Mayo, did you get the invite I sent you this morning? The invite to Happy Hour. I did. Happy hour live at Buckingham Palace at the end of this month. I'm very much looking forward to it. I don't know if you are. But Buckingham Palace is quite the esteemed venue for a live podcast recording, I think.
We will bring you the latest Apple news and insights amid the grandeur of this royal setting, according to your description. We're referring to the launch of the Apple Invites app, which is something we talked about a few, a couple of months ago at this point, our colleague Felipe.
was first to report on the existence of this app. Apple describes it as a new app that brings people together for life's special moments. It's a dedicated app for iPhone where you can go in and create what's a pretty sleek looking invite to any sort of event in your life. You can set a date, a time, a description. There are tie-ins to Apple Music, so you can share a playlist for the event.
There are tie-ins to the Photos app to automatically create a shared album for the event where anybody can drop in pictures. What else do we have? There's, oh, there's quote-unquote deep Apple intelligence integration so you can use. Image Playground to generate a background for the event artwork. And you can use writing tools to generate a description for the event. Altogether, I think it's actually a pretty sleek package of an app that ties together.
multiple other parts of the Apple ecosystem. In order to create an event, though, you do need an iCloud Plus subscription, and that starts at a dollar a month nowadays. But you can RSVP to events and... preview the event and view all of the details to an event as long as you didn't create it for free either in the iPhone app or on the web. So even if you don't have an iPhone, you can RSVP to an event like on an Android phone.
But yeah, all in all, I think it's a pretty compelling package. I don't know how often I'll use it because I don't really plan events like this. But in an ideal world where I had multiple social engagements every week. I could probably see myself using this. Would you use this though? That's like, I'm just the social stigma of sending it with somebody like an iCloud.com link. I just don't know if, I just don't know if it's going to happen. I'm trying to think of like the last time I used.
like a facebook event to plan something yeah i actually got a facebook invite at new year's eve from my friends thing and we didn't really use the because obviously you can make like a group and it has like this page and you can put like specific stuff on there and you could theoretically share photos and stuff but like it was basically just there just to make an easy way to send an invite to people and then you'd say if you're going or not and yeah it just basically collected who was there but
Equally, that same friend group, including me, barely used Facebook for anything else. So it was kind of weird to go on Facebook to do that one thing. But I think they equally find it weird if I sent them links to... an apple invite as well what the hell is this you know so i kind of feel like the modern day group of organization tool for like casual use is just like whatsapp groups or something where people just make a group of people and they say oh i'm hosting an event here and then
People say if they're going or not. And I guess you just kind of manually track the attendance. Because really, the core of the app is the attendance list, right? That's really what you're getting down to. Because one limitation of the app is you can't really post like...
as like things change, whether you need to, whether you're trying to like plan for somebody to bring a certain thing to the party or the event, whether you're trying to say, hey, we're going to move it to this time or here's where to park when you arrive. You can post little notes on it.
Yeah, so I'm hosting. I was hosting one. And when you click on it in the little gallery, they send a note. And that sends like a push notification out to everybody. Oh, it does. Well, that's useful. I missed that. So you can send a little. But again. Aside from the fact that you get the cross-compatibility via the web for Android users.
I feel like I'd be more comfortable just making like a group I message the radio. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or I guess you could do RCS if you wanted to be cross-platform these days. It is a kind of a weird thing that's like... I get what they're going for. I just don't think it's going to be used very much. You know, like all those things that Apple tries to do that's like super social and like interactive with other people. It just never quite comes together in the right way.
And this kind of feels along those lines. I struggle to criticize the application. I think it's pretty well nicely designed. It's pretty easy. It is iPhone only, so there's no iPad app or whatever. For this kind of thing, I don't think it actually matters as much. With journal, it's kind of ridiculous that the journal is not on the iPad because that's where you can do more creating and writing and stuff. For this...
You're just going to open it once and then click if you're going or not, right? I don't think you really need a full screen experience. I think they'd even struggle to fill out a full screen experience even if they did do an iPad version or prioritise an iPad version. So that's not really a criticism I can wield against it. And I think the UI on the iPhone is pretty nice. It's pretty clear how you make events and you can scroll down.
And you get this nice bleed on the background and you can kind of keep a history of events. You kind of get a nice little like nostalgia things. If you've had a party or whatever, you can go back in time and just scroll through your little gallery and see it. So that's kind of good. I just...
The make an event and then sharing it with people is getting over that hump of like, is it awkward to send people an Apple invite instead of just, you know, saying, hey, I want to do a party. You know what I mean? Like that's the biggest hurdle they got to get over.
