The iPhones 16

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

One of the many memorable moments in Steve Jobs’s 2007 introduction of the original iPhone was this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market. Jobs explained:

Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface? Here’s four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62 — the usual suspects. And, what’s wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It’s this stuff right there. They all have these keyboards that are there whether or not you need them to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it.

And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can’t run around and add a button to these things. They’re already shipped. So what do you do? It doesn’t work because the buttons and the controls can’t change. They can’t change for each application, and they can’t change down the road if you think of another great idea you want to add to this product.

Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it. We solved it in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a bitmapped screen that could display anything we want. Put any user interface up. And a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. We solved this problem. So how are we going to take this to a mobile device? What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. A giant screen.

At the time, what seemed most radical was eschewing a hardware QWERTY keyboard and instead implementing a touchscreen keyboard in software. Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, in the infamous clip in which he laughed uproariously after being asked for his reaction to seeing the iPhone: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized, with a plan? I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”

Apple didn’t get rid of all the buttons, of course. But the buttons they kept were all for the system, the device, not for any specific application: power, volume, a mute switch (that, oddly, was copied by almost no competitors), and the lone button on the front face: Home.¹ That’s it.

When Apple’s competitors stopped laughing at the iPhone and started copying it, they got rid of their hardware keyboards — theretofore the primary signifier differentiating a “smartphone” from a regular phone — but they couldn’t bring themselves to eliminate the not one but two dedicated hardware buttons that, to their unimaginative minds, were inherent to making any cell phone a phone: the green “call” and red “hang up” buttons. Android phones had those red/green buttons. The BlackBerry Storm had them too. Every phone but the iPhone had them. Until they caught up and realized those buttons were obviated too.

The thinking might have been rooted in the very name of the devices. Of course all phones — dumb phones, BlackBerry-style hardware-keyboard phones, iPhone-style touchscreen phones — ought to have phone buttons. I suspect they pondered very deeply how Apple was bold enough to eschew a hardware keyboard for an all-touchscreen design, but that they thought Apple was just taking minimalism to its extreme by eschewing green/red hardware call buttons. No matter how many other things they do, they’re phones first — it’s right there in their name!

But the iPhone has never really been fundamentally a telephone. On the iPhone, the Phone was always just another app. A special app, no question. Default placement in the Dock at the bottom of the Home Screen. Special background privileges within an otherwise highly constrained OS where most apps effectively quit when you’d go back to the Home Screen. Incoming phone calls instantly took over the entire screen. Jobs spent a lot of time in that introduction demonstrating the Phone app — including Visual Voicemail, a genuine breakthrough feature that required AT&T/Cingular’s cooperation on the back end.²

But, still, the Phone part of iPhone was then and remains now just an app. If you compared an iPhone to an iPod Touch, there was nothing on the iPhone hardware that indicated it was any more of a phone than the iPod Touch, which not only wasn’t a phone but didn’t even offer cellular networking. No buttons, for sure. No stick-out antenna. No carrier logo on the device. Look at a modern iPhone and there’s really only one function whose purpose is clearly visible from a conspicuous hardware protrusion: the camera lenses. Five years ago, in the lede of my review of the iPhones 11, I wrote, “A few weeks ago on my podcast, speculating on the tentpole features for this year’s new iPhones, I said that ‘iCamera’ would be a far more apt name than ‘iPhone’.”

What more proof of the camera’s singular importance to the iPhone would one need than the ever-growing block of camera lenses on the back of each year’s new models, or the “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign — the longest-running (and still ongoing) campaign in Apple’s history? A dedicated hardware button?

Camera Control

The facile take is that Apple has run out of hardware ideas and now just adds a new button to the iPhone each year — Action button last year, Camera Control this year, maybe they’ll finally add those green/red phone call buttons next year. But that’s underestimating just how radical it is for Apple, in the iPhone’s 18th annual hardware iteration, to add a hardware button dedicated to a single application.

And I mean application there in the general sense, not just the app sense. By default, of course, pressing Camera Control launches the iOS Camera app,³ but while setting up any new iPhone 16, Apple’s own onboarding screen describes its purpose as launching “a camera app”, with a lowercase c. Any third-party app that adopts new APIs and guidelines can serve as the camera app that gets launched (and, once launched, controlled) by Camera Control. (I’ll default to writing about using the system Camera app, though.)

Apple seemingly doesn’t ever refer to Camera Control as a “button”, but it is a button. You can see it depress, and it clicks even when the device is powered off (unlike, say, the haptic Touch ID Home button on iPhones of yore and the long-in-the-tooth iPhone SE). But it isn’t only a button. You can think of it as two physical controls in one: a miniature haptic slider (like a trackpad with only one axis) and an actually-clicking button.

When the Camera app is not already in shoot mode (whether your iPhone is on the Lock Screen or if another app is active — or even if you’re doing something else inside the Camera app other than shooting, like, say, reviewing existing photos):

• A full click of the Camera Control button launches the Camera app and puts you in shoot mode.
• A light press triggers nothing, nor offers any haptic feedback. Light pressing only does something when you’re in the Camera app ready to shoot.

When the Camera app is active and ready to shoot:

• A full click of the Camera Control button takes a photo or starts a video, depending on your current mode. (If you’re in still-photo mode, clicking-and-holding Camera Control will start a video, just like pressing-and-holding the on-screen shutter button.)
• A light press on Camera Control opens an overlay that allows you to adjust the current settings mode by sliding your finger left to right, trackpad-style.
• A double light press on Camera Control changes the overlay to adjust which settings to adjust. The options are: Exposure, Depth (ƒ-stop), Zoom, Cameras, Style, Tone.

Just writing that all out makes it sound complicated, and it is a bit complex. (Here’s Apple’s own illustrated guide to using Camera Control.) Cameras are complex. But if you just mash it down, it takes a picture. Camera Control is like a microcosm of the Camera app itself. Just want to point and shoot? Easy. Want to fiddle with ƒ-stops and styles? There’s a thoughtful UI to enable it. In the early years of iPhone, Apple’s Camera app was truly point-and-shoot simplistic. The shooting interface had just a few buttons: a shutter, a photo/video toggle, a control for the flash, and a toggle for switching to the front-facing camera. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G didn’t even support video, and the front-facing camera didn’t arrive until the iPhone 4. Those old iPhones had simple camera hardware, and the app reflected that simplicity.

Apple’s modern camera hardware has become remarkably sophisticated, and the Camera app has too. But if you just want to shoot what you see in the viewfinder, it’s as simple as ever. Pinch to zoom, tap to focus, press the shutter button to shoot. But so many other controls and options are there, readily available and intelligently presented for those who want them, easily ignored by those who don’t. Apple’s Camera app is one of the best — and best-designed — pieces of software the world has ever seen. It’s arguably the most-copied interface the world has ever seen, too. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single premium Android phone whose built-in camera app doesn’t look like Apple’s, usually right down to the yellow accent color for text labels.

After over a week using several iPhone 16 review units, my summary of Camera Control is that it takes a while to get used to — I feel like I’m still getting used to it — but it already feels like something I wouldn’t want to do without. It’s a great idea, and a bold one. As I emphasized above, only in the 18th hardware revision has Apple added a hardware control dedicated to a single application. I don’t expect Apple to do it again. I do expect Apple’s rivals to copy Camera Control shamelessly.

At first, though, I was frustrated by the physical placement of Camera Control. As a hobbyist photographer who has been shooting with dedicated cameras all the way back to the late 1990s, my right index finger expects a shutter button to be located near the top right corner. But the center of Camera Control is 2 inches (5 cm) from the corner. I’ll never stop wishing for it to be closer to the corner, but after a week I’ve grown acclimated to its actual placement. And I get it. I’m old enough that I shoot all of my videos and most of my photos in widescreen orientation. But social media today is dominated by tallscreen video. As Apple’s Piyush Pratik explained during last week’s keynote, Camera Control is designed to be used in both wide (landscape) and tall (portrait) orientations. Moving it more toward the corner, where my finger wants it to be, would make it better for shooting widescreen, but would make it downright precarious to hold the iPhone while shooting tall. I hate to admit it but I think Apple got the placement right. Shooting tallscreen is just way too popular. And, after just a week, my index finger is getting more and more accustomed to its placement. It might prove to be a bit of a reach for people with small hands, though.

I’ve also been a bit frustrated by using Camera Control to launch Camera while my iPhone is locked. With the default settings, when your iPhone is unlocked, or locked but with the screen awake, a single click of Camera Control takes you right to shooting mode in the Camera app. That sounds obvious, and it is. But, when your iPhone is locked and the screen is off, or in always-on mode, clicking Camera Control just wakes up the screen. You have to click it again, after the screen is awake, to jump to shooting mode. Apple’s thinking here is obvious: they want to prevent an accidental click of Camera Control while it’s in your pocket or purse from opening Camera. Unlike almost every other mode you can get into on an iPhone, when you’re in shooting mode in Camera, the device won’t go to sleep automatically after a minute or two of inactivity. The current default in iOS 18, in fact, is to auto-lock after just 30 seconds. (Settings → Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock.) In shooting mode, the Camera app will stay open for a long time before going to sleep. You don’t want that to happen inadvertently while your iPhone is in your pocket.

