1. Enrich people’s lives
Yet another presentation where Tim Cook has used the expression, Enrich people’s lives. I know it’s Apple’s mission, but the man is really starting to sound like a broken record in his introductory speeches.
2. Save people’s lives
The first segment was about the Apple Watch. Those testimonials with ‘regular people’ recounting how their Apple Watch ‘saved their lives’ felt so off to me, so contrived, and ultimately lacking taste. Yes, yes, Apple, you desperately want people to think of the Watch as a useful tool first, luxury gadget second, but sometimes it’s enough to let the device speak for itself.
Those testimonials were meant to sound gripping and moving, but turned out to have almost the opposite effect for me — they sounded artificial, they felt more docu-drama than documentary, and in some cases borderline ridiculous: if my heart rate spiked to 187 beats per minute, I would notice there’s something wrong without having a smartwatch tell me it’s better I call emergency services. I had a terrible, frightening panic attack in early 2004 triggering an episode of tachycardia I had never experienced before or after. When the paramedics coming to my apartment checked my heart rate and told me it was 178, I was already feeling a little calmer thanks to their very presence, therefore my heart rate must have been even higher when I decided to call them earlier that night. I didn’t have a smartwatch telling me my heart was racing; I felt it myself.
3. Useful, boring, not for me
Keep in mind I’m not particularly interested in the Apple Watch as a product. I’m glad it exists and I’m glad many people love it and find it useful in their daily lives. It’s not a product for me, though. Despite my previous observation, I don’t question its usefulness for fitness and health. It’s simply a device that does too much, throws too much information at the user, has a complex user interaction design (too complex for what I want in a watch) and — last but not least — I just don’t like its visual design.
Speaking of visual design, the main Watch Series keeps looking iterative, and I joked on Twitter, 2015–2022: seven years of Apple Watch looking essentially the same. The Apple Watch Ultra, on this front, feels fresher finally.
4. Push those boundaries harder
Someone high in Apple’s hierarchy must really love this stupid naming scheme based on Pro, Max, Ultra because they’re surely sprinkling these suffixes like stardust across their product lines. Apple Watch Ultra just sounds ridiculous to my ears. Anyway.
Considering the Watch Ultra’s target audience (explorers, athletes, scuba divers, rugged outdoor adventurers), I’m a layperson, and as a layperson its set of features initially felt very cool and useful. But my friend Alex Roddie, an experienced outdoorsman, is not impressed. He shared his first impressions with me on Twitter as the event was unfolding:
As someone who has tested countless GPS watches actually designed for mountain use, I’m not impressed by it. 36 hours battery life is pathetic. 65 hours would be just about competitive these days.
And by 65 hours I mean 65 hours of full-burn GPS tracking. I doubt that the Watch Ultra can cope with even a third of this, which makes it years behind the competition.
It’s so painfully obviously a device designed by urban people who want to ‘disrupt’ a market they don’t understand.
I look for a device that will last at least 13–14 hours of full-burn GPS tracking in a day, and then do this day after day without charging, offline, in sub-freezing or wet conditions, and with zero babysitting.
If I need to charge it more than twice a week, or go online more than occasionally, then I’m not interested! Just like every other Apple Watch, this requires too much babysitting for serious mountain/trail use.
Admittedly, for a watch that is designed to ‘push the boundaries’, 36 to maybe 60 hours of battery life doesn’t feel like a lot of pushing. Which makes me wonder, why not design the Ultra in a different way, removing every possible battery-draining feature in the first place, instead of having that huge, bright OLED display? Maybe they wanted to guarantee maximum readability, but again Alex Roddie chimes in:
Almost every serious outdoor GPS watch has a transflective display, perfectly readable in sunlight, with a backlight that’s off by default and sips power. A power-hungry OLED is the wrong choice.
And adds:
I also saw nothing in that presentation about backcountry mapping software. Yes, you can install WorkOutDoors, but that’s a third-party app, depending on the work of a single developer. Where’s the first-party topo mapping support?
