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.

The only way is upsell

One of the quirkier stories we covered last week centered on a simple Velcro strap.

Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, you see, is rather heavy, and the company seems to have addressed possible issues with comfort by adding on an extra strap that goes over the top of the user’s head. But this strap is depicted nowhere in the press photos, and (according to the Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman) is likely to cost extra on top of the standard $3,499 price tag.

If you spend that sort of money on a product, you’d hope that comfort would be priced in. (And it’s entirely possible, we should stress, that it will be. For now this is merely a rumor.) But the idea that the strap won’t be included in the box is sadly compatible with Apple’s broader strategy in recent years. Apple has become the king of the upsell.

It all started, for me at least, with the charger. In 2020 Apple made the decision to stop including a power adapter with new iPhones, using the pretext that most customers already owned one, and that they were all ending up in landfill. Handy, then, that the move also enabled Apple to reduce the size of boxes and cut costs without lowering the price. And of course Apple will still happily sell you an adapter for an extra $19 if you haven’t got one lying around. The company also stopped including EarPods in iPhone boxes, which means more AirPods sales.

To be clear, I’m not saying the environmental justification was entirely disingenuous. But I do strongly suspect that Apple found a genuinely worthwhile idea more appealing because it could be used to squeeze out bigger profits. If the company sincerely wanted to reduce tech waste in landfill, after all, it would make its phones compatible with a global connection standard rather than a proprietary one before being forced to do so by regulatory pressure. But proprietary cables and chargers are better for upsell.

In 2022, Apple went all-out on the upsell strategy. It wasn’t enough for customers to spend $799 on a new iPhone 14; the company gave that device a year-old processor and generally did all it could to push customers who could possibly afford it to get the $999 14 Pro instead. (In our review, we called the 14 “basically an iPhone 13s.”) Similarly, the Apple Watch Series 8 was barely an improvement on its predecessor–why bother with the Series 8, when you’ve got the Apple Watch Ultra to push–and the AirPods Pro were heavily pushed over the standard AirPods. Every company wants you to buy their most expensive models, but for Apple that year it became an obvious and calculated strategy to an extent never seen before.

It’s difficult to argue with decisions made by a company that just touched a $3 trillion market cap (again). But this sort of thing–gouging out an extra $400 for wheels, when your customer has already shelled out $6,999 for a Mac Pro–might not be wise in the long term. It can get people’s backs up, eroding goodwill towards your brand, but more importantly, it makes your entry-level products seem a bit, well, rubbish. And those who can’t afford the iPhone 14 Pro or the Apple Watch Ultra or the Vision Strap Plus might decide to give up on the idea entirely and spend their money elsewhere.

Have your say

Thanks to the readers who got in touch about last week’s Siri-bashing column. I was reassured to discover that some of you are even angrier about the state of Apple’s error-prone personal assistant than I am.

Richard Raymond-Smith, for example, complained bitterly about Siri’s apparent regression. It used to be able to respond to natural-language queries about a journey’s ETA, he notes, but now unhelpfully replies along the lines of “Here’s what I found on the web about ETA…” That’s a big fail, Siri.

Robert Williams, meanwhile, finds it “mystifying that Apple continues to sully its reputation for excellent products by muddling along with a product that is VASTLY inferior to, say, Alexa,” and ponders why any of the company’s software engineers would willingly work on Siri, given the embarrassment factor when revealing this in conversation. And Gus Pistolis throws down a challenge: “How do we mount a grassroots effort to get Apple to create a better if not new Siri?” The campaign starts here!

Drop me an email if you’ve got any strong opinions about this week’s piece above; I can’t respond to them all, but I do read them. No promises, but I might include a few more reader comments next week.

Reviews corner

• Affinity Photo review: An affordable Photoshop alternative.
• Pixelmator Pro review: An affordable alternative for Photoshop pro users.

Trending: Top stories

Does anyone actually enjoy working at Apple, asks the Macalope.

Wallets out, everyone. A rare original 4GB iPhone is expected to fetch as much as $100K at auction.

Apple has bagged Stardew Valley in a notable coup for Apple Arcade.

The rumor mill

Apple is planning to launch its biggest iMac ever. It could have a screen beyond 30 inches.

But there might be a very long wait until the next new Mac arrives.

The next Apple Watch Ultra might arrive sooner than we thought.

You might have to pay extra to make the Vision Pro headset comfortable.

After a huge June, here’s everything coming from Apple in July.

And looking further into the future, here’s everything Apple plans to release over the next 12 months.

Podcast of the week

The Apple Watch is getting its first major revamp to its operating system this fall. And can FaceTime spur Apple TV hardware sales? Plus the fundamental change coming to all of Apple’s operating systems, all in this episode of the Macworld Podcast!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

iOS 17 is finally tapping into the iPhone 6’s full potential.

Visual Look Up is getting a lot more useful in iOS 17.

