Unauthoritative Pronouncements

9to5 Mac noticed that Apple had an Apple Snapshots page up. There’s no announcement, or statement about what’s it’s supposed to be, or who it is for, so it’s unclear if there’s supposed to be more to this:

https://snapshot.apple.com/

It’s puzzling why it would appear for public consumption in the state that it’s in. It’s already being indexed by search engines, so if they didn’t mean to release it, they might want to change their robots.txt file.

Snap Judgement

First of all, it’s a grid of pre-populated celebrities that slowly translates right to left. You can’t scroll it faster, filter, or reshuffle it. More importantly, there’s no search feature at all. So I hope you like Sabrina Carpenter and Austin Butler, because they’re the most prominently displayed celebs. Maybe Apple will reshuffle these every Tuesday like they reshuffle the TV app Home tab.

The snapshots themselves are very abbreviated artist bios that provide virtually no information about the celebrities as people. You’re better off using literally any other method to look up information on these people. Apple doesn’t even link out to Wikipedia or IMdB. Why would they? You wanted to know where Austin Butler was born and he was born in “US”. Asked and answered!

All the media that’s collected on the snapshot pages is Apple-centric. It’s a funnel to the TV app, Apple Music app, and the Podcasts app. That funnel has very limited utility to people who are not Apple executives.

For instance: Austin Butler has a movie coming soon called Eddington. A title card is displayed for it, and “Coming 17 July”. Tapping it takes you to the TV app where you can watch the trailer. That’s it. There’s no way to go from this to advanced ticket sales, or the movie’s web site, or any social media about the movie. Just that one trailer. That’s all Apple offers.

If you wait more than 30 seconds to get to Cate Blanchett, you can see that her “Newest Release” is promoted — Black Bag. For some reason it took three taps, but I eventually got the Black Bag page to load in the TV app to buy or rent it from Apple.

The Movies & TV shows are not sorted chronologically, and there’s no way to filter or force them to be, either here in the web app or in the TV app.

The same goes for Podcasts, which is even worse because it also doesn’t include podcasts that I know the celebrity was on. Cate Blanchett, for example, did a whole slew of podcasts to promote Borderlands and Black Bag but you wouldn’t know it from what’s listed on her snapshot. Searching the Podcasts app will turn up some of those more recent podcasts, but it doesn’t do it chronologically either. I can’t tell if its weighting some of the results by the popularity of the podcast, or the number of downloads of an episode perhaps?

Are they doing some kind of processing to determine whether or not a celebrity has appeared in a podcast, or merely someone is discussing the celebrity? Tagging? It would be too clumsy to just match against the text of a celebrity’s name.

In any case, Las Culturistas had Cate Blanchett on for a March 19, 2025 episode titled “Huge Fornicators” and it’s not there but episodes of other podcasts from 2020, 2023, and two from 2022. Tapping “More on Apple Podcasts” takes you to a confusing page topped by shows that have had her on, and then a bunch of those stale episodes in the episodes section below.

Curiously, a podcast that you will see come up a lot in the Podcasts section of Snapshot is WTF with Marc Maron, but Apple has no Snapshot of Marc Maron. Is that just because there are so few snapshot pages in total, or because he’s an interviewer of celebrities, but is not worthy of being a celebrity?

Where’s News+ in all of this? I don’t like News+, but I’m pretty sure some people have written about these celebrities at some point. That has a direct connection to an Apple Service, but it’s absent. Wouldn’t it be a good way to surface content locked inside of the magazines?

Beyond Apple, there’s no way to incorporate useful content that isn’t aligned with Apple’s commercial interests. Many of these celebrities have documentaries, or movies, on Netflix. They don’t get mentioned because they’re not aligned with the TV app. Then the question becomes: is the value of Snapshots to users complete information, or is the value of Snapshots merely for the benefit of Apple?

Snap to It

This is all reeks of the half-baked delusions of marketing execs, and the ensuing web app demo that was whipped up to please them. I don’t fault the developers that did the work as much as I fault the vision for the product.

The vision I would like to see, and hopefully what this evolves into, is a more fully featured component that can be used inside of apps. Like if I’m listening to a podcast in the Podcasts app that has Cate Blanchett on it, maybe I can tap through on Cate Blanchett’s name to see a snapshot. If she’s promoting a new movie in theaters I can watch the trailer or tap through to purchase advanced tickets from a ticketing app (like a partnership with Fandango, or better yet, apps can register that they sell tickets and can all be displayed).

That would also be helpful for music artists who maybe want you to buy tickets to their performances. Maybe the music artists have web sites that have additional information and merchandise.

We should also be able to see if the featured celebrity is also in other current podcasts as part of this press tour, meaning that it shows me chronologically what she’s in, not just old episodes where she’s discussing a different movie.

However, having said all of that, it’s still never going to fill the niche of celebrities and artists communicating to their fans that social networks fill. Why would anyone look at a celebrity snapshot when they can follow the celebrity —or general pop culture accounts— on social media?

Did I mention that the URLs for this incredibly unfriendly for celebrities to use elsewhere? Every person is a number at the end of a URL. It’s not their name, or a user name, or anything human. Taylor Swift is person/6667119979 which she is totally going to plug the next time she makes a public appearance.

One Ping Only

Apple half-assed their social network, Ping, which was supposed to be a way to keep tabs on celebrities. Then it tried it again with music artist updates in Apple Music —that also died a quick death.

Apple just never wants to do the work to make the platform for common folk. It seems that the thinking is that if they have Lady Gaga posting then people will visit whatever liminal space Apple creates to host that. They also don’t really have a good way to demarcate who is and is not a celebrity. Celebrity is seemingly a person involved with a commercial endeavor on a platform where Apple financially benefits.

There are a lot of celebrities on YouTube, TikTok, and other fandom groups that have small, but intense followings. Apple has no financial stake in these things. Hot Ones, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings, is going to do more for celebrities than Snapshot ever will. Same goes for Chicken Shop Date, etc.

Apple should clearly delineate how all this works. How people can register and control their online image represented and hosted on Apple’s servers. What possible value could it have to known celebrities or relative unknowns?

Barring major revisions to functionality, and a huge expansion in who qualifies as worthy of Snapshot treatment, I don’t see how this will ever be anything more than another dead-end demo. I’ve probably written more about it in this blog post than will ever be written about it in the lifetime of Snapshots before it scrolls offscreen into the sunset.