate structure is convoluted, even to the U.S. government, apparently: The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands but has corporate headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles, with TikTok operating subsidiaries in the United States, Australia, Britain, and Singapore to cater to those markets. Development work on the U.S. version of TikTok is done in Singapore and Los Angeles, the company says, and is led by Shou Chew, TikTok’s Singaporean chief executive. TikTok also has a Chinese version called Douyin operated by a separate subsidiary based in China. Both versions, TikTok and Douyin, are ultimately — despite their various subsidiaries and headquarters — owned by ByteDance, a company based and incorporated in Beijing and whose owners are mainly Chinese and global investors and employees.

However, ByteDance, a company operated and headquartered in China is subject to control by the Chinese government — and by extension, the Chinese Communist Party, which rules the country with an iron fist. Moreover, the Chinese government owns a 1 percent stake in ByteDance, which it uses to control the company’s operations. TikTok, the Singaporean-American company, claims that it operates independently from the Chinese-controlled ByteDance and that it does not send any data back to the mother ship in China, but it is also worth noting that because ByteDance is effectively controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, it could be under pressure to not reveal any information about the collusion with the American company. Chew insists that since 2020, all American user data has been stored on Oracle servers in Texas via a project the company calls “Project Texas.”

Project Texas was established due to the U.S. government’s concerns under former President Donald Trump in late 2020, when Trump weighed barring the company from operating in the United States after teenage users of the platform coordinated a call center spam attack, booking fake seats at one of his rallies during his 2020 election campaign. Trump and the Justice Department cited two reasons for the ban: The Trump administration said it believed Americans’ data was being stored in China, on Chinese servers, to which the CCP gives itself access, and that, more importantly, the algorithm was being developed by ByteDance in Beijing, not TikTok in Los Angeles, as the company alluded to. While TikTok confirmed to the Trump administration that user data was, in fact, being stored on American soil, independent from China, the company would not say if the algorithm was controlled by the CCP, presumably because it was still being engineered in China.

To this day, the TikTok algorithms — which serve videos from the website to American users, many of whom are children or teenagers — are mainly programmed and tested in Beijing, at ByteDance’s corporate headquarters where the algorithms are subject to interrogation and meddling by the CCP-controlled Chinese government. TikTok has never denied that; it has only said that the two companies — ByteDance and TikTok — “operate independently.” This algorithmic confusion, along with reports from whistle-blowers inside the company who say ByteDance and TikTok still exchange data and that some data and oversight from Beijing is required for engineering tasks in Los Angeles, has made both parties in Congress increasingly weary of TikTok’s influence on young American minds. Still, though, bills to bar the app from operating in the United States went nowhere through Biden’s presidency, in part due to dysfunction in Congress.

Then came October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip, murdering approximately 1,200 Israelis and abducting hundreds of hostages. In response, Israel has launched a devastating counteroffensive on Gaza, killing 30,000 Palestinians over five months of war, according to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Israel has stated that its objective is to eliminate Hamas, which it says operates in civilian population centers, but as casualties rise, the American public has grown impatient with Israel’s war — and has taken to TikTok to air grievances with both Israel and Biden, who has expressed steadfast support for the country’s war. TikTok, a platform used by 170 million Americans each month, has played an outsized role in the Israel-Hamas war, with people as young as 13 being exposed to graphic imagery directly from the war. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the platform was more inclined to show pro-Palestinian videos of the conflict and that it showed violent videos to children even if they didn’t express interest in it.

These reports, along with heightened geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, reignited calls for a ban on TikTok. As young Americans took to the streets protesting the president’s support for the war, legislators and independent media reports found that many protests were organized on TikTok and that pro-Palestinian, antisemitic content was being poorly moderated by the Chinese company, while pro-Israeli content was taken down at higher rates. Theorists surmised that due to the Chinese’s history of meddling in U.S. presidential elections, the CCP must have been behind the algorithm and moderation changes. TikTok has categorically denied the claims, but nonetheless, with the president’s approval rating dropping due to the war, politicians have somehow concluded that TikTok was the culprit.

TikTok and ByteDance are named in the resolution, but the bill targets any application owned or controlled by one of the listed foreign adversaries. What sets the new bill apart from other attempts to ban TikTok, like the now-defunct Restrict Act, however, is that it does not actually force a ban on TikTok. Rather, the bill forces any company controlled by a foreign adversary to divest the American arm and sell it to an American company (or incorporate it in the United States) within 160 days of the bill’s passing, or by September if the bill were passed this month. In simplified terms, the bill asks any company that an adversary controls to “become American” or simply cease operations in the United States. If adversaries do not divest the companies, mobile operating system makers like Apple and Google, as well as American web hosting companies like Cloudflare are mandated by law to stop hosting the problematic applications. The bill gives authority to the president to enforce the divestitures and applicable financial penalties.

If the bill were to pass the Senate and be signed by Biden — which seems increasingly unlikely due to opposition from prominent senators — TikTok says that it would be “effectively banned” from operating in the United States. As soon as the bill — which, according to The Wall Street Journal, panicked TikTok executives — was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee at lightning speed, TikTok went into overdrive, pushing a notification to every TikTok user urging them to enter their ZIP code to contact their representative in hopes that members of Congress would listen to their constituents and vote against the bill. That plan backfired spectacularly and embarrassingly for the company.

Staff members of representatives and senators from all over the country reported being flooded with telephone calls from angry teenagers and young adults at a rate never seen before — all at once, as the notification was sent to TikTok’s users. They all had a message, reading from the same template: save TikTok. Immediately, representatives, Republican and Democratic alike, took to the House floor to vote on the bill after Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana called a vote on Wednesday — an unusual move for the amateur leader. Only hard-right and progressive Democrats voted against the measure, which passed 352 to 65 amongst moderates in a stunning display of bipartisanship unseen on Capitol Hill in recent history. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former speaker, nodded along with hard-right Republicans such as Representative Chip Roy of Texas, while progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York dissented, with Ocasio-Cortez saying the bill was “incredibly rushed.” Many on Capitol Hill who hadn’t decided on the bill were alerted of the calls and became vehemently anti-TikTok overnight.

The campaign from TikTok was an abysmal disaster for the company since it highlighted to members of Congress the total control the supposed Chinese government has over the American public. Suddenly, thanks to one push notification, people who had never called their representatives previously were flooding phone lines, keeping staffers busy for hours as they noted down names and took telephone numbers. The incident affirmed the decisions of representatives who had already decided how to vote on the bill and expedited its passing in the House on Wednesday. Immediately, pundits and politicians used the notification to illustrate to the American public how a Chinese company had exerted such a strong influence over the country’s youth, and TikTok was battered and beaten by legislators from both sides as Chew landed in Washington to lobby against the bill’s passing in the Senate. Chew also posted a video to TikTok describing the bill as a “total ban,” which is factually incorrect — it is only a ban if ByteDance refuses to divest TikTok. The description by Chew further trashed TikTok’s public relations, as critics pointed out that Chew could easily sell TikTok and avoid a ban.

That brings us to the current dilemma: On one hand, Congress is treating TikTok like any other piece of propaganda, forcing it to sell to an American company to prevent foreign interference in U.S. politics while also resolving data privacy concerns regulators have decried for years. On the other hand, however, the U.S. government risks violating the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans who, by the nature of the First Amendment, have the constitutional right to consume and contribute to propaganda and data mining by foreign adversaries. If Congress wanted to prevent American data from ending up in the hands of communist dictators, it could pass a data privacy law that would also affect American companies like Meta, Facebook’s parent, which has snooped on the data of Americans for years to the chagrin of Trump, who has come out against the latest measure due to his disaffection for Meta.

Either Congress wants to force TikTok to sell itself and is using TikTok’s insistence on the bill being a “total ban” as proof that the CCP has an interest in maintaining its control over the service — thus adding steam to the argument that a ban is in order on the grounds of propaganda — or Congress is deliberately hiding something from the public as Ocasio-Cortez suggested in a post of hers on the social media website X. While the first justification is a blatant and despicable violation of the First Amendment, the second argument could be potentially convincing, even to TikTok’s most ardent supporters. The only problem is that Congress has not told the public what its major justification is for banning a product half the country uses. “Propaganda” is not a reason to ban something that enables the free expression of hundreds of millions of Americans, and for that reason, I’m very worried about the fate of TikTok — especially in an election year that is critical for Democrats.

