Opinion pieces & commentary

Earlier this week, Apple announced this year’s rendition of its annual Back to School promotion. 2019’s student-focused offer delivers a free pair of Beats headphones with the purchase of iPad Air, iPad Pro, and any Mac.

Apple’s roots in education have been well-documented, but over the years its Back to School deals have lost some luster as it has gone through a series of changes. Missteps along the way, the exclusion of gift cards in favor of headphones, and more have caused Apple to miss the mark on one of its most popular first-party promotions.

Launching the 2019 Back to School sale in combination with refreshed MacBook hardware has turned that all around. Here’s why…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple’s restructure to accommodate the departure of Jony Ive led to some concern that Apple wasn’t giving design quite as high a profile in the past – amid claims and counter-claims about the run-up to it.

There is no direct replacement for Ive as head of design, and instead of the hardware and software leads reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook, they are reporting into COO Jeff Williams.

But this shouldn’t be cause for concern; quite the opposite …

Expand
Expanding
Close

If you want a true pro-grade monitor, and have deep pockets, there’s an Apple Display to make you happy. That Apple Pro Display XDR is a thing of beauty.

32 inches. 6K resolution. P3 color gamut. True 10-bit. 1600 nits peak brightness. A million to one contrast ratio. Anti-reflective coating, with the option of a matte one. Individually calibrated and modulated LEDs. True reference grade. It’s a beast.

It’s also $5-7K, which is more than most of us want to pay for a Mac, let alone a monitor …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple’s announcement yesterday about Jony Ive leaving the company was something of a bombshell even though we’d seen it coming for awhile. Ive’s iconic designs are fundamental to Apple’s success, so to see the two parting ways came as a shock to many.

The NASDAQ hasn’t yet opened, but pre-market trading suggests that AAPL investors are not overly concerned …

Expand
Expanding
Close

While I personally hardly ever notice the notch in my iPhone X, there are those who want Apple to get back to a notchless iPhone. To do that while retaining the bezel-free design, Apple would have to find a way of embedding beneath the display all the tech present in the notch.

Oppo, the best-selling smartphone brand in China, has gotten us one step closer to this: showing off the world’s first smartphone with the selfie camera underneath the display.

It is an impressive technical achievement, but it’s nothing like enough for a notchless iPhone yet, for three reasons …

Expand
Expanding
Close

It was back in February that we first heard about a new 16-inch MacBook Pro in the works, and a new report today supports this, adding some more details.

The report claims a 3072×1920 resolution, up from the 2880×1800 panel found in Apple’s 15-inch laptops since the first Retina MacBook Pro in 2012 […]

IHS Markit says the new 16-inch laptop has a target manufacturing date of September 2019 with a production rate of about 250,000 units per month. The panel would still be LCD (no OLED yet as previously reported) and supposedly manufactured by LG.

As we noted this morning, the timing does seem a little odd …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Many of us were long hoping for an iPhone SE 2: something with the portability and slab-sided design of the iPhone SE, but the near-bezel-free design of the iPhone X family. The type of thing we’ve seen in concept images and videos.

I’d pretty much given up on that for reasons explained here. The hit iPhone sales have taken since then has made things seem a little less certain – as it raised the possibility of Apple needing to hit a lower price for a new model – but we’d likely have heard rumors by now if something were in the works, so I’m still tending toward pessimism.

However, the latest 2020 iPhone report suggests that perhaps we might get an acceptable compromise …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple has long aimed to do the right thing, not just the profitable one, on a great many fronts. On tax avoidance, not so much.

Apple could be the good guy here. It could be the one tech company to take a strong stand on paying its dues, rather than using any loophole it can find to minimize the amount of tax it pays.

That would, I suggest, be consistent with the company’s approach to other areas of corporate responsibility …

Expand
Expanding
Close

We’ve already rounded up everything Apple announced at WWDC during the keynote presentation – and it was a lot!

I’d normally write one or two comment pieces on the things that most interested me, but there were so many interesting announcements yesterday that a single piece providing my take on all of it seemed the best approach.

Let’s start with what I saw as the headline on the software side …

Expand
Expanding
Close

The Supreme Court this week ruled in the Apple App Store antitrust case, and Apple lost. The court ruled that the lawsuit could proceed in a lower court.

The decision, however, was just a technical one. It didn’t address the merits of the antitrust lawsuit itself, but merely rejected Apple’s argument that the issue had nothing to do with consumers. The real battle comes when the lawsuit itself goes to court …

Expand
Expanding
Close

We’ve this morning seen claimed moulds for this year’s iPhone line-up, and once more the triangular camera arrangement inside the square camera bump is coming under fire.

People have been criticising it ever since we first saw renders of the claimed design back in January.

That’s incredibly ugly.

No offense to the person that created that, but ewww.

No. Just no.