But what I’ve encountered over the last week are situations where my iPhone is in my pocket, and I see something fleeting I want to shoot. This happened repeatedly during a Weezer concert my wife and I attended last Friday. (Great show.) What I want is to click Camera Control while taking the iPhone out of my pocket, and have it ready to shoot by the time I have it in front of my eyes. That’s how the on/off button works on dedicated cameras like my Ricoh GR IIIx. But with an iPhone 16, more often than not, the single click of Camera Control while taking the iPhone out of my pocket has only awakened the screen, not put it into shooting mode. I need to click it again to get into shooting mode. With a fleeting moment, that’s enough to miss the shot you wanted to take. The whole point of this is being a quick-draw gunslinger.

Apple offers a more-protective option in Settings → Camera → Camera Control → Launch Camera to require a double click, rather than single click, to launch your specified camera app. As I write this, I wish that they also offered a less-protective option to always launch your camera app on a single click, even if the phone is locked and the screen is off. A sort of “I’ll take my chances with accidental clicks” option. It’s possible though, that Apple tried this, and found that inadvertent clicks are just too common. But as it stands, there’s no great way to always jump into shooting mode as quickly as possible.

When the iPhone is locked and the screen is off, a double click of Camera Control will jump you into shooting mode. I started doing that over the weekend, and at first I thought it satisfied my desire. But the problem with that is that if the iPhone is locked but the screen is already awake, a double click on Camera Control will jump into Camera on the first click and snap a photo with the second. I’ve had to delete at least half a dozen blurry accidental shots because of that.

A gesture that would avoid accidental invocations is clicking-and-holding the Camera Control button. In theory Apple could offer that as a surefire way to launch Camera while taking your iPhone out of your pocket. But Apple has reserved the click-and-hold gesture for visual intelligence, a new Apple Intelligence feature announced last week. That’s the feature that will put the nail in the coffin of dedicated “AI” devices like Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1. Visual intelligence isn’t yet available, even in the developer betas of iOS 18.1, but the click-and-hold gesture is already reserved for it.⁴

So where I’ve landed, at this writing, is trying to remember only to double-click Camera Control while taking my iPhone out of my pocket to shoot, and just sucking it up with the occasional blurry unwanted shot when I double-click Camera Control when the screen is already awake. The only other technique I can think to try is to remember to always wait until I see that the screen is awake before clicking Camera Control, tilting the phone if necessary to wake it, but that would seemingly defeat the purpose of getting into shooting mode as quickly as possible.

By default, if you light-press-and-hold on Camera Control, nearly all of the UI elements disappear from the viewfinder screen. The shooting mode picker (Cinematic, Video, Photo, Portrait, Spatial, etc.), the zoom buttons (0.5×, 1×, 2×, 5×), the front/rear camera toggle, the thumbnail of your most recent photo — all of that disappears from the screen, leaving it about as uncluttered as the original iPhone Camera interface. Think of it as a half-press while using Camera Control as a shutter button. Dedicated hardware cameras have, for many decades, offered two-stage shutter buttons that work similarly. With those dedicated cameras, you press halfway to lock in a focus distance and exposure; then you can move the camera to recompose the frame while keeping the focus distance and exposure locked, before pressing fully to capture the image. Apple has promised to bring this feature to the Camera app for all iPhone 16 models in a software update “later this year”. (It’s not there yet in iOS 18.1 beta 4.) Camera Control does not have quite the same precise feel as a true two-stage shutter button that physically clicks at two separate points of depression, but it might eventually, in future iPhone models.

One issue with Camera Control is that because it’s capacitive, it’s tricky for case makers. The obvious solution is to just put a cutout around it, letting the user’s finger touch the actual Camera Control button. Apple’s more elegant solution, on their own silicone and clear cases and the new glossy polycarbonate cases from their subsidiary Beats, is “a sapphire crystal, coupled to a conductive layer to communicate the finger movements to the Camera Control”. That doesn’t sound like something you’re going to see in cheap $20 cases. In my testing, both with Apple’s cases and Beats’s, it works fairly seamlessly. I do think you lose some of the feel from the haptic feedback on light presses, though. Ultimately, Camera Control makes it more true than ever before that the best way to use an iPhone is without a case.

One more thing on Camera Control. Of the features that are adjustable via Camera Control (again: Exposure, Depth (ƒ-stop), Zoom, Cameras, Style, Tone), “Cameras” is an easily overlooked standout. Zoom offers continuous decimal increments from 0.5× to 25.0×. That is to say, you can slide your finger to get zoom values like 1.7×, 3.3×, 17.4×, etc. I almost never want that. I want to stick to the precise true optical increments: 0.5×, 1×, 2×, and 5×. That’s what the “Cameras” setting mode offers. Think of it as Zoom, but only with those precise values. (Instead of “Cameras”, this setting could have been called “Lenses”, but that’s potentially confusing because 1× and 2× both come from the same physical lens; the difference is how the sensor data is treated.) In fact, I wish I could go into Settings and disable Zoom from the list of features available in Camera Control. If I ever really want a non-optical zoom level, I can use the existing on-screen interface options.

What’s obvious is that Camera Control clearly was conceived of, designed, and engineered by photography aficionados within Apple who are intimately familiar with how great dedicated cameras work and feel. It surely must have been championed, politically, by the same group. It’s really just rather astounding that there is now a hardware control dedicated to photography on all new iPhones — and a mechanically complex control at that.

Photography, Aside From Camera Control

As usual, I’ll leave it to other reviewers to do in-depth pixel-peeping comparisons of image quality, but suffice it to say, to my eyes, the iPhone 16 Pro (the review unit I’ve been daily driving this past week) camera seems as great as usual.

The big new photographic feature this year has nothing to do with lenses or sensors. It’s a next-generation Photographic Styles, and it’s effectively “RAW for the rest of us”. This has always been the edge of my personal photographic nerdery/enthusiasm. I care enough about photography to have purchased numerous thousand-ish dollar cameras (and lenses) over the decades, but shooting RAW has never stuck for me. I understand what it is, and why it is technically superior to shooting JPEG/HEIC, but it’s just too much work. RAW lets you achieve better results through manual development in post, but you have to develop in post because raw RAW images (sorry) look strikingly flat and unsaturated. For a while I tried shooting RAW + JPEG, where each image you take is stored both as a straight-off-the-sensor RAW file and a goes-through-the-camera-imaging-pipeline JPEG file, but it turned out I never ever went back and developed those RAW images. And relative to JPEG/HEIC (which, henceforth, I’m just going to call “shooting JPEG” for brevity, even though iPhones have defaulted to the more-efficient HEIC format since iOS 11 seven years ago), RAW images take up 10× (or more) storage space.

It’s just too much hassle. The increase in image quality I can eke out developing RAW just isn’t worth the effort it takes — for me. For many serious photographers, it is. Everyone has a line like that. Some people don’t do any editing at all. They never crop, never change exposure in post, never apply filters — they just point and shoot and they’re done. For me, that line is shooting RAW.

Apple first introduced Photographic Styles with the iPhones 13 three years ago, with four self-descriptive primary styles: Rich Contrast (my choice), Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. Each primary style offered customization. Find a style you like, set it as your default, and go about your merry way. But whatever style you chose was how your photos were “developed” by the iPhone hardware imaging pipeline. Apple’s “filters” have been non-destructive for years, but the first generation of Photographic Styles are baked into the HEIC files it writes to storage.

With the iPhone 16 lineup, this feature is now significantly more powerful, while remaining just as convenient and easy to use.⁵ Apple eliminated what used to be called “filters” and recreated the better ones (e.g. Vibrant and Dramatic) as styles. There are now 15 base styles to choose from, most of them self-descriptively named (Neutral, Gold, Rose Gold), some more poetically named (Cozy, Quiet, Ethereal). The default style is named Standard, and it processes images in a way that looks, well, iPhone-y. The two that have me enamored thus far are Natural and Stark B&W. Standard iPhone image processing has long looked, to many of our eyes, at least slightly over-processed. Too much noise reduction, too much smoothing. A little too punchy. Natural really does look more natural, in a good way, to my eyes. Stark B&W brings to mind classic high-contrast black-and-white films like Kodak Tri-X.

A key aspect of Photographic Styles now is that they’re non-destructive. You can change your mind about any of it in post. Set your default to Stark B&W and later on, editing in Photos, you can change your mind and go back to a full-color image using whichever other style you want. There’s a lot of complex image processing going on behind the scenes — both in the iPhone 16 hardware and iOS 18 software — to make this seem like no big deal at all. But because the new Photographic Styles are largely (or entirely?) based on the hardware imaging pipeline, iPhones 13–15 will continue to use the first-generation Photographic Styles, even after upgrading to iOS 18.

I’ve always felt a little guilty about the fact that I’m too lazy to shoot RAW. This next-generation Photographic Styles feature in the iPhone 16 lineup might assuage, I suspect, the remaining vestiges of that guilt.

