Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column , which includes all the Apple news program you missed last week in a handy bit - sized roundup . We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes bang-up with a Monday morning cupful of umber or teatime , but it ’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hour too .

Breaking out of the walled garden

This calendar week ? We ’re going to crank things up a notch , as Apple prepares to give way to an even more crucial element of its so - call off “ walled garden . ”

Cupertino is dependable at quite a little of thing , but the company ’s great power is locking in users . This is down to the walled garden , that mucilaginous ecosystem of Apple Cartesian product that in various ways encourages you to corrupt other Apple products and monish you from buy anything from rival companies . If you buy an iPhone , you ’re more likely to corrupt a band of AirPods because they exercise so well with it , which in turn entail that when it comes time to get a new smartphone , you ’re less likely to switch to Android . Apple ’s production all act upon well with one another than they do with competing devices … which you ’d probably have a bun in the oven , except not to this extent . Nobody else die hard a walled garden that traps customers anywhere nigh as efficaciously as Apple .

The star of the show in that walled garden - the booty - winning rose , if you will – is iMessage , because its stickiness affects other people in a sort of transmissible spread . If your spouse have iPhones and drop their clip lecture over iMessage , you ’ll desire to be capable to join in ; an Android substance abuser can join a radical chat with iPhone user but wo n’t get the full set of feature film ( videos get compress , for good example , while reactions do n’t work properly ) and , famously , will come along as an out - radical - signaling special K rather than a blue house of cards . iMessage match insistency is a tumid part of the reason why , in the US , an astonishing 87 per centum of teenagers own iPhones , elbow room beyond the machine ’s global market portion .

I heard that stat , by the mode , in an interestingvideolast week by Marques Brownlee , who was discussing Nothing ’s late move tobring iMessage to Android . Interesting the idea may be , but there are plenty of caveats . The new Nothing Chats app , essentially a re - peel of the existing Sunbird app , use a bank of Mac host as a nosepiece to take into account you to access your Apple ID ’s iMessages on an Android French telephone . But that comes with a bunch of security concerns : your Apple ID could be compromised if someone hacks Sunbird ’s servers , and in fact , Nothing has already overstretch the app from the Play Store to fix several number . And once it get back , there ’s every chance that Apple will squash the whole affair .

But then again , mayhap Apple wo n’t nettle . Because bigger news go forth later in the week : Apple is going to contribute RCS to the iPhone . This is momentous hooey and good news for everyone … except Apple itself .

RCS is a truly interoperable message standard , and adding it to the iPhone will make it much easier for owners of the gadget to message their Android supporter ; typing indicators , register receipt , uncompressed images … almost everything will work substantially . The Android users willstill show up as green bubble , but other than that they should fit in seamlessly .

As I say , then , good word for iPhone users and Android users alike . But this will tighten the compeer pressing on teenagers to buy the same brand name of smartphone as their Quaker , and therefore the effectiveness of iMessage as a sale peter for Apple devices . And you’re able to bet your bottom clam that Apple only throw way on this long - request variety after much wailing and gnashing of teeth .

In other Son , as with USB - C on the iPhone and substitute payment methods on the App Store , the company only gave in because regulator were about to wedge its hand . This also intend that , as with ego - hangout , Apple will do its good to implement the changes in as unhelpful a way as potential , and probably as late as it possibly can . Not out of spitefulness , but to keep mob the fertilizer on that treasured walled garden .

Foundry

Get emotional : Apple’sBlack FridayShopping Event isslightly less terriblethis yr .

Simon Lohmannrounds up 3 thingsAndroidstill does betterthan even the iPhone 15 Pro .

Not a PC?Windows is now an appfor your iPhone , iPad , and Mac .

Everyone is attend at theM3 benchmarksall faulty .

Even Appledoesn’t have a usefor theM2 Ultra Mac Pro .

End of an epoch : The last remaining macOS install CDs areofficially nonextant .

Podcast of the week

Apple sells a lot of Macs with just8 GB of merged retentiveness . That ’s not enough in today ’s technical school world . We ’re talking about how this causes a problem and what users need to be aware of when browse for a Mac , on this sequence of the Macworld Podcast !

you could catch every instalment of the Macworld Podcast onSpotify , Soundcloud , thePodcasts app , orour own site .

Reviews corner

The rumor mill

Apple’s2024 iPad thunderclap : Alarger Air , OLED Pro , no more Lightning model .

Dan Moren explain how AI could takeiOS 18 and macOS 15to the next level .

Yup , iOS 18is shaping up to be aVery Big Deal .

Software updates, bugs, and problems

TheUSB - C Apple Pencilgets a mysteriousfirmware update .

iOS 17.2 beta 3 isout nowwith theJournal appand pot of new feature and changes .