And I'm not sure that they're going to do it. You probably need to make... Again, it's another app which is not pre-installed, right? You've got to download it from the App Store, which doesn't help in terms of adoption. People are like, what the hell is this? And then also, does it really offer enough... flexibility for like the modern world of making events and stuff like I saw somebody complain that you can't you have to like set the date and time but
some other like party planning apps you can kind of like make the event and people can suggest time so you can kind of coordinate when everybody's available right so if someone can't go okay well can we do it the weekend after you can't really do that on this and there's no like
With the Facebook group, there's a dedicated page where you can post updates and post little status updates and chat between the people that are going. With this, there's no chat. It's just a one-way update. That's what I was about to say.
tried out the add a note thing that you mentioned. So I sent you a note and said, hello, the King will be in attendance, but there's no way, there's no way for you to like acknowledge that you saw that. As far as I can tell, you can't like respond to it. You can't, you can't send me as the host.
a question it's kind of it seems very one way where i am the host of the event here's what you need to know do as i say do not ask any questions like you need like a little like notice board where people can
talk back and forth right so like let's say you've invited me this thing i could type oh what's the dress code and then you could answer and then someone else that comes and joins the event later could just see the conversation um so all of that is just not here which makes me more inclined just to do a a WhatsApp group, if you're just trying to be practical with it. I will say, though, I'm all for Apple.
making these little side apps, what are clearly side projects. You have this, you have Apple Sports, you have Journal, which Journal is a bit different. I think Journal is like Apple treats Journal as a bigger deal than it treats. invites and sports, at least so far. Then you have Apple Music Classical. You have this little category of different kind of fun apps that aren't pre-installed in most cases.
I'm all for Apple trying these things. The key is they have to try them and keep updating them. They can't just release something and abandon it like they've done in the past with something like clips or music memos. Music memos, yeah. But if they keep...
iterating on this like they've done with apple sports apple sports has gotten significantly better than it was for since it was first released like i'm all for this new let's just make some fun apps strategy yeah journal kind of begging out for an ipad app i think or like a mac app so you can yeah follow and review your journals from different places and type on a bigger keyboard than an iPhone screen.
sports is great i think now if you like sports scores and stuff but it just needs more visibility which probably means pre-installing it right to get people's eyeballs on it because i don't know how i don't i don't ignore people who would know it exists so they don't advertise it enough they don't get it out there
Music Classical is fine if you're into classical music and there's links to it in the Music app, so you can kind of find it on your own. Apple Invites is kind of in no man's land right now for me. If I wasn't an iCloud Plus subscriber, would I go and subscribe to iCloud to be able to use this application when I could, again, you're competing against the freeness of a WhatsApp group, ultimately.
And I don't think you're really going to beat that because you've already got everybody you know there. You don't have to do this separate invite process. This is a very insular experience. It's like a classic Apple social attempt where it doesn't really actually have a social network behind it.
So I know Zach Hall, our colleague, he joked that the original Apple Invites app was Apple Cards, where you made like greetings cards and you sent them to people and they printed them and they delivered them to people's houses.
This is almost that with the very minor step forward of like, you can say if you're going or not, like on the thing. It almost feels like you're making greetings card and kind of send them out in the post, right? It's not really like a modern social networking experience, if you know what I mean.
There are so many nice touches to it with the Apple Music, the photos. It'll show you the forecast or the average weather for that time of year, wherever the event is being held, so I can see. When I go to Buckingham Palace later this month, it's going to be rainy and cold.
Not a shocker there. It's, yeah, I think you're right that it's just kind of an insular experience, but I hope it improves over time. And I hope it, from a design standpoint too, I think it's fun. It's different. It kind of is like... the Apple sports app to a degree and it's design language as well. Yeah. And of course this has led to people on social media saying that this is evidence that a system wide redesign is coming as I, as part of iOS 19.
People said the same thing when sports came out about iOS 18. I don't think nowadays you can read too much into what the individual design language of separate Apple apps means for iOS as a whole. Like we've talked about the camera redesign rumor, which certainly seems plausible at this point. But beyond that, I don't think anything is an indication that the entire OS is getting an iOS 7 style redesign. I don't even mean this looks particularly departed from...
