Opinion pieces & commentary

It seems pretty clear by this stage that Apple is working on a near-bezel-free design for the iPhone 8. Not only have we heard consistent reports supporting this idea – and Jony Ive’s ambitions of a ‘single slab of glass’ design – but it’s also a pretty obvious next step in the evolution of smartphones.

Apple has been headed in this direction since day one. One of the major points of differentiation of the very first iPhone over existing smartphones of the time was that it dispensed with a physical keyboard in order to maximize the screen space. In the latest iPhones, Apple has ditched a mechanical Home button in favor of a touch-sensitive one, and it holds patents for multiple approaches to embedding a fingerprint reader into a screen.

But the latest KGI report echoes an earlier one in suggesting that Apple may be planning to drop Touch ID and switch instead to ‘new biometric technologies’ …

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There’s a joke about a time-traveller from the early 20th Century arriving today and asking someone what has changed. The present-day person pulls an iPhone out of their pocket and says: ‘Well, we all carry around this pocket computer that gives us instant access to the sum total of human knowledge.’ The time traveller looks stunned. ‘Wow, what do you do with it?’ they ask. ‘Mostly we watch cat videos.’

The Internet has been, in the main, a hugely positive development. We do have instant access to information on pretty much any subject under the sun, or, indeed, beyond it. We can communicate with people on the other side of the world, for free, as easily as we can those on the next street. We can virtually travel the world, exploring streets in distant locations from our armchair. And very much more.

The Internet also has its dark side, of course. But it’s the subversion of one of its most positive attributes – easy access to information – that poses one of the greatest threats today …

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Apple is rarely the first to adopt a new technology. From smartphones themselves to fingerprint readers, Apple’s usual approach is to sit back and watch what other companies do, then aim to produce a better version some way down the line.

With smartphones, Apple watched other companies launch devices which required a stylus, and then created one that could be used with your finger. With fingerprint readers, Apple looked at ones what required you to roll your finger across an optical reader and then created a far more reliable one-touch capacitive sensor. And so on.

For a long time, it looked like it was doing the same thing with wireless charging – but that now seems in some doubt …

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If you were in any doubt why Apple was going to so much trouble to deepen its foothold in India, new figures from Counterpoint Research provide the answer. While the global smartphone market grew only 3% last year, smartphone shipments in India grew by 18%.

The growing middle class in the country also meant that, for the first time, there were no Indian brands in the top five as consumers start to spend more on their handsets. There was also good news for Apple …

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Apple’s rumored Siri Speaker may be hitting the market this year and with it will likely come improvements to Siri itself. Apple, however, won’t be the first to release a standalone speaker with a built-in virtual assistant. Google has already released its solution, Google Home, while Amazon has its Alexa virtual assistant available in several forms, including the Echo and Echo Dot.

The Echo Dot and the Echo series as a whole has been a smash hit success for Amazon and it’s where Apple should take inspiration from for its Siri Speaker, but its success really hinges upon implements to Siri itself…

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Many were disappointed by Apple’s apparent decision to abandon the display market in favor of recommending LG models. While LG’s 5K UltraFine is an excellent display in many ways, neither the design nor the build quality live up to Apple standards.

As I said in an earlier piece, it may be shallow to care about the aesthetics of the monitor, but a display is something we stare at all day long. Given that part of the reason we buy Apple kit is the beautiful designs, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect an officially-recommended display to live up to the same standard.

Apple could satisfy many people by simply putting the 5K UltraFine innards into an Ive-designed casing. But I think a new Apple display could also help the company solve a second – less shallow – problem …

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There will be a lot of people complaining about price rises Apple just announced for apps and in-app purchases in the UK (along with India and Turkey). Once the price rises kick in over the next week, App Store prices will be literally pound for dollar.

But while some are complaining that Apple is price-gouging Brits, this isn’t actually the case …

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There has been speculation that Apple may be planning to build its own home speaker device to compete with the Amazon Echo and Google Home, with some expressing the view that Apple is already late to the party.

But does Apple need to compete in this space, when it arguably already has its own version of Echo or Home? The one that’s either on your wrist or in your pocket …

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Amid protests from some professional users of the MacBook Pro that they need the ports Apple dropped from the 2016 models, OWC has announced a solution in the form of a tailor-made accessory called the DEC.

