Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
Future shock
Those of us who write about technology for a living often have a tendency to fixate on the future. The next generation of iPhones, next year’s Macs, the features that will be unlocked when the next set of software updates arrive: if we’re not careful, focusing on the things that aren’t here yet can blind us to the real and attainable benefits of the technology available right now.
But sometimes this mentality is completely justified. Such as when the companies we write about take a similarly future-obsessed approach and sacrifice the short-term success of their current products in service to a longer-term vision. Like, to take a completely random example, Apple in 2023 and 2024.
We knew in advance that last year was going to be slow: There was an understanding that Apple needed to push ahead on the moonshot project that could one day take the iPhone’s place as its premier computing platform and that the developmental drain caused by this monomania would inevitably impact innovations in other areas. The result was a boring iPhone 15 launch, a boring Apple Watch Series 9 launch, and a general sense of killing time until the Vision Pro came along and gave us something interesting to talk about. As my colleague Jason Snell put it, we were all hoping that Apple’s quiet 2023 was the calm before the storm.
But after Vision Pro launched at the start of the year, things don’t feel like they’ve changed. Vision Pro itself is, perhaps inevitably, a curio of a product that very few people are buying and represents essentially a glimpse of what may become possible in spatial computing some years from now. In other words, another case of future fixation. The second-gen model, which is expected to be cheaper and therefore accessible to a far larger audience, isn’t likely to be here until 2026.
The MacBooks and iPads we’ve had so far this year, meanwhile, have failed to set the world alight, and the upcoming iPhone 16 launch is mainly hanging on the rollout of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s long-delayed entry into the AI arena. Which in turn is probably going to take some years of iteration before it’s really worthwhile, and won’t arrive in full until 2025. (Though the iPhone 17 might be a
The main thing I want from Apple Intelligence is an improved version of Siri because Siri is almost unusably bad on the HomePod and pretty dreadful elsewhere. But the wait is going to be a long one, apparently, because Apple Intelligence and the new Siri aren’t expected to roll out to the public until iOS 18.4 in the spring. And because it needs a lot of processing power it won’t affect the HomePod… or the HomePods some of us were dumb enough to have already bought four of, anyway. (Okay, two of them are HomePod minis. I’m not made of money.)
If any HomePod gets the benefit of AI Siri, it’ll be that current darling of the rumor blogs, the HomePod with a screen. I’ve written elsewhere that giving the HomePod a screen won’t fix its problems, but a new Siri might. We don’t yet know whether this mythical product will ever launch, whether it will get an A18 processor, or whether Apple will allow its AI system to run on a smart speaker. But with the rest of the Apple range wallowing in the doldrums, it’s something to look forward to.
Foundry
Foundry
Foundry
Trending: Top stories
What on earth has happened to the Apple rumor mill?
A screen won’t fix the HomePod’s problems: Apple needs to change the execution, not the approach.
Apple’s next-gen HomePod could change everything we know about Siri.
Podcast of the week
You have thoughts about the world of Apple, and we’re going to talk about them on the show! It’s going to be a good one, so tune into the Macworld Podcast!
You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.
Reviews corner
- M4 iPad Pro review: Apple’s first OLED tablet really is that good.
- Beats Pill review: A really good speaker that’s a firmware update from being great.
- Best iPad VPN 2024: We recommend seven of the best.
The rumor mill
iPhone 16 Pro is rumored to have much faster charging speeds.
The Apple Watch Series 10 will have a larger screen, other ‘notable’ upgrades.
A new HomePod with a display could hijack the iPhone 16 launch this fall. And look, here’s even more evidence!
Uncovered Apple chip identifiers reveal surprising slate of unreleased iPads.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max may be Apple’s first phone with three 48MP cameras.
Software updates, bugs, and problems
Attention iPhone users: A new SMS attack could steal your Apple ID credentials.
These Apple Intelligence and Siri features are coming after the iOS 18 launch.
Reliable leaker says surprise iOS 17.5.2 iPhone update is on the way.
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.