Yeah. Like it has like the transparency, the cards. But beyond that, it just looks like any old iPhone app. The existing system apps have transparency in cards. Yeah, that's true. People just like to see into it, I think. They're begging for visual changes, I think, as people perceive.
you know ios is like boring or whatever but if you actually think that this isn't ever any evidence of what the future operating system is going to look like i think you need to uh change those expectations because
There's an all likelihood that people working on Apple invites have no visibility into the next OS version at all, right? Yeah. It feels a bit like sports where it's like a little adjunct team just working it on their own and they're making it better and better and better. And this, I think, at least won't...
have the initially suffer the issue of being abandoned because it is tied to a paid product so like they're trying to make it a feature of their services division right like if they did this 10 years ago they might have had this idea and just done it and then it would die off in the app store and no one use it and apple get bored of it um by tying it to having iCloud plus they're gonna at least give it you know
some gusto in trying to get it off the ground so you'll see updates and you know continuations and things um and maybe maybe in future like ios betas or something there's more os integration so like you can see obviously there could be If you could make an invite directly from the calendar app, for instance, that might make it a lot more accessible to people. So you could then share it out and put it on the calendar. And then if they do eventually add like date.
suggestion functionality it could like automatically move around your calendar as people decide or like get notifications through the calendar or whatever like i think there's some scope there for future development but at least right now it feels a bit like something that looks pretty nice
and works reasonably well and doesn't feel super confusing like the initial release of the sports app felt pretty hard to understand like for a normal person to understand the navigation they've improved it but the initial release was pretty rough this feels much more approachable and
much more it's also because it's more of a simple app right i just don't think people are going to reach to make an invite through this when they next have a party versus just opening whatever group messaging app they use with their friends and saying hey i'm playing a party you know it feels a bit old fashioned in that way and you kind of read the press release and it's like yeah this kind of feels like a 2000s era internet product rather than like a modern day product in some regard but
I don't criticize them for trying. I just don't think this is going to be super compelling. It's hard for me to see what they really need if they want to do more stuff like this. They need like a... it needs to be like iMessage like a proper social networking experience and they can build everything into that so whereas instead of just having chats you also have like status and live and follow people back and have like a feed like
And maybe they'll go in that direction at some point, but they certainly haven't rushed to do it so far. It's the same problem you have with Apple Music, where you have people following your friends and everything, but then all of the social... connections you make in apple music aren't related back to sports or tv or any other app or podcast you know it's all it's all very siloed off
And whenever they launch something new, then you're kind of going to restart the social graph again. And it's like, oh, do you want my friends have Apple invites? Because, yeah, it does work through the web if they don't. But really, it's only really nice to do it if they did have the application. So I guess I just won't bother and I'll just send them a text message.
It's kind of where I'm landing on it at the moment. I don't want to criticize Apple for doing this because I think it's fun. I think it's cool. I think it's a good way to put Apple intelligence in front of new people. Like you can see the AI. image playground generated cover image I made for our happy hour live show. And it's very clearly AI and it's very clearly just like a AI-ified version of what's that microphone called?
The blue Yeti? Is that what it's called? The blue? Yeah. It's just a fun way to create these things. You should put it as the album artwork for the chapter because it... I think it... Yeah. Yeah, you can tell that it's, you know, it's got like a stray wire hanging off. But it's a better image for that card than you would have in a stock library of photos, right? Yep, absolutely. And I think it's more than passable for just sending out any of that to people and moving on.
Of course, if this app actually does take off, they're going to need way more customization in terms of the different backgrounds you can use, the different options. When you make a background image or the featured image for the invite, it kind of looks like the Apple wallpapers.
UI from the settings, right? But it has like... one tenth of the options in terms of the different things that are actually there and they have this emoji section but the emoji are like fixed like if you make an emoji wallpaper in the system you can choose your own emoji you like type it in right you pick them out with this it's just no we've just chosen the
the party hat emoji and that's how it laid out on the screen and like you can change the crop but that's about it so there's there's an easy way where they need like a million more wallpapers for this thing to make it like feel really original um but for a first effort it's not a bad idea i also think the
One thing that's kind of a bummer is they have the integration with the shared photo album, the shared music stuff. But for one, if you're like an Android user, you can't see the shared photos at all. You have to have an Apple account to be able to see the shared albums. which kind of sucks, right? If you're just at the party and then people are like, oh, I've put my photos on here. And then you go there and it's like, well, no, sorry.
um and then secondly it doesn't really feel like the the shared album the shared music library shared playlist stuff is like built into invites it's more like a link out to the photos and music experiences because what i kind of thought it meant by the press release for like the music thing was like oh if you're gonna have a party then you join the invite and then you could suggest some songs to go in there and then...
Other people could comment on it or reply and add their own music or add their own playlist in. But really, it's more like you just pick one playlist that then you click on and it takes you to the music app with that playlist loaded. So if you even want to do any sort of collaboration, you first got to make the collaborative playlist first, then make the invite.
then a link to that one. If you just link to a normal playlist, it'll just put it there and that'll be the end of it. So there's some rough edges to it, but... And I don't really see a... I'm not like, oh, I'm going to go use this, right? Because even if I did have an event coming up, I'd just send people text messages or an email or something. I don't think I would go to this extreme. Because it would just be weird to send people a link. Do you know what? Once I tried...