Here is the argument for banning TikTok and the argument against banning TikTok — and why they’re both sound.

For: The U.S. Government Has a Responsibility to Protect Its Citizens From Propaganda

The most damning argument for forcing TikTok to sell to an American company is not about data privacy, since Congress could easily pass a law akin to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, to protect Americans’ data from being sold to hungry overseas governments. Doing so would be within the boundaries of the First Amendment and would prevent foreign surveillance by China — something Washington has taken seriously in recent years. The more interesting — and potentially also more flawed — argument, however, is banning TikTok due to its Chinese ownership and the CCP’s control over the TikTok algorithm. I’m very skeptical of this case, even though there is a historical precedent for it. Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge and lawyer, wrote on Wednesday: “But what exactly did the House select committee see in its secure briefing that led them to vote 50-0 in favor of the bill that would ban the app?” referring to the House Select Committee on the CCP which sent the bill to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

During the second American Red Scare after World War II, the Cold War, and the era of McCarthyism, the government became increasingly skeptical of communism and its spread in the United States. To combat this, it actively infringed on the First Amendment rights of many Americans suspected of harboring communist beliefs, justifying its actions on the premise of national security. Former Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin actively encouraged the Justice Department to take action against suspected communists and helped establish the House Un-American Activities Committee, which targeted Hollywood after executives complained of communists infiltrating the industry. Professors and academics were investigated for alleged communism, membership in leftist and socialist political groups was grounds for investigation, and publishers were barred from distributing communist material. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, which mandated communist parties register with the Justice Department. (None registered.)

Each one of these actions was a blatant violation of the First Amendment in hindsight, but nonetheless, in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that investigations of the Communist Party of the United States of America were constitutional. The Supreme Court did later rule in 1957 that HUAC’s investigative practices violated the Fifth Amendment, but for many years, a nationwide fight against communism — political speech that should have been protected under the First Amendment — was legal, constitutional, and encouraged by the government due to national security concerns. The government, after World War II, didn’t want to run the risk of Americans being radicalized by the growing Soviet Union, and so fought heavily against the spread and distribution of communist media — especially when it originated from Soviet-aligned countries. The United States banned newspapers and television from Eastern countries and heavily questioned Eastern European and Asian immigrants during the second Red Scare — it’s all history.

Instead of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government is now targeting China, a communist dictatorship known for meddling in U.S. elections. And with a hugely consequential one approaching this November, the government — both sides of it, Republican and Democratic — is understandably concerned about foreign influence. Banning propaganda does not come without precedent in the West: Britain on Wednesday outlined new laws barring foreign-owned newspapers from distribution in the country after Emiratis planned to buy The Telegraph. If Congress were to operate on legislative precedent, i.e., based on laws that Congress previously passed during trying times of public disorder, yes, the new law preventing Chinese ownership of TikTok/ByteDance makes sense. It is almost certain that the CCP, a foreign adversary, has control over 170 million Americans — and Congress might have already even confirmed it. Such control poses a national security threat to the United States, and thus, just like during the Red Scare, the United States must “Americanize” TikTok.

Moreover, there could be reasons — as Patel and Ocasio-Cortez suggested — that Congress is not allowed to disclose to the American public yet that rationalize the forced divestiture of TikTok. Again, for the hard right and left to agree on something in the House is truly a feat, so there might be information that the government simply has not uncovered yet. That information could very well pertain to national security: The Chinese and Russian governments — which are often in cahoots with each other — are eager for information relating to the way Americans think and interact with one another. With TikTok given access to the image libraries and location data of hundreds of millions of Americans, the CCP has a suspiciously good reason to lobby against TikTok’s ban. The information could be used to collude with politicians, influence business dealings and trade, and steal patents and other ideas. TikTok’s privacy policy states that it does not sell information to China or any other partner — and Chew during his testimony in front of Congress last year has repeatedly insisted that Americans’ TikTok data is stored on American soil — but what if Congress has found evidence to the contrary?

And then, perhaps most incriminatingly of all, TikTok has exclusively — and annoyingly — referred to this bill as a “total ban,” when such a characterization is entirely incorrect. As I said, TikTok’s PR handling of this recent crisis has been disastrous for the company, with key executives publicly admitting, although indirectly, that they would rather have TikTok banned in the United States than divest it. Why are TikTok executives so keen on letting the Chinese bear control over an immensely popular product worth millions of dollars? Executives could easily cash in by selling it to Oracle or Microsoft, paying employees hefty bonuses, and allowing the company to turn a profit for once. American companies are eager to gain access to the trove of data TikTok possesses, and many American investors have signaled that they are willing to purchase the platform for more than it is worth. Yet, even though there is an overwhelming American interest in a product half of the country uses, Beijing refuses to relinquish its control over the data.

TikTok has sent some of its most popular TikTokers to Washington to lobby against the bill, instructing them, though tacitly, to position it to lawmakers as a “total ban,” when in actuality, all the company needs to do is sell itself to an American investor. TikTok has essentially constructed an elaborate propaganda campaign atop its platform that is already being accused of serving as a Chinese propaganda and surveillance device, sending hoards of aggravated teenagers straight to the congressional phone lines — all for something that is not even remotely true. Moreover, Beijing has taken to the press to air its grievances with the measure — as if the U.S. government will be convinced by one of its top adversaries’ disapproval — with He Yadong, a spokesman for the Chinese commerce ministry, telling The Financial Times in a statement that Washington should “stop unfairly suppressing foreign companies,” even though China literally does the same, as pointed out by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who served in the Trump administration and has expressed interest in purchasing TikTok.

Both China and TikTok — which continuously reiterates that it is an independent firm, operating away from Chinese control — have expressed the same opinion: the U.S. government should stop suppressing Chinese companies. If that is not collusion, nothing is. From the outside, and using history to influence the future — essentially the entire basis of the conservative movement — TikTok should have been banned three years ago. The company has continuously yet accidentally supported claims that it is Chinese propaganda, and the U.S. government should be within its authority to cut off Beijing’s constant stream of American information.

Against: Americans Have a Constitutional Right to View Propaganda

What I just outlined about TikTok — how the CCP has effectively vested operational control over its algorithm, how the push notification campaign underscored China’s ability to influence politics in the United States, and how TikTok may serve as a data mining platform for the Chinese government — does not change one key principle of American democracy: the First Amendment. Americans have a fundamental, constitutional right to engage with, spread, and even create anti-U.S. propaganda; petition their government for changes, even if a foreign adversary encouraged them to do so; and sell their data to foreign adversaries, even if discouraged by the federal government. All of these activities are protected under the First Amendment, the bedrock of free speech in the United States. During the Red Scare, activists sued the Justice Department for enforcing anti-communist laws that they said infringed on their First Amendment rights — and they won. The Supreme Court struck down the government’s silencing of communism, and to this day, the Communist Party of the United States of America exists as a political party — though not a thriving one. Free speech won; government regulation of speech lost.

TikTok being a fundamental danger to the United States’ national security may be true, but Americans’ ability to engage with and take part in that danger is their right. Individual cases of lawlessness can be prosecuted, but ultimately, it is between Congress and TikTok — not the Americans who use it and elect Congress — to defend national security. If TikTok is found violating federal data privacy laws — of which there are very few, but there are some when it pertains to security and adversarial governments — the Justice Department should prosecute it as if TikTok were any other foreign or U.S. company. Instead of writing laws that protect American interests, Congress has decided to take a shortcut: hampering the free speech rights of hundreds of millions of Americans. If Congress was genuinely concerned about foreign threats to the United States, it would investigate and prosecute those threats. Facebook, during the 2016 presidential election, sold data to Cambridge Analytica, a British firm, for political advertising, and Cambridge used the data to influence the election in favor of Trump, who ultimately won — plainly foreign political interference. Facebook was not obstructed from operating in the United States, as doing so would be a First Amendment violation; it instead was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for violating privacy laws. That is how the executive branch of the U.S. government functions.

