At this point, Apple has pretty much divided everything in the world into two categories. The first is things that it created, owns, or otherwise profits from. The second is stupid dumb garbage the company would like to blast into a thousand tiny shards of insignificance—or at least come up with its own version in hopes of wringing a few more cents from your bank account. Snapchat (and Instagram) have been comfortably residing in the latter category for some time now, and since that clearly couldn’t stand, Apple is now unveiling its alternative: Variety reports the tech giant has launched Clips, a video-editing and sharing app that lets its users record clips and add filters, animations, and all the other stuff that Snapchat does, only with the hope that your mind, easily distracted by shiny colors and bright new things, will forget about that social media platform altogether.
Set to become available in the app store in April, Clips combines multiple forms of media in a presumably easy-to-mix format, letting people blend short clips, photos, and music together into sharable videos that can then be shared via Apple Messages—or even, god forbid, those other non-Apple things like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and so on. The biggest advancement is probably the “Live Titles” feature, which “lets users create animated captions and titles using their voice with effects that include comic-book filters, speech bubbles, shapes and full-screen animated posters.” Finally, young people can stop having to filter their every thought through the arduous and time-consuming process of turning it into coherent sentences, instead just letting the word salad of their stream-of-consciousness patter be turned into visual text for posterity. “Ah, it looks like around 2017 is when humanity made the jump into advanced communication,” future archaeologists will no doubt observe, holding up the charred remnants of an iPhone still frozen on the Clips app screen, while the 500-foot-long air-breathing octopus that was once the internet lays waste to the landscape above their underground bunkers.
Apple is supporting 36 languages for the initial version of Live Titles, as well as dozens of music soundtracks that will automatically adjust to the length of your video of a cat eating an ice cream cone and getting brain freeze, or whatever. No word yet on whether one of the full-screen posters with animated background that are provided to apply to your videos is simply a giant middle finger flipping off the Snapchat ghost.