Opinion pieces & commentary

HomePod reviews almost universally agreed on two things: the speaker sounds incredibly impressive for the size and price, and Apple’s smart speaker is the least-smart one on the market. Both Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home speakers were found to be significantly more capable when it comes to answering questions and carrying out tasks.

This is not, of course, coincidence. Amazon opens its Alexa ‘recipes’ up to any third-party developer, and Google has long snaffled-up as much data as it can to make its smart assistants as capable as possible. Apple, in contrast, carefully controls the personal data available to both itself and to third-party developers …

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Our education specialist Bradley Chambers wrote a lengthy piece yesterday explaining the flaws in Apple’s iPad-centric education strategy. The whole piece is well worth a read, but he outlined three main barriers to the superficially attractive vision presented by Apple, even before you consider the purchase cost of the iPads themselves:

• Books are tied to Apple IDs, so schools would have to re-purchase textbooks annually
• Teachers simply don’t have time to create their own interactive books
• Apple’s apps don’t integrate with the established IT systems used by schools

But while the new budget iPad may not be a great fit for most schools, it is a smart move for the consumer market …

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Whenever a big company is in the news for the wrong reason, it’s never long before a #Delete<Company> hashtag appears. We saw it most recently with #DeleteUber.

The thing about these campaigns is that some people do – but most don’t. If Facebook were simply facing a one-off controversy over its negligence in allowing a third-party to misuse data, then with the right handling, it would soon be business as usual.

But the signs so far are that the social network isn’t handling this crisis well. Couple this to longstanding grumbles about newsfeeds, and the #DeleteFacebook campaign could easily become a serious threat to the company’s future …

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Apple set expectations for the March 27 event with the invite: ‘creative new ideas for teachers and students’. It’s going to be themed and directed at education markets, no question.

But that doesn’t mean the event will be irrelevant to an average consumer outside of a school. Whilst software announcements will almost certainly focus on things like Apple Classroom, any new hardware revisions affect normal customers just as much as schools. Here’s what I’d like to see happen.

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OLED superseded LCD because it’s brighter, has better color saturation, and is more power-efficient. microLED is expected to replace OLED within the next few years for the same reasons – it improves on all three of those factors.

I don’t believe that Apple’s ‘secret manufacturing facility‘ for microLED screens indicates any desire or plan on Apple’s part to move into large-scale component manufacturing, but I do think it’s a very smart move.

I suspect there are three reasons Apple has established the facility …

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Some eighteen states have now signed a Right to Repair bill, with California the latest to sign up. The bills say that manufacturers must facilitate DIY and third-party repairs by publishing repair information and making both replacement parts and diagnostic tools available to consumers.

I’m instinctively on the side of those who think that devices should be both repairable and expandable by their owners. But I do recognize the trade-offs that involves …

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The MacBook Air has been one of Apple’s more neglected product lines. The 11-inch model was discontinued in 2016, and the 13-inch model hasn’t seen any major updates since 2015.

I thought I knew why Apple was keeping the machine in the lineup: it needed an entry-level Mac to bring people into the ecosystem, and at a time when most people buy laptops, the Mac mini wasn’t going to be it. The 12-inch MacBook was the obvious successor, but at $1299 it was just too expensive.

So my theory was that Apple was holding onto the MacBook Air until it was able to bring the 12-inch MacBook price down to hit the magic $999 number. But it now seems that Apple has a different, more ambitious plan …

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A KGI note over the weekend suggested that Apple is planning to release new ‘high-end over-ear headphones‘ – though not until late fall at the earliest.

Without my experience of the HomePod, I’d have merely shrugged at the report. Apple hasn’t exactly made a name for itself for headphone quality, either through its own-brand EarPods and AirPods, or through the Beats-branded products it has promoted since buying the company …

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We saw a lot of confusion last week about the HomePod’s cable. We’d heard conflicting stories about whether or not it would be removable, and the confusion didn’t end once it went on sale.

Once it was available, Apple seemed to confirm the non-removable theory by stating that a damaged cable require returning the speaker to Apple.

But then a Reddit user revealed that the cable can indeed be removed, and we confirmed it in a video demo. So what’s the story here … ?

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Today’s Digitimes report that Apple will abandon a 5.8-inch OLED successor to the iPhone X this year is almost certainly nonsense.

The site suggests that Apple will release only one OLED model this year, which would be the 6.5-inch one first suggested in a KGI report. This year’s 5.8-inch model would, claims Digitimes, be an LCD one …

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Buying a gadget can be a risky business these days. We’ve already seen two ways things can go wrong. The first and most obvious is when a company takes your money and then goes bust before it can deliver. Otto locks was just one recent example – crowdfunding sites are littered with others.

A second risk is a company discontinuing support for a gadget that relies on an app or a server. When the app is discontinued, or the server goes offline, you can be left with a useless hunk of metal. A recent example of that was Logitech discontinuing its Harmony Link remotes, informing owners that the products ‘will no longer function’ beyond March 16 of this year. (Consumer and media pressure did at least result in a solution.)

