Apple’s being walloped by regulators, and it’s increasingly clear most of the tech press doesn’t understand antitrust. Fortunately, Ian Betteridge does, so go and read his blog.

My take, honestly, is all this just makes me feel a bit sad. I like a lot of what Apple does. Even if I didn’t write about Apple, I’d have an iMac, an Apple TV or two, an iPhone, and an iPad. But Apple as it grows (and is expected by the markets to continue doing so) has overreached in some cases, and enacted dark patterns elsewhere.

I imagine a lot of people are rushing to defend Apple by default because, in part, they remember when the company nearly winked out of existence. Others, perhaps, because the company does objectively do an awful lot of things really well, and seems to care more than most rivals about what matters. But that doesn’t excuse the bad stuff, nor that in some cases Apple has decided it’s OK to just be ‘least bad’. That isn’t good enough.

I don’t want an MLS nav item forced on me in Apple TV. I want to install Retroarch on my iPhone. I don’t want ads in the App Store trying to trick me into installing something other than what I searched for. And I don’t want devs of apps I love to partake in a lottery with every single update they file. Small things, of course, but all of these little pieces – from millions and millions of users, businesses and creators – add up.

If nothing else, what happens next will be interesting. But mostly, I hope it will be beneficial, leading to a better future for consumers and Apple alike, even if the Apple that emerges is in key ways different from the one we have today.

As ably documented by Michael Tsai, Apple Arcade’s future is looking rocky. This comes from reports Apple’s rowing back on new content and paying less to developers.

Honestly, I always thought Apple Arcade was a strange move for Apple, given that it’s never seemed there was anyone sufficiently senior at the company who genuinely cares about gaming. Music and typography are infused in Apple’s DNA. Gaming is too often presented as something cool to show off the power of new devices, or comes across from Apple execs as a weird thing people waste time on. No new M-series chip or gaming toolkits will get us past that.

However, specifically on Apple Arcade, while I thought it was a weird decision, I’m nonetheless glad it exists. Because it’s objectively good. Sure, people who claim the only ‘real games’ are AAA (and who even attempt to dismiss the Switch, let alone mobiles) won’t give it a chance. But there are loads of fun titles, even if much of the service’s strength now lies in ‘+’ fare (existing App Store releases minus ads/IAP) rather than exclusives. It’s superb for kids who like mobile games (again: no ads; no IAP). And there are still interesting new things to play. (I mean, Arcade added a pinball game at one point. And pinball is pretty niche!)

For me, the main error Apple Arcade made was during its launch. It offered too much, too soon. It was simultaneously overwhelming and somehow yet made people think they could blaze through everything and instantly demand more. And more didn’t come for a long while, and so users felt they weren’t getting good value, even though Arcade at the time cost only five bucks per month.

Retention then became the driver, as subscribers dried up, extinguishing much of the original direction of the service (quality; games as art; experiments; uniqueness) for friendlier and grindy fare that is too often akin to freemium with the IAP ripped out. It’s hard to see where things go now. Maybe the future of Apple Arcade will be mostly + games, thereby turning it into Apple’s equivalent of Google Play Pass, rather than a place to exhibit the pinnacle of mobile games.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but Apple Arcade feels like the same old story with Apple and gaming: what success occurs is in many ways despite rather than because of Apple’s decisions and direction. I do hope things improve. I won’t hold my breath. Had I been doing so with Apple and gaming, I’d have expired within a year of getting my first Mac, way back in the 1990s.

I recently spotted an interesting post by Benedict Evans on Threads. He argued people spent 20 years dreaming about pen computing, but now Apple has a flawless pen computer, it’s “pretty much useless for anything except actually drawing”. He therefore concludes: “Pen computing didn’t happen. I do wonder how far that is applicable to voice, natural language processing and chat bots – the fact they didn’t work was a trap, because even now that they do work, they might be a bad idea.”

I have a different take. If people did once dream ‘pen computing’ was the next step, it feels more like Apple subverted this by removing the need for a specific input device. Instead, you just use your fingers. ‘Pen computing’ became a subset of that, for people who needed more control and precision. Arguably, then, ‘pen computing’ is a massive success, because what it evolved into is how the majority of people use computers – that is, touchscreens on smartphones.

The takeaway here for me isn’t so much that Benedict is wrong nor that I’m right. It’s that you cannot predict the details of the next big thing. We don’t know with any certainty how things will play out, even when the broad brushstrokes become obvious and later largely come to pass.

So with voice, will it work? Quite possibly. But not necessarily in the specific ways we currently imagine it will.