We’re seeing more of the same today …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple has now made an official statement confirming an earlier report that it had removed or restricted the majority of popular third-party screen time and parental control apps from the App Store.

The company did, however, deny that it was anything to do with competition with its own Screen Time app …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Music Business Worldwide reports that Amazon is gearing up to offer a hi-res streaming music service.

We understand that Amazon is currently in discussion with various large music rights-holders regarding the upcoming launch of a high fidelity music streaming platform – and that at least one major record company has already agreed to license it.

MBW has heard this whisper from several high-placed music industry sources, who say the price of Amazon’s new tier will likely be in the region of $15 per month. It’s expected to launch before the end of 2019 …

Expand
Expanding
Close

There has been much speculation about what led to the Apple/Qualcomm settlement at the eleventh hour.

Did Intel tell Apple it was unable to deliver 5G modems by 2020? Did Apple reach its own conclusion that Intel wasn’t up to the job? Or was there some other factor at play that mysteriously led Apple to have a change of heart about a massive lawsuit centred on Qualcomm’s business practices, despite a long history of vehemently objecting to them … ?

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple’s MacBook keyboard replacement program solved one problem: customers would no longer have to pay for a fix for an Apple design failure. But, as I wrote recently, it still left many of us with another one: the hassle of living without our machine for a week – even those of us fortunate enough to have a backup machine.

I called an Apple Store, and they told me they’d need it for about five days, and that’s a much bigger deal […] It’s not that it’s impossible to be without it – I managed before – but it is a major hassle. I have my key work apps and bookmarks set up on my MacBook Air, but I know from that experience that there are a zillion small things that will drive me nuts in the week I’m without the machine.

I suggested a solution, and it’s one that Apple has now implemented …

Expand
Expanding
Close

As AirPods continue to grow in popularity, the truly wireless earbud market is also becoming increasingly crowded. Samsung, for instance, just launched the Galaxy Buds, while Apple’s Beats brand also introduced the Powerbeats Pro.

Amazon is also rumored to be planning an entry into the totally wireless earbuds market with a focus on sound quality. But can they compete with AirPods?

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple has always ‘thought different’ when it comes to its retail stores. The company presents them as places people can go to experience the products beyond just buying them. Places where you can go to get help, whether it is a hardware fault or something you can’t figure out how to do. And somewhere you can go to learn how to get the most from your Apple products, or to get inspired about using them in creative ways.

Ensuring that the stores live up to these lofty ideals is trickier, however, and we’re seeing increasing kick-back against one of Apple’s more idealistic visions for its latest flagship stores: ‘town squares‘ …

Expand
Expanding
Close

What lessons could – and should – Apple learn from the AirPower debacle? Clearly, lessons do need to be learned; this was a massive embarrassment. But I also think it’s important that the company doesn’t over-react.

Apple has a long history of announcing products before they are ready, with often lengthy delays before customers are able to get their hands on them. And that’s one area where people can’t say it would never have happened under Steve Jobs …

Expand
Expanding
Close

On a recent episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen Hackett and David Sparks were looking at the iPad as a laptop replacement. I felt like it was one of the most refreshing discussions of the iPad and iOS that I had heard in a while. They looked at things about the iPad that give them joy and things that do not. The show got me thinking about the history of iOS on the iPad, and where things got stagnant. For me, the iPad as a device became stagnant around the time of the iPhone 6 Plus debut. The reality is that the iPhone has gotten better about handling iPad tasks a lot faster than the iPad has vs. a macOS powered laptop. Since then, iOS on the iPad hasn’t changed dramatically outside of how multitasking works. If you want to listen to a great discussion about the good and bad parts of the iPad lifestyle, I would give this episode a listen. As I think about the future of the iPad, I have come to the realization that iOS 13 on the iPad will be the most important release to date.

Expand
Expanding
Close

After announcing the upcoming Apple Card at yesterday’s “It’s show time” event, I got to thinking about how Apple has never offered a non-folio wallet case for its iPhones. While I’m eager for a truly wallet-less future, we’re not there yet and I think a lot of folks will opt for a physical Apple Card to go along with the digital default. Here’s my pitch for a slim first-party wallet case from Apple.

Expand
Expanding
Close

I have to say yesterday’s Apple event was something of a snoozefest for me.

Now, I fully acknowledge that this is partly down to my particular tastes. I’m not a TV guy, for starters: I haven’t owned a television in 20 years, and while I do have a Netflix account, it’s borderline whether or not I actually use it enough to justify even the small cost. So it didn’t really matter what Apple announced there; it wasn’t going to interest me.

Same thing with gaming. I have X-Plane on my iPad, and use that briefly a few times a week, and three or four other games I play maybe a few times a year. I basically don’t have the gaming gene.

But while I could say to Apple ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ the truth is, it is partly Apple too …

Expand
Expanding
Close