But Nokia has just shown us a third way for a gadget purchase to go wrong after the event …

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I’ve commented before on Apple’s rather messy iPhone lineup. The company currently sells the iPhone SE, the iPhone 6s, the iPhone 7, the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X. Given the Plus model variations, and ignoring colors and storage capacities, that’s eight different phones across four different sizes.

If we ignore the relatively minor form factor differences between the iPhone 6s, 7 and 8, that’s also three different designs.

But KGI’s predictions of what we can expect this fall, reiterated today, would make for a much more sensible lineup …

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One of the biggest shake-ups to the way that consumers manage their finances launched in the UK this weekend. Known as Open Banking, it means that you’ll no longer be limited to using whatever apps your bank chooses to make available, but can instead manage your accounts from a wide variety of third-party apps.

It’s been possible for some time to use third-party apps to analyse your spending, and even perform some financial transactions, but right now in the USA, anything with access to your accounts relies on partnerships agreed by your bank. You can use the apps your bank wants you to, but not others. For example, Chase partners with Intuit and Wells Fargo with Xero and Finicity, but the choice of app is up to your bank, rather than you.

That’s what Open Banking changes …

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One of the largest Internet advertising companies yesterday told the Guardian that Apple’s implementation of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari would result in a loss of revenue amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

ITP doesn’t block ads, but instead blocks cross-site tracking – a method used by advertisers to serve ads based on your interests by gearing them to the types of website you visit. The ad industry argues that this enables ads to be more relevant to consumers, while Apple argues that it represents an intrusion into the browsing privacy of its customers …

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Apple’s HomePod is set to arrive sometime in ‘early 2018’ after missing its promised December ship date. Based on Apple’s definition of ‘early’ in the year, we can expect HomePod to go on sale any day between now and the end of April.

The smart speaker landscape has changed dramatically since HomePod’s unveil last June however. Missing the holiday quarter certainly wasn’t ideal for Apple, but the real shift is new competition from products that offer similar solutions to HomePod.

The market for HomePod with its premium price and limited skill set would be a challenge for Apple with just one of those factors, but combine the delay with new competitors and the challenge is only amplified: lower prices, wider compatibility, and a late entry to the market will make the $349 Siri-enabled speaker a tougher sell for Apple without a refocused pitch.

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This time last year, I gave my end-of-year report card for Apple’s 2016 performance – and it’s time now for the 2017 version.

Last year, there were some controversial decisions, with two key products getting more attention for what they omitted rather than what they offered: the loss of the headphone socket in the iPhone 7, and most ports in the MacBook Pro. Both now feel like very old news. As I wrote at the time, while there may be much discussion at the time, people do quickly get used to changing standards.

2017 has been an interesting year …

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Apple caused a furore yesterday when it admitted that it deliberately slows down older iPhones.

The issue first came to the fore with a Reddit thread, which showed a significant difference in performance on the same device when fitted with old and new batteries. Geekbench founder, John Poole, confirmed the phenomenon, and developer Guilherme Rambo subsequently identified the code that controlled it.

Apple then confirmed the facts, and explained its reasons …

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There have long been rumors that Apple plans to eventually converge Macs and iOS devices into a single product line running the same operating system. I expressed my own concerns about this way back in 2013, though also listed some things from which we could draw reassurance.

Apple has consistently denied the rumors, Tim Cook doing so with a particularly striking phrase back in 2012.

You can converge a toaster and refrigerator, but these things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.

But yesterday’s news that Apple plans to support cross-platform apps that run on iPhone, iPad and Mac does raise a variation on this concern …

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When Apple finally put its iMac Pro on sale yesterday, there was a lot of discussion about the concept of a non-upgradable pro machine.

While the iMac Pro looks lovely, it’s hard to justify £5k+ on a non-upgradable machine.

iMac Pro looks neat, but I don’t fancy the idea of spending a kajillion dollars on a non-upgradable machine.

Apple releases their first VR capable, *non-upgradable*, computer *starting* at $4999 […] Who is this machine for?

I’m predisposed to share this view …

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In the entire history of operating system bugs, I don’t think there have been many bigger than the one reported this week. Allowing anyone with physical access to a Mac to login to it without a password is inexcusable; letting them in as root, so they have complete control of the machine and all accounts on it, is simply mind-boggling in its incompetence. Especially when the bug turns out to have been known for at least a couple of weeks.

We can at least take comfort in the fact that this bug wasn’t there for long, at least in the official release. But there have been smaller bugs and glitches that have literally lasted for years without being fixed.

I think it’s time for another Snow Leopard: a macOS update where the core focus is on security, stability and bug fixes rather than shiny new toys …

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Now that Apple has released the iPhone X, there are currently eight different iPhone models in the lineup. These include the SE, 6s and 6s Plus, 7 and 7 Plus, 8 and 8 Plus, and now the iPhone X. How does Apple intend to make sense of this if there are another three, possibly four, iPhones coming out next year? Here’s my proposal.

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