Design — and the Pro vs. Regular Question

Apple kindly supplied me with all four models in the iPhone 16 lineup for review: the 16 in ultramarine, 16 Plus in pink, 16 Pro in natural titanium, and 16 Pro Max in desert titanium. Ultramarine is my favorite color color on any iPhone in memory. It’s a fun poppy blue, and quite vibrant. Pink is good too, with to my (and my wife’s) eyes, a touch of purple to it. The colors are extra saturated on the camera bumps, which looks great. Natural titanium looks extremely similar, if not identical, to the natural titanium on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro. (Apple’s own Compare page makes it appear as though this year’s natural titanium is noticeably lighter than last year’s, but here’s a photo from me showing a natural 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro side-by-side.) Desert titanium is sort of more gold than tan, but there is some brown to it, without rendering it the least bit Zune-like.

In short, the regular iPhone 16 offers some colors that truly pop. The iPhone 16 Pro models remain, as with all previous “Pro” iPhone colorways, staid shades of gray. White-ish gray, gray gray, near-black gray, and now desert gray.

I always buy black, or the closest to black Apple offers, and this tweet I wrote back in 2009 remains true, so the only year I’ve ever had a “which color to buy?” personal dilemma was 2016 with the iPhones 7, which Apple offered in both a matte “black” and Vader-like glossy “jet black”.⁶ I still kind of can’t believe Apple offered two utterly different blacks in the same model year.

But “which model to buy?” is sometimes more of a dilemma for yours truly. In 2020 I bought a regular iPhone 12, not the 12 Pro, on the grounds that it weighed less and felt better in hand than the Pro models. Whatever the non-pro iPhone 12 lacked in photographic capabilities wouldn’t matter so much, I correctly guessed, while I remained mostly homebound during the COVID epidemic. But I was also tempted, sorely, by the 12 Mini, and in hindsight I really don’t remember why that’s not the model I bought that year.

It’s a good thing, and a sign of strength for Apple, when the regular iPhone models are extremely appealing even to power users. It seemed like an artificial restriction last year, for example, that only the 15 Pro model got the new Action button. The year prior, only the 14 Pro models got the Dynamic Island; the regular iPhone 14 models were stuck with a no-fun notch. If you’re fairly deep into the weeds regarding TSMC’s first-generation 3nm fabrication, it makes sense why only the iPhone 15 Pro models got a new chip (the A17 Pro — there was no regular A17) while the iPhone 15 models stayed on the year-old A16, but still, that was a bummer too. This year, the regular 16 and 16 Plus not only get the Action button, they get the new Camera Control too (which, as I opined above, would make more sense as a “pro” feature than the Action button did last year), and a new A18 chip fabricated with TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process.

For my own use I’ve preordered an iPhone 16 Pro. But for the first time since the aforementioned iPhone 12 in 2020, I was genuinely tempted by the regular iPhone 16. The biggest functional difference between the 16 and 16 Pro models is that only the 16 Pros have a third telephoto lens. Last year, the 15 Pro Max went to 5×, but the 15 Pro remained at 3×. This year, both the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max have the 5× telephoto lens. I tend to think I seldom use the telephoto lens, but it turns out I used it a little more in the last year than I would have guessed. Using smart albums in Photos to sort images by camera and lens, it looks like out of 3,890 total photos I shot with my iPhone 15 Pro, the breakdown by camera lens went like this:

Camera	Optical Zoom	Photos	Percentage
Ultrawide	0.5×	338	9%
Main	1×/2×	3,076	79%
Telephoto	3×	476	12%

And, eyeballing the photos in that telephoto lens smart album, for most of them, I could have used a little more reach. I don’t expect to use 5× more often than I used 3×, but I expect to get better shots when I do. But it’s also the case that a fair number of the photos in that telephoto smart album are shots I just don’t care about that much. I do use the telephoto lens, and I look forward to having a 5× one instead of 3×, but I could live without it entirely and not miss it too much. (I only have 8 videos shot using 3× from the last year. Longer lenses are not good focal lengths for handheld video.)

Aesthetically, the two-lens arrangement on the back of the iPhones 16 and 16 Plus is far more pleasing than the three-lens triangle-in-a-square arrangement on the iPhones 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max.

For the last few years (the iPhone 13, 14, and 15 generations), the aesthetic difference in the back camera systems hasn’t been so striking, because Apple placed the non-pro iPhones’ two lenses in a diagonal arrangement inside a square block. The two lenses on the backs of the iPhones 11 and 12 were aligned on the same axis (vertical, when holding the phone in tallscreen orientation), but they were still inside a raised square. You’d have to go back to 2018’s iPhone XS to find a two-lens iPhone with the iPhone 16’s pleasing pill-shaped bump.

Either you care about such purely aesthetic concerns or you don’t. I care. Not enough to purchase an iPhone 16 instead of a 16 Pro, but it was a factor. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus simply look more pleasing from the back and feel better in hand, especially caseless, than any iPhone since 2018.

Here’s the pricing for the entire iPhone 16 lineup:

Model	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB
16	$800	$900	$1,100	—
16 Plus	$900	$1,000	$1,200	—
16 Pro	$1,000	$1,100	$1,300	$1,500
16 Pro Max	—	$1,200	$1,400	$1,600

But perhaps a better way to compare is by size class. Regular size:

Model	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB
16	$800	$900	$1,100	—
16 Pro	$1,000	$1,100	$1,300	$1,500

And big-ass size:

Model	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB	1 TB
16 Plus	$900	$1,000	$1,200	—
16 Pro Max	—	$1,200	$1,400	$1,600

At both size classes, it’s a $200 delta to go from the regular model to its Pro equivalent. Looking at Apple’s excellent-as-always Compare page, here are the advantages/exclusive features that jump out to me for the 16 Pro models, other than the extra telephoto camera lens, roughly in the order in which I personally care:

• Always-on display.
• ProMotion display (adaptive refresh rates up to 120 Hz vs. 60 Hz).
• An extra GPU core (6 vs. 5), which Geekbench 6 benchmarks as 17 percent faster. Call it 20 percent if you trust core count more than Geekbench.
• Night mode portrait photos.
• LiDAR scanner, which I presume is a (or the?) reason why Night mode portrait photos are Pro-exclusive.
• “Studio-quality four-mic array”. I put that in quotes not to express skepticism but because I haven’t tested it or compared it against the iPhone 16. But it, uh, sounds like a great new feature.
• USB 3 support vs. USB 2, for “up to 20× faster transfers”.
• A roughly 4 percent faster CPU in both single- and multi-core performance, according to Geekbench 6.
• Ability to shoot Dolby Vision video up to 4K at 120 fps.
• Apple ProRAW photos and ProRes videos (and other pro video features like log video recording and ACES).

I think it’s amazing that the iPhone Pro models are now able to shoot professional-caliber video. But I don’t shoot video professionally. And because I don’t, I can’t remember the last time I needed to transfer data from my iPhone via the USB-C port, so, while the Pro models offer a noticeable advantage in USB performance, I might never use it personally over the next year.

Another difference is that the 16 Pro models have slightly bigger displays than the regular 16 models. The 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are 6.3 and 6.9 inches; the regular 16 and 16 Plus are 6.1 and 6.7. Whether that’s actually an advantage for the Pro models depends on whether you care that they’re also slightly taller and heavier devices in hand.

Battery Life

I omitted from the above comparison the one spec people care most about: battery life. Here is the sleeper spec where the Pro models earn their keep. Once again grouping like-vs.-like size classes, and including the 15 Pro models for year-over-year comparison:

Model	Video	Video (streamed)
15 Pro	23 hours	20 hours
16	22 hours	18 hours
16 Pro	27 hours	22 hours
15 Pro Max	29 hours	25 hours
16 Plus	27 hours	24 hours
16 Pro Max	33 hours	29 hours

Those battery life numbers come from Apple, not my own testing (and Apple cites them as “up to” numbers). But those numbers suggest 20 percent longer battery life on the 16 Pro models compared to their size-class non-pro counterparts. Anecdotally, that feels true to me. I use a Shortcuts automation to turn on Low Power mode whenever my iPhone battery level drops below 35 percent. With my iPhone 15 Pro, that generally happens every night at some point. Over the last week using the iPhone 16 Pro as my primary iPhone, it hasn’t dropped that low most nights. To say the least, that’s not a rigorous test in any way, shape, or form. But Apple has no history of exaggerating battery life claims, especially relative comparisons between devices. I think it’s the real deal, and the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max probably get 20 percent longer battery life than their corresponding 16 and 16 Plus counterparts, and between 10–15 percent over last year’s Pro models, in practical day-to-day use.

That alone might be worth a big chunk of the $200 price difference to some people.

Apple Intelligence

I spent the weekdays last week running iOS 18.0; on Friday afternoon, I upgraded my 16 Pro review unit to the developer beta of iOS 18.1 (beta 3 at the time, since upgraded to beta 4). I’m sure many, if not most reviewers, will review only what comes in the box, and what’s coming in the box this week will be iOS 18.0 without any Apple Intelligence features.

