9to5Mac Concepts

Apple hasn’t made an affordable high quality external display since 2016 when they retired the final iteration of the Thunderbolt Display. The company has a long history of offering the best possible mass market monitors for notebooks and desktops, dating back to the late 90s or the early days of the Studio Display. Apple’s made a lot of weird decisions over the past decade and this certainly falls under that category. Now that the company has started to reboot the Mac and meet the needs of clamoring customers, it’s time for them to step up and make the display we actually need.

AirPods Max are officially one year old. That means we’re probably getting close to the first revision, assuming Apple is planning to keep them around. There are lots of ways Apple could improve upon these excellent over-the-ear headphones. But, we wanted to think realistically. What might Apple actually do to upgrade AirPods Max?

In a year that EarPods are becoming trendy again and Apple just introduced the third-generation AirPods, 9to5Mac is back with another concept. This time, we’re imagining a possible revision of Apple’s braided EarPods, which haven’t received an update in almost a decade.

In October, Google announced that they were going to eventually move their iOS apps away from Material Design and introduce more native-looking user interfaces. While we still haven’t gotten a glimpse at what some of the most used apps on the planet may look like built with native UIKit components, I thought it’d be cool to draw up some concepts and imagine what they might entail.

One of the main draws of AirPods has always been their ability to essentially be invisible, both to the user and to people around them. When they were first introduced they had two features, the ability to play music and the ability to talk to Siri with a tap. But over the past five years, Apple has added new features both through hardware revisions and in software updates that have us wondering if AirPods deserve their own companion app on iPhone. Here’s what we think it should look like.

One of Apple’s best services is Apple Card. Sure, it might just be another credit card that happens to have a really great app in Wallet, but Apple Card could be much more than that. Currently, Apple Card offers excellent customer support, powerful security features, and one of the best physical cards you can get your hands on. Folks like Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg have been wondering, though, what could be next for Apple Card? We’ve been wondering the same thing, and here’s a dive into our ideas.

One of Apple’s most important products is the $329 iPad. On the surface it seems uninteresting, almost boring. But it serves as a key entry point to the Apple ecosystem, and as a way to get iPad owners to upgrade every couple of years without having to spend an arm and a leg. It’s the best value Apple offers right now. The latest 9th-generation iPad is, in my opinion, one of the best products Apple makes. It has virtually no compromises for the price. But there are plenty of us who would love the option of a larger display that doesn’t cost a fortune. After all, people love big screens and low prices.

It could be any day now. The notch is inescapable. It’s making its way to any and every device is can. The new MacBook Pro didn’t need a notch, it’s there primarily for aesthetics. Last night, Bloomberg published images of Meta’s upcoming smartwatch that happens to have a notch with a camera. It is entirely possible that Apple is considering putting a notch and a camera on the Apple Watch eventually.

As soon as Apple unveiled the new iMac earlier this year, it hit me that the company needed to give the same design treatment to its mobile counterpart, the MacBook Air. Soon after, the rumors started flowing in, and now that Apple has officially revealed its newest notebook designs with the MacBook Pro, it’s time to look ahead to how the MacBook Air could be redesigned.

There are lots of wild rumors floating around the internet ahead of Apple’s big Mac-focused on Monday. New leaks have appeared that say the MacBook Pro is going to get a notch and an edge to edge display. There’s also much debate about the color options Apple is going to offer. We wanted to see what the new MacBook Pro might look like with all of the rumors combined.

CarPlay has always been a temporary way for Apple to get its software into existing cars while they work on something far more innovative. Everyone under the sun knows that Apple is building its own car. When we will see the rumored “Project Titan” though, nobody knows. In the meantime, Apple appears to be expanding its efforts to integrate into more aspects of existing cars from other manufacturers. Bloomberg has reported on Apple’s plans to connect CarPlay with things like air conditioning, batteries, seats, and more. Here’s what we think CarPlay could look like with deeper car integration.

We’ve been saying it for years, where’s the iPad’s weather app? It’s been missing from the iPad since day one but many of us expected the app to eventually make its way over. It is one of the few first-party holdouts that haven’t made the leap to iPad, despite being an obvious addition. With the complete overhaul that weather received this year and the acquisition of Dark Sky, we have renewed hopes that the iPad will finally gain the weather app. We’ve thrown together a concept of what it might look like.

When Apple unveiled iPadOS 15, lots of iPad power users were disappointed that larger changes weren’t made. But one feature has become quite popular and that’s quick note. Quick note is the first applet that can freely float and resize over other full-fledged apps. Quick note is quite useful and fairly smart, letting users add links, rich data, and drawings. But what if this same UI paradigm was used for other tools?

Over the past several years, Apple Watch software updates have been kind of small. watchOS 7 sped up the Apple Watch user interface, while watchOS 8 adds a handful of new useful apps. But with watchOS 9, Apple should introduce the biggest update to the experience yet.

In the first part of our macOS Mammoth concept, we shared a look at ideas for improving the system and redesigning core elements of the desktop. Now, we want to share some ideas for new apps that we’d love to see Apple add in the next version of macOS. There were plenty of different things that we tried out during the design phase, but ultimately we landed on four distinct apps. Let’s take a look.

Earlier this year we correctly predicted that macOS 12 would be called “Monterey” and later discovered renewed Apple trademarks for places in California. The two renewed names were in fact “Monterey” and “Mammoth.” It’s only natural to assume that next year’s release of macOS will be called Mammoth with Monterey being chosen this year. So what might we see in macOS 13 in 2022? Well, we don’t know yet. But we do know what we want to see.

I often wonder what things would have looked like at Apple if major events hadn’t occurred. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about classic Mac OS and old-school small gadgets. So naturally, the question arose: “What if Apple kept making Newtons and what if they ran Mac OS?” Well, if you’re now wondering the same thing, keep on reading.

Apple’s newest Safari design in iOS 15 has been controversial, to say the least. It’s a complete overhaul of one of the iPhone’s most popular apps that follows entirely different design philosophies. Countless folks, including myself, have tried to come up with ways to “fix” the new design and make it more familiar and comfortable to use. This is my latest try. What I wanted to do was to follow the same principles and aim for the same goal. A mobile browser that’s easy to use in one hand and one that makes switching between sites on the fly a breeze.

Yesterday I published a piece about how Apple could address concerns about Safari’s new bottom bar centric design in iOS 15. Many folks are unhappy with the redesign, but some of us (me included) really like it. I spent some time figuring out different ways Apple could extend this new design language to other built-in apps on the iPhone. I narrowed it down to three distinct user interface components.

One of the biggest updates in iOS 15 is the completely overhauled Safari. It’s been controversial, to say the least. We’ve heard from many users who are already fed up with the new design just a few weeks after using it in beta. And while some do seem to like the new design, there are still several ways that could make it more useable for the average person.

Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our iOS 16 concept and explained why we were publishing these ideas so far in advance, especially with the first iOS 15 beta just dropping. That first piece focused on changes to system components, while this piece focuses on individual apps and ties the two together. We looked at a few of Apple’s built-in apps that we believe could use some additional love, as well as ways for Apple to go after some of its biggest competitors.