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

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.

Ask a Siri question

It’s been a few weeks now since the excitement of the WWDC 2023 keynote presentation, and the triumphs and disappointments have had a chance to sink in. There was plenty of the former, but several of the latter, and the one that continues to sting–particularly when I have an especially bad week with the feature in question–is the lack of reassurance about Siri.

Apple is surely aware that Siri is bad, and that it needs to be improved. But looking back through our coverage of WWDC, an event that’s all about software, I can find only two mentions of the ailing voice assistant. One is the news that it will soon intelligently handle multiple commands in succession without having to be asked properly each time; this is a welcome if belated addition, coming years after Alexa and Google Assistant gained the same capability. And the other relates to it losing one word from its trigger phrase, which strikes me as disastrous. As it stands, Siri is constantly nagging and bothering me when I don’t want it to turn on, just because it (wrongly) thinks it’s heard the words “Hey Siri.” When it’s listening out for just “Siri,” my life is going to be hell. Realistically, I’ll probably have to turn off that feature and access Siri with a button press as before. There’s progress for you.

Neither of the stage mentions, you’ll notice, made any reference to Siri’s accuracy. Which is… odd.

What I wanted to hear from Apple this June was reassurance that it understands that Siri needs work and that the company’s people are on it. Maybe it would be a lot to expect an admission of failure on such a public stage, but Federighi could have done one of his self-deprecating jokes, while slickly segueing into a hype job about the improvements coming down the pipe. I mean, what happened to Operation Bobcat, Craig?

I don’t understand why Siri isn’t Priority No. 1 at Apple Park right now. Because–and I must apologize to regular readers for harking back to a favorite complaint here–the voice assistant simply isn’t fit for purpose, and its deficiencies taint my experience with nearly every Apple device I own. That includes, as previously mentioned, the devices (such as the Apple Watch) on which I very rarely use Siri, because Siri won’t take a hint and pushes its way into my life anyway. But it’s particularly infuriating on the ones where I rely on Siri, which is to say the HomePods in the living room and kitchen, and the iPhone, hooked up to CarPlay when selecting songs on a drive.

Ask for a song that shares a name with the album it’s on, and Siri will assume you mean the album (which surely the statistics would argue against?) and blithely start playing that instead. Ask for a song that’s incredibly famous in the studio version, and Siri will inexplicably plump for an obscure live recording with unclear vocals. Ask for a song you play all the freaking time but this time say the name of the artist slightly less clearly than Siri likes, and it will guess a same-named song by someone else who you’ve never listened to in your life. As far as musical choices go, Siri is like that wedding DJ who patiently listens to your grandma’s request for Perry Como, then slams on the Andrew WK record he was going to play all along. It would be funny if it wasn’t so annoying.

Remember when Apple apologized for Maps? That was great! Taking responsibility is cool. Resolving to improve things is cool. Let’s all admit that Siri is a dog’s dinner, then we can get back to salivating over Vision Pro, and I can stop writing these articles. Otherwise, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Trending: Top stories

The widgets revolution is coming to change your screens forever.

iOS 17 has a bunch of great features–that no one will ever use.

Apple Vision Pro will replace the Mac long before the iPhone.

Swiss fruit growers have expressed concern as Apple seeks trademark rights to actual apples.

Best Buy’s Apple Watch Ultra Upgrade+ plan offers a peek at Apple’s hardware sub.

Apple has killed off Apple Card financing for SIM-free iPhones.

The rumor mill

The iPhone 15 is getting a U2 chip to prepare for Vision Pro integration.

Sorry, iPhone SE fans. The new model probably won’t arrive until 2025… if at all.

An FCC filing suggests Apple is launching an AirPods Max competitor from Beats.

Podcast of the week

Apple revealed iOS 17 at WWDC, and it looks like it’s more than a maintenance release. We talk about the features of iOS 17 that caught our eye, 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

If you’re reading this on an Apple device, go update it right now.

New Maps, Calendar, and search integrations are coming to Chrome on iOS.

You can now home-repair your iPhone 14 and M2 MacBook.

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