Apple Clips got “Fredo”’d

Apple has announced the end of support for Clips. It was a funny (and fun) little app that helped iPhone and iPad users speedrun the production of peppy little social media videos, using the stuff they captured on their Apple devices.

Clips has been around since 2017. This announcement caught me by surprise. I thought it had been banished to the land of ghosts and winds ages ago.

It was a fine app! But even Apple sometimes releases things that wind up like the 2018 revival of Murphy Brown.

Exactly. That was a thing that really happened. You probably heard about it at the time. Then you went and completely forgot about it.

That doesn’t mean “Clips” (or Season 11 of Murphy Brown) shouldn’t have existed. It was a decent enough idea and people worked hard to make it a reality. There’s such a thing as a well-made product that just doesn’t have a big audience.

Apple Clips just got “Fredo”’d, that’s all. Even Apple’s portfolio has plenty of examples of apps and services that are Perfectly Fine, that have their fans, without a doubt…but it’s universally understood that they will only continue to live on while certain conditions — beyond its control — remain still in force.

Fredo Corleone knew that Don Michael Corleone wouldn’t and couldn’t kill him while their mother was still alive. An app like Clips usually goes away because a key piece of the operating system or its APIs undergoes a big change, and the thing no longer works. There wasn’t anybody at Apple willing to fight for the resources to keep it going. That’s when Clips started muttering its Hail Marys in the back of the rowboat.

This got me thinking about other Apple apps and services. Most of us imagine an aspirational version of Apple. This version of the company (which often intersects with the real thing…but not always) doesn’t compete in a marketplace unless and until they’ve figured out a way to add value. What kind of smartphone can they make that an unassailable industry titan such as Blackberry or Nokia can’t?

With the benefit of hindsight, I think most of their failures happen when they churn out “another one of those.”

Clips was “another one of those.” Social media users who like to zazz things up to a doubleplus degree already have their fave video-generators. Those who don’t are happy with whatever tools Instagram or TikTok provides in the app. Clips didn’t seem like a step forward, or even an alternative enhanced with Apple’s unique MSG.

Apple Invites is still with us. Arguably, this one is still fresh on the vine: it was released early this year. But it feels like Apple abandoned it years ago. It still doesn’t seem like an actual Thing, does it? It feels like a way for Apple to show off Apple Intelligence. And it’s also a swell opportunity for Apple to remind iPhone users that each of their their lives would be so much easier if could strongarm their friends and family members into dropping Android and Windows and giving themselves up willingly to the Apple ecosystem.

Is Invites any better than Partiful or Evite? From a privacy point of view…oh, wow, yes, absolutely. That’s Apple’s de-facto value-add. But otherwise? It can’t compete with services that are being run as if the future of the whole company depends on winning new users and turning them into fans.

Apple sometimes makes this same kind of curious move with its hardware, too. Apple will sell you a HomePod, sure. You might get it home and break it out of its factory seals and discover it’s been sitting on a shelf for so long that it contains a promotional postcard urging you to go out and see Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker. But, sure, they’ll sell you one.

And yet it’s “one of those.” A smart speaker, made by Apple. As Caesar said to one of his generals when he was presented with some Perfectly Okay spoils of war: “Nice. Not thrilling. But…nice.”

So it just kind of loiters there in the product lineup, bereft of significant updates, to hold that space for something To Be Named Later that Apple hopes will make more sense.

I cannot end this post before I scroll through the list of Apple apps that are still shipping, to see if I can spot one or two that ought to steer clear of rowboats.

Does Apple care about the iWork suite, or iMovie or GarageBand, any more?

I’ve just taken a casual trip through their update histories. Apple seems to have parked them in Maintenance mode. They get a little dust-off every time there’s a major OS update, or when the iPhone learns a new trick that the apps are going to have to support.

Otherwise…nada. Apple seems to have thrown in the towel. These apps played big roles in the revival of the company under Steve Jobs. iMovie and GarageBand were responsible for a whole generation of kids-now-adults learning the language of music and visual storytelling while they were still learning longhand. Keynote is still very much an all-star presentation app.

But fandom inside and outside of Apple isn’t enough to keep these things going. They’re trapped in a vicious circle. iWork can’t compete with fully-mature and exactly-as-free cloud-based tools like Google Workspace, which run on 99% of desktop and mobile devices. And the teams at Apple that support these apps aren’t going to get the resources required to elevate these apps into world-dazzling alternatives without that kind of commercial audience.

And that’s a damned shame. I haven’t touched Pages or Numbers in a true live-fire situation in God knows how many years. But they show off what a truly bespoke Mac or iOS app can accomplish that an app that runs a universal UI inside a platform-specific wrapper absolutely cannot. When they were released, these apps served to showcase the old-fashioned frumpiness of Windows. They could, once again, help demonstrate to the world that Apple has a unique and important point of view about how apps should work, and how apps should work together.

But it just isn’t going to happen. In its day, Apple’s Aperture was the best RAW editor available anywhere, and also a celebration of All Things Mac. But at some point, its time ran out. Apple knew that its cancellation would instantly convert millions of loyal Apple users into a nearly-equal number of grudging Adobe users. But it didn’t matter.

And then there’s “Chess” and “Graphing Calculator.” But they’re not going anywhere.

What kind of dirt do these two apps have on Apple? Are they like J. Edgar Hoover or something? Nobody wants to get rid of them, and find out?

Maybe the reason why Steve Jobs never put license plates on his cars was because he was scared out of his mind about what might happen to him or his family if Chess or Graphing Calculator would run the plate and learn his home address.

Photo Booth doesn’t have that kind of juice. It’s just doing what a lot of lifers do at huge companies: keeping its head down and hoping that if the management team has completely forgotten that it exists, then they won’t remember its name during the next round of cuts.