The First Amendment emphasizes that its existence should not affect how the government protects its citizens — its job is to instead protect citizens from their government. The claim that Americans are allowed to view propaganda might sound ludicrous at first read, but in actuality, it is entirely true, because if the government was allowed to block so-called “propaganda,” it would use that power to block all speech it did not like — a classic First Amendment violation. TikTok might be propaganda, but what is defined as “propaganda?” According to the State Department, it is material created by countries on that list of “foreign adversaries” the U.S. government simply does not like for a variety of (good) reasons. Congress, and by extension, the executive branch, are both given enormous power to protect and defend the civil liberties of the American people, and an important part of that duty is to defend the integrity, culture, and security of the United States. Congress has every right to subpoena TikTok, investigate its ties to the CCP, understand how it manipulates Americans, and then fine TikTok any amount of money it deems sufficient to prevent Americans’ data from being sold to and used by foreign adversaries — something that is already a crime under U.S. law because it is integral to the security of the nation’s people.

Instead of taking its job seriously, the government has taken the easy route: threatening free political expression because it does not agree with it. That expression might be propaganda, but propaganda is protected speech — the Supreme Court has said so. A common argument against this opinion is that Congress is not banning TikTok, but rather simply forcing a sale, which it is within its authority to do as a body of the government that regulates the market. That argument is simply false: If this bill told TikTok, “Sell to an American company or face financial penalties,” then yes, it would be regulation of the free market. But forcing a total ban if the accused business does not obey congressional instructions is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. It unnecessarily involves ordinary civilians in a matter between the government and a business providing services — and when civilians are involved, Congress must take extra care to protect and defend the Constitution. Threatening a TikTok ban — just simply threatening one — is three steps too far. The government’s job is to regulate the market, not impose its beliefs on the American people — and banning any tool, large or small, that is used by Americans to express themselves is thereby an action by Congress of imposing its beliefs on citizens.

This stance is not pro-TikTok, it is simply pro-American. TikTok, as outlined earlier, is a bad company that abuses its power in the United States to indoctrinate grade-school children with CCP-curated propaganda while collecting adults’ data and providing it to China to meddle in presidential elections. It is a criminal enterprise that deserves to be punished and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Keyword: the law. You cannot change the law — the First Amendment — unless you amend the Constitution, an impossible task in today’s political climate, so it is best to instead use what the law already says to hold bad actors accountable for their actions. TikTok has spied on American journalists to uncover whistle-blowers; it has engaged in poor content moderation practices risking the lives of the nation’s youngest; and it has evidently sent data back home to one of the United States’ most formidable enemies — and all of these actions are fundamentally anti-American, and more importantly, illegal. The Justice Department could and should immediately prosecute TikTok like it has Google and Meta, but it does not have the authority — despite what a majority of rank-and-file representatives say — to ignore the free speech rights of half of the U.S. population.

TikTok has turned itself into its own enemy, lying to the American public and Congress, using foreign influence to petition the U.S. government, and employing literal espionage to punish journalists. It is not the “good guy” in this case, per se — it never has been, and it never will be. TikTok has proved its harshest critics correct by sending a notification to millions of users blatantly lying about the consequences of a federal law, and for that, it deserves to face hefty consequences — but not at the expense of the American people. If TikTok was any other company with ownership from any other government, a ban would not even be discussed on Capitol Hill, even if that imaginary company breached the most severe data privacy laws. If Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told the world tomorrow that his company had been selling Meta users’ data straight to the CCP, the Justice Department would censure his company, but it would never even begin thinking of banning the platforms millions of Americans use to express themselves. But the government has yet again cut itself an excuse due to its utter destain for China, a blunder that it will soon come to regret if the bill is signed into law and angry teenagers sue the federal government.

The United States has always held foreign-owned businesses to higher standards, but those higher standards have never resulted in a legal, constitutional addition to the law. During the Red Scares, both the first and second, the U.S. government tried to silence communism in the United States and failed spectacularly. It failed for a good reason: If the government gave itself the ability to silence speech controlled by governments it does not like, American democracy would fall apart. What if, someday, a nation that the United States has currently not deemed as an adversary launches a breakthrough invention that puts U.S. technology to shame? It launches a new social media platform and advertises its invention for millions of Americans to see, but the United States does not like its citizens viewing inventions from other countries. So, it marks the country as an adversary and forces the platform to sell to an American company, using its newly minted powers, effectively ceasing the promotion of the breakthrough. Such an act would not only be a First Amendment violation but would also throw the United States into regression. Americans could be subjected to a dictatorship because the new bill gives too much power to the president.

The most popular counterclaim to this is that China does the same — that China silences speech from adversaries like the United States to protect its people and that the United States needs to do the same. The United States and its governance structure is not even remotely similar to the Chinese’s — I simply cannot stress this enough. China is run by President Xi Jinping, a de facto communist dictator who rules China like a kingdom to the point where search engines have had to block the term “Winnie the Pooh” because it is used as an insult toward the president. If the Justice Department under Biden ordered Google to block the term “Genocide Joe,” Republicans would light the Capitol on fire, but nevertheless, that is precisely how Xi governs his country. The Chinese mentality of banning things deemed “unsafe” for the American public is plainly unconstitutional in the United States. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington this week have used the “China did it” argument numerous times when it is entirely flawed. If the “China did it” mentality was successful in the United States — much less the West in general — then Congress would be out of a job because the very essence of a democracy is a system of checks and balances coupled with free speech.

Western-operated businesses, especially ones headquartered in the United States, are not owned nor controlled by the U.S. government for obvious reasons, yet the CCP treats them as such. By contrast, China owns a slice of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, and the two evidently collude regularly, as demonstrated and verified by many studies and media reports. But what sets the United States and China apart is that the United States is a liberal democracy with free speech at its core, and China is a communist dictatorship. This week’s bill uses China as a role model while lambasting China’s control over a crucial enterprise on the internet — it is a disturbing double standard for Washington to employ, and one that should not be encouraged.

The 352 representatives who voted in support of the bill on Wednesday did have one thing correct — a core tenet of the bill: TikTok is a national security disaster. It is almost certainly true; Congress does not even have to prove it. But again, as Patel wrote, for the government to threaten a ban on a product so many Americans use to express themselves, the government must bring its receipts to the table — or it simply runs the risk of becoming China 2.0. I’m sympathetic to the data privacy argument, which is why Congress should pass data protection laws instead of taking the easy route and slamming the gavel on the sound block and exclaiming, “The resolution is now adopted,” stripping away the rights of millions of Americans and subjecting the government to a long, arduous and inevitable legal battle. The government already has the laws to protect Americans — now, it is time for it to enforce them.

The resolution is now headed for the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has not indicated if he will bring the bill to the floor for a vote or if he would refer it to a committee for further talks, a surefire way of all but killing the measure. But already, prominent hard-right and progressive senators have expressed their opposition to it, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has said he does not think “Congress should be trying to take away the First Amendment rights” of 170 million Americans. The Senate has historically been less proactive in taking up “Big Tech” legislation and also faces the hurdle of the filibuster, a quirk in the Senate rules that requires 60 senators at minimum to vote to end debate on a bill. Purely due to the politics of the Senate, I do not think the bill will clear the filibuster threshold, though it probably has enough votes for passage. And I also think Democrats will wisen up and quickly realize that banning an application millions use during an election year crucial for the party will wind up being a political disaster that, candidly speaking, will most likely cost Biden re-election.

Politics, the role of government, and Chinese influence on the United States are all complicated topics that have been written about and discussed at length for decades. But currently, the U.S. government needs to understand what is at stake with this bill: democracy. Yes, I’m conflicted on the fate of TikTok — there are some good points for forcing its divestiture, but the First Amendment is mighty and important. Whatever TikTok’s fate may be, we will find out before Election Day. Just don’t call your senator telling them to vote against the bill, please.

It’s like Apple tried to make the future with today’s tools

Many months ago — eight, in fact — Apple announced Apple Vision Pro, a marvel of technological engineering and prowess that left me with some concerns, mainly about where this device would fit in my life. While I can’t answer that question yet — I’ve only used Apple Vision Pro for about a day now, on and off — I can say one thing: Apple Vision Pro is mind-blowing. When you first put it on, it’s off-putting, behaving unlike any other computer you’ve ever used before. It’s deeply uncanny, making even the most seasoned computer users second-guess their every move. It takes a second to think about what you want your new computer to do, assess how you should make it do that thing, then perform the gesture to make it do the thing — three steps to perform one. But after a while, Apple Vision Pro shines, becoming a gadget that you find yourself simply being able to feel immersed in. Time flies when you’re wearing Apple Vision Pro — minutes become hours and hours become afternoons. Apple Vision Pro is the most fun you’ll have using a computer in years. It’s like the iPhone all over again.