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 Twitter or on Facebook for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.

Apple Inc

I have spent the last couple of decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new items, large and small, that enhance the experience of using a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. And yet this past weekend, I was reminded that most users simply don’t notice new features, even when they’ve been available for years.

If you’re reading this column right now, you’re one of the most well-educated people on the planet about Apple stuff. But your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances? They might never know about flashy new operating-system features unless you personally show them off. It’s one of Apple’s most vexing problems: keeping devices relatively simple while also trying to make complex new features discoverable.

Lunch of discovery

My family spent the last few days attending my daughter’s college graduation. After a walk around a funky Oregon neighborhood, my wife and I dropped into a bakery restaurant for lunch. The place was busy, and we found a table and sat down, and waited for our order to arrive. I set my iPhone 14 Pro down on the table, and she gestured at the always-on lock screen, gently ribbing me for using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of pictures of our children.

I explained that the lock screen is set to shuffle between nature photos in my library, based on machine learning, and it quickly became clear that she’d never tried to edit her lock screen, a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall. (Also missing from her lock screen are another banner feature of iOS 16, lock screen widgets.)

If you don’t read websites about Apple features, how are users supposed to intuit these changes? To edit a lock screen, you have to lock your phone and then long press on the lock screen–a pretty unnatural sequence of events.

In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a new feature for app developers called TipKit, which brings a unified way for all apps to provide helpful advice about features their users may not miss. It’s a great idea, but Apple itself seems to really struggle when it comes to getting users to embrace new features.

But it gets worse.

Face the music

Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock screen that shuffled among photos of her kids, as identified by machine learning–not a set of images she selected herself–she was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, my next discovery was that Apple’s shiny new feature was backed by a bunch of rickety technologies that couldn’t rise to the challenge.

To do a Photo Shuffle of people on the lock screen, you pick their faces from your Photos Library–but my wife had never spent any time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone, merging faces together and assigning them names. (Why would she? The People album is buried on iPhone. Name and face assignments don’t sync across a shared photo library, so all of my work classifying faces on my Mac don’t extend to her.)

Worse, Photo Shuffle’s method of offering people to display appears utterly broken. It offered my wife a small number of faces, most of whom were completely random and fairly uncommon. She’s got hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, and yet we weren’t among the faces offered. And if the faces you’re looking for aren’t in Photo Shuffle’s very small list of options, there’s no recourse. You’re stuck.

So, off to Photos to spend five minutes doing a quick pass through her photo library to identify her family members by name, mark them as favorites, and clean things up by merging duplicate entries together. Unfortunately, whatever process provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently doesn’t get updated with any priority–when I came back to it at the end of our lunch, none of the family members had appeared in her Photo Shuffle options. So much for that clever idea.

How many apps?

The other thing I discovered at lunch was that, despite Apple’s innovations in iOS features over the last few years, my wife remained set in the behaviors she had learned when she started using the iPhone. In other words, Apple made changes to make the experience better–but they just never registered with her.

Let me get specific: this is about apps. My wife has pages and pages of apps on her home screen. We’re at a wedding, and there’s an app you need to download to contribute photos to the happy couple. It gets downloaded and stays forever. Need to pay to park in a new city? Download an app and keep it forever. And they’re all getting tacked on to the end of the last page of her home screen, forever.

(In fact, she complained that she hated dragging apps she actually wanted all the way from the last page forward onto the first page. I pointed out that she could now hold the wiggling app with one finger while rapidly swiping with another in order to quickly change pages, which blew her mind–because she was still following the old behavior of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll. Another new feature she never knew about!)

Turns out, she uses one or two pages of apps and searches for everything else. She’s got a few folders from back when she made an attempt to organize her phone, but at some point, she gave up and went to search. I ended up deleting several pages of her home screen and showing her how to use App Library.

The truth is, her behavior–a page or two of key apps and then using search to find apps in the junk drawer–is probably the way most people use their iPhones. Apple knows it, which is why they added App Library and stopped requiring people to put every app they’ve downloaded somewhere on the home screen. But if my wife is any indication, that new feature just never registered.

I don’t have any answers here. I recognize how hard a problem it is to make new iPhone features discoverable and how hard it is to change ingrained user behavior. The new TipKit APIs suggest that Apple continues to wrestle with the issue.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing (and Macworld will keep publishing) articles about what the new features are. And you, dear reader, will presumably share them with your friends and family. So far as I can tell, we may be the best way Apple has of getting its message out.

iOS, iPhone

I have spent the last couple of decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new items, large and small, that enhance the experience of using a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. And yet this past weekend, I was reminded that most users simply don’t notice new features, even when they’ve been available for years.

If you’re reading this column right now, you’re one of the most well-educated people on the planet about Apple stuff. But your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances? They might never know about flashy new operating-system features unless you personally show them off. It’s one of Apple’s most vexing problems: keeping devices relatively simple while also trying to make complex new features discoverable.