When I was at Silverstone last year, with friends i took a load of photos and videos and we were in like a facebook chat or whatever and people were sharing with their pictures and they just put them in the facebook chat like you know just dropped them in directly and facebook messenger like compresses photos to hell um
And so it was super down res and it looked awful and you lose like the HDR of the images. So I was like, you know what I'll do? I'll put mine in an iCloud link, right? So you can download them in full res, full quality. Put the link in there.
And then everyone hated me for it. They're like, what is this thing? I don't understand. You click on it, it doesn't work. I don't understand how to get the pictures out. Just send them in the Facebook chat. So I just also sent them in the Facebook chat and that's where people got them from. But if I like, so...
If I then went to them, oh, I'm having a party here, respond to this invite, and I sent them this thing, they'd be like, the hell is this? You know? It would just get rejected. So, yeah. I think it is kind of like a... We're not necessarily the target audience for this as two people who are relatively introverted, relatively older in comparison to some of the people who are using other.
planning apps like this like i know partiful is a big one that i'd never heard of until this week and then our colleague michael burkhart who is younger than both of us was like you guys have never heard of partiful literally not once in my life and also I think at the very beginning of this segment, I said something like, in an ideal world where I had multiple social engagements to plan every week, I would use this.
For me, an ideal world is not having multiple social engagements every week. We're on the target market, to be fair. Yeah, exactly. But I kind of feel like the modern person is more inclined to make WhatsApp groups than... Download separate applications for invites and stuff. But part of all does exist and they're also now mad that Apple's basically Sherlocked them in many ways. Final point on this just for now. The invites app icon is really good.
It is. It's a really nice icon. The dark mode version is great. Just abstract enough to encompass a rather wide category of thing, right? But it's not like... some random squiggle and it's not just like a splodge on a white background it like you know has an invite envelope that follows that traces the rounded rectangle of the actual app icon and then it has some more abstract
um like dots inside of it so they did a really good job with the icon i really like the icon happy hour this week is brought to you by indeed we've all been in that spot at work where someone decides to leave just as the project is nearing completion and your business is suddenly left in a lurch with work stalled. In situations like that and others, being able to find a replacement quickly is so important. So how can you find amazing candidates fast? It's easy.
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Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at Oracle.com slash happy hour. That's Oracle.com slash happy hour. Thanks to Oracle for sponsoring the show. Bit of an interesting story this week, Mayo, a topic that I never expected to discuss on a podcast, but a topic that I never expected to have to research and then clear my browsing history after researching it.
But so in the European Union, we have alternative app marketplaces, right? And one of the biggest, if not the biggest or most successful alternative app marketplace at this point is Alt Store. This week in Alt Store, an app called Hot Tub emerged. It is, as Apple describes it, a quote-unquote hardcore pornography app, and it's available in Alt Store alongside Delta, Fortnite.
I think in and of itself, we knew that this was inevitable. Apple itself has been saying this is going to happen at some point and it's going to be bad. Well, that's the Harbinger. They've always... They've always fallen back to you, right? We're protecting children from content. This is like the example come to life. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to an interview that Phil Schiller gave.
like this time last year where he addressed some of the potential categories of apps that could emerge because of the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. So in and of itself, we knew this was happening, or we knew it would happen at some point. If anything, I'm kind of surprised it took this long for something like this to materialize. But one way that I think the launch of Hot Tub garnered more attention, caused more headlines, is because the announcement from Alt Store...
specifically called it the first Apple-approved porn app for iPhone. The nuance here, I think, is that in order to go For your app to be available on an alternative app marketplace in the European Union, it has to go through Apple's notarization check, which, correct me if I'm wrong, Mayo, but that's basically just checking for security and...
vulnerabilities, not the actual content of the app. Apple has no power under the DMA to take any action against an app submitted for notarization based on the content or category of that app. That is correct. It's a purely technical process. I don't think a human's involved at all when you submit through an alternative app marketplace. Because notarization happens for... ios and mac apps right um so even if you submit through your own website as a mac developer you can notarize your app um
But it doesn't mean like, it's not an app review process. It's like it attaches a digital signature, which lets Apple track the app. And then in the future, if malware was found, it can like revoke that single signature and pull the app off people's Macs without... actually upfront doing any sort of review process. The use of Apple approved in that language clearly got under Apple skin and that led them to issuing what I think is one of the firmer, most spicy.