My guess is that the Apple Watch Ultra will be a success, overall, but its sales will be mostly driven by a less extreme audience — Sunday hikers, recreational divers, and people who want to look cool with the more ‘rugged watch’. I’m not in the market for an Apple Watch, but if I were, I’d probably get an Ultra just because the regular Apple Watch design is so iterative and boring that the Ultra’s looks quite fresh in comparison.
I have the feeling that many of those people who really push the boundaries, the people Apple wants to market the Ultra to, have already realised that this watch is too limited — or simply inadequate — for their needs, and will keep relying on their Garmins, Suuntos, and Casios. Sure, the Ultra may have potential, but you don’t purchase a tool that must have your back in highly dangerous situations based on what it may be capable of in a future iteration or software update.
5. Small earphones, short observation
New AirPods Pro. Hard pass. I’m sure they’re great at what they do, but I simply cannot use this type of in-ear earphones. I’ve tried several, from many brands, but they simply don’t stay put in my ear canals. If I had to choose an ideal model of true wireless earphones, the third-generation regular AirPods would be my pick. They’re not in-ear, and their stems are short enough as not to be ridiculous like the first AirPods. Though I’m not sure I’d spend €200 for a product whose life cycle coincides with the one of its tiny, non-replaceable battery.
6. The fourteens
Ah, the new iPhone 14 line. As all rumours anticipated, the iPhone mini form factor is no more. There is a regular iPhone 14 with a 6.1‑inch display. Then there’s a new, bigger regular model — the iPhone 14 Plus with a 6.7‑inch display. Both these models feature the same notch and the same A15 Bionic chip of last year’s iPhone 13 line. There are subtle differences if you read the tech specs carefully. Probably the most notable (i.e., the least insignificant) difference is that the A15 Bionic chip of these two iPhone 14 models has a 5‑core GPU, while the A15 in the iPhone 13 models has a 4‑core GPU. And of course the newer iPhones have the new emergency features touted at the event — Emergency SOS via satellite, and Crash Detection.
If you don’t like big phones, you’ll have to hold on to your iPhone 12 or 13 mini for a bit longer (or there’s always the SE). Pro or not, the new fourteens only come in two sizes — big (6.1″) and bigger (6.7″).
The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max are of course the more interesting devices. They do feature a new chip, the A16 Bionic, and a more sophisticated and capable camera array on the back. At this point, several professional photographers have already chimed in, explaining and showcasing what kind of improvements you should expect, and how everything compares to last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. I liked Ted Forbes’s first impressions video and the obligatory annual in-depth feature by Austin Mann. Check them out, they can surely guide you through the details better than I could.
My takeaway is that if you’re a hardcore iPhone-only photographer, and you’re constantly looking for the best camera experience in an iPhone, you’ll probably want to upgrade from your 13 Pro. If you just use the iPhone as the quickest shortcut to take a photo, and want to take the occasional good-looking photo, I suspect a regular 14, and even the previous 13 and 12 models will be enough (13 mini and 12 mini if you, like me, prefer smaller phones).
And if you, like me, don’t really care about camera specs and performance in an iPhone, because you still prefer using traditional cameras, you’ll end up saving even more money. If you also hate big-ass iPhones with notches, then you’re welcome to do as I did — purchase a third-generation iPhone SE.
7. Dynamic Island, the place where fanboys get high
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m really passionate about user interfaces, and in fact many readers have already contacted me and urged me to share my thoughts on that new mix of hardware and software feature of the new iPhone 14 Pro models — the Dynamic Island.
I generally agree with everyone else: it’s a clever feature and an intriguing execution to solve an otherwise annoying design detail iPhones have had for 5 years now: the notch.
Despite the mantra You get used to the notch pretty quickly that everyone and their dog and perhaps even Apple themselves have been chanting since the iPhone X debuted, the unquestionable thing with the notch is that it was there, in all its ugliness, taking up most part of the very top of the display, disrupting the status bar’s usefulness, and generally being an intrusive element and a sore sight æsthetically.
Physically, this new Dynamic Island is detached from the upper bezel and is smaller than the notch we’ve seen on iPhones since the X. And as I tweeted during the event, my first impression is that at least with the Dynamic Island, Apple has found a way to embrace this minor notch in such a manner that makes people look at it instead of making them try to ignore it.