With that being said, the product doesn’t feel complete, and neither does it feel like it’s at its best. Apple has a lot of work to do: The software, visionOS, is half-baked, and the hardware is heavy, hot, and disorienting. There is no storage included in the box, the included bands are uncomfortable, and the cameras are lackluster at best. Even just placing the headset on your head is jarring: You have to unscrew the Fit Dial or undo the hook-and-loop fasteners — depending on the type of band you’re using — every time you want to use it, then once it’s on your head, you have to make adjustments to it to ensure weight is balanced properly across your cheeks and forehead. It’s finicky. The field-of-view, somehow, is smaller than other virtual reality headsets on the market, breaking immersion, and Apple Vision Pro is essentially unusable in the dark.

But you’ll notice that in that list, most of the glaring issues I have are with the hardware, not the software, and that is because visionOS — though it lacks strong application support from third-party developers as well as basic features like Home View customization — is great. The operating system feels beautiful and intuitive. Though it takes some getting used to after setup, you’ll quickly get a hang of the gestures and eye-tracking after just a couple of hours, so much so that it becomes second nature to use Apple Vision Pro. You’ll find yourself zipping through the OS with no quibbles, using your hands and eyes to navigate through screens and across menus. visionOS is the Apple-iest software on any head-mounted computer, and I have many thoughts about it.

Over just one day, I’ve compiled how I feel about Apple Vision Pro so far. Here are those thoughts and feelings.

Setup

When you first get your Apple Vision Pro out of the box, it comes assembled with the Solo Knit Band, a fabric strap that loops around the back of your head with a “Fit Dial” that you loosen or tighten. You take Apple Vision Pro out of its cradle by holding the main unit’s aluminum frame, not the Light Seal — the fabric part that attaches magnetically to the main unit — or the speaker pods. This is because the Light Seal is prone to snap off since the magnet is relatively weak, which will result in you dropping the headset. This arrangement makes Apple Vision Pro a pain to carry and makes the $200 optional travel case a necessity. Apple Vision Pro does not come with any way to store it in the box; just a cover that you slip over the front glass to prevent scratches and fingerprints when the device is not in use.

Inside, you’ll additionally receive an extra, thicker Light Seal cushion and another band — the Dual Loop Band — along with a nice keepsake booklet instruction manual, 30-watt wall charger, braided USB Type C cable, and detached aluminum battery. The battery is the second nuisance in the box, though I understand why it’s separate. Once you remove the cardboard inserts that keep the headset secure during shipping — and there is a lot of it — you need to plug in the battery to a port on the left side of the unit, just to the right of the speaker pod. The connector on the end of the cord of the battery is shaped like a circle with an aluminum cap, and the cap has an LED light that glows white when the headset is in use. The port on the headset has two gray circles around it, painted onto the silicone of the speaker pod band: a hollowed-out one and a fully filled-in one. You align the LED light on the battery connector with the hollowed-out circle by pressing the connector into the port, which feels like it has a spring in it, then twist the cord by a quarter turn clockwise to align it with the filled-in circle. You’ll then hear a snap, and the LED light will blink white, indicating that it has been successfully connected. The spring then decompresses, and the aluminum connector pops out of its well, protruding from the body of the headset.

The battery itself is heavy, and is as large as an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro, albeit much thicker. I’d say that it’s about three iPhones thick, with rounded corners and edges and an embossed Apple logo at the top. Once you’ve secured the battery, you loosen the Fit Dial located on the right side of the band by twisting it counterclockwise. You then slip the Solo Knit Band over the back of your head, aligning the headset’s displays in front of your eyes and allowing the nosepiece – which seems like a piece of delicate, thin fabric that stretches around your nose — to rest on top of your nose. The device itself is heavy, with pressure being distributed across your forehead, cheekbones, and neck. You’ll then hear a slightly modified version of the Mac’s boot-up chime, hearkening back to the product’s older, 40-year-old sibling. From there, the displays light up, with passthrough mode enabled by default, showing you your surroundings.

You’ll then see a cursive “hello” appear in your space, about 3 feet away from your current position, around at eye level. Below the animation — which plays in different languages similar to iOS and macOS — is a Get Started label, which prompts you to click the Digital Crown at the top-right of the headset to begin setup. Once you click it (it feels just like an Apple Watch or AirPods Max), visionOS prompts you to look at your iPhone to sign in with your Apple ID and connect to Wi-Fi. When you look at your iPhone, you probably won’t be able to read anything because the passthrough quality isn’t spectacular, as I lamented earlier and will describe later. However, you’ll see a sheet similar to the one you see when your iPhone discovers unpaired AirPods, although, in Apple Vision Pro’s case, the sheet is black with an Apple Vision Pro graphic. You then tap the Get Started button, then just continue to look at your iPhone through Apple Vision Pro. An augmented circle will appear around your iPhone, and it will slowly fill in with white until setup is complete. After that, visionOS signs into your Apple ID automatically, similar to when setting up a new Apple TV.

After preliminary setup is complete – including restoring from a backup if you have one — visionOS prompts you to adjust the distance between the displays to prevent visual discomfort. The screen gently fades to black, and two green, hollow circles appear in the center of your view, mimicking the shape of the displays on Apple Vision Pro. Text appears below the circles, telling you to press and hold the Digital Crown to adjust interpupillary distance, or IPD. Unlike other VR headsets, IPD is measured and adjusted automatically, with internal sensors and motors mounted inside Apple Vision Pro. You simply hold the Digital Crown down, and the circles on-screen will join closer together. Once the circles are filled, visionOS will guide you to double-click the Digital Crown to complete setup. Then, a green check mark will appear, indicating that IPD has been set. Once IPD is set, visionOS will enable passthrough again and display a medium-sized white dot in the center of your view and will instruct you to look at it and pinch your thumb and index finger together. When you look at the dot, it becomes smaller, and when you tap your fingers, it animates. Then, six dots all appear in a circle at the center of Apple Vision Pro, and visionOS guides you to look at each one and tap your fingers together to begin setting up eye tracking. Once you’re done, visionOS adds a translucent layer of white to your surroundings, simulating brighter lighting, and then displays a series of orange-colored dots in a variety of shades, prompting you to look at each one and tap your fingers together. The same process repeats in even “brighter” lighting with teal dots; your surroundings are entirely invisible by this point, filled with white.

After basic setup is complete, visionOS shows you an instructional video illustrating how to use the basic gestures of visionOS: tapping, scrolling, and looking. Your eyes act as the cursor, and your fingers act as the buttons on the mouse. When you want to select something, look at it — and only it — then tap your index finger and thumb together. To scroll, you tap your fingers together and move your arm up or down, or right or left depending on how you want to scroll. After that, a welcome script appears, and visionOS takes you straight to the Home View. Welcome to Apple Vision Pro.

Hardware

The first thing you’ll notice from the second you put on Apple Vision Pro is the quality of the passthrough feature, where the cameras mounted outside of Apple Vision Pro display your surroundings through the two screens. Passthrough is grainy on Apple Vision Pro and also feels weirdly out of focus. It’s extremely jarring, especially if you’ve never worn another VR headset. It looks nothing like real life — colors are washed out, there is noise all over the frame, and most noticeable of all, there is an extreme amount of motion blur. Wearing Apple Vision Pro and moving around is not a pleasant experience. The entire frame jitters around, and up-close objects, like your iPhone, look fuzzy and out of focus. When you look toward the edges or have Apple Vision Pro fitted slightly lower than it should, there is an enormous amount of green tint and chromatic aberration coming from the sides of the displays. The color distortion is uncanny.

The next thing you’ll notice is the limited field of view. If you’re guided by the marketing materials, drop everything you know and listen to me: it’s nothing like Apple’s advertisements. When you first put Apple Vision Pro on, it’s like looking through a tunnel, where what would usually be your peripheral vision is covered by black borders. The borders, in my experience, are shaped like a capsule or oval, with a semi-transparent dividing line where your nose would be when you’re looking without Apple Vision Pro. The limited field of view, which I’d say is about 100 degrees horizontally — lower than the Meta Quest 3’s 110 degrees — breaks immersion for me and makes me feel like I’m looking through a headset rather than heavy glasses. The field of view issues coupled with the low-quality passthrough cameras make the “reality” part of Apple Vision Pro lackluster at best.