Statements from Apple in a while? I'll just read it verbatim. We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids. Contrary to the false statements made by the Marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our app store. The truth is that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like AltStore and Epic.
who may not share our concerns for user safety. What do you make of that statement and Apple's response to this situation, Mayo? Do you think... I go back and forth on... the existence of this app in the first place. I think, A, it was inevitable to come to the European Union at some point. B, in and of itself, an app that lets you browse adult content on your iPhone is not, it's far from...
the worst thing you can do on an iPhone today. You can just go to Safari and find quite a bit of abhorrent content. You can go to Twitter and find some pretty awful adult content. Well, here's the crush. You can go to the App Store, the Apple App Store, and download... twitter called x now reddit myriad of other applications of that kind and as long as you go to the website first and allow explicit content they're allowed to show it in the app so
You can get to plenty of hot tub content, let's say, through the Reddit app, the official Reddit app that Apple approves. It even slaps a 17 plus rating on it on the store to give it that indication that you can find other stuff on it.
But if you go to the web, you can turn off the NSFW filter, the Not Safe for Work filter, and it will show you pornographic content directly through the iPhone Reddit app. So for Apple to say that they like... so the app store solely protects people from seeing that kind of content is just not true because you can literally do it right you you don't even have to go through a web browser you can do it through native applications and the content policy from
The app just seems to be, it's fine as long as it's not on by default and the user has to allow it through the website of the service and then they can show it in the native app. And those policies existed for a long time. And do you remember that whole hoo-ha about...
tumblr right that was going to be pulled from the store and remember and they they had a policy on adult content and they eventually did the same thing too where they added filters and you have to opt out essentially so apple seems okay enough with that policy for it to be a thing and
They certainly haven't taken Reddit out of the App Store at all in the last 10 years and you can definitely do that. That's just a fact of life. So they turn a blind eye to it too as long as you follow those steps. They just don't want you down in the app. the download the app directly from the app store and then immediately be able to see it but if you go into your account settings and turn it on it's allowed to show up there and the iPhone will dutifully render it so it's a bit of you know
hidden words there because they don't fully block it. They could go to a much further extent if they didn't want that stuff on the iPhone at all. Even forgetting the fact you can just navigate to any page you want in the web browser. I do contest that I was not surprised in the slightest. You don't need a crystal ball to realize that if Hot Tub is presenting itself as Apple approved, Apple's not going to be happy about that. And so they came down hard in response.
I think in about a proportionally measured way as the fact that you're out there as this using language that clearly isn't sanctioned to say that your app has been Apple approved. And in fact, doesn't the, like the... the policy for apps distributed through web distribution or alternative marketplace distribution. It even says you're not allowed to say that Apple approved the app, basically using language like that. So they kind of brought this on themselves in terms of Apple...
Jason Snell on Six Colors kind of put it in what I thought was a good way, where Alt Store poked the bear, and they very much knew that that's what they were doing, like you said. They were hoping for some sort of response from Apple, or they were hoping to get under their skin a little bit. What I go back to and what Apple keeps jumping back to is how alt store used to cost money every month. I forget how much it costs. It was like $2 a month or something because you have to pay.
the core technology fee to download every time the app marketplace is downloaded and then over, what is it, a million installs for apps inside the app marketplace. But Epic gave them a quote unquote mega grant. To offset the cost of the core technology fee and Apple's argument. And what they keep pointing out is that because there's no barrier to entry to alt store because of this mega grant from Epic, this.
porn app sits in alt store unfiltered available alongside all these other apps that are harmless or not harmless in apple's eyes but basically harmless i don't know how much i buy into that argument Well, how do you get your story in the first place? You have to go to a website, right? Right. So if you want to find out our content...
There's a more direct path than going to Safari to then type in Alt Store, then download the app and then find Hot Tub inside it. You can Google Hot Tub directly if you're in Safari if you really want to. On that basis, I'm not sure Apple has much of a leg to stand on, but I think they're well within their right to push back on using language like Apple approved because it's not. And if you asked Apple to approve it, they would reject it.
I think ultimately this is like one of the first manifestations of the kind of things that Apple would like vaguely suggest was going to happen. And now it's finally happened, right? And it kind of was the truth too with the game emulator stuff, i.e. with Delta itself. But in that case, Apple could ethically just allow that category application on the actual app store and kind of take out a lot of the wind out the sails of...
you know the alternative marketplaces because now you can just get dealt with through the main app store so why are you going to download a separate app to do it uh with hot tub there's no way apple's going to approve an app that's solely focused on adult content in the main app store And I think it's unlikely that there will be like a future EU law that dictates, well, the official Apple App Store has to allow all types of content too because it's within their right to say no to it.