Look at it and also actively interact with it, because it’s been transformed into something that’s indubitably useful, and with an interaction model that finally seems to have been designed by people who know something about what they’re doing.
Of course, however, now we have all the geeksphere and fanboyland cheering Apple as masters of genius design and interface innovators, meanwhile my eyes have been rolling so much they hurt. Even John Gruber dared to cast this fireball with a straight face (emphasis mine):
I don’t think an iPhone-style Dynamic Island will ever come to iPads, either. For one thing, I’m inclined to think iPad bezels will never shrink to the point where the sensor array won’t fit behind them. For another, iPads now have mouse pointer support when connected to a trackpad and the same illusion-ruining factor I mentioned about the Mac would apply. But here’s an idea: perhaps the Dynamic Island would come to the iPad purely in software. The iPad hardware sensor array would still be hidden in the bezel surrounding the display, but iPadOS could render a pure software Dynamic Island on screen. That, I think, would work completely. You could rotate the iPad and the Dynamic Island would always be at the top. The mouse pointer wouldn’t disappear under any actual hardware sensors. It’d just be a black stadium rendered entirely by software. It could actually be more elegant than the iPhone’s Dynamic Island because there’d be no sensors to disguise.
Yeah, let’s draw a persistent black spot in an otherwise clean user interface because why not. Because now apparently there is no other way (more elegant, more device-appropriate) to replicate the functionality of the Dynamic Island. Instead of working towards eliminating all kind of display intrusions, let’s literally go draw these intrusions where there’s no reason to. By the way, I suspect that if Apple really did that to iPads, the Dynamic Island won’t be “more elegant than the iPhone’s” because it probably would have to be bigger for usability reasons — I doubt that the notifications and animations on a Dynamic Island that’s kept at the same iPhone size on an 13-inch iPad Pro would be as useful, enjoyable, and readable.
So while I agree that the Dynamic Island is a clever bit of UI, it still remains a workaround to make a hardware design weakness become a software and UI strength. And I’ll say it’s great work, indeed. No snark here.
But also…
8. Mac OS, the castaway on an island bereft of ideas
What are these same clever Apple designers doing on the Mac? As I watched the Dynamic Island being illustrated and demoed during the event, I kept thinking about how this design cleverness has been sorely lacking on Mac OS for years. And I am, once again, left with the impression that the software designers at Apple today have generally a better understanding of iOS than Mac OS. New features that are iOS-first or iOS-only feel certainly more organic, more fitting, more ‘right’ for lack of a better term.
What they’ve been doing on Mac OS — or rather, to Mac OS — are repeated attempts at a visual and functional iOS-ification that leave many long-time Mac (and computer) users baffled. And not because these users are “afraid of change”, or “don’t understand Apple’s innovation”. But because this general dumbing-down of Mac OS and the Mac’s UI shows the incompetence of UI designers who don’t get basic UI principles of traditional computers’ operating systems, and are arrogantly trying their new coats of paint because “it’s time to touch things up otherwise they feel too stale”. They keep fixing what isn’t broken. The result is the needless and badly-executed redesign of System Preferences in Mac OS Ventura. The result is shoehorning yet another multitasking interface layer — Stage Manager — that is entirely not needed on Macs because what was there already worked well enough; Stage Manager looks and feels like a last-minute bolt-on that complicates the multitasking UI instead of making it more efficient and streamlined.
It’s like Apple’s mission with the Mac’s UI has become to take by the hand all these poor users coming from iOS devices who might find the Mac soooo difficult, soooo complicated to use, and need its UI to be as close to the iPhone and the iPad’s otherwise they’re utterly lost. At times I even suspect that many of those interns at Apple working on Mac OS are all iOS-devices-first people.
All the clarity about the direction iOS has to take, along with the iPhone; the way iPhone/iOS features are thought out, developed, and implemented, appears almost nonexistent on Mac OS and the Mac. Where is, in Mac OS, that solution that is as clever as Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro models? Where is, in Mac OS, that attention to detail, that innovative thing that makes you utter, Hah, they clearly know what they’re doing and where they want Mac OS to go — where is it?