That stance is fair enough, but I don’t see it as a big deal to include my 18.1 experience in this review. iOS 18.1 feels pretty close to shipping. Apple has promised “October”, and my gut feeling, using it for the last five days on this review unit, is that it’s pretty solid. I suspect it might ship closer to early October than late October. But even if it doesn’t appear until Halloween, I don’t think it’s absurd or offensive that Apple is already using Apple Intelligence to market the iPhone 16 lineup. It’s a little awkward right now, but it’s not a sham. It’s vaporware until it actually ships, but it’s vaporware that anyone with a developer account can install right now.

Also, none of the Apple Intelligence features currently in iOS 18.1 are game-changing. The Clean Up feature in Photos is pretty good, and when it doesn’t produce good results, you can simply revert to the original. The AI-generated summaries of messages, notifications, and emails in Mail are at times apt, but at others not so much. I haven’t tried the Rewrite tool because I’m, let’s face it, pretty confident in my own writing ability. But, after my own final editing pass, I ran this entire review through the Proofread feature, and it correctly flagged seven mistakes I missed, and an eighth that I had marked, but had forgotten to fix. Most of its suggestions that I have chosen to ignore were, by the book, legitimate. (E.g., it suggested replacing the jargon-y lede with the standard spelling lead. It also flagged my stubborn capitalization of “MacOS”.) It took 1 minute, 45 seconds to complete the proofreading pass of the 7,200+ words in Apple Notes on the iPhone 16 Pro. (I tried the Rewrite function for shits and giggles and the only way I can describe the results is that it gave up.)

New Siri definitely offers a cooler-looking visual interface. And the new Siri voices sound more natural. But it also feels like Siri is speaking too slowly, as though Siri hails from the Midwest or something. (Changing Siri’s speaking rate to 110 percent in Settings → Accessibility → Siri sounds much more natural to my ears, and feels like it matches old Siri’s speaking rate.) Type to Siri is definitely cool, but I don’t see why we couldn’t have had that feature since 2010. I have actually used the new “Product Knowledge” feature, where Siri draws upon knowledge from Apple’s own support documentation, while writing this review. It’s great. But maybe Apple’s support website should have had better search years ago?

These are all good features. But let’s say you never heard of LLMs or ChatGPT. And instead, at WWDC this year, without any overarching “Apple Intelligence” marketing umbrella, Apple had simply announced features like a new cool-looking Siri interface, typing rather than talking to Siri, being able to remove unwanted background objects from photos, a “proofreading” feature for the standard text system that extends and improves the years-old but (IMO) kinda lame grammar-checking feature on MacOS, and brings it to iOS too? Those would seem like totally normal features Apple might add this year. But not tentpole features. These Apple Intelligence features strike me as nothing more than the sort of nice little improvements Apple makes across its OSes every year.

Apple reiterated throughout last week’s “It’s Glowtime” keynote, and now in its advertising for the iPhone 16 lineup, that these are the first iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence from the ground up”. I’m not buying that. These are simply the second generation of iPhone models with enough RAM to run on-device LLMs. LLMs are breakthrough technology. But they’re breakthroughs at the implementation level. The technology is fascinating and important, but so are things like the Swift programming language. I spent the first half of my time testing the iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.0 and the second half running 18.1 with Apple Intelligence. A few things got a little nicer. That’s it.

I might be underselling how impossible the Clean Up feature would be without LLMs. I am very likely underselling how valuable the new writing tools might prove to people trying to write in a second language, or who simply aren’t capable of expressing themselves well in their first language. But like I said, they’re all good features. I just don’t see them as combining to form the collective tentpole that Apple is marketing “Apple Intelligence” as. I get it that from Apple’s perspective, engineering-wise, it’s like adding an entire platform to the existing OS. It’s a massive engineering effort and the on-device execution constraints are onerous. But from a user’s perspective, they’re just ... features. When’s the last year Apple has not added cool new features along the scope of these?

Apple’s just riding — and now, through the impressive might of its own advertising and marketing, contributing to — the AI hype wave, and I find that a little eye-roll inducing. It would have been cooler, in an understated breathe-on-your-fingernails-and-polish-them-on-your-shirt kind of way, if Apple had simply added these same new features across their OSes without the marketing emphasis being on the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella. If not for the AI hype wave the industry is currently caught in, this emphasis on which features are part of “Apple Intelligence” would seem as strange as Apple emphasizing, in advertisements, which apps are now built using SwiftUI.

If the iPhone 16 lineup was “built from the ground up” with a purpose in mind, it’s to serve as the best prosumer cameras ever made. Not to create cartoon images of a dog blowing out candles on a birthday cake. The new lineup of iPhones 16 are amazing devices. The non-pro iPhone 16 and 16 Plus arguably offer the best value-per-dollar of any iPhones Apple has ever made. This emphasis on Apple Intelligence distracts from that.

The problem isn’t that Apple is marketing Apple Intelligence a few weeks before it’s actually going to ship. It’s that few of these features are among the coolest or most interesting things about the new iPhone 16 lineup, and none are unique advantages that only Apple has the ability or inclination to offer.⁷ Every phone on the market will soon be able to generate impersonal saccharine passages of text and uncanny-valley images via LLMs. Only Apple has the talent and passion to create something as innovative and genuinely useful as Camera Control. ★

The Things They Carried

Monday, 16 September 2024

Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple’s ‘It’s Glowtime’ Keynote

Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”:

17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was so long ago that Field Notes hadn’t yet been created; my back-pocket notebooks are much slimmer now than that hardcover Moleskine.¹ Instead of the Leatherman and a ring of four keys, I’m down to just two keys and a Halifax key-sized tool from The James Brand. The keys and Halifax lay flat and fit comfortably in the change pocket of a pair of jeans.² And while I do own (and very much enjoy) a Ricoh GR IIIx — a modern but very similarly sized descendant of the above camera — I don’t carry it on an everyday basis because iPhone cameras have gotten so good.

But there was an everyday carry item I omitted from the above photo — wired earbuds. I don’t remember if I omitted them because I forgot to include them, or if it was for aesthetic reasons. But circa 2007 I generally had a pair of wired Apple earbuds with me. Today, I’ve always got my AirPods Pro — far and away my favorite consolidation. By weight, AirPods (with case) are heavier, but measured by fussiness, they offer a never-tangled fraction of the wired earbuds experience.

The remaining items in my pockets are equivalent but upgraded. I’ve got better (and because I no longer wear contact lenses, prescription) sunglasses. I long ago switched from the Pilot G2 to the Zebra Sarasa, a pen I consider nearly perfect. The above Swiss Army watch broke in early 2009, and I’ve since started a small (I swear) collection of mechanical watches. But on most workdays, there’s an Apple Watch on my wrist.

iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch. I’ve almost always got two of them with me, and often all three. I’m sure for many of you reading this, it’s always all three.

These are Apple’s three “everyday carry” products. They’re as much a part of our lives as our clothes and glasses and jewelry. They thus go together swimmingly in the same product introduction event.

Last week’s “It’s Glowtime” event was very strong for Apple. It might have been the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X. All three platforms are now in excellent, appealing, and coherent shape:

• iPhone: Last year was a bit “meh” for the non-pro iPhone 15 models, which were stuck with year-old A16 silicon and didn’t get the new hardware Action button. This year, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus get the brand-new A18 chip, the Action button, and the new Camera Control button. That Camera Control button would have made total sense as a Pro-exclusive feature this year (more sense, to me, than making the Action button Pro-exclusive last year) but all new iPhones have it. This year’s iPhone 16 and 16 Plus even come in the best and most fun colors in a few years. The iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max have best-in-class camera systems, the A18 Pro chip (6 GPUs vs. 5 in the regular A18, bigger CPU caches, faster memory and storage I/O), and slightly bigger screens.³ The iPhone remains the best product in the most important and profitable device category the world has ever seen.

• Apple Watch: The new Series 10 models sport bigger displays, longer battery life, and 10 percent reductions in thickness and weight. The new watch displays are slightly bigger, and, more importantly, also have noticeably wider viewing angles, and in always-on mode update once per second instead of once per minute. There’s an absolutely gorgeous polished jet black option in aluminum — marking, to my taste, the first time in the entire history of Apple Watch that there’s a base-priced aluminum model that stands toe-to-toe with the more expensive models on aesthetic grounds. But those more expensive models are better than ever too, with Apple replacing polished stainless steel with much lighter polished titanium. I was unaware that titanium could be polished to a mirror-like sheen. Apple had previously made Series models of Apple Watch in titanium — I bought one in Series 5 and again in Series 7 — but those were at the Edition tier, priced above the stainless steel models. There was no Ultra 3 announcement — the lone sour note in the Watch segment — but the Ultra 2 is now available in an excellent and sure-to-be-popular satin black DLC coating.

• AirPods: No more selling years-old models at entry-level prices. The new good/better/best lineup is clear. Good: new AirPods 4 for $129. Better: AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and a better case (with wireless charging and Find My support, including a speaker) for $179. Best: the existing $249 AirPods Pro, which, yes, debuted two years ago, but which continue to be updated with improved functionality via firmware updates — most notably and importantly now, certified support for use as hearing aids. There’s also the revised AirPods Max, with new colors and USB-C replacing Lightning, but alas, no significant internal updates like the H2 chip now available in all other AirPod models, which powers features like voice isolation and nod/shake-your-head Siri interactions or lossless audio support. That’s a slightly sour note, but on the whole, the AirPods lineup looks (and sounds) better than ever.