These hurdles are fundamental version-one hardware issues that I’m sure will be addressed in future versions. But that’s the entire story of this headset: a glimpse at the future with today’s tools. Today, batteries are large, unwieldy, and thick, so it’s impractical to put a battery inside the already heavy Apple Vision Pro. So, Apple had no choice but to detach it from the main unit and enclose it in a thick aluminum chassis. The battery makes you stop and think whenever you find yourself veering off into the immersiveness of Apple Vision Pro. You’re always conscious about where it is, if you need to pick it up, and if you’re pulling on the cord. In practice, I’ve found it best to just place the battery in your left pocket, even when stationary, as you won’t be worried about it when using Apple Vision Pro. However, be careful to take it out of your pocket when you’re done using the headset since walking away while it’s connected will cost you over $2,000 to fix. (Yikes.)

Even without the battery, Apple Vision Pro is an extremely heavy piece of machinery. With both bands, the main unit rests on your cheekbones and nose and hugs your forehead tight. If you use the device for more than 30 minutes at a time and then take it off, you’ll feel some residual pressure on those areas. It’s not tenderness, per se — it didn’t hurt — but it feels like squeezing. It takes a second for you to return to normal; you still feel like you’re wearing the headset even 10 minutes after you take it off. That’s how heavy it is. The headset also generates a lot of heat, thanks to the M2 and R1 systems-on-a-chip and fans. When Apple Vision Pro is on and you use it for an extended period, you can feel warm air coming out from the exhausts at the top of the main unit, as well as some heat on the aluminum frame. My head didn’t feel hot, even after using the device for hours on end, but when I took it off, my head was sweaty, especially around my forehead. I wouldn’t consider the heat something that makes the headset feel uncomfortable — unlike the weight — but it’s strange.

The headbands themselves are disappointing. The pre-installed one, the Solo Knit Band, seemed the most comfortable, unlike for many others I’ve seen. For me, it hugged the back of my head well, keeping the headset secure while moving around, and equally distributed the weight across my face. When I tried the Dual Loop Band — which has both a top strap and back strap — I found that the back strap wasn’t allowing the headset to go lower down on my head, leaving a gap between the Light Seal and my forehead. It did feel lighter on my cheeks, though, presumably because the weight was instead placed on the top of my head. But while it was comfortable, the headset didn’t fit right.

The Solo Knit Band is also easier to take on and off, though it’s an involved process for both bands — it’s nothing like how it’s portrayed in the marketing materials published by Apple. When you want to put on Apple Vision Pro, the Solo Knit Band is probably already tightened, so you have to rotate the Fit Dial to loosen the band, slip the headset on, and then tighten the band again by twisting the dial in the opposite direction — clockwise. Putting it on itself requires some practice: I first found myself trying to get in from under the headset, then slipping on the band, but I’ve now defaulted to raising the headset above my head, stretching the band behind my head, then situating the main unit onto my forehead and cheeks before tightening the band. Then, I usually have to move the headset up or down — up if there is too much pressure on my cheeks, and down if the displays look blurry — which I usually do while I wait for visionOS to start up. Apple also says you should move the band up and down to distribute weight evenly across your face — the natural position of the band is to sit higher than your ears, but you want the band to be at ear level while also not being lower than the ears, since that would bend them.

For the first few times that I used Apple Vision Pro, the displays were extremely blurry, to the point where I couldn’t see anything but the user interface of visionOS — and even looking at that was unpleasant. To address this, I had to recalibrate the IPD in Settings. I did this a couple of times, and each time I did, I heard the motors move, indicating that the IPD was being adjusted. It turns out that as you change how the strap fits on your head, your IPD also changes in a way that the system has to recalibrate. Failure to do so might make you go cross-eyed, which is what happened to me for the first couple of minutes. But even after I recalibrated my IPD, I still wasn’t able to see anything close up through the passthrough mode. This continues even as I write this; it seems like the minimum focal distance of the cameras that power Apple Vision Pro is around a foot, maybe a foot and a half from your face. I still am unable to read very clearly from my iPhone — I can make out large letters, like titles, but the passthrough seems only good for looking at people and your surroundings.

In low-light conditions, the passthrough fails. It still “works,” but that’s using a very broad definition of the term. visionOS never disables the passthrough mode ever, so the system just adds artificial light, which increases grain. It’s incredibly off-putting, but luckily, this can be addressed by using an Environment. And when in very bright conditions, like looking into a light, the displays automatically dim to protect your eyes. Looking at some displays shows flickering due to mismatched refresh rates. Passthrough is in a high dynamic range, though, so you can see outside of a window and inside of your home, for example.

Again, this is not a full review, and I haven’t tested every aspect of the hardware in every imaginable condition — I’ve only had an Apple Vision Pro for about a day. But one thing is for certain: Apple Vision Pro’s hardware screams “version 1.0” all day long. As you’ll hear in the visionOS section of these second impressions, this device is oddly futuristic — in a good way — but its hardware limits it beyond belief. The hardware, while not disappointing, has a ways to go, but for now, it acts as a hindrance to the fantastic software and feature set of this device.

visionOS

After you take off Apple Vision Pro, you’ll usually keep the battery plugged in unless you need to charge it, in which case you can disconnect it and charge it separately. (I haven’t done enough extensive testing to determine battery life. That is coming in the full review.) Apple Vision Pro’s displays only are powered on when (a) the battery is plugged in — obviously — and (b) when Apple Vision Pro is on your head and, importantly, it can see your eyes. When not in use, Apple Vision Pro stays on for about a minute, indicated by the battery connector’s LED indicator staying on, syncing apps and downloading data before it goes to sleep — without an affordance for Find My since visionOS doesn’t have Find My functionality — similar to AirPods Max.

There is no power button to wake Apple Vision Pro — you just put it on, and the system wakes from sleep mode nearly instantaneously. There is no Apple logo when you wake it up, either; there is only one when you boot Apple Vision Pro. The only way to turn off the headset entirely is by disconnecting the battery — and connecting the battery again immediately powers on Apple Vision Pro. There is no way to make the device go to sleep while it’s on your head, and there is no way to make it fully turn off while the battery is connected — at least not that I’ve seen. Additionally, immediately disconnecting the battery will not prompt visionOS to save any of your data. There is no state restoration if you disconnect the battery — it’s equivalent to a shutdown on macOS, but with no warning to save your data because there is no reserve battery in the headset itself.

Once you place Apple Vision Pro on your head, the passthrough functionality kicks in. After the colors adjust — they start blue-ish and then are tuned to your environment — a window pops up around the bottom of the screen with an Optic ID logo. You do not have to look at this window for Optic ID to authenticate you; Optic ID scans your irises automatically and logs in without you having to lift a finger — no taps, no button clicks. Optic ID is configured during setup and is easily one of the most delightful experiences on visionOS. Configuring it takes about two seconds and all you have to do is look at a target placed in a window. Once it’s set up, it never fails unless your Apple Vision Pro is placed too high or too low on your head.

If Apple Vision Pro is fitted incorrectly, either with the wrong IPD, position on your face, or some other reason, visionOS will give you an alert notification before you can proceed with Optic ID. When you’re in motion or if the sensor array is covered — for example, if you have the front cover on, like when your Apple Vision Pro is not in use – you’ll get an alert that reads: “Tracking failed,” complete with an orange icon; if your surroundings are too dark, you’ll get an alert that your hands will not be cut out and overlaid on your application windows; if your Apple Vision Pro is too high, too low, too close, or otherwise misaligned with your eyes, you’ll get a notification allowing you to proceed, but asking you to adjust your device; and if your IPD is incorrect, you’ll be immediately taken to the display adjustment view to readjust, which is compulsory since not doing so can cause sickness.

