Apparently this year Apple will make us bored. Steve Jobs, who understood many things, it is no coincidence that he held his first keynote in these days, in early January. In fact, at the beginning of the year in Western countries we love to make predictions about what is to come and we want to hear reassuring voices that the new year will be a positive year full of wonders. Jobs with his keynote at Macworld brought the first basket of “gifts” for technology lovers (sixteen years ago in the basket there was the iPhone, say, and then the MacBook Air and many other novelties) and everyone was happy . It doesn’t take much, you say. But it wasn’t much at all.
With Mac, Apple is the fourth PC manufacturer in the world, third in the USA
Now, however, comes the Befana who takes away all the holidays, in the form of Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman, the most famous expert on leaks and rumors in the Apple field, one whose salary depends on the ability to pick up the signals coming from Cupertino and put them on the front page. And it seems to be all in the song by Lucio Dalla, “The year that will come”: “The old year is over, by now, but something is still wrong here”.
What’s wrong?
According to Gurman this will be the year of “Apple Reality”, Apple’s viewer. We’ll get there shortly. What is interesting is not so much this forecast, which has been going on for a few years (“Next year Apple will present its viewer” we have been hearing it for at least three years now), but the lack of news in other fields.
No revolutionary new iPads, no revolutionary new Apple Watches, no revolutionary new Apple TVs, no revolutionary new products (beyond the headset). No new AirPods. No super-powerful 27-inch iMac. No new-design MacBooks. No Mac Pro with a new design but only transition to M2 Pro and Max.
In short, nothing at all. A year of updates and boredom, boredom and updates. A new operating system for iPhone and iPad that will do much the same thing. A new operating system for Mac that still won’t give up backwards compatibility with Intel processors, maintaining the abnormal memory consumption that characterizes the last three versions of macOS.
It’s okay that there are times that revolution takes place and others that evolution takes place, but this 2023 risks being as boring as the Cretaceous, especially along the same length. With a very slow change of everything in terms of updates: let’s remember that the M2 is a processor that is simply the evolution of the M1, with a small incremental improvement, not a new processor with substantially different processing in terms of nanometers.
It will be three times Christmas and party every day
The subject changes, according to Gurman, when it comes to Apple Reality, xrOS, space visitor glasses, metaverse and all the rest. Here we don’t want to criticize Apple’s strategy in this sector or its products simply because the products aren’t there yet and we don’t have the faintest idea of what the strategy will look like. What we have seen so far of augmented reality are apps that allow, using the iPhone or iPad, to place a virtual object on a table or in a room. All Apple products, whether phones or computers, have an example at the bottom of the presentation page.
Nice, you look at it maybe twice and then you forget it exists. Just as you forget that virtual reality exists twenty minutes after buying an Oculus viewer or a Hololens. Are they good for something for normal people, like a phone or a tablet can? Probably not for now. But, as we said, it makes no sense to criticize products and strategies that we don’t know. The only thing we figured out is that the mechanism for seeing multitasking apps on iPad and Mac, i.e. Stage Manager, could finally make sense because it would be the most sensible interface for a virtual reality headset. A virtual desktop with apps on the side that allows you to switch between them. But, we said, they are our fantasies.
A little light in the night
There is the possibility that Apple will present a new HomePod of more generous dimensions than the current (and excellent) mini, which will allow you to listen to music better and more and interact with the environment.
But will this little light at a certain point in the long dark tunnel that risks being 2023 be enough to illuminate a gloomy and depressed atmosphere? A year of speed bumps and marginally changed products? Apple’s product line right now is objectively very strong. Apple has pulled a few things (a 12-inch screen ultraportable MacBook) but maybe working on a 14-15-inch screen MacBook Air like (to have a big screen at a reasonable price) or even an iPad that size. But Gurman says his informants are skeptical about actually releasing these items.
The only thing that seems to be that Apple really wants to release abundantly in the course of 2023, will it be boredom? And the iPhone with the USB-C connector, of course. But do we really have to settle?