But I don't think Apple can get too... Their line to regulators and everyone is like, we're protecting children, we're protecting people from this stuff. But practically speaking, I think there are enough protections in place. is it is like if you've got an alternative marketplace you already have to click on those like five different screens to approve it to go through and you're accepting the risk of downloading software that apple hasn't officially looked over
And so I think Apple probably overstates the impact that this actually has. I understand that they were annoyed by the language of Apple approved. And I would even expect them to, if Hot Tub continues to advertise themselves as Apple approved, I think they could easily...
sue for that and probably win because it's just not true and in direct breach of the contract language but in terms of this app existing in the ether they probably just kind of have to relent at some point because it isn't it isn't that
dangerous really like and you have to go out your way to go and find it and it's not like it's like a it's not like it's like an application that looks like like a child's game for meant for kids and you install it and then suddenly it's like ah there's adult content in your face it's advertised as that so it's not really different to just
going to safari and typing in you know googling fraud content directly or you know going to one of your favorite websites so the impact on humans is relatively low like i don't really think apple has much of a leg to stand on in terms of social justice or social morality you know
And I think the best point is you literally can download the Reddit app right now and go on plenty of NSFW subreddits and browse content that is probably most of the same content that you'd find through Hot Tub to your heart's content. So Apple will use this as a big... moral play but the practical uh the practical realities are it's kind of inconsequential mostly the one comparison i thought of this week is how apple would respond if let's say
only fans launched an app in the european union because with only fans and i'm talking a bit out of out of my element here but my my interpretation of it is it does help support independent like there is an element where it's not just adult content yeah and it is a large percentage of adult content but there's an exchange between the viewer or the customer And the creator, right? And that clearly benefits the creator. Whereas with this Hot Tub app, to me, it's hard to tell.
A, where some of this content is coming from. If Hot Tub is just ripping it off from different places, putting it in its app, charging to remove what are ads sold by them. Like that whole dichotomy is very weird and kind of is a bit scummy, I think. I think there's a lot of copyright infringement in the art of conduct industry. I think that's fair to say. Right.
So I would be curious to see how Apple would respond if OnlyFans, which is still a quote-unquote adult entertainment service slash app launched in the European Union compared to this. Well, I mean, if you compare it to Reddit policy, you can kind of imagine them allowing in the US App Store natively.
if they complied with in-app purchase requirements, right? So they have to take their car. And all the NSFW stuff would have to be hidden unless you go to some portal on the OnlyFans website and turn it on. Then I think it's almost comparable to... to the Reddit case, right? And I imagine Patreon is exactly like that because Patreon is basically like OnlyFans in many regards.
And they have a native app right now. And they're obviously in a fight over adopting in-app purchase directly, right? Because they don't want to give 30% cut. But I presume Patreon supports adult creators as well. And I imagine that they just don't list them in the native app. And you can find them online. I assume that's how Apple would approach it. Back to what I think is our normally scheduled content. A slightly less uncomfortable topic. Back to our friend Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.
He says that Apple has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices. Apple had initially wanted these glasses to pair with an iPhone, but it ran into problems over how much processing power the iPhone could provide.
and how it affected battery life, so it shifted to making these AR glasses connect to a Mac. From a hardware perspective, they had advanced projectors that could display information, images, and video in the field of view for each eye. But Mark says that the Mac-connected product performed poorly during recent reviews with executives, so they made the decision to cancel the project altogether.
He does say that Apple is, of course, still working on these underlying technologies for future AR glasses, but this product in this form, which is connected to a Mac for the processing power, has been scrapped. I've gone back and forth on this a little bit over the past week since the story came out. I struggle to understand how compelling a pair of AR glasses that required being tethered to a Mac actually are.
If the product exists primarily to replicate the Mac virtual display feature of Apple Vision Pro, I think that's fine. That's a very cool feature. I think it's one of the best features of Vision Pro. But from a standalone... product perspective i don't see a huge market for this yeah i mean i guess it's kind of along the same lines as like those x real glasses that let people watch yeah like movies connect to their iphone on a bigger screen um but instead of being
movie centric it was more like productivity centric with you know a bigger screen for you of bigger virtual display for your mac um but yeah i agree with you as a mac connected product it probably doesn't have many much legs and it just kind of feels like they were trying to find something as another intermediate stepping stone towards what everyone actually knows what they want to do, which is like freestanding goggles, glasses.
but i can kind of get i'm not like mourning the loss of this particular initiative i still think there's probably more traction in getting something that is like a vr headset to do like movie watching because if you take the vision pro you have mac virtual display is one of the most compelling aspects and you have you know content consumption tv shows and movies on big screens in your head that is also super compelling and i think everybody kind of agrees that
A proper AR glasses standalone experience is a long ways off. And so everyone's trying to find these little things they can do in the meantime. And...