Once Apple Vision Pro is unlocked, no Home View is displayed by default — it’s just your surroundings, akin to Transparency Mode on AirPods Pro. To show the Home View — a grid of alphabetically organized applications — you press the Digital Crown once, which spawns the Home View anywhere that you look. You can create a Home View anywhere you want, including on the ceiling or the floor, and once an app is opened, you can create a new Home View somewhere else to open a new app. The Home View isn’t customizable at all — there are no folders, no app re-organization, known colloquially as “Jiggle Mode,” and no ability to delete default, pre-installed apps — and is only organized by app name from the second page onward, with the first page dedicated to Apple apps and a folder of iPad apps running in Compatibility Mode. Swiping between pages just requires a tap of your fingers and a flick to the left or right, with dots appearing at the bottom of the view to indicate how many pages there are, similar to iOS. Looking at an app changes its icon’s appearance slightly, creating a subtle 3D effect where individual pieces of the icon are separated from each other with a minor drop shadow. It’s similar to the animation you see when selecting an app in tvOS but made for 3D.

visionOS, from the get-go, feels like the love child of macOS and tvOS: it’s an unholy combination that nobody would’ve ever expected, but that works remarkably well, feeling natural and intuitive. Like on tvOS, looking at a control makes it pop, with a subtle highlight around the button shape. Simply glancing past one casts a small glimmer of light onto it, too. Tapping on an icon by pinching your fingers compresses the button slightly before it bounces back, performing an action and dimming the icon while the action is in progress. But like on macOS, your eyes are an extraordinarily precise method of interaction, similar to a mouse cursor but just slightly less precise — a mouse cursor is exactly one pixel, whereas your gaze is many pixels. The effect is uncanny: Unlike on macOS or tvOS, you have to be actively looking at the element you’d like to select. Since Apple Vision Pro is a computer at the end of the day, you’ll tend to veer off or be distracted by other icons next to the one you want to select, but looking at something else will select that element, not the one you actually want. A simple glance won’t do — you have to actively look at what you want to tap while you’re tapping it. For the first couple of hours, it’s jarring, as everything is new to you. For example, I found myself pinching my fingers together as I moved my hands when I spoke, looking at a window. But after you settle in, it feels like second nature — like how a computer should always function. You make fewer mistakes and work more intentionally.

Your space is infinitely large in visionOS — even more expansive than your actual living space, because looking out through a window (definition No. 1: an opening in the wall that is fitted with glass to admit light) allows you to create a window (definition No. 3: a framed area on a screen for viewing information) that is as large as a tree. By default, visionOS apps open extremely large, taking up as much room as they want, but that’s because they’re far away when you open them for the first time. To move a window, you look at the bottom of it, where there are two icons: a dot, and a bar, arranged horizontally. Looking at the bar highlights it, and from there, you can tap your fingers together to move it left, right, up, down, and along the z-axis (back and front). To perform a z-axis move, you extend your arm outward or inward, but you don’t have to move it so much that it’s uncomfortable — only slightly. Like a physical object, moving a window outward (away) increases its size, and moving it inward decreases its size — both by an equal scale factor, respecting the aspect ratio of the window. To change the aspect ratio, you look at the bottom left or right corner to make the bar form around the corner. Then, you can tap and drag diagonally in any direction to change how wide, narrow, tall, or short a window is. To close a window, just tap the dot. It’s just like macOS, or iPadOS with Stage Manager enabled.

Once you place a window, it doesn’t move anywhere, even if you move. This means that you could place a window in the living room and walk to the kitchen, and the window would remain in its location in the living room. As you move closer to a window, it doesn’t “jiggle” around, even slightly. Windows feel like physical, translucent objects in your space, with the “glass” visual material and subtle drop shadows added to the floor or a table beneath a window. Using the augmented reality mode on iOS — even with iPhones 12 Pro and beyond equipped with lidar sensors — isn’t perfect, with virtual objects appearing to float around weirdly or make micro-movements as the camera moves, but that isn’t the case on Apple Vision Pro. It’s spectacular and just something you have to see for yourself. If you or someone else walks through a window, it fades and becomes semi-transparent, and then returns to its near-opaque state once there are no obstacles in view. Funnily, visionOS ignores physical objects as obstacles — it only prioritizes people — meaning that you can push a window into your bed or couch, for example. All parts of the window remain visible, with the window appearing overlaid on the physical object. Looking at a window from behind shows a white, almost opaque box, and looking at one from the side shows a razor-thin side profile of the window which you can look at up close.

Authenticating with Optic ID, tapping app icons, closing windows, taking screenshots, and opening the Home View all play unique, delightful sound effects. The one played while authenticating with Optic ID sounds like a key unlocking padlock — it’s the equivalent of skeuomorphism for sound and is intensely satisfying. Other sounds are familiar: the screenshot sound is from macOS and the battery charging and keyboard clicking sounds are from iOS. These sounds come from the speaker pods by default, but you can change that to connected AirPods if you’d like. Control Center is where you adjust audio settings, put the device into Travel Mode or Airplane Mode, change Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, record the screen, enable Mac Virtual Display, AirPlay to an Apple TV, or adjust the Environment you’re in. (You can also adjust audio and Environments by turning the Digital Crown and looking at the element you’d like to change.) Navigating to Control Center on visionOS is one of the weirdest interactions on the operating system: You move your head up toward the ceiling and look for a translucent dot with a chevron pointing down on it. You then tap that, then tap the Control Center button. Control Center also shows you your battery percentage, the time, and the date.

visionOS is a delightful operating system to use — period. From the get-go, it looks entirely different than macOS or iOS because it’s designed to fit within your space, blending in with your surroundings. But as soon as you get used to it, you realize where it gets its roots: macOS and iOS. Users of those two platforms will feel at home on visionOS because visionOS is a natural extension of them, with cues taken from tvOS, watchOS, and iPadOS. The Mac feels like an extension of my limbs when I’m working on it — it’s that natural to me — and the iPhone feels like a piece of paper that morphs into whatever I want. It doesn’t feel like I’m navigating a computer when I use those two operating systems because I’m so in tune with their every move. I know what is going to happen if I click a button on macOS or tap an icon on iOS — and that familiarity carries over to visionOS with no extra training.

The tactile feedback that you feel when you physically press your iPhone screen or the haptic feedback you feel when you click a Magic Trackpad — that feedback is now your fingers touching together on visionOS. The “pinching” gesture is an intuitive combination between clicking down on a mouse and tapping a touchscreen with your finger. The “pinch-and-swipe” gesture has the inertia of the two- or three-finger swipes on Magic Trackpads with the intuitiveness of scrolling on iOS. visionOS is a seamless, natural, perceptible blend between all of Apple’s operating systems, and that’s what makes it so fantastic. It’s a five-star interface, and though it lacks some basic features like app organization, editing in the Photos app, or turning off Spatial Audio (weird), it’s an astoundingly delightful interface to use — and hyper-futuristic.

My only gripe is this: visionOS has a steep learning curve. When you first use visionOS, there’ll be a temptation to move your hands up and tap things. Sometimes, you’ll be looking at something, reach and grab something different, and tap it — only to realize you’ve tapped the control you were looking at, not the one you reached out for. These mistakes — if you’ll call them that — come after decades of life, not just computer use. Our eyes never worked as the pointing device throughout human history; our gaze has always been independent of our limbs. On visionOS, your gaze is an extension of your limb, and thus your arms, hands, and eyes are no longer asynchronous or independent. You’ll want to go fast on visionOS, even when you first begin using it, but you can’t unless you train yourself to look at something and then tap it. Once you master looking and tapping, you’ll naturally place your hands in your lap as you move through visionOS, rather than raising them to tap things in space. The only time you’ll raise your hands is if you want to move a window or scroll — two actions that require arm movement rather than just hand or finger movement.

There is no better example of this irregularity — the one where you have to look and tap rather than reach out and tap — than the virtual keyboard on visionOS, which is easily the most grueling interface on the entire operating system. There are two ways to control the virtual keyboard: physically pressing “keys” with your finger in the air or looking at a key and tapping your fingers together like any other control. The first one is truly asinine; it’s genuinely remarkable how bad it is. The second one, however, requires some retraining: If you know your way around a keyboard well, it’s pretty simple to just keep your hands in your lap and quickly glance at each letter, though going ultra-quick will inevitably yield some mistakes. Regardless, text input on Apple Vision Pro is arduous, and that is being generous. You’ll be much better off by connecting a keyboard — there is no need for a trackpad since eye tracking is that good — via Bluetooth, as the virtual keyboard is a true pain. Alternatively, some text fields have a microphone icon to their left that you can look at to begin dictation — though dictation is as accurate as an iPhone, which is to say, not very accurate.

