Is 2024 the year Apple gets everything right?

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. 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 give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

A very good year

It’s been a tough couple of years for Apple watchers, with dull iPhone and Apple Watch refreshes, uninspiring Mac launches, and little of note from the iPad and AirPods departments. The product pipeline slowed down, and the things coming out of it lost their sparkle.

There was a reason for this, of course, and that is the Vision Pro project. This moonshot product launch sucked in developmental resources and marketing focus alike, and for some at Apple Park, it must have felt like the entire company had turned into a mixed-reality specialist. Which made sense, because Vision Pro represents the future like no other Apple product. Apple needed to plan for life after the iPhone and was wisely prepared to sacrifice some excitement in 2023 to secure it in 2033.

But Vision Pro is out now, indeed the hardware was completed a long while ago, and while work on the line will continue-engineers will now be focusing on that important cheaper version-it is unlikely ever again to dominate employees’ time and energy the way it did last year. This frees things up for what now looks like a far more productive year for the company. Indeed 2024 could be remembered in years to come as one of Apple’s best, and not just because it saw the launch of the headset that would set up the company for the decade to come.

While we’re still waiting on a major physical redesign in the Mac space, for example, we’ve already seen a sensible rejig of the MacBook line. The arrival of the M3 MacBook this spring essentially completed the Apple silicon transition, removing confusion and ensuring there is a machine for every need and budget. (Well, within reason.) Okay, this didn’t count as an exciting announcement, but it was certainly more meaningful than any of the M2 launches.

We haven’t seen any iPads yet (although that could conceivably have changed depending on when you’re reading this) but here too Apple reportedly has a clever announcement to make—namely, that the landscape selfie camera, first rolled out on the 10th-gen iPad in 2022 and inexplicably held back from the rest of the line, is going to become the standard. This is both sensible and wildly overdue: iPads are far more commonly used for video chats in landscape orientation than for selfies in portrait, and the only reason to keep the camera on the short edge was to avoid component overlap with the Apple Pencil connector. Needless to say, that kind of cop-out wasn’t very Jony Ive of Apple, and we’ll be very glad to see the end of such a compromise.

But the real breakthroughs for Apple in 2024 won’t be hardware. They will come in the software and specifically, AI space, where the company has been lagging behind its rivals for years. iOS 18, which will be announced in June and roll out to iPhones around the world in the fall, is set to focus on generative AI. That means improvements in a wide variety of apps, and indeed in the development of apps, but AI is most sorely needed in one area of Apple’s portfolio: Siri.

Siri has been terrible for as long as I can remember, and I’ve driven myself mad writing articles complaining about this fact. If Apple’s work in AI results in a passable Siri in 2024, that wouldn’t just be a good year. It would be a miracle.

Foundry

Trending: Top stories

New iPads are coming. Does anyone care?

Apple’s Epic rollercoaster ride is trapped in a full-on freefall, the Macalope has noticed.

Jason Snell argues that an open Apple isn’t good for anyone.

While Jason Cross has thought up 9 ways Apple can improve Vision Pro right now.

The clock is ticking on ad-free Apple TV+, so enjoy it while you can.

Apple will allow iPhone app downloads on the web in the EU-but there’s a catch.

Podcast of the week

Apple’s latest addition to its Mac lineup is the M3 MacBook Air, and on this episode of the Macworld Podcast, we talk about why the Air is probably the best laptop for you!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

• M2 vs M3 MacBook Air: Is the cheapest model good enough?
• Adobe Photoshop Elements review: updated for 2024.
• Best Mac displays
• Best NAS drives for Mac

The rumor mill

Apple to finally fix 13-year-old error in the iPad’s design, report claims.

Apple’s first big AI innovation in 2024 may be… smarter ads. Try not to be disappointed.

The M3 MacBooks are already old news as Apple gets to work on the M4 lineup.

Listen up: AirPods Pro to get ‘hearing aid mode’ in iOS 18.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

There may be hope for Apple Watches sold with disabled blood-oxygen sensors.

If you use GarageBand on your Mac, there’s a rare—and critical—security update.

If macOS Sonoma 14.4 has caused issues with USB devices, here’s a possible fix.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.