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But, still, flying home from California on Tuesday, I was left with a feeling best described as ennui. On Threads, I summarized my feelings with one short sentence:

The obvious truth is that we all, including Apple, miss Steve Jobs.

Quoting me, Walt Mossberg responded:

This👇. Absolutely true. The post-Steve Jobs Apple has been a phenomenal money-making machine and has had a few notable product successes like AirPods and the Apple Watch. But it hasn’t replicated the big game changer product experience of the Jobs era.

I’ve been pondering this for the remainder of the week. One factor is that the iPhone defined the apex of personal computing. In the early years of PCs, everyone knew we wanted portability. Most of us — including me — thought we reached that with laptops. But laptops don’t go with us everywhere, and, it turns out, we want computers that go with us everywhere. That’s the iPhone, and the original iPhone in 2007 established the all-touch-screen form factor and general concept right out of the gate. That first iPhone blew our minds the moment Steve Jobs showed it to us.

Eventually, some company will introduce such a product again. It might be Apple. If it happens any time soon or soon-ish, it probably will be Apple. Apple, as a company, has a long-term strategy that it hopes will make it as likely as possible that it will be Apple. But there’s been no such product since the iPhone and, in my opinion, there is no technology extant today that would enable such a product. I feel confident that if Steve Jobs were alive and still leading Apple product development, there would have been no iPhone-like mind-blown-the-moment-you-first-saw-it new product in the intervening years.

Mossberg correctly cites AirPods and Apple Watches as big successes of the post-Jobs era. Not coincidentally, they are two of the three platforms Apple featured in last week’s event — and two of the three that people carry wherever they go. But we don’t really carry AirPods and Apple Watch — we wear them. They’re not more important than our iPhones, but they are more intimate, more personal.

But they’re also more subtle. When AirPods debuted many people thought they looked weird to wear. When Apple Watch debuted people were underwhelmed. But it turns out, perhaps even more so than with the iPhone, Apple nailed the design with both products right out of the gate. Apple Watch has an iconic, instantly recognizable form factor, but from a distance of more than a few feet away, it’d be hard to tell a brand-new Series 10 from 2015’s original “Series 0” models. The original watch straps remain compatible with the newest models — including even the Ultras. With AirPods, the stems have gotten noticeably shorter, but on the whole, they’re the exact same basic concept as the original models from 2016. They’re even offered in the exact same array of colors: white, white, or white.

What we’re seeing is Tim Cook’s Apple. Cook is a strong, sage leader, and the proof is that the entire company is now ever more in his image. That’s inevitable. It’s also not at all to say Apple is worse off. In some ways it is, but in others, Apple is far better. I can’t prove any of this, of course, but my gut says that a Steve-Jobs–led Apple today would be noticeably less financially successful and industry-dominating than the actual Tim-Cook–led Apple has been.

I think Apple Watch, under Jobs, would have been more like iPod was or AirPods have been: a product entirely defined by Apple, not a platform for third-party developers. (Jobs was famously reluctant to even make iPhone a platform.)

But the biggest difference is that Apple, under Jobs, was quirky, and I think would have remained noticeably more quirky than it has been under Cook. You’d be wrong, I say, to argue that Cook has drained the fun out of Apple. But I do think he’s eliminated quirkiness. Cook’s Apple takes too few risks. Jobs’s Apple took too many risks.

Tim Cook is no mere bean counter. Far from it. He shares with Jobs a driving ambition to change the world. Cook, just like Jobs, surely relates deeply to this quip from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.” But the ways Cook is driven to change the world are different.

Jobs often wore his heart on his shirtsleeve, not merely in public but on stage. Remember the 2010 WWDC keynote, when Jobs had an iPhone demo fail because the Wi-Fi wasn’t working, and 20 minutes later he came back on stage and angrily demanded that the media turn off their portable Wi-Fi base stations being used for live-blogging the keynote? He was fucking angry and he let us know it. You simply didn’t mess with a Steve Jobs keynote.

Cook almost never reveals his true passionate self in public. But at least one time he did. At the 2014 annual shareholders meeting, Cook faced a question from a representative of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). As reported by Bryan Chaffin at The Mac Observer:

During the question and answer session, however, the NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook two questions, both of which were in line with the principles espoused in the group’s proposal. The first question challenged an assertion from Mr. Cook that Apple’s sustainability programs and goals — Apple plans on having 100 percent of its power come from green sources — are good for the bottom line.

The representative asked Mr. Cook if that was the case only because of government subsidies on green energy. Mr. Cook didn’t directly answer that question, but instead focused on the second question: the NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable.

What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR’s advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.

“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.” He said the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response — the closest thing to public profanity I’ve ever seen from Mr. Cook — it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.

He didn’t stop there, however, as he looked directly at the NCPPR representative and said, “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

A philosophy of “Whatever is best for the ROI” is McKinsey-flavored cowardice, not leadership. Sometimes a leader needs to make decisions with uncertain business sense, or even knowing that the decision doesn’t make business sense, but simply because their intuition or conscience tell them it’s the right thing to do. Insofar as he’s willing to make such decisions, Cook is like Jobs. But what sort of decisions those are, are very different.

Jobs was driven to improve the way computers work. Cook is driven to improve the way humans live. Accessibility and the environment are much higher priorities under Cook than they were under Jobs. Apple’s entire foray into Health has occurred under Cook’s leadership — and Health-related features were tentpole features in last week’s keynote. I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost far more money to get AirPods Pro certified as medical-grade hearing aids than Apple will make back in profits from an increase in sales. The Apple 2030 initiative to bring the company’s entire carbon footprint to net zero emissions is fundamentally about doing the right thing, not just selling more products.

Jobs emphasized making more interesting products, and maximizing surprise and delight upon their unveilings. Tim Cook wouldn’t have sent the police after Gizmodo’s purloined iPhone 4 prototype; Steve Jobs probably thought Apple took it easy on them.

Cook values predictability. But predictability is in conflict with quirkiness. You don’t need to even recognize Mark Gurman’s name to have predicted that last week’s event would focus on new iPhones, new AirPods, and new Apple Watches. Nor do you need to follow the rumor mill to have correctly guessed that all of those new products would look very similar to the models that preceded them. Evolve, evolve, evolve. There’s no resting on laurels inside Apple with any of those products. The iPhones 16, Apple Watch Series 10, and AirPods 4 are all the result of intensely-focused industry-leading engineering (including in fields like material engineering) and design. But they also all basically look exactly like all of us expected them to look.

Remember the 3rd-gen iPod Nano in 2007? A.k.a. “the fat Nano”:

It’s quite possible you don’t remember the fat Nano, because it wasn’t insanely great, even though it replaced 2nd-gen iPod Nano models that were. And so a year later, with the 4th-gen Nanos, Apple went back to the tall-and-skinny design, as though the fat Nano had never happened.

That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously a mistake. I’m quite sure that inside Apple there were designers and product people who thought it was a mistake before it shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. That’s ultimately why Cook’s Apple is more successful — with more customers, more revenue, higher margins (and thus more profit), and more, well, sheer dominance (and, thus, more regulatory scrutiny). But it’s also why Cook’s Apple delivers fewer surprises. The delight is still there, but there’s less amazement. It’s by design. They’re not trying but failing to reach the heights of the Jobs era’s ecstatic design novelty, because those peaks had accompanying valleys. Apple today is aiming for, and achieving, utterly consistent excellence. Quirkiness no longer fits.

The lampshade iMac G4. The G4 Cube. Peripherals like the iSight camera — a product that was never intended to sell in massive numbers, but belongs in a museum alongside the best designs from Dieter Rams’s Braun. Flower Power and Dalmatian iMacs. Under Jobs, Apple made many products that were memorable at each, or at least every other, revised generation. But sometimes — like the fat Nano — they were memorable for being duds. Under Cook, Apple produces instantly iconic designs that tend only to evolve — in mostly predictable ways, on mostly predictable schedules.⁴

Tim Cook’s Apple has not missed any fundamental new technology or shift that would have resulted in industry-changing new products or platforms that, if he’d lived, Steve Jobs would have led Apple to create through his singular genius or sheer force of will. But I also don’t think we’d have been left with new iPhones 16 that look like last year’s iPhones 15, which looked like the iPhones 14, which looked like the iPhones 13, which looked like the iPhones 12, which looked like the iPhones 11 except that year the side rails went from rounded back to flat, like the iPhone 4 and 5 models. I can show you an iPhone 4 and you’ll know, instantly, that it is either an iPhone 4 or 4S. I can show you an iPhone 5 and you’ll know it’s either an iPhone 5 or 5S (or the first iPhone SE). If it were a black-and-slate iPhone 5 you might even know it’s a 5 specifically, not a 5S, because the anodization of the black iPhone 5 wore off over time, producing a weathered look — a patina — that I found endearing in an evocative way no subsequent iPhone has. It was an imperfection, but sometimes imperfections are what we love most about products.⁵ Show me an iPhone from 2020–2024 a decade from now and I’ll have to remember exactly when the Action button and Camera Control appeared to know which was which.

