Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to read it during lunch or dinner hours as well.
Real life is not like TV
One of the good things about “Ted Lasso” — a show that’s covered “nice” quite extensively — is its willingness to embrace the complexities of sports and life. The team doesn’t always win; players don’t always stick together; their supporters do not always use plain language; the characters suffer and grow in various ways over the three seasons; and their fictional world contains as much racism, homophobia and general unpleasantness as ours. I applaud this honest approach to storytelling. But I will also insist on the fact that it has its limits.
Yes, the team (incoming spoilers) are relegated from the Premier League at the end of the first season. But they do well afterwards, even (more spoilers) beating their bitter rivals in a climactic tabletop showdown in the very last episode. Yes, the characters face prejudice, mental health issues, and relationship worries, but only within the neat parameters of a sitcom redemption arc. Gay characters come out and are supported by their colleagues. Prima-donna attackers learn the value of teamwork. Even cynical journalists are charmed by self-deprecating folk humor to a degree that would be surprising to say the least in our world.
What I’m trying to say is that, for all the facade around “problems,” Ted Lasso remains a sanitized version of the messy, ethically ambiguous, and often frustrating and unfair world of professional sports. And I think that makes for an illuminating demonstration of why sports and Apple are always going to make strange bedfellows.
Take cricket, for example. For selfish reasons, I have long cherished the hope that Apple would buy the broadcasting rights to international cricket, and maybe one day it will. But it’s a maddeningly complex sport that doesn’t create neat stories.
The rules (or technically the laws) are almost impossible to explain to a newcomer, and players are often accused of cheating even when they follow them to the letter. New franchise leagues have flooded the sport with money, but the three most powerful nations are doing their best to rack it all up. Verbal abuse and physical intimidation are woven into the fabric of the game, while its history is inextricable from colonialism and the British class system. It is a sport riddled with racism, sexism, privilege, mental disintegration and greed. It is also, when the stars align, one of the most beautiful and thrilling human activities you can see: as memorably described by the great English captain Douglas Jardine (not himself stranger to controversy), battle and service and sport and art.
I’m no polymath when it comes to sports, but I suspect and hope fans of, say, tennis or rugby league will recognize their own favorites in Jardine’s description. Sport is a wonderful thing. But it’s also deeply messy. This is often, as we say these days, problematic.
Does this sound like something that would fit in with Apple’s carefully curated brand identity? Can you imagine Tim Cook being okay with football hooliganism, blood doping and threats of a broken arm? This, remember, is a company that, like a 1952 dinner party host, prohibits developers from writing apps about politics, sex, or religion. If I wrote an app that simply listed the most offensive cricket slurs, I sincerely doubt it would be approved. Or, for that matter, the one repeating the “jokes” that Asian cricketers would have been subjected to in the Yorkshire dressing room a few (but not enough) years ago. And unlike Ted Lasso, the perpetrators of this abuse haven’t properly redeemed themselves in time for a season finale.
Then again, if the aggressiveness and greed of professional athletes aren’t enough to put off Apple’s brand consultants, perhaps they will be dissuaded by its whims. Football’s hot property remains, as always, Lionel Messi, who is arguably (and also in fact) the greatest player of his era. Messi must now be richer than some of the smaller countries, thanks to Apple and Adidas luring him to the United States with profit-sharing deals (as detailed in a fascinating and detailed article by The Athletic). Apple is certainly making the most of the signing, broadcasting his Inter Miami unveiling on Sunday, his first training session this week and planning an all-out blitz for his games. But that doesn’t mean his arrival will be a success. Football history is littered with big flops. Messi could lose form, get injured or simply fail to capture the imagination of the American public. And sometimes, unfortunately, self-confidence is not enough.
Foundry
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Here are three Macs you shouldn’t buy from Apple and three that you should buy instead.
The EU battery rule could change your iPhone forever.
If Apple is worth 3 trillion dollarswhy does the user experience feel so cheap?
Dan Moren rounds up 3 missing Vision Pro features that will play a a key role in the future.
The rumor mill
Apple is three years away from releasing its first foldable MacBook.
A Giant 32-inch iMac reportedly being tested, but not coming any time soon.
Podcast of the week
We are going to change with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. But is this the change we really need? In this episode of the igamesnews Podcast, we talk about Siri as we approach a future filled with tools based on artificial intelligence! Stay tuned.
You can watch every igamesnews podcast episode on Spotify, Soundcloud, Podcasts app or our own site.
Software updates, bugs and issues
We explain why you should wait before installing the iOS 17 public beta on your iPhone.
And here are five iOS 17 features that won’t be ready in time for launch this fall.
Apple published, withdrew, and then reissued a emergency security patch for an exploited flaw.
New macOS malware “ShadowVault” stole passwords, cryptos and credit card data.
Chrome users can finally access iCloud passwords in macOS Sonoma.
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you want to receive regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook to discuss the latest news from Apple. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
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