DOJ v. Apple 

As a no-longer-practicing attorney and someone who generally digs Apple, I reviewed the DOJ complaint filed today and have a few takeaways.

  • A taxpayer-funded lawsuit against a trillion-dollar company is not going away anytime soon. It will take on a life of its own. Trust me on this one.
  • In my eyes, the monopoly case here is much more complicated than it was against Microsoft back in the day. The iPhone has a lot of viable competition.
  • To follow up on that point, Apple considers the benefits arising from its control over the iPhone a competitive advantage. Can the government force Apple to make the iPhone more (for lack of a better term) hackable and diminish its market advantage? I suspect many Apple customers don’t even want that.
  • Regardless of merits, this will be a distraction for Apple. The only question is: How big?

The Problem with Vision Pro App Store

Lately, I’ve been challenged when using App Store for Vision Pro. Specifically, there’s no easy way to find the most recently released visionOS applications. While Apple does have a “new” category, a lot of apps in it were available on launch day. As somebody interested in finding new and interesting ways to use this fancy gizmo, I want to see the most recent applications being launched.

For now, I’m willing to sort through all the noise to find a little signal. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to do it.

I know this is temporary, and that over time it’ll get easier to find the notable applications, and the firehose of new ones will not interest me. But for the time being, I wish Apple had a simple way to see everything that’s new from the last several days.

On Apple Getting AI Help

Bloomberg reports that Apple is in talks with Google (and possibly OpenAI) about a deal to run iPhone AI features through these third-party providers. It’s all sketchy at this point but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

Capacity is one of Apple’s big problems in terms of AI. There are just so many iPhones out in the wild that if you add an AI feature requiring any cloud processing, they would have to have massive server capacity to keep up with it.

That’s just one more reason why the on-device model makes sense. However, if there was something they did want to do on the server or make available to their users to be done on a server, they’re going to need help. So the real question would be whether Apple makes that deal or just does AI processing on device.

Mac Power Users 736: Maintaining & Caring For Your Apple Hardware

Join Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users as we offer advice on how to best care for Macs, iPhones, iPads, and more, from cleaning to battery management and beyond. Then, we reflect on recent news, including the new MacBook Air and the death of the company’s car project.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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M3 MacBook Air has Faster SSD Speeds

A bit of good news from iFixit on the teardown of the new M3 MacBook Air: they have now switched to two 128 GB storage modules. You may know that in the first two iterations of the Apple silicon MacBook Air, the base storage models were significantly slower in read-write speeds than the other models in the line because they only used one socket for storage, significantly cutting down the bandwidth. With the M3 model, the device gets SSD write speeds approximately 33% faster and read speeds approximately 82% faster.

There was a lot of hand-wringing when the M2 model didn’t make any changes to the SSD problem. It could just be that the manufacturing timeline didn’t give them enough time to fix it. I would argue that they should have caught this problem before releasing the first one. Regardless, I’m happy that Apple did respond, and now customers of the lower-end MacBook Air will get better SSD read and write speeds.

Focused 199: Repotting and Retirement, with Jim Eagar

Jim Eagar joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about how to navigate the four phases of retirement with meaning and purpose.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

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