Reacting to watchOS 10 and Other Stuff I Missed

Thankfully, I have Rob

Bear with me — I’m about to hit you with a few excuses.

I am spinning a lot of plates.

As if operating one YouTube channel wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to spin up another one. This is in conjunction with running the Medium Academy (of which we’re halfway through the first cohort), a commitment to writing daily, an increased focus on publishing social media content for LinkedIn and Twitter, and everything that goes with running a solopreneur business.

I’ve outsourced a bunch of tasks this year. Short-form video editing, PR, design, and publishing duties are all undertaken by people who are far better at those tasks than I. However, there’s another task which I haven’t technically outsourced, but which I regularly receive help with.

It’s keeping on top of Apple news and rumours. I’m acutely aware of how daft that sounds given my recent grumblings about the lack of anything interesting emerging from Cupertino in recent months. However, during last night’s recording of Eight or Sixteen, my podcast co-host, Rob, revealed three pieces of Apple rumour mill murmurings that are actually pretty interesting and about which I had zero knowledge.

He does this a lot.

This is my reaction to the stuff I wasn’t aware of. Sorry, I’m late to the party.

Apple halted M2 production

According to reports on various tech websites and from allegedly reliable sources in Korea, Apple apparently started the year by ‘halting’ the production of its M2 chips.

This was, we’re told, down to a slump in global demand for new MacBooks. It wasn’t a brief pause in production, either — this was, if we can believe the reports, a down-tools-and-do-something-else moment which continued into February.

Once production of the M2 resumed later that month, it apparently only did so at half capacity. Bad times, right?

Well, maybe — but it’s hardly surprising. Although we don’t get to see all of the numbers, Apple’s last earnings call revealed what is clearly a tumultuous time for its sales performance. While iPad revenue was up by 30% (due in no small part to the new M2 iPad Pro models), overall revenue was down around 5% year-on-year, owing to iPhone supply chain issues and a $3.2 billion drop in Mac sales.

During the call, Tim Cook referred to a “challenging” situation for the Mac due to it residing within an industry that is “contracting”. Although, his refreshingly honest surmise that this, basically, means it’ll be “a little rough in the short term” says everything we need to know about Mac sales right now.

No M3 in the 15-inch MacBook Air

This one has stumped me completely. According to Rumour Mill Ninja, Mark Gurman, Apple won’t be putting an M3 chip into the rumoured 15-inch MacBook Air. Instead, it’ll be powered by a variant of the existing M2 chip.

I was convinced that we’d see an M3 chip in the 15-inch MacBook Air. It made total sense; we’re approaching a year since the M2 chip first made an appearance in the redesigned 13-inch MacBook Air and the arrival of its successor would act as great fanfare for the new form factor.

Whether this is due to the aforementioned production challenges, or Apple’s desire to save the M3 chip for something else is anyone’s guess, but it does lessen the impact of the new, large-screened MacBook Air if it ever sees the light of day.

Revolutionary watchOS 10

If you’ve been pinning your hopes on a big Apple Watch update this year, that might be exactly what we’re getting — even if it may not be what you were expecting.

According to Apple Rumour Mill Dark Arts Specialist Mark Gurman, Apple won’t be doing much — if anything — with the Apple Watch hardware in 2023. However, it is expected to make some pretty big changes to watchOS.

Details are extremely thin on the ground, but we can probably expect a significantly redesigned user interface and new capabilities for the Apple Watch that have previously only been available on the iPhone.

Whatever those changes are, this is welcome news. Now that I have my big, silly Apple Watch Ultra, I’m satisfied with the hardware (for now) but as polished as watchOS is, there haven’t really been any significant UI changes since its launch in 2015. watchOS has enjoyed a slow, iterative development process. Maybe it really is time to give it a significant overhaul.

Wrapping up

Thanks to Rob, I now feel fully up-to-speed with the most interesting insights into Apple’s behind-the-scenes movements and tussles.

Despite my concerns about the barren tech landscape in which we currently find ourselves, I do think we’re in for an interesting summer. The Mac, clearly, needs a serious sales injection, therefore it’ll be interesting to see what Apple does to light a fire under Tim’s spreadsheets.

Any advances made in Apple Watch land are fine by me, too. Certainly, if it gives me an excuse to take another hike with the Apple Watch Ultra, I’m game!

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Originally published at https://markellisreviews.com on April 19, 2023.