Zac Hall

I’m sure it’s been said countless times before, but—now that would be a good name for a column!—iMessage could use a send quietly option that’s always available. Send quietly is a feature today, but it’s only available when the recipient is in a Focus mode.

Here’s an early Earth Day victory for the planet we all inhabit. Apple is relaxing the rules for its repair policies to allow used genuine parts for the first time. The change will apply to select iPhones and go into effect this fall.

You don’t need to own an Apple Vision Pro to appreciate it. Just having competition from the high end is pushing Meta to improve its mainstream mixed reality headset.

Meta Quest 3 hit the market last year for $499. That’s $3000 shy of Vision Pro, but with the same goal of colorized passthrough for mixed reality. The only problem was that Meta’s version of passthrough was hardly comparable to Apple’s. My own evaluation is that Meta Quest 3 passthrough is usable but not convincing.

That appears to be changing now. In a Quest software update called v64, Meta says that it has improved passthrough quality for the Meta Quest 3 headset. Here’s a summary from the release notes:

Apple has released a new software update for Apple Vision Pro. visionOS 1.1.2 is now available. According to the release notes, visionOS 1.1.2 focuses on bug fixes.

Apple is also testing visionOS 1.2 for Apple Vision Pro users on the beta release cycle. A new build of visionOS 1.2 has also been released today.

Apple Vision Pro is the best way to watch video, but Netflix hasn’t received the memo. Fortunately, young and aspiring developers are ready to show up and ship. Enter Christian Privitelli, the 19-year-old Australian developer of Supercut.

Happy Eclipse Day! Remember Apple’s secretive Project Artemis film? The movie production team basically took over Kennedy Space Center in a time machine for it. Last week the official movie title was revealed as Fly Me to The Moon, and today the first official trailer has dropped.

Apple Watch is an essential runner’s companion, and Apple Watch Ultra takes it to the next level with longer battery life and more. That’s why participants of this year’s The Speed Project call it an “instant lifeline” during a grueling relay race from Santa Monica to Las Vegas.

Update: Public beta versions are starting to roll in. Have fun!

Miss living on beta? All aboard the iOS 17.5 beta train. After a few too many weeks with no developer beta, Apple has released the first iOS 17.5 beta for testing. The full list of beta releases today includes Apple’s other platforms as well:

• iOS 17.5
• macOS Sonoma 14.5
• visionOS 1.1
• watchOS 10.5
• tvOS 17.5
• HomePod 17.5

Enjoy the fresh beta bits, and let us know what you find!

Apple CarPlay is the safest way to interact with your iPhone in the car. You never need to touch your iPhone while driving – something you should never ever do anyway. Instead, you control navigation, communication, and entertainment with voice control and a simplified interface on your car’s screen.

What if your car doesn’t have a built-in display? What if it has one that doesn’t work with Apple CarPlay? The good news is you don’t have to go out and buy a brand new car. In most cases, you can have a really good in-dash system installed for anywhere from $200 to $1,000. Picking the right solution before you make the investment is important.

Apple turned Jetsons-style video calling into reality with FaceTime. Now the company sees personal robotics as an area worth exploration, reports Mark Gurman for Bloomberg. Is Rosey the Robot the next Jetsonian technology to become a reality?

Don’t throw your phone out of the window. Whatsapp, Instagram, and other Meta services are facing an outage of some kind for lots of users.

Four years ago, I was wowed by the experience that Pocket Rocket provided on the iPhone and iPad. The ARKit-powered rocket visualizer app excelled at bringing augmented reality rockets to life in your environment. Fast-forward to now and Pocket Rocket has officially taken off on Apple Vision Pro.

iPhone 16 Pro rumors continue to fly by, and the latest involves a change to the back glass. According to a Weibo post (via ShrimpApplePro), Apple may be bringing the custom dual ion-exchange glass process to this fall’s premium model.

Spotify is cranking up the volume, err, subscription price, for the second time in a year. Whether it’s to cover the increased cost of licensing music or to fund future complaints against Apple, Spotify will start charging subscribers $1 to $2 more per month, depending on their plan.

Update: We’re told May 2 is the release date for Beats Solo4 headphones. Early May sounds busy. No word on when this guy makes a come back.

It’s been a few days since Apple announced new Beats Solo headphones. 2,764 days and counting to be exact. The day counter is clearly about to reset, however, as more and more signs point to Beats Solo4 hardware launching soon.

The clearest sign yet? 9to5Mac has exclusively received the full rundown on Beats Solo4 specs from trusted sources. The TL;DR is this: Beats is about to deliver a big upgrade to the on-ear headphones for the same price as their predecessors from 2016. That translates to a great value in 2024 dollars, plus they’re USB-C. Here’s what we’re told to expect from Beats Solo4 headphones…

It feels like just yesterday when Apple continued to sell 2017’s Apple Watch Series 3 despite it not receiving an already announced watchOS update. Fortunately, Apple hasn’t repeated that mistake again. Instead, we’re merely looking at the successor to that Apple Watch potentially missing support for the next major watchOS release.

Nothing makes me feel more like Zion Williamson than shooting hoops at the arcade. And while I’d love to take arcade basketball home with me, I’m not sure that’s the best investment. Fortunately, Apple Vision Pro has quickly become the best way to turn any space into an arcade basketball arena.

Update: MacRumors has updated its piece with this: “We’ve received information from several sources indicating that the image is fake.”

Apple Vision Pro’s greatest contribution to humankind in year one may just be inspiring the iOS 18 redesign everyone wants. Our friends at MacRumors have published what they describe as an “iPhone frame template from an anonymous source who claims they obtained it from an iOS engineer.” It could be nothing, or it could be the first glimpse at a return to realism in iPhone software design.

Want to be featured on the App Store? Develop a new feature that uses Apple’s latest technologies. Looking for a similar featured spot on Apple Podcasts? Consider charging listeners for your podcast.

Siri has recently been attempting to describe images received in Messages when using CarPlay or the announce notifications feature. In typical Siri fashion, the feature is inconsistent and with mixed results.

Nevertheless, Apple forges ahead with the promise of AI. In a newly published research paper, Apple’s AI gurus describe a system in which Siri can do much more than try to recognize what’s in an image. The best part? It thinks one of its models for doing this benchmarks better than ChatGPT 4.0.

Siri launched with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, replacing Voice Control with a more capable virtual assistant. A dozen years later, Siri has evolved into the primary way we interact with our Apple products.

Wait, no, I’m being told Siri sounds more natural but the core technology is roughly the same. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence now means generative AI and chat bots are based on large language models.

Siri and the rest of iOS 18 will join the AI revolution in June, ending our long national nightmare of Siri being somewhere between hot garbage and kinda useful sometimes. At least that’s what’s being reported, but we don’t really have a great sense of what to expect yet.