Federico Viticci, bringing the fire:
In working with my iPad Pro over the past few months, I’ve realized something that might have seemed absurd just a few years ago: some of the best apps I’m using – the ones with truly desktop-class layouts and experiences – aren’t native iPad apps.
They’re web apps.
When the iPad starts to feel like a Chromebook, we have a problem.
John Gruber, bringing the fire:
In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until “the coming year”.
I should have my head examined.
This announcement dropped as a surprise, and certainly took me by surprise to some extent, but it was all there from the start. I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.
When WWDC starts to feel like Google I/O, we have a problem.
Is the Vision Pro the perfect night computer? Will this year bring a sweeping redesign to Apple’s operating systems? Has Apple (accidentally?) built the ultimate desktop computer for AI? Are questions a bad way to write an episode description?
No, you did not read that wrong. Better late than never?
With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple Intelligence .
This is gross.
Update: Chance Miller reports that this is happening with today’s macOS release, not iOS. Also gross.
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It’s been a while, so on this week’s episode, David and I share what is in our Macs’ menu bars, touching on some all-time great macOS apps.
In a comment to John Gruber, Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy said:
Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
I don’t think many people who have paid attention to Apple Intelligence will be shocked by this, but it does underline something I’ve believed for months: shipping the new colorful Siri UI early was a mistake. I love the new UI, but it is tied to the same old, bad Siri. The UI change was a moment for Apple to reset expectations for the technology, and it whiffed on the chance.
There’s a new social app on the horizon: Here’s The Iconfactory:
Twitterrific for Mac was the very first Twitter client, but it has fallen out of date. Help us bring it back to the future!
STATIC BREAKS INTO MY AIRPODS
Oh, I’m being told that this blog post is supposed to be about another Phoenix. The folks at Tapbots are building a Bluesky client. From their FAQ:
What about Ivory? Are you leaving Mastodon?
Of course not! Mastodon is our home on the social web and we will continue to invest our time there. Since the incredible growth of Bluesky in the past year, our customer base has become split between the two services and for us to continue to thrive as a company, we must support both. Unfortunately, we can’t survive on Mastodon alone.
It’s easy for people in our corner of the Internet to think Mastodon is a huge success, but in terms of raw user numbers, it just … isn’t. I am sure Phoenix will bring the polish Tapbots is known for to Bluesky, which is great. The official app is so close to a Twitter/X clone that if you took the labels off, I’m not sure most people could tell the difference.
This week on the podcast, there are new iPads and Macs to discuss, as well as new emoji whose names are unknown to one particular host.
Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors:
A spokesperson for Apple has told French technology website Numerama that its M4 Max chip lacks an UltraFusion connector, which would have paved the way for the release of a doubled-up M4 Ultra chip in the future.
As we recently covered, Apple told Ars Technica that not every generation of M-series chips for Macs will include an “Ultra” chip. That seems like Apple indirectly confirming that it has no plans to release an M4 Ultra chip, and the M4 Max’s lack of UltraFusion technology makes it even more likely there won’t be an M4 Ultra chip.
In addition to the new MacBook Air, Apple also updated the Mac Studio today:
Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.
That’s right… these are the chips that ship in the updated Mac Studio:
When this leaked yesterday, part of me didn’t believe it, but here we are.
So, what is an M3 Ultra? Apple explains:
Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac, double the Neural Engine cores, and the most unified memory ever in a personal computer. M3 Ultra also features Thunderbolt 5 with more than 2x the bandwidth per port for faster connectivity and robust expansion. M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.
“M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “Thanks to its 32-core CPU, massive GPU, support for the most unified memory ever in a personal computer, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and industry-leading power efficiency, there’s no other chip like M3 Ultra.”
The M4 Max version starts at $1,999 with the M3 Ultra starting at $3,999. The latter can be specced to $14,099 with these options:
The M4 Max tops out at 128 GB of memory and 8 TB of storage with 14 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine.
Even though I am not a Mac Studio user anymore, I am glad to see the machine get updated. I have lots of questions about why the top-of-the-line chip is based on an M3 and not an M4, though. Perhaps we’ll see an M4 Ultra this summer in an updated Mac Pro, in an attempt by Apple to separate its two high-end desktop Macs a little more. ( Or not.)