Cook has patience where Jobs would grow restless. In the Jobs era, when a keynote ended, we’d sometimes turn to each other and say, “Can you believe ____?” No one asked that after last week’s keynote. Much of what Apple announced was impressive. Very little was disappointing. Nothing was hard to believe or surprising.

This isn’t bad for Apple, or a sign of institutional decline. If anything, under Cook, Apple more consistently achieves near-perfection. Tolerances are tighter. Ship dates seldom slip. But it’s a change that makes the company less fun to keenly observe and obsess over. Cook’s Apple is not overly cautious, but it’s never reckless. Jobs’s Apple was occasionally reckless, for better and worse.

My dissatisfaction flying home from last week’s event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised. I miss occasionally being disappointed by a product design that stretched quirky all the way to wacky. I miss being amazed by something entirely unexpected out of left field. Poor me, stuck only with the announcement of noticeably improved versions of three products — three product families — that zillions of people around the world, myself included, carry with us wherever we go. ★

The iOS Continental Drift Fun Gap

Sunday, 8 September 2024

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and two of his goon friends are in a nightclub in the Tangiers casino resort (a fictionalized version of the old Stardust), which is run by Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro). Santoro and Rothstein, who’d been friends for decades, are now on the outs. The Tangiers is a front for the mafia and the Teamsters. Rothstein, a gambling genius who was born to run a casino, is earning major bank for the bosses back home. Santoro is gangstering up Las Vegas, and is under severe law enforcement scrutiny. They just held a contentious meeting, just the two of them, at Santoro’s request, in the middle of the desert — a meeting Rothstein wasn’t sure wouldn’t conclude with him dead in a freshly dug hole in the sand.

Santoro and his two friends are just a threesome. All men. Morose.

Rothstein comes in with Billy Sherbert (Don Rickles) and a party of half a dozen or so men and women, including Oscar Goodman, famed defense attorney and future mayor of Las Vegas (playing himself), and several women. Everyone (but Rothstein, who’s not much for fun) is laughing. You’d be laughing too if you were out having drinks with Don Fucking Rickles and Oscar Goodman.

Santoro gripes about Rothstein not acknowledging him, and, well, makes some comments that suggest he doesn’t hold Jews in the highest esteem. Santoro’s right-hand man, Frank Marino (played by the great Frank Vincent, of Billy “Go Get Your Fucking Shine Box” Batts fame), dryly observes, “They’re having a good time, too.”

The camera pulls back to show their threesome, alone in their booth, isolated. Santoro, who is absolutely not having a good time, replies, “So are we.”

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot, lately.

Allison Johnson, in a piece for The Verge headlined “European iPhones Are More Fun Now”:

Whining about stuff is a treasured American pastime, so allow me to indulge: the iPhone is more fun in Europe now, and it’s not fair.

They’re getting all kinds of stuff because they have cool regulators, not, like, regular regulators. Third-party app stores, the ability for browsers to run their own engines, Fortnite, and now the ability to replace lots of default apps? I want it, too! Imagine if Chrome on iOS wasn’t just a rinky dink little Safari emulator!

Imagine if Chrome could deplete your iPhone battery as fast as it does your MacBook battery. Imagine if you were one of the millions (zillions?) of people whose “incognito mode” browsing history was observed and stored by Google and deleted only after they lost a lawsuit. Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit.

Imagine downloading a new dialer app with a soundboard of fart sounds and setting it as your default! Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem interested in sharing these possibilities with everyone.

That sounds like fun.

Sure, we’ve got retro game emulators in the app store. And that rules. But that’s only because Apple was worried everyone in the EU was about to download AltStore PAL so they could play Ocarina of Time on their iPhones.

If the benefit of the DMA is allowing emulators worldwide how is that an advantage for people in the EU?

Here’s the thing: wouldn’t it just be good business to offer everyone the same choices no matter where they live? It’s not as if Apple was making two different iPhones to try to appeal to different cultural preferences. It’s making one iPhone that’s more flexible and customizable and one that isn’t.

Maybe, bit by bit, Apple will cave in and offer parity the way it did with emulators. But I think the company should make an uncharacteristic move: drop the charade and let everyone, everywhere have the same iPhone. It would be bold! Courageous, even! But most importantly, it would be a lot more fun.

Yes, let’s allow everyone, around the world, to delete their Camera app. That sounds like fun.

Federico Viticci, on Threads:

My realization in 2024 has been that the DMA fork of iOS is the best iPhone experience. We can finally use our phones like actual computers with more default apps and apps from external sources.

And on MacStories:

It’s still iOS, with the tasteful design, vibrant app ecosystem, high-performance animations, and accessibility we’ve come to expect from Apple; at the same time, it’s a more flexible and fun version of iOS predicated upon the assumption that users deserve options to control more aspects of how their expensive pocket computers should work. Or, as I put it: some of the flexibility of Android, but on iOS, sounds like a dream to me.

Apparently, this thought — that people who demand options should have them — really annoys a lot of (generally American) pundits who seemingly consider the European Commission a draconian entity that demands changes out of spite for a particular corporation, rather than a group of elected officials who regulate based on what they believe is best for their constituents and the European market.

Let’s run a tally. On the EU side, there is Fortnite and other games from Epic, a shady company that was justifiably booted from the App Store for bait-and-switch chicanery intended to provoke a lawsuit in which they got their asses handed back to them. On the rest-of-the-world side we have the imminent release of iPhone Mirroring and Apple Intelligence. I don’t play Fortnite, and even if I did, I wouldn’t on my phone, but I find the latter far more interesting — and fun — than the former.

The non-Epic iOS software available exclusively in the EU is ... well, nothing of interest. Maybe some apps that help with content piracy. Other than that, nothing. Admittedly, the DMA only went into effect 6 months ago. Long-term, maybe there will arise a thriving ecosystem of useful and fun apps and games that are exclusively available in EU marketplaces. Right now, it’s Fortnite. There are a bunch of articles (and surely soon to be more) informing EU citizens how to access Apple Intelligence (by lying about where they are). There are crickets chirping regarding how iOS users outside the EU can cheat their way into the EU’s new DMA rules. No one cares.

Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having?

As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal. ★

The iOS Continental Drift Widens

Friday, 6 September 2024

At the end of August, Apple announced several more DMA compliance changes. They are worth examining in detail.

Changes to the Mandatory Browser Choice Screen

Developers of browsers offered in the browser choice screen in the EU will have additional information about their browser shown to users who view the choice screen, and will get access to more data about the performance of the choice screen. The updated choice screen will be shown to all EU users who have Safari set as their default browser. For details about the changes coming to the browser choice screen, view About the Browser Choice Screen in the EU.

Some of the choice details of the new changes:

• All users with Safari as their default browser, including users who have already seen the choice screen prior to the update, will see the choice screen upon first launch of Safari after installing the update available later this year.

• The choice screen will not be displayed if a user already has a browser other than Safari set as default.

• The choice screen will be shown once per device instead of once per user.

• When migrating to a new device, if (and only if) the user’s previously chosen default browser was Safari, the user will be required to reselect a default browser (i.e. unlike other settings in iOS, the user’s choice of default browser will not be migrated if that choice was Safari).

I get that the entire point of this mandatory choice screen is that because iOS is, in DMA parlance, a designated “gatekeeping” platform, the presumption is that Apple has unfairly advantaged Safari by bundling it with the OS and making it the default. So, from the European Commission’s perspective, some significant number of iOS users are using Safari only because it is bundled and default, and would prefer and/or be better served — or even just equally served — using another web browser as their default. Thus, Safari gets treated differently. It’s not just another browser in a list of 11. It’s the only browser whose users will be forced to choose again even if they’ve already chosen it in iOS 17.4 or later. It’s the only browser whose users will be forced to choose again whenever they migrate to a new iPhone or iPad. What exactly is the point of forcing this screen per-device rather than per-user, other than to repeatedly irritate Safari users who own multiple iOS devices?

At what point do these restrictions punish Safari users who want to use Safari? I’d say the EC has crossed that point by forcing these rules on Apple. Another detail:

• Users will be required to scroll through the full list of browser options before setting a browser as default.

You know how in certain “terms and conditions” agreement screens, you can only “agree” after scrolling all the way to the bottom of the legalese that almost no one actually reads? That’s how the browser choice screen must now work. Almost nothing in iOS works like this, and I suspect more than a few users who spot their preferred browser above the fold in the randomized list will find it very confusing that after selecting their browser, “nothing happens”. This is legally-mandated bad interaction design.

If Safari is currently in the user’s Dock or on the first page of the Home Screen and the user selects a browser that is not currently installed on their device from the choice screen, the selected browser will replace the Safari icon in the user’s Dock or in the Home Screen.