You've got cheaper Vision Pro, but you could also have a really, really cheaper Vision Pro if all you did is just do movie projection. So maybe they'll explore that angle. But I think tying it to a Mac is... problematic like if you did movie projection you probably could just rely on the iPhone's CPU power right because you're doing far less um for for doing a more fully featured AR experience you kind of need more powerful hardware that's why
The Vision Pro has an M chip in it, not an A-series chip, right? And so that's probably what they ran into with the iPhone. And I can't imagine they seriously thought the iPhone would be able to handle it because there's a reason why the Vision Pro doesn't have the iPhone chip in it.
Right. But this is the insides of product development, right? And I guess they were just trying to find... Everyone's trying to find something that they can put out in the meantime before the thing they actually want to make is ready. And this is something that they tried and...
didn't want to continue to pursue because i can see how a product like this is useful if it can be powered by the iphone but as you said that's clearly not possible right now you have vision pro on the market and if i'm thinking in terms of things in kind of in this category that i think apple should release my mind immediately jumps to something far more basic which is a meta ray-ban style pair of quote-unquote smart glasses those things are popular
Those things are not hugely technically demanding. They have no projection. I think all these random diversions are a bit misguided. The number one thing they need to do with Vision Pro... is make it cheaper and lighter to wear on your head. And so that should be the first, like they've already made the product, right? And so in terms of the future roadmap of the product, find ways to make it cheaper to make and cheaper to sell.
and less heavy on your head right with maybe some slightly different straps i think they could easily double the appeal of the vision pro just by doing that and double it again if they make it even thinner and cheaper in the next generation so that seems the most obvious course of action and i think they're probably doing that right but we might not see that second generation until early 26 um and then separately you have the kind of
wearable stuff which is more in the ray-bans kind of domain right and apple does already have its own wearables that are successful like the apple watch and airpods and stuff but if you want something that's got a visual element to it so you can kind of do visual intelligence without having to have a separate device
You kind of need glasses. I mean, there is this talk of AirPods with cameras in them. So I think it's possible that Apple sees that as their answer to Ray-Bans. You just wear the little earbuds instead. But I think there's probably room in the market for them to have AirPods and air glasses or whatever they want to call them. But maybe they're slightly too late to do that and they're just committed to the AirPods line for now.
And there's also a line in Mark's report where he says there's a lack of focus and clear direction within Apple's Vision products team. That's currently overseen by Mike Rockwell and John Ternus. And this did, I did find that line funny because just last week, Mark said that Kim Vorath, who helped get Vision Pro out the door, had shifted her focus to Apple intelligence.
So you have a lack of clear focus in the vision products group combined with the woman who by all indications played a huge role in shipping vision pro focused on something else does lead to come to some concerns for. the future of this product category, especially for me, who's someone who likes Vision Pro as a product, uses Vision Pro every week, and wants to see rapid and continued innovation in this category. It just doesn't seem like the roadmap is there.
So many different exit ramps that Apple seems to be taking with different product categories, trying something, abandoning it. It gives me a bit of the same vibe as the Apple Car team. And to the Vision Products Group credit, they did ship Apple Vision Pro. The Apple Car team never shipped anything. But the back and forth about what the goal is, what they're going to try, again, gives me a little bit of pause for the future of this category. Yeah, I would agree with that.
Last week, we talked about iOS 18.3 adding Starlink integration thanks to T-Mobile's partnership with SpaceX. That has become a bit of a conspiracy theory over the past week. So on. TikTok. There have been a handful of videos that have gone viral saying that iOS 18.3 quote-unquote installed Starlink on everyone's iPhone. This is not true, and...
Apple has since published a support document clarifying exactly how this works, basically explaining that all iOS 18.3 did was add support for the latest version of T-Mobile's network. So T-Mobile is using the 1900 MHz Band 25 spectrum to provide that coverage using Starlink. The iPhone supports Band 25, so all iOS 18.3 did was add support for that part of T-Mobile's network.
There's no direct collaboration between Apple and SpaceX. So all of these TikToks, posts on threads saying that you shouldn't update to iOS 18.3 because of this quote unquote SpaceX integration is. Those posts are just wrong, right? Yeah, I mean, it's like when they did 5G masks using Huawei equipment. It's not like saying, well, Huawei is now inside your iPhone. It just doesn't work like that. I think this also goes back...
to what's become kind of a running topic on this show. Yeah, this is deja vu, a recurring segment. Where Apple is reactive instead of proactive. So, A, iOS 18.3's release notes didn't include a single mention of this change. It was Bloomberg's Mark Gurman who covered the change, I think the day after iOS 18.3 was released. B, there was no reference to this change anywhere on Apple's website, including on any of the support documents.
