Month: April 2025

Tim Hardwick, on MacRumors: Dummy models shared by AppleTrack suggest that Apple has made some subtle adjustments to accommodate internal components in the tighter chassis. Most notably, the USB-C port on the bottom edge is no longer centered front-to-back. Instead, it appears shifted closer to the rear of the device, which is likely to accommodate display components within the enclosure. I remember making fun of Samsung for something like this ages ago. Making a slim phone has a lot of challenges, and the mockups we see of the "iPhone 17 Air" would not get this right. We will have to wait until…

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors: Apple first updated the page in mid-March to indicate that the personalized Siri features are coming in a future software update. Apple then removed the "available now" text from the Apple Intelligence page in the U.S. on March 31, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The "available now" text did have an asterisk that led to fine print indicating that some of the Apple Intelligence features would be coming over the course of the next year, but the NAD said this footnote was not "sufficiently clear." Good! The whole marketing behind the series of iPhone 16s…

Stephen Hackett commenting on the NYT article on what is wrong with Apple. I haven't read the NYT article but Stephen's comment is spot on: For a company that says it doesn’t like looking back at its own history, very often, Apple makes decisions like it’s the late 1990s and the company is on the verge of failure. That drives it to make incredible products, but it also means Apple can be incredibly stingy. To play in the AI race, you’ve got to be willing to spend piles and piles of cash. The world's richest company unwilling to spend money…

Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has a recap of the new report in The Information about why Siri has remained so bad. Here are some of the bits that plainly make me angry, but not surprising the state of Siri today: "Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements." "Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was apparently confident he could fix ‌Siri‌ with the right training data and better web-scraping for answers to general knowledge questions. Senior leaders didn't…

The iPhone X, launched in 2017 at a price of £999, hasn't gone up since. You can walk into an Apple Store and get the iPhone 16 Pro for the same price of £999 now. If I were to argue that prices of the iPhones have gone down - both in terms of increasing inflation and also in terms of the features the iPhone 16 Pro offers compared to the iPhone X 8 years ago - there wouldn't be much or any rebuttal against my argument. Every year it feels like a price increase is imminent, but the iPhone has…