Lunch of discovery

My family spent the last few days attending my daughter’s college graduation. After a walk around a funky Oregon neighborhood, my wife and I dropped into a bakery restaurant for lunch. The place was busy, and we found a table and sat down, and waited for our order to arrive. I set my iPhone 14 Pro down on the table, and she gestured at the always-on lock screen, gently ribbing me for using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of pictures of our children.

I explained that the lock screen is set to shuffle between nature photos in my library, based on machine learning, and it quickly became clear that she’d never tried to edit her lock screen, a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall. (Also missing from her lock screen are another banner feature of iOS 16, lock screen widgets.)

If you don’t read websites about Apple features, how are users supposed to intuit these changes? To edit a lock screen, you have to lock your phone and then long press on the lock screen–a pretty unnatural sequence of events.

In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a new feature for app developers called TipKit, which brings a unified way for all apps to provide helpful advice about features their users may not miss. It’s a great idea, but Apple itself seems to really struggle when it comes to getting users to embrace new features.

But it gets worse.

Face the music

Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock screen that shuffled among photos of her kids, as identified by machine learning–not a set of images she selected herself–she was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, my next discovery was that Apple’s shiny new feature was backed by a bunch of rickety technologies that couldn’t rise to the challenge.

To do a Photo Shuffle of people on the lock screen, you pick their faces from your Photos Library–but my wife had never spent any time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone, merging faces together and assigning them names. (Why would she? The People album is buried on iPhone. Name and face assignments don’t sync across a shared photo library, so all of my work classifying faces on my Mac don’t extend to her.)

Worse, Photo Shuffle’s method of offering people to display appears utterly broken. It offered my wife a small number of faces, most of whom were completely random and fairly uncommon. She’s got hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our kids on her phone, and yet we weren’t among the faces offered. And if the faces you’re looking for aren’t in Photo Shuffle’s very small list of options, there’s no recourse. You’re stuck.

So, off to Photos to spend five minutes doing a quick pass through her photo library to identify her family members by name, mark them as favorites, and clean things up by merging duplicate entries together. Unfortunately, whatever process provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently doesn’t get updated with any priority–when I came back to it at the end of our lunch, none of the family members had appeared in her Photo Shuffle options. So much for that clever idea.

How many apps?

The other thing I discovered at lunch was that, despite Apple’s innovations in iOS features over the last few years, my wife remained set in the behaviors she had learned when she started using the iPhone. In other words, Apple made changes to make the experience better–but they just never registered with her.

Let me get specific: this is about apps. My wife has pages and pages of apps on her home screen. We’re at a wedding, and there’s an app you need to download to contribute photos to the happy couple. It gets downloaded and stays forever. Need to pay to park in a new city? Download an app and keep it forever. And they’re all getting tacked on to the end of the last page of her home screen, forever.

(In fact, she complained that she hated dragging apps she actually wanted all the way from the last page forward onto the first page. I pointed out that she could now hold the wiggling app with one finger while rapidly swiping with another in order to quickly change pages, which blew her mind–because she was still following the old behavior of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll. Another new feature she never knew about!)

Turns out, she uses one or two pages of apps and searches for everything else. She’s got a few folders from back when she made an attempt to organize her phone, but at some point, she gave up and went to search. I ended up deleting several pages of her home screen and showing her how to use App Library.

The truth is, her behavior–a page or two of key apps and then using search to find apps in the junk drawer–is probably the way most people use their iPhones. Apple knows it, which is why they added App Library and stopped requiring people to put every app they’ve downloaded somewhere on the home screen. But if my wife is any indication, that new feature just never registered.

I don’t have any answers here. I recognize how hard a problem it is to make new iPhone features discoverable and how hard it is to change ingrained user behavior. The new TipKit APIs suggest that Apple continues to wrestle with the issue.

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing (and Macworld will keep publishing) articles about what the new features are. And you, dear reader, will presumably share them with your friends and family. So far as I can tell, we may be the best way Apple has of getting its message out.

iOS, iPhone

Apple’s transition to Apple silicon is complete, now that the Mac Pro has finally been unveiled. But the reality is, Apple met its deadline last year when it rolled out the Mac Studio–a computer that, for a lot of customers, filled the role of the Mac Pro as a Mac with the most processing muscle. In terms of mass market appeal, Apple was able to provide, within two years, Macs with its silicon for just about every use case.

The Mac Pro is a computer that very few customers will actually consider buying. Apple could have probably dropped the Mac Pro from the lineup after the Mac Studio arrived and few would have complained. But after the 2013 trash can Mac Pro debacle, Apple is uniquely aware that the needs of those few are extremely important. It’s not just that they need powerful CPUs and GPUs, PCIe slots for expansion cards, and support for multiple, high-resolution displays. It’s that they want a Mac to do PC things.