Attaching to the underside of the 2016 MacBook Pro, and said to exactly match both the footprint and the aluminum finish of the machine itself, the DEC adds 4TB of storage, an SD card slot, a Gigabit Ethernet port and an unspecified number of USB-A ports.

One thing really stands out about the DEC …

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Two further patent applications published today and spotted by Patently Apple show that Apple continues to explore the idea of bringing a Watch-style Digital Crown to the iPad and iPhone. The original patent application was published back in July, and the two additional ones published today further refine the idea.

Apple has generally been moving away from physical controls on iDevices, the iPhone 7 replacing the mechanical Home button with a touch-sensitive one, and the iPhone 8 rumored to be embedding it into the display. We’re also expecting to see a near bezel-free design next year.

It was for this reason that the idea initially seemed unlikely …

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Apple had rather a controversial year in terms of product launches. Its two new flagship products – the iPhone 7 and the new MacBook Pro – got most attention not for what they included, but rather what they left out.

Most of the press coverage of the iPhone 7 focused on the company’s decision to omit the 3.5mm headphone socket. This was despite the fact that the move had been so long rumored that I suspect Apple deliberately leaked its plans in order to give everyone time to get used to the idea.

With the year’s MacBook Pro, the headline new feature of the Touch Bar was largely over-shadowed by the company’s decision to go all-in on the relatively new USB-C standard, omitting all other ports bar (ironically) the headphone socket …

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Consumer Reports said yesterday that the 2016 MacBook Pro was the first ever Apple laptop that the organization couldn’t recommend, due to battery-life issues.

That in itself didn’t strike me as too odd. Different users have definitely been reporting very variable results in times of battery life, and some of them have been well below half the ten hours that Apple claims. Our video rundown showed as much and our poll found that the largest group of readers was reporting five hours or less.

Given that Consumer Reports was seeing as little as 3.75 hours in its own tests, that would be good enough reason to withhold a recommendation. But it was the high-end results the organization reported that puzzle me …

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When Apple launched the iPhone 5 with a new-fangled Lightning port – instead of the 30-pin dock connector that had been a standard feature on every previous generation of iPhone, as well as on iPods since 2003 – there was a great deal of outrage.

‘What about all the docks and speaker systems we own that have 30-pin connectors?’ was the question many asked. The decision was described as arrogant and unreasonable. Apple was accused of profiteering, by forcing everyone to buy new cables, docks and speakers.

Apple responded in three ways. It pointed to the undeniable technical superiority of the new port. It explained the difficulty of making ever slimmer devices with a port designed for much thicker ones. And it assured everyone that this would be the last change for a long time – that the Lightning port would be around for many years to come …

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When Apple unveiled its latest MacBook Pro models, making particular reference to their ability to drive multiple 4K and 5K monitors, some wondered whether the company was readying itself to exit the desktop market – as it has already done for displays.

Even Apple’s own employees appeared to share this concern, with one asking on the company’s internal Apple Web system ‘Are Mac desktops strategic for us?’.

Tim Cook was quick to offer reassurance, stating that the desktop market was ‘very strategic’ for Apple, and that the company has ‘great desktops in our roadmap.’ There were, though, a couple of problems with this assurance …

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Apple has finally launched its legal challenge to an EU ruling that it must pay an additional €13B ($14B) in tax after a special tax deal offered by the Irish government was found to be illegal. The Irish government had already submitted its own appeal against the ruling, stating today that ‘Ireland did not give favourably tax treatment to Apple- the full amount was paid in this case and no state aid was provided.’

On the face it, the EU case is a strong one. The deal with the Irish government – detailed in a Bloomberg analysis – meant that the vast majority of Apple’s taxes were assigned to a ‘head office’ that wasn’t tax resident anywhere in the world, and which therefore paid no taxes at all. This is how, according to the EU case, Apple effectively paid as little as 0.005% tax on billions of dollars of European sales …

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When Apple exited the display business and announced that it was partnering with LG for two new 4K and 5K UltraFine displays aimed specifically at owners of the new MacBook Pro machines, it promised that the 5K model would be available in December. LG went further and said ‘early December.’