This issue could be easily addressed just by utilizing the device everyone has next to them when they’re using Apple Vision Pro: their iPhone. On tvOS, text input is worse than visionOS, so Apple sends a notification to your nearby iPhone to let you use its keyboard to type. This isn’t an option on visionOS, and it should be. The iPhone’s keyboard is great — much better than Apple Vision Pro — and Apple should add the ability to use it on visionOS as another continuity feature. Relatedly, Optic ID doesn’t unlock your iPhone, and there are some times when I just want to do something on my iPhone, even with the mediocre passthrough quality. When you swipe up on iOS to enter the Home Screen with Apple Vision Pro on, it silently fails. Hilariously, there is an option under Settings → Optic ID & Passcode that allows you to bypass Optic ID on Apple Vision Pro if a nearby iPhone has been unlocked with Face ID, similar to the “Unlock with Apple Watch” feature on iOS, but it should work the other way around with a future software update, where unlocking Apple Vision Pro with Optic ID unlocks your iPhone when you use it. I predict that Apple will fix these glaring issues, but for now, they’re omissions that make visionOS feel incomplete.

Experiences

First, hand occlusion, or hand cutouts: When your hand is over a window or experience in visionOS, and your room is sufficiently lit, Apple Vision Pro will dynamically track your hand and cut it out from the frame so you can see it over windows. In Apple’s marketing materials, it seems like the hand occlusion is superb and immaculate, but that is only partially true. The bad passthrough quality and motion blur are so perceptible that hand occlusion isn’t crucial. In bright lighting, the cutouts are jumpy and you can see about half a centimeter of a “halo” around your hand when it’s over a window, but it’s fine and barely noticeable in practice. Even in immersive Environments, you can see your hands and arms — but not any other body part — and move them freely. Oddly, this hand occlusion does not extend to a physical keyboard, so if you need to look at it to type, you’re out of luck — visionOS only cuts your hands out. But if you’re looking at screen recordings of visionOS and thinking that hand occlusion is poor, it’s imperceptible in practice and you won’t be bothered by it — even in the most immersive of Environments.

Speaking of Environments, there are six VR versions: Heleakalā, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Mount Hood, the Moon, and White Sands. There are two that are labeled “Coming Soon,” and there are five lighting effects that change the way passthrough looks by adding a filter: Morning Light (blue), Spring Light (red), Summer Light (yellow), Fall Light (amber/orange), and Winter Light (another shade of blue). You access these Environments by pressing the Digital Crown to go to the Home View, then looking at the sidebar mounted to the left to select “Environments.” The light effects are useless, but the VR Environments are by far some of the most impressive aspects of visionOS. Each one is in HDR, and you can see your hands inside of them — great for writing. You control your level of “immersiveness” — i.e., how much of the Environment you want to see — by rotating the Digital Crown clockwise, which shows a circle that fills in depending on how immersed you are. Partial immersiveness shows a circular portal to the Environment at the center of your gaze — you can recenter by pressing and holding the Digital Crown — and full immersiveness takes you entirely into the Environment.

Environments are 3D and come in light and dark variants which you can toggle from Control Center. If you begin to move around in an Environment, Apple Vision Pro won’t immediately break immersiveness, but as soon as it detects that you’re even remotely close to an object, like a wall, it’ll blend your surroundings via passthrough in with the Environment automatically. Similarly, if you’re too close to an object from the beginning, visionOS will display a warning that says you’re too close to an object and will refuse to let you enter the Environment. I don’t think it’s possible to accidentally bump into anything when Apple Vision Pro is strapped to your head; it seems to do a great job at blending your surroundings in, even when fully immersed. Your arms are always cut out in every Environment, and if someone approaches you while you’re in one, they’ll break through, with a ghost-like halo of them appearing at their location. You can’t miss someone if they’re waiting for your attention nearby. It’s almost too good, in fact: If you’re sitting in a living room with other people, or perhaps an airplane, passthrough will activate no matter if the person is looking at you or not, in my experience, meaning that you’ll be able to see everyone around you all the time unless you’re actively looking away from them.

Third-party apps can also display their own immersive experiences, and two apps stood out to me: Disney+ and Night Sky. Disney+ has a couple of experiences: the Disney+ Theater, Avengers Tower, Scare Floor, and Tatooine. They’re all simply incredible — you just have to see them to believe it. My favorite is the Disney+ Theater, where you’re sitting in a chair in the theater and there is a giant, expansive skylight on the ceiling which you can look at. Behind you are more rows of seats, and to your sides are massive, red curtains, just like a beautiful live-action drama theater. Your hands are still cut out, so it really does make you feel like you’re sitting in the chair, with everything from virtual cupholders to tables and armrests. As you turn on a film, the lights go dark and the video player takes up the entire front wall of the virtual theater. It truly is incredible and makes you go, “Wow.” No wonder why they got Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, to demonstrate Disney+ during the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Night Sky, meanwhile, lets you sit in a planetarium, which surrounds you — you can look up, down, left, and right. Tapping on constellations, stars, planets, and rockets will give you more information in a window, and you can even walk around and explore. The only downside to these experiences is that you can’t bring in other apps like you can with the default Environments. Even though they look similar, they’re more akin to full-screen apps whereas the Apple-provided Environments are more like desktop backgrounds.

The second “revolutionary” experience is in the Photos app: panoramas. Since the iPhone 5s, iOS users have been able to take panoramic photographs just by holding their iPhone up and moving it around horizontally. On Apple Vision Pro, those panoramas can be viewed around you, meaning that panoramas engulf your view. The panoramas are still 2D images, but they surround your entire field of view — as much as you can see through Apple Vision Pro and then some, both vertically and horizontally. My strongest recommendation, even for those who aren’t intent on buying an Apple Vision Pro right away, is to take more panoramic photographs on your iPhone. They are easily one of the most mind-blowing parts of the headset, and truly something only Apple can do. Even years-old panoramas I took with iPhones of many years ago with inferior cameras look fantastic on Apple Vision Pro and transported me back to when they were originally taken.

For example, many years ago, I took a panorama at an ice hockey game on a field trip from the stands, out toward the rink and the opposite stands tilted slightly up. When I viewed that panorama on my iPhone or Mac, it wasn’t that impressive — you could see distortion, you couldn’t see the entire frame, and it was very narrow, so you had to zoom in to let the picture take up the horizontal length of the screen. On visionOS, I just tapped the Immersive button (it’s shaped like a panorama) at the top right of the picture in the Photos app, and it took up my entire view. It felt exactly like I was there, standing from my seat, looking into the arena, Amway Center. It was captivating, and a must-feel experience for anyone.

The other, perhaps slightly less impressive experience is Spatial Video, which you can capture on iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Vision Pro. I haven’t tried capturing one on the headset itself, but I did view my iPhone videos that I took over the holidays. I see the appeal and why someone would enjoy looking at them: Each video feels like a portal in time, opening up in a blurred oval that you can look inside to feel the depth effect more prominently. People feel like they’re right there, standing in front of you, but the resolution and frame rate make it feel like a video at the end of the day. Spatial Videos are shot at 30 frames per second in 1080p, which is too low of a resolution because Spatial Videos are viewed only about half a foot away from your face.

Additionally, shooting Spatial Videos without moving your iPhone very much is a difficult task, and after viewing just a couple of videos, I was feeling slightly queasy and had to leave the Photos app to stabilize again. This is due to the way Spatial Videos are viewed: they’re very close to your face, and the video takes up your entire field of view, causing nausea. They’re fascinating to view — you feel like you can touch objects in them — and I certainly will take more of them for later viewing, but in my opinion, the more compelling experience was viewing panoramas.

Aside from immersive experiences like Environments, 3D movies, panoramas, Spatial Videos, and AR views — all of which I’ll discuss at length in articles to come — regular, 2D apps also run on visionOS, and this is where the “spatial computing” part of this computer comes into play. 2D apps are where Apple Vision Pro shines — there have been VR headsets for years that can simulate virtual environments convincingly, but there is no headset on the market that provides a computing experience as riveting as Apple Vision Pro. As I wrote earlier, windows by default on visionOS are massive, taking up your entire room, but you can make them smaller and have a bunch of more compact, normal-sized windows in your space — all 360 degrees of it. You can even place windows in separate rooms, so if you’d like to put Safari in the living room and Crouton in the kitchen, for example, you can do so. The locations of your windows persist throughout sessions, too, so if you take Apple Vision Pro off and put it back on later, it’ll remember where your windows were last located. If you lose your windows, no worries: you can recenter them by pressing and holding the Digital Crown. When you recenter windows, they don’t change their relative distance to each other, meaning that if you had Safari to the right of Mail but in a different room, recentering would maintain their position, but not their location. You can look anywhere and recenter and apps will follow you.