That’s why Apple’s brought back the Mac Pro tower design in 2019–and in fact, is still using the same case for the M2 Ultra model. While it might be disappointing to us common folks that the new Mac Pro has the same design as the Intel model, it didn’t really need to change. And most importantly, the new Mac Pro can literally slide into the same spot as the old Mac Pro, whether it’s on a desk or a server rack.

Mac Pro pics from #WWDC. Sorry about the quality it was hard to deal with all the people trying to shoot it #AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/DvKJbHQM0o

— Macworld (@macworld) June 5, 2023

The Mac Pro is the nichest of niches. It doesn’t sell in enough numbers to drastically impact Mac sales, and the companies and users who are buying one won’t replace it for several years. But in the PC market where Apple touts the power of its silicon, the company needs the Mac Pro to complete a picture that shows how its Mac lineup can accommodate users from the most basic to the most demanding professional. It needs to satisfy those users who want a Mac but need a PC.

The Apple silicon Mac Pro is a far cry from the Intel model it replaces. It costs $1,000 more at the low end and $40,000 less at the high end. It doesn’t have user-upgradeable RAM. There aren’t any $2,400 graphics card options at checkout. And the Afterburner card that was a $2,000 upgrade is now standard—and Apple says the M2 Ultra’s media engine is equal to seven of those cards.

But the Mac Pro is still the Mac Pro—and now it’s all Apple inside and out. The Mac Pro is a bit like the cherry on top of a delicious ice cream sundae that is the Mac lineup. Most users who need the power that a Mac Pro provides can turn to the Mac Studio, which is available with the same M2 Ultra chip, memory, and storage. It comes down to PCI slots, which are limited to audio and video I/O, networking, and storage cards. More than ever, the Mac Pro seems like a superfluous vestige of old Apple.

But the Mac Pro isn’t a frivolous part of Apple’s lineup. Even with matching performance to the Mac Studio, the Mac Pro has an important role: to keep its most demanding users from switching.

Mac Pro

Apple’s transition to Apple silicon is complete, now that the Mac Pro has finally been unveiled. But the reality is, Apple met its deadline last year when it rolled out the Mac Studio–a computer that, for a lot of customers, filled the role of the Mac Pro as a Mac with the most processing muscle. In terms of mass market appeal, Apple was able to provide, within two years, Macs with its silicon for just about every use case.

The Mac Pro is a computer that very few customers will actually consider buying. Apple could have probably dropped the Mac Pro from the lineup after the Mac Studio arrived and few would have complained. But after the 2013 trash can Mac Pro debacle, Apple is uniquely aware that the needs of those few are extremely important. It’s not just that they need powerful CPUs and GPUs, PCIe slots for expansion cards, and support for multiple, high-resolution displays. It’s that they want a Mac to do PC things.

That’s why Apple’s brought back the Mac Pro tower design in 2019–and in fact, is still using the same case for the M2 Ultra model. While it might be disappointing to us common folks that the new Mac Pro has the same design as the Intel model, it didn’t really need to change. And most importantly, the new Mac Pro can literally slide into the same spot as the old Mac Pro, whether it’s on a desk or a server rack.

Mac Pro pics from #WWDC. Sorry about the quality it was hard to deal with all the people trying to shoot it #AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/DvKJbHQM0o

— Macworld (@macworld) June 5, 2023

The Mac Pro is the nichest of niches. It doesn’t sell in enough numbers to drastically impact Mac sales, and the companies and users who are buying one won’t replace it for several years. But in the PC market where Apple touts the power of its silicon, the company needs the Mac Pro to complete a picture that shows how its Mac lineup can accommodate users from the most basic to the most demanding professional. It needs to satisfy those users who want a Mac but need a PC.

The Apple silicon Mac Pro is a far cry from the Intel model it replaces. It costs $1,000 more at the low end and $40,000 less at the high end. It doesn’t have user-upgradeable RAM. There aren’t any $2,400 graphics card options at checkout. And the Afterburner card that was a $2,000 upgrade is now standard—and Apple says the M2 Ultra’s media engine is equal to seven of those cards.

But the Mac Pro is still the Mac Pro—and now it’s all Apple inside and out. The Mac Pro is a bit like the cherry on top of a delicious ice cream sundae that is the Mac lineup. Most users who need the power that a Mac Pro provides can turn to the Mac Studio, which is available with the same M2 Ultra chip, memory, and storage. It comes down to PCI slots, which are limited to audio and video I/O, networking, and storage cards. More than ever, the Mac Pro seems like a superfluous vestige of old Apple.

But the Mac Pro isn’t a frivolous part of Apple’s lineup. Even with matching performance to the Mac Studio, the Mac Pro has an important role: to keep its most demanding users from switching.

Mac Pro