Vacation News Roundup: Spatial Personas, robot project, more

If you didn't catch me updating my blog page of my website a few days ago, the reason why I was gone for the week is a spring break vacation. Sorry for any inconveniences this has caused with your Apple News following. Now it's time to roundup all the news from the vacation!

First and most importantly, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, perhaps as a way to keep employees working on the next big thing after Apple said goodbye to cars a month and a half ago, Apple is thinking about personal robotics (it apparently was thought about at the same time as cars back in 2014-15). A tabletop device with a robot to move a screen around has already been developed, and a mobile robot able to follow users around the house is in the works, but don't expect any of this coming even remotely soon. For the former, the underlaying idea of a machine like this is to improve video calling by focusing on a single person in a group frame and imitate movements of the head. Apple is also looking into navigation algorithms for the robots. The project is spearheaded by the home devices group at Apple, and at least one Project Titan engineer has relocated to it. People don't really need robots like they would with iPhones today, however, but that might change in the future. There has been some internal argument over whether Apple should even keep working on projects like this, and Apple is worried whether people would be content to pay Apple prices for robots like the ones being developed.

Next, Spatial Personas. Spatial Personas, a feature that was showed off at WWDC23 but not released until this week, lets a person ((s): up to five people can be using it together) you're video calling with (Vision Pro to Vision Pro) and SharePlaying with break out of the FaceTime window and into your environment, letting you feel like they're physically near you (which is enhanced by the fact that you can make eye contact with each other, collaborate on the app SharePlayed, move around, and interact with each other). People using visionOS 1.1 or later (which includes the newly released this week visionOS 1.2 beta, with its siblings iOS 17.5 (with code of Found Moving With You notifications coming to 3rd-party item trackers!), iPadOS 17.5 (with code suggesting a squeeze gesture on a new Apple Pencil!), macOS 14.5, and watchOS 10.5), and the option will be visible while FaceTime calls are going.

After that, we have when the Q2 2024 earnings report comes. The date for that is now scheduled for Thursday, May 2. Q2 2024 stretched from January through March of this year (the fiscal year starts in October for Apple), and it is the first quarter to include Vision Pro sales (but not fully: the Vision Pro was released in the middle of the quarter on February 2). It is also the first to fully include sales of the M3 MacBook Pros and iMac announced at the end of October. The earnings report is to come at 1:30 Apple Park time (4:30 ET), with the earnings call (to include a part with a Q&A with Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri) scheduled 30 minutes later at 2:00 Apple Park time (5:00 ET). Apple (as usual) didn't provide any official guidance for the earnings, but the you can see last quarter's earnings report (which reported $119.58 billion in revenue, at least partly from the holiday season) here.

Then, we have Tim Cook selling a heck of a lot of Apple shares. To be exact, "a heck of a lot of Apple shares" was 196,410 shares, amounting to around $33.2 million if you look at the average price of the transactions, with Cook netting (taxes included) almost $16.4 million. All the shares that he sold were gotten back for a performance-based stock award, as part of a predetermined trading plan for Apple stock. After all that, the Apple-CEO-since-2011 still has almost 3.3 million shares. He said in 2015 that he was planning to "give away all his wealth".

Finally, two anniversaries with as many days between them have been celebrated this week. First, this is not a late April Fools joke: Apple really did start as a company on an April 1 (year: 1976)! I hope no one called Apple an April Fools joke back then, especially when they didn't know what it would become in the next 48 years! I will write a history of Apple post soon (I can't write it here given space issues). The other anniversary is the launch (the launch, not the announcement) of the very first iPad on April 3 (this time a 14-year anniversary). Again, the history of the iPad is coming in another article: I can't fit it here.

Well, I hoped you were interested by all this news I somehow managed to put in one blog post! Phew! So glad that I'm finally done! Bye!

By Leo