There are two kinds of apps on visionOS: apps made for visionOS and apps made for the iPad or iPhone. Both work excellently, contrary to what spokespeople for YouTube and Netflix have said, but visionOS-optimized apps work the best. Apps made for visionOS are made out of the translucent glass material, which looks like a semi-transparent gray color with white text. The contrast changes depending on the lighting in your room, and text is readable and sharp. Sidebars expand as you look at them, too, and elements pop well, blending in with visionOS’ design language. Moving apps is seamless, as they don’t have specific size classes — they move and resize freely, just like macOS apps, adapting to the size you set them at. Some apps with large amounts of text or ones that display webpages, like Safari, Notes, and Mail, show a white background under the main area rather than the glass material for increased legibility. Your notes will always have a white background, for example.

Most importantly, if you look at an element in a visionOS-optimized app, the element will be given a brighter highlight color, indicating that the system knows you’re looking at it, which is important to see before you tap. visionOS apps also have a unique inset-style scroll bar and use less color in their interfaces because it’s hard to discern small amounts of color for it blends in with your surroundings, creating low contrast. visionOS-optimized tasks are where Apple Vision Pro feels at home, and the windows themselves feel like real objects in your space. It’s remarkable how fun interacting with them is. More information on these is coming in the full review.

The second kind of app is an iPhone or iPad app running in Compatibility Mode, which means that the app runs unmodified, just as it would on an iOS or iPadOS device. These apps work fine, and there isn’t much to write home about. At the top right corner of an iPhone or iPad app, you’ll see an ornament that allows you to change the app’s orientation, even for iPhone apps that don’t support the landscape orientation, interestingly. Closing and moving these apps still works the same, including the scale effect when you move the window across the z-axis. Apps optimized for the iPad work the best, in my experience, as they’re larger and support more size classes, à la Stage Manager on iPadOS. You can have as many iPad apps as you want, and they’re all located in the “Compatible Apps” section of the Home View, with squircle icons. (visionOS apps have circular icons.)

One interesting, and perhaps inconvenient side effect of these apps is that, because there is no dark mode on visionOS, iPhone/iPad apps always are in light mode by default. If an app supports a custom dark mode setting, you can enable that — and I prefer it since dark mode seems to blend better with visionOS’ UI elements — but some apps, namely Apple-made ones like Calendar and Reminders, don’t and are permanently in light mode, which is a shame. Also, if an app is optimized for the iPad’s trackpad, you’ll see UI elements highlighted in gray — similar to when hovering over them with a trackpad cursor on iPadOS — as you look at them. But if an app isn’t optimized, or is optimized poorly, elements won’t be highlighted. They’ll still work when you look and tap your fingers together, but it’s confusing sometimes. Regardless, most iPad apps on visionOS work sufficiently well, and I’d rather use them over the equivalent websites, even though Safari also works well, even with small touch targets.

visionOS supports trackpads and some Bluetooth keyboards, but not Bluetooth mice — let alone USB mice. These peripherals act just like they would on iPadOS, including support for keyboard shortcuts, Spotlight (⌘ Space), and gestures. I find that a Bluetooth keyboard is a necessity to do any semblance of work on Apple Vision Pro, but a trackpad is less useful, since looking and tapping, even for text, is a more fun, useful way of using Apple Vision Pro than the trackpad. If you connect a trackpad, however, the circular cursor moves between apps and doesn’t lie in the middle of your view.

The best way to work on visionOS is actually not on visionOS at all, but on macOS, using the Mac Virtual Display feature. To enable Mac Virtual Display, you can either (a) open the lid of your Mac laptop and unlock it, go to the Home View on visionOS, then tap the augmented Connect button above the screen, (b) go to Control Center on your Mac, select Screen Mirroring, then pick your Apple Vision Pro from the list, like you would an Apple TV, or (c) go to Control Center on Apple Vision Pro, choose Mac Virtual Display, then select a Mac from the list. You’ll need a Mac running macOS Sonoma or later, and one with Apple silicon to get the highest 4K resolution. Macs with Intel processors are limited to 3K. After you connect your Mac — which takes about two to three seconds — the display will go black, and a large, visionOS window-sized display will appear in the center of your view. You can bring it closer, which will make the display appear close to 32 inches, or farther, to make it take up the size of a wall, just like any other window on visionOS using the bar at the bottom. You can additionally look at the corner to make it larger, though you can’t change the aspect ratio — it looks like it’s stuck at 16:9.

The display itself has extremely low latency — I couldn’t tell a difference from any other external display. It’s certainly nothing like using AirPlay to connect to an Apple TV, and I could easily edit a video or type with it. It’s also extraordinarily high resolution, with crisp text and visuals, just as if I had a massive external display connected to my Mac, and supports playing back HDR content. The display, however, is ever so slightly translucent — I can’t make out details behind the display, but it’s not entirely solid either. It’s not a big deal, even for tasks that require precise color controls, but it’s not like having a rich-in-color, bright real organic-LED display in front of you. Black levels are close but aren’t exactly like a MacBook Pro with a mini-LED display. The refresh rate seems to be at 100 hertz, so if you’re coming from a MacBook Pro display, it’s slightly different, but again, the difference is negligible if you’re actually working rather than nitpicking.

Mac Virtual Display is special, though, for one reason: it doesn’t take over visionOS. If you want — and you’ll want to — you can place the display in the center of your view, move your head to the top or side, and spawn a new Home View with the Digital Crown to open a new app from visionOS, like Messages. Then, you can use Universal Control to use your Mac’s trackpad to move your cursor from macOS to visionOS and interact with the visionOS app just as if you connected an external keyboard and trackpad to visionOS directly. Then, you can move the cursor back to macOS and continue working. If you get a notification from Messages, it’ll appear on visionOS and macOS, and you can interact with the visionOS one by just looking at it where it comes from at the top, tapping your fingers together, then dragging your cursor from macOS to the Messages app to begin typing with your Mac’s keyboard. It’s no less than pure magic.

Mac Virtual Display makes Apple Vision Pro a fantastic tool to work with. While you’ll want to use pure visionOS for entertainment and casual computing to enjoy its unique experiences, there is no better way to enjoy spatial computing than with Mac Virtual Display. It’s every single one of your Mac apps, as well as the familiar Mac experience, blended with the wonder and novelty of spatial computing. You can work anywhere you want — Joshua Tree, the Moon, or any other Environment — with as big of a low-latency, beautiful screen as you want, along with an unlimited amount of computing space because you can create as many visionOS windows as you’d like. It has been such a joy to use Mac Virtual Display, and it works spectacularly.

The experiences I’ve had on visionOS over just a day are phenomenal. Apple Vision Pro is mind-blowing, and everything you do on it feels like magic. It’s the most “Apple” a VR product has ever been. It’s an infinite, immersive canvas with continuity features and 3D experiences that impress.

Conclusion

If you think what you just read is a lot, you’re wrong. That’s the short part. Apple Vision Pro is (a) an entirely new piece of hardware unlike one we’ve ever seen from Apple before, (b) an entirely new computing platform that runs a groundbreaking, futuristic operating system, and (c) a product with many use cases — too many to count. That is a lot of ground to cover, and I simply can’t do that in just one day.

There is still so much I haven’t covered: Personas, EyeSight, killer apps, app development, use cases, etc., the list truly does go on. And trust me, I will cover all of the above. But for now, just take this away from this extremely long piece: Apple Vision Pro is like Apple tried to make the future with today’s tools. Everything that Apple could control about this headset feels straight out of the future. This is the future of computing. In 1984, the Macintosh opened an entirely new computing paradigm that would lead us to the World Wide Web; in 2007, the iPhone opened an entirely new computing paradigm that would lead us to the personal internet; and now, in 2024, the 40th Anniversary Macintosh is bringing a computer into our spaces.

Like the iPhone never replaced the desktop personal computer, or the Macintosh never replaced heavy-duty servers, Apple Vision Pro will not replace any device Apple currently makes. Instead, Apple Vision Pro and visionOS open an entirely new world of computing. My mind is still racing with thoughts, and I’ll save much of it for later — after I enjoy my new slice of the future for just a bit more time.