Welcome to our weekly roundup of all the Apple news you missed this week, in a handy bite-sized summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we love it with a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, but it’s also cool if you want to read it over lunch or dinner.
Good publicity, bad publicity
The most memorable Oscars in recent history took place this week. It can’t be easy to win the Academy Award for Best Actor and still have the worst night of your career, but don’t think about the other winners of the night, whose triumphs have been eclipsed by The Slap, at least in the short term.
One of the biggest winners was ‘CODA’, which took home three major awards and made history as the first Best Picture winner from a streaming service. Any justification there for Apple’s beleaguered TV+ service, which acquired and distributed the film, supported the creators’ creative choices and advocated it at the Academy. We’ve been thinking about how much credit Apple really deserves given the acquisition came after “CODA” was completed and even premiered at the 2021 Sundance Festival, but this at least highlights the quality of programming Cupertino is lining up on TV+ .
Creating a world-class streaming service may seem easy when you have pockets as deep as Apple’s, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Subscriber numbers don’t appear to be particularly healthy, as Apple’s refusal to buy a back catalog of shows and filming of the original shows was disrupted by the pandemic. Disney+ debuted around the same time, bringing with it a mountain of old movies; Apple had to start from scratch and struggled to convince subscribers with its much smaller library of (admittedly good quality) material. Right now, Disney+ is a long way forward.
But that doesn’t mean the TV+ strategy can’t work. Disney, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video all deal with a plethora of content in a way that isn’t entirely positive; if you don’t plan ahead, you can spend half the evening wading through straight-to-video sequels trying to decide what to watch. A limited, curated and consistently high-quality streaming experience can work, if you can at least get a reasonable volume of content. And a high-profile prize win could be just the thing to highlight your USP and spur or even punch a few users into subscribing.
Trending: Top Stories of the Week
The launch of the Mac Studio and Studio Display made one thing clear: Apple is at its best when it doesn’t know best.
The M1 era may be over, but there are still Apple silicone mysteries to be discovered.
iFixit’s Studio Display teardown has answered a burning question: why is it so thick?
Welp, the Macalope exclaims, it looks like the iPhone SE is just as doomed as the iPhone X.
Don’t compare Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with Apple’s M1 Ultra, begs Michael Simon.
This stunning Mac folder shortcut just changed our lives.
Here comes everything from Apple in the glorious month of April.
iOS 15.4.1 and macOS 12.3.1 bring major bug fixes and security updates.
Please stop writing April Fool’s stories
Lucky readers of this column will have 364 days of freedom ahead of them, but I’m writing it on April 1, the worst day of the year.
As I sit here, the top-ranked post on the Apple Reddit page is a claim that the company is partnering with AMD and will close its Apple Silicon division sometime in the next two years. (It’s funny, you see, because it’s not true. Aha ha ha.) And about half of my Twitter feed, and a good part of my email inbox, is made up of funny jokes from corporate PRs with a sense of humor bypassed . As Fast Company puts it, “Today is the day when brands replace retail chains with jokes, with mostly indifferent – but sometimes worse! – results.”
Saying things that aren’t true isn’t funny and never was. But this stuff is even more pointless now, in a world where objective truth was long ago abandoned in much of the media and the tech beat is largely sifting the truth out of the endless parade of rumors (see below). That Reddit post is followed by a link to a MacRumors story about foldable iPads that I think is serious, but since we’ve given up an entire day for nonsense, who can be sure?
For this reason, I hereby make a proposal. Next year, let’s all announce a permanent boycott of all companies that put out an April 1 joke, and we’ll see how seriously they are committed to the cause of lie-based comedy.
IDG
The rumor mill
Is Apple done with iOS 15? With all major features released and no beta available, it may be time to focus on iOS 16.
Apple’s two-chip strategy for the iPhone 14 makes a lot of sense.
A new iPad Pro with an M2 chip is reportedly coming this fall.
Podcast of the week
Apple TV+’s CODA won big at the Oscars, and Major League Baseball is coming. And Macworld readers have a lot of thoughts about Apple’s Magic Mouse. That’s all in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.
You can watch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app or our own site.
Bugs & Problems
Google has pushed an emergency update to Chrome for Mac to fix a critical zero-day exploit.
Apple VP Craig Federighi has provided an explanation as to why automatic iOS updates often take weeks to install.
macOS Monterey 12.3.1 is here, bringing Bluetooth and display fixes and critical security updates.
iOS 15.4.1 meanwhile fixes iPhone battery drain issues and fixes a critical security flaw.
Here’s what to do if you can’t sign in to your Google account on your Mac.
Has your Mac stopped responding? Here’s how to defrost a hanging Mac.
And if you have the opposite problem, help is at your fingertips. Here’s what to do if your Mac won’t shut down.
Video of the week
According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a hardware subscription service that will allow users to lease their devices like people who lease cars. This program would be different from the 12 and 24 month loan programs currently available. And while the release date is still months away, specs have already leaked out about the upcoming iPhone 14.
Ken Mingis, Michael Simon and Juliet Beauchamp discuss why business users benefit from a hardware subscription service and what they can expect from the iPhone 14.
And with that, we’re done for this week. If you would like to receive regular round-ups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter for breaking news stories. See you next Saturday, enjoy your weekend and stay Appley!
This post Can Apple TV+ Turn the Success of ‘CODA’s Oscar Night’ into Streaming Momentum?
was original published at “https://www.macworld.com/article/628098/apple-breakfast-april-2-2022.html”