It’s time for Apple Miscellany, a run down of some of the less covered happening in the Apple Universe. This week, we find out Apple is cutting costs in the Fitness+ division, a shorter Apple Pencil for the iPhone Duo didn’t make the cut, and the new Apple Watches have hidden memory onboard.
Layoffs at Apple Fitness+
Apple last week laid off a :handful” of Apple Fitness+, says Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. Gurman’s comments came in the latest edition of his weekly Power On newsletter.
“This is widely seen within the Fitness+ organization as the beginning of more drastic cost-cutting measures and other major changes to the service in the months and years ahead,” Gurman said.
Gurman believes the Peloton competitor–now overseen by services chief Eddy Cue and health leader Sumbul Desai–is not the chopping block, but it’s an easy place for Apple to look to make cuts, thanks to the service’s considerable costs, need for new content and subscriber churn rates.
A Shorter Apple Pencil
Gurman also said that although a shorter Apple Pencil for the iPhone Duo was in development, Apple dropped development due to “technical problems ahead of mass production.” The new pencil stylus was shorter than the iPad models, and it was magnetic, so it could attach to the device’s hinge.
Instead, the iPhone Duo will gain support for the existing USB-C version of the Apple Pencil later this year, supporting its use for the Duo’s external and interior screens. Enabling support isn’t a matter of simply flipping a switch, but instead requires new software to make them compatible and that will require running scads of internal tests. The company believes that support will be ready by the end of the year.
Hidden Memory in New Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 Models
A Chinese hardware researcher claims that Apple is using a 128GB NAND flash die in Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 models, despite both devices officially offering only 64GB of storage. While it is not clear as to why Apple would cripple the onboard storage, they may be reserving the space for intensive sensor data read/writes, a durability buffer, or perhaps for Apple Intelligence-related tasks.
We wont know for sure how much onboard NAND storage the Apple Watchh Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 have until teardowna expose what exactly is inside this year’s Apple wearables. It should be noted that a 128GB NAND storage profile tied to the T8320 chip for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 was discovered earlier this month.
If it does turn out that the Apple Watch’s NAND storage is indeed bigger than advertised, it won’t be the first time that Apple has done something like this. As a teardown of the 2024 M4 iPad Pro showed that, while advertised to have 8GB of physical RAM, the models actually contained 12GB of physical RAM, with only 8GB made available to the system.
