receive to our weekend Apple Breakfast column , which include all of the Apple news you missed this week in a ready to hand bite - sized roundup . We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a morning cupful of chocolate or tea , but it ’s cool if you want to give it a read during tiffin or dinner hours too .
The power of low expectations
One of our most wide read article this hebdomad was aminute - by - arcminute previewof the Far Out event , posted by our in - house psychic ( me ) the daytime before . This was partly an self-justification to publish jokes about Apple ’s merchandising idiosyncrasy , but it ended up being reasonably accurate , predictingall eight of the Cartesian product unveiledand quite a lot of the details .
This predictability was itself predictable , since the general feeling these days is that Applecan’t keep a arcanum . And it ’s pretty unmanageable to hide the existence of a massively hyped new mathematical product while manufacturing95 million unitsin a supply chain on the other side of the world .
But against all odds Apple did find a way to spring a few surprise . Whereas the physical pattern of a product needs to be shared with your manufacture partners , for example , the name of that product does not , and as far as I ’m aware nobody predicted that therugged Apple Watchwould get the nameUltra . Nor did anyone leak its price , and here at Macworld we were cheerily surprised that the Ultra cost $ 799 rather than $ 999 or more .
The biggest surprise of the tonic , however , was the Dynamic Island , a masterstroke that might just have turned a hardware licking into a software victory . Like the snick before them , the photographic camera and detector at the top of theiPhone 14 Proare essentially a compromise : we give up a piffling filmdom outer space in a potentially unhinge area because the alternatives — from the pass and home base clitoris toweak under - screen tv camera — are sorry . Apple ’s screen cutout are a necessary disappointment customer take to get down to get other undecomposed stuff and nonsense . It ’s the kind of thing , in other words , to breeze by in the tonic so to not make it a big batch .
Apple , though , made it the single big deal of the entire introduction . The name and the bravado with which it was introduced — let in a foreign mission statement about making notifications “ rich and delightful”—seemed almost absurd until we saw the feature itself : a dynamic interface area that grows and shrink to give relevant info while disguising the sensing element . For once , the hoopla was fully justified . It ’s a neat , cute and highly ingenious style to make a virtue of necessary , giving the 14 Pro an crying sense of personality and huge potential for usability .
A design as smart as this would do well in any context . But the best thing about the Dynamic Island ’s launching is the way of life it egress to a background of zero expectation . Like a parent walking into the celluloid to watch the secondFrozenfilm , keynote viewer had been take to expect something actively bad and nettlesome . And just as that parent was delighted by the empowering storyline and killer tune , iPhone vendee gained a source of pleasance where none was expected .
Regulatory filings , patent applications , supplying - range of mountains leaks and medium hyper - scrutiny intend it ’s unlikely that Apple will ever again manage to recoil a completely surprising Modern merchandise on an unsuspecting humankind . But at the Far Out event we get a glance of what the company can do instead , which is to under - promise and over - deliver . And keep launching the next right thing , of row .
IDG
Thebiggest surprisefrom the Far Out event ishow little everything costs .
Apple is here to remind you thatlife is precious – and so is your wallet , write Jason Snell .
Tim Cook has asolution for green Messages bubblesbut you’renot gon na like it .
Appleunveiled a lotat the Far Out upshot , but somebig thing did n’t make it .
Podcast of the week
In this episode of the Macworld Podcast , we give our two centime on the Apple Watch Ultra , the iPhone 14 , the AirPods Pro , and everything else that happened at theFar Out event .
you could catch every sequence of the Macworld Podcast onSpotify , Soundcloud , thePodcasts app , orour own site .
Software updates, bugs & problems
iOS 16will set in motion onSeptember 12 !
Some ofiOS 16 ’s upright featureswon’t make it into Monday ’s launching . You ’ll demand towait a small longer .
