For your weekend listening enjoyment, a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Dan Moren. Topics include Atlas, ChatGPT’s new web browser (or anti-web browser) for the Mac; Apple’s loss in a “landmark” regulatory lawsuit in the UK regarding App Store commission rates; multiple reports of poor sales for the iPhone Air; and Apple’s M5 product announcements: MacBook Pro, iPads Pro, and Vision Pro.

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Worth a re-link, following up on my post yesterday linking to Stephen Hackett’s “Boring Is What We Wanted”, here’s Rogue Amoeba co-founder Quentin Carnicelli, writing back in 2018:

At the time of the writing, with the exception of the $5,000 iMac Pro, no Macintosh has been updated at all in the past year. Here are the last updates to the entire line of Macs:

• iMac Pro: 182 days ago
• iMac: 374 days ago
• MacBook: 374 days ago
• MacBook Air: 374 days ago
• MacBook Pro: 374 days ago
• Mac Pro: 436 days ago
• Mac Mini: 1,337 days ago

Worse, most of these counts are misleading, with many machines not seeing a true update in quite a bit longer. While the Mac Mini hasn’t seen an update of any kind in almost 4 years (nor, for that matter, a price drop), even that 2014 update was lackluster. [...]

Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.

Five years into the Apple Silicon era, and Apple is doing exactly that. The situation has completely reversed. Apple Silicon has been an utter triumph for the Mac platform.

Yours truly on Friday, regarding the news that Meta is going to ban rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp:

Perhaps because I’m only a light user of WhatsApp, I had no idea that rival AI chatbots had accounts there. I just tried it with 1-800-ChatGPT and it seems pointless. It’s noticeably slower and uses an older model than just using the ChatGPT app.

A few readers have pointed to one good use case for this gateway: airplane Wi-Fi, particularly on airlines that offer “free” Wi-Fi for messaging apps like Apple Messages (iMessage) and WhatsApp. The ChatGPT app won’t work unless you pay for full Wi-Fi access on a flight, but WhatsApp does, and through January, you can interact with ChatGPT through that loophole. Clever.

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected:

This is just another boring incremental upgrade.

That 👏 is 👏 the 👏 point.

Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. From failing NVIDIA cards in MacBook Pros to 27-inch Intel iMacs that ran so hot the fans were audible at all times, Mac hardware wasn’t always what Apple wanted.

Consider the MacBook Air — by all accounts the most popular Mac Apple sells. There was a March 2015 update, and then a very minor speed bump in June 2017. That June 2017 update was so insignificant that it didn’t even warrant its own press release from Apple. All it got from Apple was, at the very end of a press release touting updates to the iMac, MacBook Pro, and late great 12-inch MacBook, this single sentence: “Apple today also updated the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8 GHz processor.”

It wasn’t until the very end of October 2018 that Apple released a significant MacBook Air update — the first models with retina displays. For the three-and-a-half-year stretch between March 2015 and October 2018, there wasn’t a single notable MacBook Air refresh — at a time when all other Macs had gone retina. Intel’s processor offerings were so unpalatable during that stretch that Apple just didn’t update their most popular Mac model.

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