By John Moltz

February 3, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Let them fight

Cue up your best Ken Watanabe gif because the kaiju of Apple rumors are going head to head! Samsung announces it’s getting into… some kind of reality, but it doesn’t matter because Apple’s going out of business. Again.

Dueling rumors

Ming-Chi Kuo came in hot this week with a rumor that Apple would ship a foldable iPad in 2024. The killer feature? A kickstand.

I’m not going to say that Steve Jobs would never have shipped an iPad with a kickstand, but I do believe he would have said “If you see a kickstand, they blew it” a few years before he eventually did. It is reportedly a carbon fiber kickstand, so at least it’s fancy.

I dunno, though, Ming-Chi, are you sure about this?

…I’m positive about the foldable iPad in 2024…

Oh. Wow. OK.

Case closed, then, I gue-

“Rumors: Foldable iPad in 2024 dismissed, Apple developing 21-inch ‘foldable notebook’”

OHHHH, CLEAR THE STAGE BECAUSE IT’S ON. WE GOT OURSELVES A RUMOR BATTLE.

While Ming-Chi Kuo reported on Monday that a foldable iPad with a built-in kickstand could launch in 2024, that may have been a bit optimistic. Since Kuo made this claim, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman and analyst Ross Young have both said they’ve heard nothing about such a device being in the pipeline for next year…

Your rhymes are weak
Your insight’s meek
Don’t trust rumors
From this geek

Interestingly, however, Young says that there is supply chain chatter about a 20.5-inch foldable notebook from Apple. This product could be ready for 2025, but more details are unknown at this point. Young says that the supply chain is referring to this as a “notebook,” but it’s unclear what software it will run.

[pushes glasses up on nose] Erm, the last time I checked, all notebooks are foldable. So. Erm.

As fun as rumor battles are, it kinda sounds like perhaps they’re both talking about the same device. If the big new feature is it folds for you to more easily type on a virtual keyboard, though, I’d rather it be an iPad than a MacBook without a physical keyboard. Consider me in Ming-Chi Kuo’s corner on this one.

This one goes to X

Samsung announced new phones this week and also announced it would be joining the battle to sell immersive headsets that will, purely by random coincidence, probably look exactly like whatever Apple’s look like.

…the South Korean company also confirmed that it is working on a mixed reality device with “XR” technology to compete with Apple’s rumored AR/VR headset.

So, you got your Augmented Reality. You got your Virtual Reality. And you got your…

You sure you wanna go with that name, Samsung?

…the South Korean company confirmed that it has been developing “XR” or “extended reality” technologies in a partnership with Qualcomm and Google.

That… doesn’t start with an “X”, but OK.

But the bigger issue, have you seen reality? I can understand why you’d want to augment it—put on a fresh coat of paint, some flowers, dress it up a bit—or create a new, totally different virtual reality. But do I want “Reality, the Extended Cut”? No, I do not. I already watched The Snyder Cut. Haven’t I suffered enough?

Well, welcome to the X-tended family, Samsung. Hope you survive the experience.

Meta’s Reality Labs unit, home to the metaverse ambitions, lost $4.28 billion in the fourth quarter, bringing its total operating loss for the year to $13.72 billion.

Mob boss: “This is a nice business you got here. It’d be a shame if something… Wait, this business is terrible. What did you do to lose that much money?! Jeez, I was gonna knock a couple of things over but now I just feel bad for you.”

Is Apple really sure it wants to get into this business?

Sults and results

PAGING MR. DELL. MR. MICHAEL DELL. PLEASE REPORT TO A PHONE WHERE SOMEONE IS PROBABLY CALLING YOU FOR A QUOTE ON APPLE’S QUARTERLY RETURNS.

Yes, it’s time for Apple to shut it all down and give the money back to the shareholders again (wait, isn’t it already doing that through buybacks?) because the company announced its first quarter financials this week and both revenue and profit were down from a year ago.

Sure, some may quibble and say “Uh, yeah, but they were still both the company’s second highest ever, it’s just that the year ago quarter was a huge quarter.” And others may ask “Where did you say you got your business degree again?” And still others may point to my CV where it says “The Wilkes-Barre Correspondence School and Beautician Academy”.

(No. No, it is not “accredited” by “the man”.)

The point is, Apple is clearly going out of business. One monster quarter at a time.

Hopefully it will survive long enough to ship its AR headsets and folding whatever-they-ares.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]