For 17 years, the iOS Home Screen has been consistently spatial. Wherever an app is placed on your Home Screen, it stays there. Now, obviously, the EC’s objection is that Apple has unfairly privileged Safari with default placement in the user’s Dock, and they are seeking to remove this privilege for any user who chooses a browser other than Safari on the choice screen. But surely some number of users will regret their choice. Or simply seek to open Safari while trying some other browser as their new default. But now, unlike the way iOS has worked for 17 years, the Safari icon won’t be where they left it. It’s also worth noting that apps in the iOS Dock don’t show their names, only their icons. There surely exist many satisfied Safari users who don’t even know what “Safari” is — they only know the blue-compass icon. And they know that whenever they open URLs from an email or text message, those URLs open in an interface with which they’re completely familiar. The browser choice screen does, of course, show the browsers’ icons, but still. This is legally-mandated confusion.

The list of browsers presented to users remains mostly unchanged from Apple’s previous browser choice screen: the 11 most-downloaded browsers in each member state of the EU. So each of the 27 EU nations has its own list. Apple lists the current browsers, per country, at the bottom of their support page.

Here is a single list of all included browsers, sorted by how many of the 27 EU nations they’re included in. For the 9 browsers included in all 27 countries, I’ve randomized the order:

• Chrome, Google LLC (27)
• Edge, Microsoft Corporation (27)
• Opera, Opera Software AS (27)
• Brave, Brave Software (27)
• Safari, Apple (27)
• DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, Inc. (27)
• Aloha, Aloha Mobile (27)
• Onion Browser, Mike Tigas (27)
• Firefox, Mozilla (27)
• You, SuSea Inc. (23)
• Ecosia, Ecosia (17)
• Vivaldi, Vivaldi Technologies (13)
• Web@Work, MobileIron (10)
• Web, AirWatch LLC (5)
• Want, Qwant (3)
• Browser, Maple Media Apps LLC (3)
• Access, BlackBerry Corporation (3)
• Seznam.cz, Seznam.cz a.s. (2)
• Presearch, Presearch.org Global Limited (1)
• Avast Secure Browser, AVAST Software (1)

I was familiar with most of the 9 browsers included in all 27 countries, and you probably are too. But I’d never heard of Aloha or Onion Browser — and Onion Browser in particular stands out for coming from an individual developer, Mike Tigas. (Onion Browser also stands out for being open source.) Both Aloha and Onion are advertised as “privacy focused”, which seems particularly true for Onion Browser, which is connected to Tor. Aloha includes built-in ad-blocking and a geo-fence skipping VPN.

So 9 of the 11 spots are occupied by the same popular browsers across the entire EU. Of the other 11 browsers, the only one I’d ever heard of was Ecosia, which, like DuckDuckGo, is better known as a search engine (and, like DuckDuckGo, is on the very short list of search engines Safari offers in most countries around the world).¹

Did you know that BlackBerry made an iOS browser, and that it’s oddly popular in Ireland, Poland, and Sweden? I did not. (Did you know that BlackBerry still exists? I did not.)

The entire point of this mandatory browser choice screen is to reach Safari users and make it as easy as possible for them to switch default browsers. But how many such users are there, who should switch? How many users are there who understand what a web browser is, what a default web browser is, are currently using Safari by default, but who see this choice screen and think “Oh this is great, I had no idea I could switch to one of these other browsers, I’ll do it...”? I’m sure there exist some such users. But I’m also sure there exist other users who don’t quite know what a web browser is, don’t know that the browser they’re currently using — and perhaps have been using for over a decade — is named “Safari”, and won’t know how to undo a mistake they might make on this browser choice screen. Users who already know how to change their default iOS web browser don’t need this mandatory choice screen; users who don’t know how to change their default browser might be stuck with a mistaken or regretted choice. Pick Safari and you will see this browser choice screen again; pick anything else, perhaps as a lark, and you’ll never see it again.

My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I consider the single most dominant software monopoly in the world today. Users who already know they want to use a non-Safari browser and have set one as their default won’t even see this screen. Users who want to use Safari and know they want to use Safari will merely be annoyed by this screen (repeatedly). But non-technical users who are confused by this screen — and I guaranteed there are millions of such users in the EU alone — will surely just pick a browser they’ve heard of and hope they’ve made the right choice. Chrome is by far the most-used web browser in the world, and for some number of users the only one they’ve ever heard of.

Shortly after iOS 17.4 shipped in March — the first version with DMA compliance features, and thus the first with a mandatory browser choice screen for Safari users in the EU — there were a few stories about third-party browsers seeing an uptick in users. This one from TechCrunch is perhaps the best example. The gains were mostly reported in Bezos numbers — relative gains with no absolute numbers. Aloha Browser “said users in the EU jumped 250% in March”. Opera reported “39% growth in users on iOS selecting its browser as their default specifically, from March 3 until April 4” — but that was down from 164% growth the previous month, before iOS had implemented the mandatory choice screen in the EU. The one browser that reported actual numbers was Brave:

“The daily installs for Brave on iOS in the EU went from around 7,500 to 11,000 with the new browser panel this past March,” per a company spokesperson. “In the past few days, we have seen a new all time high spike of 14,000 daily installs, nearly doubling our pre-choice screen numbers.”

Since April, I’ve seen bupkis about any continuing “success” of the browser choice screen for small browsers. I suppose that played a part in the EC forcing Apple into the further concessions — especially re-presenting the browser choice screen to all EU iOS users who selected Safari in iOS 17.4, 17.5, or 17.6 already. But I think the truth is obvious: the vast majority of iOS users use Safari because they want to, spanning the gamut from informed nerds who appreciate Safari’s features, UI, and privacy, to non-technical typical users who just know they like the experience with Apple’s first-party ecosystem of apps and services.

But whatever the effect of this browser choice screen on iOS browser usage in the EU, it’s hard for me to see any way that Chrome doesn’t benefit from it the most. That seems like a perverse outcome for a law intended to regulate “large gatekeepers”. Chrome, with 65 percent market share across all web browsing globally, is a bigger monopoly than iOS, Android, or Windows, and the only other browser with double-digit market share (19 percent) is Safari — the browser the EC is attempting to steer users away from.

‘Default’ Apps

Back to Apple’s announcement on its Developer News site:

For users in the EU, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 will also include a new Default Apps section in Settings that lists defaults available to each user. In future software updates, users will get new default settings for dialing phone numbers, sending messages, translating text, navigation, managing passwords, keyboards, and call spam filters. To learn more, view Update on apps distributed in the European Union.

Additionally, the App Store, Messages, Photos, Camera, and Safari apps will now be deletable for users in the EU.

Keep in mind that at least since iOS 14 (four years ago), we’ve been able to remove any apps we want from our Home screens. It’s just that certain essential system apps can’t be deleted — when removed from your Home screen, they remain available in the App Library. The App Library was a great addition to iOS, and probably should have come years sooner. But what the EC is demanding from Apple now is the ability to delete these apps. This is particularly tricky with the App Store app, because it’s through the App Store that one can reinstall deleted default iOS apps. Presumably, the App Store app will be reinstallable via Settings, one of only two non-deletable apps.²

What those cheerleading these changes miss is that deleting these core system apps doesn’t magically make iOS a modular system. Apple hasn’t announced any sort of API for third-party apps in the EU to handle SMS (and now RCS) cellular text messaging, and I don’t expect them to. Such an API would be a privacy and security nightmare.³ My guess is that if you try to delete the Messages app, iOS will show you a special confirmation alert warning you of the consequences, and if you proceed, your iPhone will simply no longer be able to send or receive SMS or RCS messages. And, obviously, iMessages. What a great feature.

Likewise, Apple hasn’t announced any sort of API for modular photo storage. Users who delete the system Photos and Camera apps won’t — at this writing — be able to choose some other app to handle photo storage. Photos and videos shot will still go to the system photo library. Images that users have previously stored on their devices will still be in the system photo library. There just won’t be an app from Apple to show the system photo library. My understanding is that, under the hood, neither Photos nor Camera are really “apps” in the traditional sense. They’re just thin wrappers around low-level system frameworks. The same system-level frameworks allow third-party apps to access the system photo library. Apple, seemingly, hasn’t been forced to allow third-party software to replace these low-level system frameworks. They’re just being forced to allow users to “delete” these thin wrappers that present themselves as apps to users. But the actual way that the system photo library works remains unchanged. It’s like if the Mac let you delete the Finder — the file system would still be there, but the user would have no way to browse it.

An OS with a fundamentally modular design, with APIs that allow nearly every system component to be replaced by third-party software, sounds like a great idea. But no major OS is actually architected like that. iOS certainly is not. So requiring Apple to allow apps like Photos and Camera to be “deleted” is purely facile, and betrays the European Commission’s technical ignorance. The EC bureaucrats issuing these dictums clearly have no idea how iOS actually works. They just know what they can see. iOS ships with a bunch of apps. All they care about is that now users in the EU will be able to delete those apps.

