Apple on Tuesday sent out invites for a special event dubbed “Spring Loaded,” for April 20, 2021. As with all events in the past year, this one will be held online. You can watch the event on any Apple device from Apple’s web site or on your Apple TV.
There are a lot of rumors swirling about what we be announced including iPads and the long anticipated AirTags, but we’ll have to wait for another week to find out for sure.
Siri has apparently prematurely revealed that Apple plans to hold an event on Tuesday, April 20, where the company is expected to reveal brand new iPad Pro models and possibly its long-awaited AirTags trackers.
The #AppleEvent special hashtag does not yet seem to be enabled, so the announcement is still not official. Makes me wonder if Apple will turn this particular Siri response off on the server side, or if it will slowly make its way to my other devices.
My bet is on the latter, given that the date is a week away. Invites forthcoming later today?
In the Apple TV+ series debuting June 4th, King starts at the end of a romance, exploring where devotion took Lisey and Scott Landon—what it cost them and what it gave them. King being King, he weaves a stalker thriller and an otherworldly supernatural mystery into his heartfelt love story.
Stephen King has quietly become a top notch TV series creator, getting better with each new kick at the can. This one is definitely on my short list to watch. Lots of details in the Vanity Fair piece.
Big fan of Mythic Quest. Big fan of Ted Lasso. But the trailers for both (back before I’d watched either) left me cold. Neither was able to capture the essence of the show, the magic that drew you in.
With that in mind, watch the trailer below. I can’t wait for the special episode that will drop Friday, and the season start three weeks after that. And if you are new to Mythic Quest, ignore the trailer, dig into Season 1, Episode 1.
The three questions raised by The Verge’s Alex Castro:
Is the exclusive App Store a necessary part of iOS?
The heart of the case is the so-called App Store tax — a 30 percent surcharge Apple collects on purchases made through the App Store. Fortnite was kicked off the App Store for dodging that tax by installing its own payment system, which is forbidden under App Store rules. Now, Epic is making the case in court that the rules should never have been put in place.
How is the iPhone different from a PlayStation?
One of the biggest challenges for Epic is that the App Store model is fairly widespread. Consoles like Xbox and PlayStation operate on basically the same playbook, delivering games digitally through an open but curated digital store that’s locked to the hardware and controlled by the manufacturer. That alone doesn’t make it legal, but it adds credence to Apple’s claim that the App Store lockdown isn’t trapping consumers. If you don’t want to play Fortnite on an iPhone, you can play it on a console or a PC. Some devices come locked into a specific distribution channel and some don’t, giving users the chance to vote with their feet.
How much control can Apple exert over its hardware?
Underneath everything else, Apple is facing a profound question of how much control it can exert over its own devices. For critics, this is Apple’s original sin, using industrial and graphic design to lure customers into a walled garden, then locking the gate. For fans, it’s Apple’s genius, integrating hardware and software to deliver a more purposeful and powerful user experience. But it all rests on Apple’s ability to maintain a closed stack, using hardware integration to control what happens in software.
The quotes are just the start of Alex’s take on each question, just a taste. I found this a solid read, helped me get my head around an incredibly complex set of topics. Worth reading, and worth reading the comments/responses that follow.