Once these videos, TikToks, posts, whatever started going viral, Apple saw them and Apple reacted. They added a new section on its satellite documentation website. explaining how Apple's actual satellite network provider works, so that's GlobalStar, compared to carrier-provided features like what we have between T-Mobile and Starlink. Again, it's...
reactive instead of proactive for Apple's strategy. This whole controversy could be avoided if they added one bullet point in the 18.3 release notes, which was like, support for carrier-provided satellite cellular services, full stop. Exactly. Yep. And it wouldn't have blown up. anywhere close. And I don't think you have to be a PR public relations expert to know that these headlines would make the rounds. SpaceX is led by
A controversial figure. Yeah. Who is a controversial figure. You should have known that the reaction to that would have been people freaking out about something Elon Musk associated. being quote-unquote installed on their iPhone. Yeah, and if you don't mention it, it seems like you're trying to hide something when really you're just trying to like, oh, here's a decent, nice little enhancement to your iPhone experiences. Yeah, it's an own goal. A complete own goal. It is.
And last week, I think I said, like, why would you bother with, like, Apple's own satellite services via Global Star if this T-Mobile thing works? The initial reaction to the T-Mobile Starlink stuff, apart from the... you know conspiracy theory side of it in terms of just how does it actually work in this beta period people were saying that it kind of works but it also treats it like
The cell tower's got like one bar of signal the whole time. So it kind of drops in and out. And sometimes you just try and send a text message and it sits there for a long time and then it gives up and it fails. So it's not a panacea in terms of...
you know getting universal satellite service at least in this initial rollout so there are still reasons to use the iphone version where you hold up hold your phone up to the sky because you're going to get basically a better connection and finally this week The M5 chip is officially in mass production. This is just a supply chain report from ET News, I think is where it originated.
Nothing out of the ordinary here. I think we expect the first M5 Max to come this year. Are you telling me that after M4 comes M5? Yeah, I was wondering why you put this in the show notes because I thought it was obvious. I guess it's the March of Time. right about now if you use like the three month approximation might mean we might see the first m5 product ship in like june time i guess is where i was going with this in terms of intrigue of course there's going to always be another chip
You think June time is where we get the first M5? Seems. I mean, if they're in mass production now, I don't think they're going to hold it until the end of the year. I don't know what it would come to in June. Mac Studio, no? Oh, you think the Mac Studio is going to skip the M4 altogether? Possibly.
Possibly. I guess that would be such a departure from past years. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess German did say M4 was the first time that they're all going to get the same chip, right? So it just kind of feels like I've waited to. Maybe the M5 is going to go in the Mac Pro. There we go. I'm going wild.
That is wild. They're going to put the M5 Super Ultra Hydra chip in the Mac Pro in June. Because I guess it'll go... I'm going to assume it's going to follow the same timeline that we've seen. So M5... See, the outlier is the M4 iPad Pro, which was the first M4-powered machine. But I think we're going to see the first M5 Max later this year. So that's going to be the MacBook Pro, the iMac, and the Mac Mini.
Then we'll see iPad Pro with M5 sometime early next year, followed by the M5 Ultra next June. Don't you think it's quite a long time? If you just assume the ET News report is accurate, it's going into mass production now. If it's not shipping until October, that's quite a long time away. It's only January. It's only February, you know?
Well, like the iPhone A series chips normally go into mass production around like June, July time. Yeah. To then ship in September. So it's more of like a three-month time frame than a six, seven, eight, nine-month time frame. At least when I saw this story, I was like, oh, maybe something M5 is going to come out in the June time period around WWDC. I guess it could be an updated version of the iPad Pro.
They want to do the same thing that they did last year. Oh, they can ship it in the iPad again first? Yeah. I mean, that seems most likely to me because we don't even have an M4 MacBook Air. I mean, that's expected sometime. I feel like the M format will come out tomorrow, you know, like next week or something. It's on the verge. Any time between now and March is basically like...
the M4 MacBook Airs. But then I guess they also got to fit in the M4 Max Studio update as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing we've seen throughout the whole Apple Silicon era so far is Apple kind of just... releases things when they're ready. They're less concerned about aligning chips between different products, which is a great strategy. I don't think we need to wait for...
everything to be perfectly in sync to release an M4 MacBook Air, an M5 MacBook Air, or an M5 iPad Pro. If you just release things when you have the chips, that's fine. You know, you don't have these awkward product categories where...
I don't know. Stuff languishes. Stuff languishes. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I just put this out here. I was like, this feels slightly too soon for it to go into mass production if we're not expecting the first M5 stuff to the end of the year. But yeah, I guess Apple also has enough money to just leave stuff in.
Fact in the inventory for some few more months if they really have to. All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with... Bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I'm on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? I'm at BZA Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.