Sure, many photographers prefer using third-party camera apps to Apple’s system Camera app. But iOS has long offered rich support for using third-party camera apps, and with iOS 18 that support is getting even better, with users soon being able to configure the Lock Screen button that was previously dedicated only to launch the system Camera app. (Same goes for the button heretofore dedicated to the system Flashlight “app” — that’s configurable in iOS 18 too.) Camera apps added to the Lock Screen even gain special privileges in iOS 18 — for all users, worldwide, not just in the EU. Even the developers of third-party camera apps don’t see any point to being able to delete the system Camera app.

So who benefits from being able to outright “delete” the Photos and Camera apps? As far as I can tell, only people suffering from OCD who are bothered that after removing them from their Home Screen, that they’re still listed in the App Library. It’s unclear to me whether users in the EU will be able to delete apps like Photos and Camera even if they don’t have any third-party photography apps installed, which would leave their iPhone in a state where there is no way to take new photos or view existing ones. This is performative regulation. None of this deletable apps nonsense increases competition; it merely increases the chances of profound user confusion.

To be clear, just like with the browser choice screen, I don’t think these “default apps” and “deletable apps” compliance concessions from Apple are going to matter much. By design, deleting apps in iOS is a multi-step process and requires a long tap-and-hold even to get into jiggle mode. Even novice users don’t accidentally delete apps. But it’s also true that there’s no measurable demand from users to be able to delete essential system apps. So what’s the point of requiring Apple to support this? Just to watch the company dance?

I mean why stop here? Why not require Apple to ship new iPhones with only Settings and Phone pre-installed? Why not mandate that users be allowed to delete the entire OS?

Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring

When Apple announced, a few weeks after WWDC in June, that the two biggest features of the year — Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring — would likely remain unavailable in the EU this year “due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act”, DMA supporters suspected spite as the motivation. I quoted Ian Betteridge then and will quote him again, because I think his reaction epitomizes this viewpoint:

So, Apple, which bits of the DMA does Apple Intelligence violate? Because unless you can actually tell us — which case we clearly have a bit of a problem with some of the claims you’ve made about how it works — or you’re talking bullshit, and just trying to get some leverage with the EU. Which is it Tim?

I absolutely guarantee that people are going to swallow this “well you can’t make Apple Intelligence work thanks to the DMA!!” line without actually asking any questions about what it violates, because “well Apple said it and they don’t lie evah”

My response to Betteridge in June holds up, and looks even more prescient with these latest concessions from Apple.

As the DMA applies to Apple in particular, where I think DMA supporters go wrong is that they’re not really DMA supporters, but rather App Store opponents. What they feel strongly about is opposing Apple’s tight control over all third-party software on iOS, including, if not especially, control over payments for apps, games, and digital content accessed through native apps. And so they endorse and support the DMA because the DMA breaks that control. Because of the DMA, third-party app marketplaces for iOS now exist in the EU, and apps in Apple’s own App Store are able to opt into new terms to use their own payment processing (in the EU). Thus, from the perspective of opponents of Apple’s App Store, the DMA must be a net good overall, because they see the point of the DMA (as it pertains to Apple at least) as being about breaking up the App Store’s stranglehold over all iOS third-party native software.

But that’s not really the point of the DMA at all. It’s just one byproduct of it. And a very high profile byproduct, because supporting alternative app marketplaces and alternative payment processing were regulations that Apple needed to comply with starting in March of this year. If your personal beef with Apple is the App Store model, it’s easy to see how you could conclude that the DMA is about breaking up that model. And if you think the DMA is mostly about breaking up the App Store model, it’s easy to see how you think it’s nonsense that Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring would raise any compliance issues, and so withholding those features from EU users (along with a third feature, enhancements to SharePlay Screen Sharing) must be spite on Apple’s part.

The thinking, I presume, is that Apple is being spiteful by withholding these features from users in the EU, in the hopes that EU iOS users will turn against the DMA and somehow demand from their EC representatives that it be repealed or amended. But that’s facile. Apple made its case against the DMA, best exemplified by Craig Federighi’s keynote address at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, back in 2021 — to no avail. The DMA passed by an overwhelming margin in the European Parliament: 588 votes in favor, 11 votes against, and 31 abstentions. It’s the law of the continent.

It makes no sense for Apple to withhold tentpole iOS features from EU citizens out of spite. Even if you think Apple is guided by its own self-interest above all else, their biggest self-interest is selling new iPhones. And the biggest new feature in this year’s iPhone 16 models is going to be Apple Intelligence, and the best new feature in iOS 18 is iPhone Screen Sharing. These features will sell iPhones — but not in the EU, at least this year.

The key is that the DMA is not a targeted attack on the App Store model. It’s a sweepingly broad attack on the entire idea of integration. And integration is Apple’s entire modus operandi. The integration of hardware and software designed to work together. The integration between different devices — Continuity — that are designed to work together.

Also: the integration between different apps on the same device. Safari isn’t just a web browser that just happens to be Apple’s. It’s the web browser designed by Apple to do things the iOS way on iOS (and the Macintosh way on MacOS). If, as a user, you do things the Apple way — owning multiple Apple devices, using iCloud for sync, using Safari as your web browser — you get an integrated experience, with access on device A to the tabs open on device B, shared browsing history and bookmarks between all devices, and support for systemwide services and features. The default apps from Apple on a factory fresh iPhone are designed to work together and present themselves consistently. That’s not to say no one should use third-party apps that are alternatives to Apple’s own. Of course not. Surely almost every reader of Daring Fireball uses one or more third-party apps that are alternatives to Apple’s. I use several. But the built-in Apple apps, taken together, constitute the Apple-defined experience. Those really are the apps most non-expert users should use. And the best third-party alternatives — like Fantastical (calendar), Cardhop (contacts), Overcast (podcasts), and Bear (notes) — fit seamlessly within that overall Apple experience. They’re third-party apps that feel integrated with the first-party experience.

From the EC’s perspective, everything ought to be modular and commoditized. That’s their ideal for “competition”. A dominant position in “phones” and “tablets” shouldn’t give the company that makes those devices a leg up in the market for web browsers, email clients, messaging, or camera apps. But from Apple’s perspective, the iPhone isn’t merely a “phone”, a piece of commoditized hardware. That’s why the company generally eschews articles, speaking and writing not of “the iPhone” but just “iPhone”. For Apple, iPhone is an integrated experience, encompassing hardware, software, and services, all designed and engineered by Apple itself.

Now that we have proof that the DMA demands that Apple allow all apps other than Settings (and on iPhones, Phone) to be deleted, and to allow third-party defaults to be set for everything from contactless payments to password management to maps to translation and even keyboards (keyboards?), it’s obvious that the EC might also demand that users be able to specify a third-party “default” AI language model for Apple Intelligence. Not just the optional “world knowledge” layer that Apple is currently partnering exclusively with OpenAI to provide, but the base layer of Apple Intelligence with semantic personal knowledge. Apple Intelligence isn’t designed that way. It’s not a module or an “app”. It’s a deeply integrated layer of the system software. Faced with a decision from the EC that Apple either make all of Apple Intelligence open to third-party AI (including AI systems unvetted by Apple itself), or never offer Apple Intelligence in the EU, I think Apple would choose never to offer it in the EU.

As for iPhone Screen Sharing, gatekeeping platforms aren’t permitted under the DMA to preference other products or services from the gatekeeper itself. iPhone Screen Sharing only works between iPhones and Macs — computers made by Apple. That’s against the DMA — or, at least, the EC could clearly rule that it’s against the DMA.

If the DMA had been in effect 10 years ago, I don’t think Apple Watch would have been available in the EU until and unless the EC said it was permitted. Same for AirPods, which pair with Apple devices in a vastly superior but proprietary way compared to standard Bluetooth. Any sort of integration between an iPhone and another Apple device that isn’t available to third-party devices could be ruled to violate the DMA. By the letter of the DMA, the EC should, I think, rule that all such integration is a violation.

This uncertainty will likely clear over time. Perhaps the EC will rule that Apple Intelligence and/or iPhone Screen Sharing pose no violation to the DMA, and Apple can make those features available, as they exist today, in the EU. Like, maybe the EC commissioners themselves really just want to break up the App Store model and that’s it. But European Commission vice president Margrethe Vestager clearly believes that Apple Intelligence is anti-competitive and thus a violation of the DMA. Speaking at Forum Europa in July, she said:

I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition. I think that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.

She’s very clear that she believes Apple is “obliged to enable competition” with AI under the DMA. Apple Intelligence enables no competition at all. Something has to give here.

The EC’s apparent expectation is that because the European Union is so large and so essential to the world, Apple — along with the DMA’s other targeted “gatekeepers” — will bend to its will and henceforth design its products and services with the DMA in mind. Modularity over integration, at all layers of the stack. Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, quipped in July: “Apple’s new slogan should be ‘act different’.”

But the EU isn’t that large or essential. The European Commission is beset by delusions of grandeur. What’s happening with Apple Intelligence and iPhone Screen Sharing this year is what I expect to happen with every new product or service Apple creates that integrates with iOS: they will come late, or never, to the EU. And all new products and services Apple creates integrate with iOS, so almost everything new from Apple will come late, or never, to the EU.

While not the intention, that’s the actual effect of the DMA. ★