What's next

Steve Jobs famously said that if anyone was going to cannibalize Apple’s products, he wanted it to be Apple itself.

The examples of Apple successfully devouring its own gadgets are plentiful, the most famous perhaps being the iPhone supplanting the iPod.

And it may soon be the iPhone’s turn to be gobbled up.

As the iPhone approaches its 20th birthday (my God, has it really been that long?), there are no immediately obvious products that might do it in.

That’s not likely to be true for long, however. The CEO of Nothing, an upstart U.K.-based smartphone brand with a reputation for striking design, recently suggested that today’s smartphones will be succeeded by handsets that run a single, AI-powered app.

Or perhaps next-gen devices will be some kind of AI pin, pendant or necklace, as Jony Ive and Sam Altman recently suggested?

What about smart glasses, perhaps the most likely form factor to replace smartphones?

Before you scoff, check out this post by our writer Ed Hardy, who sketches out a plausible timeline for Apple’s own cannibalistic smart glasses. Ed argues that Apple’s taking a two-pronged approach, and that early, lightweight versions will debut sooner than you think. It’s an interesting read.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• I’d like to thank Incogni for sponsoring this week’s newsletter. Incogni runs a well-reviewed service that scrubs the web of your personal info — and the company is offering an exclusive discount for our readers with code CULTOFMAC.

• Tim Cook may be breathing a sigh of relief today: A U.S. trade court blocked President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

• The Preview app on your Mac is good for minor tweaks to PDF documents, but if you want to make complex changes, you're going to need a dedicated PDF editor. Check out UPDF 2.0 from our friends at Superace. The updated app brings a host of AI-powered features to an already feature-packed PDF editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone.

• If you’ve ever harbored dreams of making a fortune with a fart app, now’s as good a time as any to jump into app development. According to Apple, app devs are making more money than ever.

• While the upcoming iPhone 17 Air will be super-thin and light, its sibling device, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, will be anything but. A new video out of China, and based on a dummy unit, gives us a peek at what this big boy might be like in-hand.

• The super-capable M4 Mac mini just dropped to its lowest-ever price. Spending less than $500 for this machine is a crazy-good deal.

• Talking of AI-powered apps taking over your devices, check out the X post below that showcases Sky, an AI app for your Mac coming this summer.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

^{A message from Superace}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

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