Apple is a company known for innovation; for groundbreaking products that revolutionise how we think about tech by giving us things we never realised we wanted or needed. And what we want right now are basic web overviews of celebrities like Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and Lionel Messi, apparently.
Even long-time Apple fans have been left scratching their heads after the tech giant debuted Snapshot by Apple, a new web page that provides limited details about a handful of celebrities and bands, and links to related content on Apple apps. A dedicated URL for this? Really? One of the best Apple products it is not.
"Your favorites, at a glance," reads the header on Snapshot by Apple. The strapline tells us we can, "Discover more about the artists, actors, and athletes you love across Apple."
Click on a celeb, and you'll be taken to their profile, which is... we could say sleek and minimalist, but what we would really mean is extremely basic.
The Dua Lipa page (see the gallery below) provides a brief bio of the artist and tells us her date of birth and that her genre is pop. There are links to her latest single on Apple Music, interviews on Apple Podcasts and films that feature her music on Apple TV.
The page isn't personalised (at least for now), so they're not actually 'your favourites' – they're Apple's favourites. It reminds me of when I had to build a database in a high school computer science class back in 1996, only Snapshot on Apple isn't even searchable.
Apple hasn't said anything about the existence of this web page yet, so I'm presuming it's a work in progress that will eventually gain more functionality. After Apple's controversial Apple Intelligence rollout, it's no longer surprising to see the company set something live before it's ready. But people are already expressing some scathing opinions about the site.
"I'm not sure what the feature equivalent of low hanging fruit is, but this has been laying on the forest floor for quite a bit," one person writes on Reddit.
"Man, this is a company that is running out of ideas. There is literally nothing of value here unless you are one of the handful of celebrities they are featuring," someone else complains. "You can't even learn much about them."
People are comparing it to other Apple innovations that "nobody asked for", like its 'slofies' (slow-motion selfies). "First the memojis, then the invitation shit and now this. They’re loosing it," one person writes.
The verdict is just as harsh over in the comments over on the dedicated Apple news site MacRumors. "Apple has truly lost its way. Stop cozying up to the celebs and start innovating again," one person demands. "I don't know how I got by without 'Celeb Watch'. I can just feel my productivity increasing," another person mocks.
Snapshot feels like it could be the 'about' section on a service like Apple Music, or perhaps the germ of a plan to give users curated news feeds to try to coax them away from social media.
Perhaps the idea is that it will eventually feed across all of Apple's apps and pop up in Siri responses rather than serve as a site that people would choose to browse. For the moment, it's an ad page for Apple services that doesn't offer much of a reason for visiting it.
For more Apple news, see the rumours about the iPhone 20 (yes, already). For UI design news, don't miss the debate about the latest Snapchat redesign fail.