Apple also showed introductory pricing valid only this month, reverting to full price in January.

As of today – officially mid-December – you can order the 4K model direct from Apple for the introductory price of $524, albeit with a lead-time of 5-6 weeks. But the ‘Add to Bag’ button on the 5K model remains greyed-out, its status shown as ‘Currently unavailable’ …

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Following widespread complaints that the remaining battery life estimate was wildly inaccurate on the new MacBook Pro models, Apple acted swiftly to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, that action was not to fix the estimate, but rather to remove it altogether. As John Gruber put it, ‘this is like being late for work and fixing it by breaking your watch.’

I do appreciate the challenge Apple faces with providing accurate battery-life estimates with the 2016 MacBook Pro. I’ve heard from multiple sources that the Skylake CPUs used in the new machines are extremely responsive in the way they ramp Turbo Boost up and down to provide the optimum balance of power and energy-efficiency for each given task.

That means that the amount of battery power being consumed can vary dramatically within the course of just a few seconds. Given that macOS seemingly estimates battery life on a second-by-second basis, the combination of the two things is clearly going to result in the kind of wild fluctuations and inaccurate estimates we’ve seen.

But it’s surely not beyond the wit of Apple’s software engineers to change the way the estimate is calculated … ?

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I noted a few weeks ago that, given the ultra-low repairability of the new MacBook Pro, I was buying AppleCare for the first time. Pretty much anything going wrong with the machine – RAM, SSD, Touch Bar, even the power switch – is likely to require a whole new motherboard. And given that the screen is bonded into the lid of the case, we can also forget about repairing that.

So I bit the bullet and handed over the cash for an AppleCare policy. What we need when buying AppleCare is the 15-character registration code. What we actually get is a cardboard box containing not just one but two separate booklets totalling 92 pages …

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It was reported yesterday that Apple is disbanding the division of the company responsible for its wireless networking products: the hard drive-equipped Time Capsule and both AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express routers. The report was given additional credence by recent discounts and the fact that the products haven’t been updated in more than three years.

On one level, the decision seems like a no-brainer for Apple. The company is in the premium product basis. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was a new thing, it made sense for Apple to boost adoption rates by offering its own products; now it’s ubiquitous, there’s no reason for the company to be in what is today a very mundane product category.

But if the news is confirmed, it will sadden me a little – and worry me slightly as well …

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I don’t generally bother with AppleCare. My usual view is that, like any other extended warranty, it offers poor value for money. You’re paying a lot of money upfront for coverage you’ll likely never need.

Most Mac faults are going to make themselves known well inside the first year of standard Apple warranty coverage. The likelihood of a major fault occurring in the interval between the standard warranty expiring and AppleCare doing the same is very low. (There’s an additional factor at play in the EU, which I’ll get to later as it won’t be relevant to U.S. readers.)

But I am opting for it this time. Because the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is not only non-upgradable, but also pretty much non-repairable …

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[First of all, I would like to say that this is but my very own take, which is not necessarily shared by my colleagues here at 9to5Mac and therefore not an editorial, staff-wise opinion piece. It represents my view and my view only, so try to keep that in mind.]

Up until not too long ago, I used to ask myself a simple question: if I were to pick one company — and one company alone — to rely on for all of my “tech needs”, which one would I choose? The answer would come rather swiftly: Apple.

As a critic (by nature more than profession) I have always seen the vast majority of products skeptically, but that didn’t take from the fact that the Cupertino giant made what I considered to be the best smartphone, the best tablet, the best computers and even two of the most valid operating systems around, accounting for a sweet, unified and well-connected package that would make me feel like I didn’t have to look outside of it. It was Apple’s dream of ecosystem lock-in, essentially.

However, as my view of this universe has got more and more panoramic — especially in the last year of collaboration with the sister site 9to5Google, which has helped me a lot to gain even more direct experience with Apple’s competition — I started to have a feeling that this bubble was somewhat bursting.

And this feeling is something I simply haven’t been able to shake, and one that has brought me, like apparently many others, to think that the well-oiled profit machine Apple Inc. may have lost some of its touch, for what concerns the present and, more importantly, the future…

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