Boys will be boys. I’m not sure there’s another phrase that infuriates me quite so much. Since my daughter’s attended school, that’s only cemented the phrase’s place in making me fume.

The first specific moment was during a pre-school open day. Parents could attend the grounds. Outside, boys were zooming along on cars and trikes, directing them at girls and scaring the life out of them. A member of staff looked on, smiling. “Boys will be boys”, she said.

In infant (5–7) school, I became aware for the first time of how girls were used to moderate the behaviour of boys. Classes were broadly evenly split by gender. When possible, a boy and a girl would be paired for tasks. My daughter is now in juniors (8–11) and this continues. The argument for this pairing is boys otherwise misbehave. Throughout, my daughter has complained that most (not all) boys muck around while she’s trying to complete a task. She and other girls are regularly told off for trying to tell boys to be quiet.

At her infant school leaving event, the teachers sweetly said something positive about every child. But it was notable how many adjectives along the lines of ‘funny’ and ‘silly’ were used for boys. For girls, ‘sensible’ was far more common.

And through to yesterday. My daughter came home from school quite upset. During lunch, some boys had decided to throw horse chestnuts at a group of girls. My daughter was hit in the leg repeatedly by their spiny cases, to the degree she was bleeding and this morning has marks that look like a horrible rash down one leg from all the puncture wounds. The initial response from a teacher she told: boys will be boys.

Talking to other parents, all the above isn’t ubiquitous but it’s far from uncommon. And while I’m not an advocate of single-gender education, I can see why it has advocates. As it is, the attitude elsewhere that so often pervades is to our wider detriment. Boys are taught that they can get away with things girls can’t, and push the limits. Girls are scolded when they step out of line and for a moment are not ‘sensible’. And any response to physical harm that’s casually dismissed as ‘boys will be boys’ isn’t setting anyone up for a good future. Society needs to do better.

In 2012, I fell ill. Abrupt dizziness. I felt like I’d been drinking heavily, and had no idea what was going on.

Being a logical type, I looked at changes in my life around that time. It took a full day before I realised the only major change had been updating my Mac to OS X Lion. The full-screen animations were making me sick. Fortunately, I could avoid the worst of Lion’s effects when I knew they were the problem, and third-party apps subsequently dealt with the issue entirely.

And then iOS 7 happened. In an instant, Apple’s smartphone switched its familiar but largely static interface to a minimalist effort packed full of animations. Parallax wobbled about on the Home Screen. Folders blasted towards your face at incredible speed. Within half an hour, I realised I couldn’t use my iPhone.

I wasn’t alone. In a piece for The Guardian, I spoke to several people who were suffering, along with spokespeople for vestibular disorder societies who confirmed this was a real problem that could potentially impact millions. I received personal messages from many more folks desperate for a solution.

The piece was widely shared. Online, I faced significant scepticism. People noted I wrote about mobile games, and so how could these animations affect me? But by that point I’d rapidly learned with vestibular accessibility – in fact, any accessibility – that everyone is different.

With vestibular conditions, some people are floored by parallax, but it doesn’t affect others. Some can cope with iOS folder animations. For others, it might mean being dizzy for a few minutes – or a few days. Personally, I can enjoy motion-based entertainment where I can anticipate what’s next – roller coasters; driving games – but am knocked back by abrupt animation I cannot prepare for and that takes up a significant portion of my field of view.

The article – and presumably other feedback – must have reached suitably senior people at Apple, because fixes subsequently arrived. They weren’t total, but they also weren’t an end point. Over the years since, I’ve swapped quite a few messages with Apple’s accessibility team. One involved slide transitions for nested menus on iPhone. In my sole live WWDC, I was fortunate to attend an accessibility session where it was revealed the animation could be disabled in the Settings app. Reader, I may have shed a tear.

It’s ten years since that Guardian article was published. Accessibility remains an odd beast. Far too many people consider accessibility to be solely about helping people with vision issues to use technology. But increasingly we do see a wider understanding of accessibility, in that it needs to be for everyone – something I wrote about for the dearly departed MacUser back in 2015. That we now have accessible games controllers is a genuinely exciting development.

However, I’d still like more software developers to bake in accessibility as a default. Start with an accessible foundation, rather than plug gaps later. But I do appreciate companies from the tiniest indie to massive corporations increasingly take this subject seriously, including catering for people with vestibular conditions. And I hope if you have any accessibility concerns yourself, you’ll be met with the kindness I’ve received from Apple’s teams.

Speaking of, that action button screen on the new iPhones is a vestibular trigger. Time to write another quick email…