We got news that Apple has settled the App Store fee dispute with the European Union, which is good. If Apple can get out of this mess with a negotiated deal instead of years of litigation and penalties, they should consider themselves ahead of the game.

When I first saw the headline, however, I was hoping it meant a more global agreement with the European Union. I talk to European Apple enthusiasts every day in the MacSparky Labs, and they are all incredibly frustrated that Apple fails to release features in the EU that are available elsewhere.

I’m not going to pretend to know who’s to blame, but European citizens and Apple customers are the ones paying the price.

Back in my days as a lawyer, I was a party to enough ongoing negotiations to know that the people outside the negotiations have no clue what’s actually going on. But I can hope this is merely a first step and that my European Apple-using friends can get access to Siri AI sooner rather than later.

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For some time now, I’ve believed that while the Vision Pro is on a slow burn at Apple, its future was certain. The incoming CEO, John Ternus, has said several times that he believes this is part of Apple’s future.

We’ve heard lots of rumors about them working on a pair of glasses in addition to the immersive product. Finally, the content for the Vision Pro seems to be flowing pretty steadily. I’m looking forward to the baseball games we’re getting later this month in immersive video.

Last week, we got news of layoffs. And of course that gets you thinking. Right now, Apple’s dealing with a hardware and supply chain crunch where everything is more expensive and harder to get. Vision Pro is the proof-of-concept product that isn’t mainstream.

I’ve never been convinced Apple wanted to sell a lot of these, even when they weren’t dealing with exorbitant prices and supply chain nightmares. Add this to the recent news of layoffs on the Vision Pro team, and I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a slow-burn product, but instead an on-pause product.

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We got a nice surprise from Apple this morning with some new Macs. Those of you waiting for that M5 Ultra Mac Studio are finally going to get your wish. You can get the M5 Ultra with up to 36 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU cores. Interestingly, memory tops out at 512 GB. That’s the same ceiling the M3 Ultra had, and it’s the configuration Apple dropped back in March. There’s no mystery why. The M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, up from the $4,000 entry price for the M3 when it launched. Again, no surprise.

If your needs are more modest, the Mac mini also got updated to M6 and M5 Pro variants. That’s right, we can now buy an M6 Mac.

The mini also took a price hike. The base model is $899 now, up from $599 last fall and $699 since June. I’m glad Apple released these things. I expect the AI gang will buy them like hotcakes.

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