Apple's week February 28

Long-time no see. I've had an avalanche of life happening this month, and my spare time has been filled with something called Kingdom Come Deliverance II. But, here I am, trying a new thing.

I've been trying to find new ways to get this blog on a more regular schedule but too much crosses over with AppleInsider work. However, we don't offer a weekly news summary, at least, not anymore. The closest thing to it is our newsletter, so check that out if you haven't.

It's simple. I want to try and make a weekly segment where I discuss some of what's going on in the news. It will primarily cover Apple, but I'll toss in some other tidbits as I see fit.

Apple Vision Pro gets Apple Intelligence

Ok, this is old news as I write this, but I haven't discussed it here yet. Apple Intelligence has finally arrived on Apple Vision Pro. It's about what you'd expect.

Thankfully Apple didn't leave anything out in this first beta, at least nothing that really matters. Siri is unchanged and notifications are the same, but everything else is here otherwise. Writing Tools gets a new interface if you're using it inside of a native visionOS interface. Image Playground is a native app, but it's still making horrific images of people with sharp teeth and crazy eyes.

That said, I am happy Apple Intelligence is finally here. It means I can run the proofread function on text I've written without needing to resort to another device, like the Mac mini via Virtual Display or iPad outside of the visionOS environment.

Apple Intelligence is slow going and not very flashy or impressive, but I'm happy about this. I want functionally useful features, not hyper-marketable nonsense that almost never does what it is supposed to. Google Gemini is a horrible lying machine and ChatGPT just isn't trustworthy on a surface level. Though, they are useful in limited circumstances as long as you treat them as unreliable at face value.

Apple doesn't have a chatbot, it isn't even competing for world knowledge and offers ChatGPT as an out. I don't view the company as "behind." It's just taking a different approach.

Amazon just announced Alexa+ and it promises a lot of more personalized features. I won't pass judgement on it yet, as it isn't even in real people's hands yet, but I'm laughing at the "Apple is behind" narrative it has reignited.

Apple isn't even competing in the same game as these other companies. It offers a private, secure AI that's not sucking up user data and keeps everything on-device or in a Private Cloud Compute that's as good as on-device.

There are some interesting and nerdy things you can do with AI that I can admit to. It's really interesting overall, even if the name is wrong and dumb. Apple's is the first that appeals to me because it is private and trustworthy. It is the first to implement ChatGPT in a way I can use too.

We'll see where this whole AI thing goes, but I think we're still in a bubble. It'll inevitably become another technology that acts in the background that people don't even talk about. Which, honestly, is a good thing. Make our lives better, but don't disrupt them.

An algorithmic mistake

If you use dictation regularly, you might have noticed an issue where saying "racist" might temporarily show "Trump." This hilarious, if unfortunate, error is very likely the result of an algorithm being oversaturated with phonetically similar words in context.

Trump's moves against DEI and otherwise overtly racist demeanor has led to increasing use of the word racist and Trump in close proximity. A lot of people use dictation. If you don't' believe me, go out in public and if people aren't chatting loudly on speaker into their phone, they're dictating a text.

As more and more people say "Trump is a racist" the algorithm is tilted towards that in context. It has gotten to the point that it can't tell if a person meant to say racist or Trump.

While Trump did comment on how he felt about Apple's DEI efforts, he never said anything about this error. I wonder why.

I will say it was funny to have our story lead to Alex Jones responding on X to say "AppleInsider is a joke."

iPhone 17 camera bar

We've seen an increasing number of rumors around a camera bar being used in the iPhone 17 lineup. While the initial renders aren't that good looking, I think it's a possibility Apple is exploring to expand available internal space as iPhones get ever thinner.

I'll admit, I'm still not convinced and I'm not a fan of the deign choice. However, I do think Apple has the ability to make the design more appealing.

I don't think Apple would make this change simply for aesthetic reasons. It'll make a clear argument for why the camera bar exists. Likely it spent a lot of time and money investigating placing more components in to the camera bar, only to realize it needs to go to the whole lineup.

A thinner iPhone 17 Pro Max without compromises beyond this bump isn't a bad deal. Let's see what Apple does.

Everything else

There's more to this week of course. The iPhone 16e is here, and I think it's a fine next step past the iPhone SE it replaces. I wrote a whole thing about how it isn't an iPhone SE 4 by a different name, and I stand by it.

Apple revealed new age verification systems, which I'm totally here for. While it shouldn't be on Apple to handle this, I like the idea of them doing it more than Meta. Apple will at least handle the responsibility well and not use it as another metric for data gathering and advertising.

Apple's shareholders rejected a request to abandon DEI and while Tim Cook says the company will comply with the law, there's no such laws yet. Trump isn't happy, but of course he isn't. He and his racist sycophants won't be happy until DEI is dead.

Check out the latest AppleInsider Podcast if you're looking for more on the week's news. William and I break down the most important stories as always. And I hope everyone is enjoying our new Controversy Corner segment. We won't stop discussing important news, but we're happy to put all the politics in one chapter so those that don't want to hear it can skip it.

As I've said, I understand that politics and global news can be exhausting. Perhaps you've come to AppleInsider for an escape where you can hear about iPhone stuff. That's fine, skip the chapter. But we're not going to stop reporting the news because it makes a few right-winged extremists unhappy or uncomfortable.

I can't promise I'll be able to do this every week, but it's my goal. I'd like to have some kind of consistency in posting to this blog, and I think this is a good way to do it. We'll see.

On a more personal note, my fitness run for the year is going strong. I completed an 8 week Fitness+ custom plan and lost about 15 pounds in the process. I'm taking a week or two to slow down before I start another. I'm really happy with having fitness and health as priorities.

Feel free to reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon to respond to this post.